Is Marx (Capital) Secular?

Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

—Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself. . . . The immediate task of philosophy . . . is to unmask human self- alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form.

—Marx, Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Secular Predicaments

Three contemporary predicaments have wreaked havoc with the modernist and especially twentieth- century Western expectation that secularism would be the future for ever more parts of the world and would remain a permanent feature of the West.

There is, first, the phenomenon of enormous planetary slums where, to paraphrase Mike Davis, the politics of proletarian revolution have been replaced by the politics of the holy ghost. Huge enclaves of poor people find sanctuary in religion today—evangelical Christianity in Latin America, North America, and southern Africa; populist Islam in Asia and North Africa; and a range of local religions in regions around the globe. “If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”¹

In addition to the vitality of religion among the world’s most destitute, there is, second, a broad transnational renaissance for religion today, one accompanying if not generated by the intensification of capitalism’s global reach in recent decades. Rather than inciting secular revolutions and consciousness, globalization appears to have produced something of its opposite, in which the legitimacy and energy of states as well as national and transnational political movements (and conflicts) are often bound expressly to religion. As market rationality penetrates every fiber and crevice of the planet, religion—and the politics animated by it—is far from waning. It is rebounding.

Third, and related, our times feature a sometimes subtle and sometimes forthright “de-secularization” in liberal democratic as well as non- Western states. Against the presumption that secularization is an inexorable and progressive tendency in capitalist orders generally, and liberal democracies in particular, proudly secular Euro- Atlantic societies are “outing” their own religious predicates as they defend their expressly Christian nature and give the lie to the notion that secularism entails religious neutrality. Striking too are the many postcolonial nations rebuffing half a century or more of secular governments for forthrightly theological or hybrid forms of authority and law.

Each of these predicaments bears detailed historically and geopolitically specific explanations. Together, however, they wreak havoc with the crude presumptions about secularism and religion organizing the past century of Western political and historical understanding, presumptions that implicitly forecast a combination of reason, science, liberal democracy, and the market as dethroning religious political authority and energies.

Secular Prejudice in Thought

Nietzsche wrote that accurately apprehending the origin and development of morality in the West was inhibited by what he called the “democratic prejudice” of moderns.² When we refract the past through the egalitarian and progressive historiographical conceits of the present, Nietzsche believed, we fail to understand other tables of values and forgo the chance to understand and reflect on ourselves through them. “Democratic prejudice” makes us bad readers of the past and sacrifices the potential of genealogy to illuminate the workings of power in (and the contingent nature of) our own moral order of things.

Much Western thought today suffers from a variation on Nietzsche’s charge, namely, a “secular prejudice” compromising our efforts to apprehend the play of religion in thought and the world, in present and past. Operating from a nest of assumptions about the religious and the secular, starting with a belief in their putative opposition, we misapprehend how they were otherwise conceived even in modernity and thus miss an opportunity for insight into contemporary predicaments of secularism, religion, and globalization.

The good news is that in some corners of Western intellectual life this “secular prejudice” is breaking up under scrutiny by a range of scholars, including, among others, Talal Asad, William Connolly, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, Winnifred Sullivan, Peter Danchin, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Hent de Vries.^3...