Secularism

The anthropology of secularism studies how nation-states actively shape ‘religion’ as a category, institutional structure, and lived experience. It does not cast secularism as an impersonal process through which religion inevitably declines or retreats to the private sphere as modernisation advances. Instead, this subfield of anthropology understands secularism to be a mode of governance—a dense web of laws, institutions, and sensibilities—that promotes forms of religiosity deemed conducive to public order and desirable citizenship. Conversely, secularism also marginalises or reshapes forms of religiosity considered socially destabilising or corrosive to national progress. The anthropology of secularism offers a critical perspective on these processes as anthropology has done with other concepts once presumed to be natural or inevitable, such as progress or capitalism, and in so doing deepens our understanding of ongoing struggles over religion, citizenship, and state power. This entry opens by revisiting the once widely held assumption that modernisation would inevitably lead to secularisation. It then clarifies distinctions between four related terms—'secularisation’, ‘the secular’, ‘secularity’, and ‘secularism’—before turning to the anthropology of secularism’s conceptual foundations, the critique of the longstanding conception of religion as universally a matter of belief. Challenging this presumption highlights the subfield’s central concern: how secularism determines what counts as religion. The following section explores the ways secularism in liberal states constructs religion as both belief-based and privatised. The entry concludes with an examination of socialist and post-socialist contexts to show how secularism constitutes religious life within these regimes.