Abstract
Joseph Blankholm’s The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious offers an ethnographic investigation into how secular people navigate their ambivalence towards religion. By definition, being secular means not being religious; however, being secular also means holding a set of beliefs about the nature of reality, gathering with like-minded others, engaging in rituals to mark time and celebrate important events, and participating in a longstanding tradition of secular thought and practice. All of these things—belief, belonging, ritual, and tradition—we associate with religion. Thus, secular people negotiate the paradox of embodying their non-religiosity in a way that awkwardly resembles (Christian) religiosity. Blankholm shows that because we inherit so many of our words, ideas, practices, and institutions from a Christian tradition whose many iterations have long dominated the globe, even the people most averse to religion cannot entirely avoid it and must paradoxically appropriate elements of Christianity in the expression of their own secular identities. By demonstrating how the people ostensibly farthest from Christianity are still bound in some ways by its language, logics, and practices, The Secular Paradox ultimately raises an uncomfortable question for its readers: Are we all Christian?
On its face, this question may seem strange. Of course, not all of us profess the Christian creeds, attend church, or consider Jesus Christ our lord and savior. However, The Secular Paradox suggests that whether or not we happen to be confessing Christians is almost beside the point, as people who inhabit places touched by Christian empires live their lives in constant, if often unnoticed, negotiation with elements of Christianity. Consider some everyday examples: each time we reference the date—right now, 2025—we implicitly acknowledge the birth of Jesus; in most of our cemeteries, headstones face eastward so the dead can rise up from the grave and meet Jesus face to face when he supposedly returns from the east; we punish criminals by making them pay penance in state penitentiaries; in English we blurt our “bless you” every time someone sneezes; and goodbye is a contraction of God be with ye. On a more fundamental level, the concept of “the free will”—central to modern conceptions of selfhood—was first articulated by ancient Christian theologians reflecting on the nature of sin. And ironically, the very notion of “secularity” derives from a medieval canon law distinction between ecclesiastical and worldly affairs. As Blankholm explains, “In French, ‘Christianity' takes a different suffix: le christianisme. The ‘-ity' suffix used in English blurs the boundary between a particular tradition, consciously affirmed—an -ism—and a broader inheritance in which even non-Christians find themselves. Christians inherit the Christian tradition, but even as a non-Christian, so do I” (Blankholm 2022, 219). The Secular Paradox provides an ethnographic case study of the downstream effects of our Christian inheritance on specifically secular people, and it intimates that while we each come to terms with our own lives, we often do so, paradoxically, in terms borrowed from Christianity.
In this regard, Blankholm makes a unique intervention not only within secular studies but also within a longstanding discussion among philosophers of religion and intellectual historians, who have made similar arguments regarding the uncanny resemblances between modern secular philosophy and ancient Christian theology. These scholars have shown that standard-bearers of modern atheistic philosophies—such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett—paradoxically drew from Christian theological sources to articulate their secular perspectives on the human condition (Pecora 2015; Khawaja 2016; Carlson 2019). Using an interpretive practice that philosophers of religion—borrowing Heidegger’s own term—have theorized as “de-theologization,” these and other thinkers translated or transposed Christian theological concepts into their own secular ontologies. As a result, although they articulated decidedly atheistic pictures of human life, their descriptions resembled Christian theology in both language and logic. As Ryan Coyne (2012, 113) explains in the case of Heidegger’s secularizing appropriation of Augustinian theology, “Even as Heidegger calls for radically expunging ‘the residues of Christian theology’ from the field of philosophy, he draws upon these remains.” Philosophers of religion have puzzled over this irony in intellectual history for decades, and Blankholm’s ethnography gives us a way to understand it from the ground up—as the secular paradox. That is to say, The Secular Paradox shows us that “de-theologization” is not just a rarefied hermeneutic practice used by modern philosophers but an everyday act among secular people who face the same challenge: expressing who they are in terms borrowed from hegemonic traditions that they nevertheless reject.
For many of us in today's postcolonial world, coming into our own identity demands coming into some relationship with our Christian inheritance—whether we abstract its concepts, blaspheme against it, translate its ideas into our own ontology, or simply avoid it as often as possible. Like any inheritance, we don't choose to have it, but it's ours to deal with nevertheless. Many works in secular studies over the last several decades have taken a “genealogical” approach to this problem, whereby scholars have demonstrated when, where, and how “pathogens” or “bugs”—to speak within the logic of the genealogy metaphor—have entered into our discursive traditions and created downstream problems for its inheritors. This approach has proven highly productive for scholars, yet it implicitly burdens us with the impossible task of cleansing or purifying our genetic inheritance. What, after all, can be done to clean bad blood? For those who have grown weary of genealogical critique, The Secular Paradox demonstrates how everyday people build a future from borrowed pieces of the past without rehearsing what has gone before, which gives us a way to think about inheritance beyond critique.
