Secular

Abstract

This essay argues that secular is an important keyword for Victorian studies because it foregrounds the particularity of universal concepts. Victorian narratives of secularization and colonial regimes of religious toleration can all be shown to have roots in the Protestant conception of religion as private individual belief and voluntary association. They therefore raise the question of how and whether such political conceptions might transcend their particularist origins. To make this point I begin by exploring the difference between secularism and secularization as critical terms. I then suggest how the recent wave of work on secularism has illuminated the link between the two—namely, by showing how attempts to imagine a secular world in fact depend upon specific ideas of what religion is and where it belongs.