Religionization and Secularity1
Markus Dreßler

This entry discusses four concepts: religionization, religio-secularization, religio-secularism, and religion-making. They are proposed asheuristic devices for the analysis of the processes through which social
structures, practices, and discourses come to be understood as ‘religious’ or ‘religion.’ Since all of these concepts relate to the demarcationof boundaries between religious and non-religious domains, they are
devices for analyzing the formation and maintenance of secularities.
This entry is based on the premise that processes of religionization and practices of religion-making have been intertwined withprocesses of secularization and politics of secularism. If we take aconstructivist approach to religion, we must consider how to position secularity, conceived in terms of conceptual distinctions
and structural differentiations,2 within this dynamic. It is suggested that, at least for the modern context, secularity can be regarded
as a product of processes of religio-secularization and practices ofreligion-making. As with the Multiple Secularities approach, the constructivist approach to religion advanced here is interested in the historical conditions under which certain assemblages of knowledge andstructures were and continue to be related to religion and secularity.

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Religionization is intertwined with secularization and secularism

Secularity as a productof religio-secularization
and religion-making

This text is a condensed version of Markus Dreßler, “Modes of Religionization: A
Constructivist Approach to Secularity.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 7, Leipzig, February 2019.
https://www.multiplesecularities.de/media/wps7_dressler_religionization.pdf.
As developed in the Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities
research project. See Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research
Programme of the HCAS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.’” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities” 1, Leipzig, March 2016. http://ul.qucosa.de/api/
qucosa%3A16727/attachment/ATT-0/.
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1Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Religionization and Multiple Secularities
Religionization:
homogenization andreification of religion

Pioneering studies
by Talal Asad

Religionization is proposed as a heuristic term that highlights practices through which religion is homogenized and reified. The termemphasizes the processes through which certain assemblages ofknowledge, expressed in discourses and practices, are densified andbecome recognizable as ‘religion.’
Religionization is the subject of a growing body of academic literature – though not all scholars employ the term. The work of Talal
Asad, which investigated the discourses and practices through which‘religion’ was first bounded and reified in the modern West, still is amajor reference point in this debate. In Genealogies of Religion andFormations of the Secular he developed a genealogical perspective on
the formation ‘religion’ and its modern binary other, the ‘secular.’3 He
aspired “to problematize ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as clear-cut
categories but also to search for the conditions in which they wereclear-cut and were sustained as such.” “I wanted to ask,” he explains,“ ‘what are the conditions in which these dichotomies, these binaries,
do seem to make sense?’ ”4
One can draw a parallel between Asad’s consideration of the conditions in which the religion-secular binary appears to make sense
and the “reference problems” for secularity, which Monika WohlrabSahr and Marian Burchardt formulated in their initial framing of theMultiple Secularities research project.5 Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt
define “multiple secularities” as “the forms of distinction between
the religious and other social domains (which are thereby marked
as non-religious) that are institutionalized and in part legitimized
through guiding ideas.”6 “Reference problems” are specific historical situations and societal circumstances that prompt secularity interms of a cognitive separation between two spheres, as well as a cultural commitment (‘guiding ideas’) to maintaining this distinction.
3
4
5

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Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
Talal Asad in David Scott, “Appendix: The trouble of thinking. An interview with Talal
Asad,” in Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors, ed. David Scott
and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 298.
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, „Multiple secularities: Toward a cultural sociology of secular modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012): 881.
Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Multiple secularities,” 886–87.

