Religious literacy for a secular age: approaches from secularism studies and affect theory

Religious literacy has become a widely invoked concept in scholarship, policy, popular discourse, and beyond. Since the 1990s, but more actively since 9/11, arguments in favor of training citizens to “get” religion and to understand why it matters “on the ground” have proliferated. A trans-Atlantic, Anglophone conversation has emerged as United States and United Kingdom educators and policymakers have called for increased engagement with, and public understanding of, religion. Often advancing one or more of the agendas of social cohesion, active citizenship, and democratic self-awareness, religious literacy emerges as a framework for addressing timely issues within pluralist settings. Frequently, advocates for religious literacy also call upon notions of secularity, explicitly citing the idea that the need for religious literacy results from our so-called secular society’s lost ability to interact with religious populations and identify religious tropes. Religious literacy, in this way, participates in the debate around religion’s place within the liberal-democratic public sphere and points to tensions underlying the category of the “secular.” Despite the growing body of literature on such themes, there is a dearth of scholarly analysis connecting theories of secularism to current policy proposals. My thesis intervenes by linking critical secularism studies—an emerging field that rethinks the classic secularization narrative—to the dialogue on religious literacy. I argue that religious literacy, with its inherent emphasis on “literacy” has the capacity to set us on an all-too-narrow path from the start by advancing intellectualized and “linguisticized” conceptions of religions, which privilege the cognitive, textual, rational, and apparently democratically compatible aspects of religions. Challenging such presumptions, this project examines the discourse on religious literacy, using the tools of critical secularism studies and affect theory to expose some of the liberal assumptions underlying the conversation. The thesis, in response, proposes a fresh perspective on religious literacy that takes into account the affective and embodied dimensions of religions and the “secular.”