Locating Religion and Secularity in East Asia Through Global Processes: Early Modern Jesuit Religious Encounters

Jose Casanova

doi:10.3390/rel9110349

Abstract

The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization. While most of the recent scholarly work on the globalization of the categories of religion and secularity focuses on the second Western hegemonic phase of globalization, this essay focuses on the early modern phase of globalization before Western hegemony.

Highlights

The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization
East Asia lasted from the mid-sixteenth-century to the late eighteenth-century, was shaped primarily by the encounters between the Jesuits and other Catholic religious orders and the religions and cultures of East Asia
The categories of religion and secularity had not yet acquired a stable and identifiable form during this early modern phase, those early modern colonial encounters, which are the main focus of this paper, played a significant role in the emergence of the categories in the West in the transition from the first to the second phase of globalization

Summary

Religiosity and Secularity

After several decades of critical deconstruction, we know that both religion and secularity are “modern” “secular” “Western Christian” categories, which have become globalized and serve to classify and organize differently the religious field all over the globe (Asad 1993, 2003; Beyer 2006; Casanova 2008, 2011, 2012, 2018b; Mazusawa 2005; Nongbri 2013; De Vries 2008). Theological categories that served to organize the religious field of Western Christendom and the subsequent historical process of European secularization (Casanova 2014). Both categories, religion and secularity, have become globalized in and through global colonial encounters, beginning with the “first globalization” in the sixteenth-century. Religion and secularity, have become globalized in and through global colonial encounters, beginning with the “first globalization” in the sixteenth-century In the process, they led to the restructuration of already pre-existing very different religious fields in all non-Western cultures and civilizations. This paper is going to focus on the first phase of globalization with some brief concluding remarks on the second and third phases of globalization

East Asia

Jesuit Interreligious Encounters in East Asia in the First Globalization

The Christian Century in Japan

Jesuit Project in Imperial Neo-Confucian China