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt suggest four ideal-typical reference
problems for secularity:

Reference problems forsecularity(1) the problem of individual freedom vis-à-vis dominant social
units [...]; (2) the problem of religious heterogeneity and the resulting potential or actual conflictuality; (3) the problem of social or
national integration and development; and (4) the problem of the
independent development of institutional domains.7

In the modern period, the problem of the legitimation of government, compounded by the centralizing state’s increasing powers, andthe negotiation of the place and role of religion that this legitimationengenders, may be seen as a further reference problem for secularity.
It highlights the question of the political in the modern condition,
which may “be regarded as the vantage point through which thisantagonism/binary [of religion and the secular] is constantly reinforced.”8 Furthermore, it points to the mutually constitutive impact ofreligion (defined vis-a-vis the political) and secularity (constituting
itself vis-a-vis religion), and, more broadly, to the processes throughwhich the religious/secular and similar binaries (such as religion/
culture) are evidenced as means of describing, making sense of, andthus ordering the human experience as well as social formations in
the modern world.
Comparable to these reference problems, Asad’s concern with theconditions under which binary distinctions “do seem to make sense”
indicates the importance of taking context into consideration whenanalyzing how ‘religion’ is being evidenced in the modern period.
However, in contrast to the Multiple Secularities project, which conceives of conceptual distinctions as responses to specific social structures and reference problems, Asadian critique inquires primarily
into the epistemic forces through which the evidence of the secular– taken for granted by the Multiple Secularities perspective – is established. Irrespective of this principal difference, a social constructivist
position that recognizes the social reality of conceptual distinctions
and structural differentiations with regard to religion, while at thesame time being interested in how this reality is being established,
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Additional reference
problem: legitimacy of
government

Religion/secular binary:modern instrument ofworld ordering

Asadian critique focuseson the epistemicSocial constructivism
enables dialogue
between Multiple
Secularities andgenealogy

Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Multiple secularities,” 887.
Markus Dressler, “Beyond religio-secularism: Toward a political critique,” The
Immanent Frame. February 25, 2014. https://tif.ssrc.org/2014/02/25/beyond-religio-secularism-toward-a-political-critique/.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

thus acknowledging its contingency, provides an opening for a dialogue between the Multiple Secularities perspective and Asadian genealogy.

Religio-secularization:interrelationship ofreligionization andsecularization
Religion-secularism:
knowledge regime
legitimizing religio-secularization

Religio-Secularization and Religio-Secularism
Resonating both with the genealogical method and with the Multiple
Secularities focus on conceptual distinctions, as well as structural andinstitutional differentiations related to such distinctions, religionization in the modern context may be conceived in a constructivist
manner as “the signification of certain spaces, practices, narratives,and languages as religious (as opposed to things marked as secular).”9 Recognizing that religionization understood in this manneris inherently related to processes of secularization and politics ofsecularism, the term religio-secularization seems appropriate to capture and emphasize this interrelation.
Accordingly, the term ‘religio-secularism’ is proposed to denote the knowledge regime that legitimizes processes of religiosecularization and strives for the normalization of such processes.
For the modern period, we canuse the notion of “religio-secularism” to put emphasis on the mannerin which the concepts of religion and the secular have been intertwined, forming a semantic continuum constituted by the oppositional way in which they are pointing to each other without being
able to be defined independently from one another. It also points to
how secularism and religionism are corresponding worldviews andpractices.10

One side effect of the described dynamic of religio-secularism is that,to the extent that we (contemporary students of religion) are often
confined to a positionality, which is based on a modern and Westernknowledge formation,it has become almost impossible for us to rethink religion in nonpolitical ways. What I mean by “nonpolitical,” simply, is an intellectual
space that makes it possible to conceive of religion in a manner that
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Markus Dressler, “Religio-secular metamorphoses: The re-making of Turkish
Alevism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (2008): 281.
10 Dressler, “Beyond religio-secularism;” see also Yolande Jansen, “Beyond comparing
secularisms. A critique of religio-secularism,” in Oxford Handbook of Secularism, ed.
Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

does not necessarily implicate the political directly as a point of reference against which the domain of religion is demarcated.11

Religion-Making
From a social constructivist perspective, we can understand ‘religion,’‘the secular,’ and their respective derivatives as social realities thatare not given, but the product of continuous negotiation and objectification. This implies that we need to focus on agency in processesof religio-secularization and the specific locations in which religion
and the secular are produced, bounded, and distinguished against
the background of particular contexts.12
The term religion-making aims to shed light on the multiple layers of agency in religionization processes. A distinction between threemajor dimensions of religion-making – from above, from below, andfrom a pretended outside – has been proposed for that purpose.13
These dimensions reflect different ensembles of actors with different
interests, and different positions of power, all of which are involved inpolitics of religionization and may form powerful symbioses.14‘Religion-making from above’ can be defined as “a strategy froma position of power, where religion becomes an instrument of governmentality, a means to legitimize certain politics and positions of
power.”15 The notion refers to

Religion-making:focus on agency inreligio-secularization

Religion-making fromabove: religion as tool ofgovernmentality

authoritative discourses and practices that define and confine things(symbols, languages, practices) as “religious” and “secular” throughthe disciplining means of the modern state and its institutions (suchas law-making, the judiciary, state bureaucracies, state media, andthe public education system).16
11 Dressler, “Beyond religio-secularism.”
12 Peter Beyer, “Conceptions of religion: On distinguishing scientific, theological, and‘official’ meanings,” Social Compass 50, no. 2 (2003); Markus Dressler, “The social
construction of reality (1966) revisited: Epistemology and theorizing in the study ofreligion, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 31, no. 2 (2019).
13 Arvind-Pal S. Mandair and Markus Dressler, “Introduction: Modernity, religionmaking, and the postsecular,” in Secularism and religion-making, ed. Markus Dressler
and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21–22.
14 The chapters in Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, eds., Secularism andreligion-making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) offer empirically richand theoretically engaged perspectives on various modes of religion-making andhow they interrelate.
15 Mandair and Dressler, “Introduction,” 21.
16 Mandair and Dressler, “Introduction,” 21–22.
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Religion-making frombelow: religion for thesake of empowerment

What needs to be added is a reference to international institutions
with legal and political authority, which are also important agents ofreligion-making.17 Trevor Stack has further argued that “religioussecular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern
governments have rationalised their governance and marked out theirsovereignty.”18 The double perspective articulated by Stack is important: distinctions between the religious and the secular are employed asa mode of governance, and as a way of legitimizing claims to politicalsovereignty.19 Connecting religion-making politics to secularity, understood as a product of politics of distinction, Stark’s assertion is verymuch in line with the notion of religion-making from above. It also
connects the top-down mode of religion-making with the reference
problem of the legitimation of government discussed above.
‘Religion-making from below’ can be defined aspolitics where particular social groups in a subordinate position
draw on a religionist discourse to re-establish their identities as legitimate social formations distinguishable from other social formations through tropes of religious difference and/or claims for certain
rights.20

It is important to understand that discourses can only establish their
dominance through subordination of other discourses. Whether inappropriating or in subverting terms, religion-making from below
therefore needs to be analyzed in relation to religion-making fromabove. The language of religion employed by particular groups fortheir particular purposes is an expression of particular stakes andinterests, responding to particular contexts, traditions, and the struggle over their interpretation. The notion of religion-making frombelow aims to acknowledge and underline that those who are in asubordinate position, such as groups that draw on the language ofreligion as a means to improve their particular social positions, may
have considerable agency in religionization politics. Investigating thepotentials and constraints of this agency should be one of the aims

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17 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond religious freedom: The new global politics ofreligion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
18 Trevor Stack, “Introduction,” in Religion as a category of governance and sovereignty,
ed. Trevor Stack, Naomi R. Goldenberg and Timothy Fitzgerald (Leiden: Brill,2015), 1.
19 Stack, “Introduction,” 3.
20 Mandair and Dressler, “Introduction,” 21.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularityof the inquiry into the processes of the making of religion as well as
the secular.
Scholarly work within the religio-secular field needs to reflect
on its own position and “the siding effects of academic work.”21
Such work can easily become a tool for the vindication of particular political positions, both with regard to the justification andnormalization of notions of ‘orthodoxy,’ as well as with regard to
narratives of victimization. This brings us to ‘religion-making froma pretended outside,’ identified as “scholarly discourses on religion that provide legitimacy to the first two processes [of religionmaking, from above and from below,] by systematizing and thus
normalizing the religious/secular binary.”22 That the role of the academic study of religion is more complex than naïve imaginationsof it as an impartial surveyor of given religious phenomena mightsuggest, and that it has itself often been implicated in the discursive
reification of religion was commented on very early on by Wilfred
Cantwell Smith.23 Subsequent critical initiates of the discipline,
such as Jonathan Z. Smith, author of the famous phrase “religion issolely the creation of the scholar’s study”24, inspired students of thefollowing generation to focus in more detail on the role of scholars in the construction of religion.25 The ‘religion-making from apretended outside’ perspective is also indebted to Edward Said andsubsequent post-colonial critics of academia’s involvement in colonial politics of religionization.26 It is important to consider how
scholarly religion-making is interrelated with the other discussed
modes of religion-making, in particular with religion-making fromabove. Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions27 is an

Religion-making froma pretended outside:
the role of scholars in
religionization

21 Bjørn Ola Tafjord, “Scales, translations, and siding effects. Uses of ‘indígena’ and ‘religión’ in Talamanca and beyond,” in Religious categories and the construction of theindigenous, ed. Christopher Hartney and Daniel J. Tower (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 168.
22 Mandair and Dressler, “Introduction,” 21.
23 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The meaning and end of religion (Minneapolis: FortressPress, 1991).
24 Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, religions, religious,” in Critical terms for religious
studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
25 For example Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing religion: The discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
26 See also Beyer, “Conceptions of religion.”
27 Tomoko Masuzawa, The invention of world religions: Or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Arena of religion-making:cultural encounters

example of such a dual perspective, as are the contributions of otherauthors in the post-colonial tradition.28
It might be useful to reflect on cultural encounters, and the translations and negotiations of new and old concepts and practices thatthey engender as an additional arena of religion-making. Studies
on intercultural exchanges from early modern imperialism, and theconcomitantly expanding missionary project, through to the age ofcolonialism have contributed greatly to our understanding of the
dynamic character through which modern notions of religion and,
consecutively, secularities have emerged globally.29 Reflection on theincreasing entanglements of knowledge with regard to religion andsecularities since the early modern period adds a historical dimensionthat can serve as a corrective to a too narrowly modern framework
for religionization. Notions of encounter, translation, and entanglement also challenge overly static conceptualizations of the particularlocations from which religion-making is undertaken such as thosedefined in the three agency-centered modes of religion-making discussed above.
The notion of religion-making has been meant as a heuristic
device for inquiry into the continuing construction of concepts ofreligion, the secular, and their derivatives, as well as the social formations related to these concepts. The distinction between modesof religion-making aims to render visible the complexities and interrelations between various interests and corresponding knowledge
arrangements behind religionization processes and the historicalconstellations that they respond to.

Conclusion
It has been argued that in the modern context processes of religionization are intrinsically related to processes of secularization and that
their mutual affirmation, corroborated by secularist politics, is reflected in the formation of secularities: conceptual distinctions and8

28 Such as David Chidester, Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion insouthern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
29 Thomas F. Banchoff and José Casanova, eds., The Jesuits and globalization: Historical legacies and contemporary challenges (Washington: Georgetown University
Press, 2016).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

structural differentiations, through which both religion and the secular become recognizable and which therefore both reflect and contribute to a religio-secular episteme.
From the perspective of the Multiple Secularities project, the notions of religionization and religion-making highlight the historicaland dynamic character of the formation of secularities against thebackground of changing discourses about religion, often triggeredby specific reference problems. Informed mainly by social constructivism and post-colonial approaches, the notions of religionization
and religion-making are meant to offer complementary angles on
the epistemological, social, historical, and political factors that shapeand influence (1) discursive distinctions between the religious andits various others/outsides, (2) structural differentiations between religious and non-religious domains, and (3) the relationship between
discursive, material, and structural dimensions in the formation ofsuch distinctions and differentiations.

Religionization andreligion-making:historicizing secularities

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Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Quoted and Further Reading

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Asad, Talal. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003.
Banchoff, Tho mas F., and José Casanova, eds. The Jesuits and globalization: Historical legacies and contemporary challenges. Washington: Georgetown University
Press, 2016.
Beyer, Peter. “Conceptions of religion: On distinguishing scientific , theological, and‘offi cial’ meanings.” Social Compass 50, no. 2 (2003): 141–60.
Chidester, David. Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in southern
Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.
Dressler, Markus. “Religio-secular metamorphoses: The re-making of Turkish Alevism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (2008): 280–311.
Dressler, Markus. “Beyond religio-secularism: Toward a political critique.” Th
eI mmanent Frame. February 25, 2014. https://tif.ssrc.org/2014/02/25/beyond-religio-secularism-toward-a-political-critique/.
Dressler, Markus. “The social construction of reality (1966) revisited: Epistemology and theorizing in the study of religion.” Method & Theory in the Study ofReligion 31, no. 2 (2019): 120–51.
Dreßler, Markus. “Modes of Religionization: A Constructivist Approach to Secularity.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond theWest, Beyond Modernities” 7, Leipzig, February 2019. https://www.multiple
secularities.de/media/wps7_dressler_religionization.pdf.
Dressler, Markus, and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, eds. Secularism and religion-making.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman. Beyond religious freedom: The new global politics of religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Jansen, Yolande. “Beyond comparing secularisms. A critique of religio-secularism.”
In Oxford Handbook of Secularism. Edited by Phil Zuckerman and John R.
Shook, 369–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Kleine, Christoph, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “Research Programme of the HCAS
‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.’” Working
Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities” 1, Leipzig, March 2016. http://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A16727/
attachment/ATT-0/
Mandair, Arvind-Pal S., and Markus Dressler. “Introduction: Modernity, religionmaking, and the postsecular.” In Secularism and religion-making. Edited by
Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, 3–36. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. The invention of world religions: Or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.
McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing religion: The discourse on sui generis religion
and the politics of nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Scott, David. “Appendix: The trouble of thinking. An interview with Talal Asad.”
In Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors. Edited byDavid Scott and Charles Hirschkind, 245–303. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2006.
Leipzig University – HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, 2019www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/companion

Companion to the Study of Secularity – Markus Dressler: Religionization and Secularity

Smith, Jonathan Z. “Religion, religions, religious.” In Critical terms for religious
studies. Edited by Mark C. Taylor, 269–84. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The meaning and end of religion. Minneapolis: FortressPress, 1991.
Stack, Trevor. “Introduction.” In Religion as a category of governance and sovereignty.
Edited by Trevor Stack, Naomi R. Goldenberg and Timothy Fitzgerald, 1–20.
Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Tafjord, Bjørn Ola. “Scales, translations, and siding effects. Uses of ‘indígena’ and‘religión’ in Talamanca and beyond.” In Religious categories and the construction of the indigenous. Edited by Christopher Hartney and Daniel J. Tower,
138–77. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, and Marian Burchardt. „Multiple secularities: Toward
a cultural sociology of secular modernities.” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6(2012): 875–909.
Th is text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. The intent of the Companion is to give scholars interested in the concept of Multiple Secularities, who are
not themselves specialists in particular (historical) regions, an insight into different
regions in which formations of secularity can be observed, as well as into the key
concepts and notions with respect to the study of secularity.
It is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities − Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. For as long as the HCAS continues toexist, the Companion will be published and further expanded on the HCAS’ website.
Towards the end of Multiple Secularities project, all entries will be systematised andedited in order to transform the Companion into a completed Open Access publication.

Please cite as:
Dreßler, Markus. “Religionization and Secularity.” In Companion of the Study ofSecularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2019. www.multiple-secularities.de/media/
css_dressler_ religionization.pdf

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