The Problem of the Postsecular

Abstract

What are we to do with the sacred? Jonathan Freedman recently posed this as “one of the great unanswered questions of contemporary literary criticism.” Readers of this special issue of American Literary History might frame the question differently, or dispute the largeness with which it looms, unyielding and intractable, at the horizon of our discipline. As early Americanists Justine Murison and Jordan Alexander Stein have noted, “the ‘religious turn’ in literary studies—taking place since the late 1990s but reimagined in more urgent terms following 9/11—has made a discipline-wide fashion of what had long been one of the most bread-and-butter concerns of our field” (1). Yet as Freedman voices it, the question of the sacred seems still to bewilder and hush, as though it were a daring, even destabilizing inquiry for literary scholarship to pursue. The sense that the “religious turn,” for those who do pursue it, marks the bold trespass of a tacit ban speaks to the enduring hold of the secularization narrative on American literary studies. The dominant narrative of secularization into which the academic study of literature in America fits its own emergence is a story of the West’s gradual but decisive emancipation from dependence on religious structures of organization, value, and meaning. In broadest outlines, the secularization story begins in the flowerings of intellection and creativity, within and against the structures of the Catholic Church, that have come to characterize the European Renaissance. The story continues in the Reformation, which upended the spiritual and political hegemony of Rome, and in the treaties that ended the so-called Wars of Religion by carving out separate domains of religious and political authority. Henceforward, the latter would be grounded in purportedly universal reason; the former, on Luther’s model, in inward, revelatory, and eventually discretionary forms of faith. This settlement lays the ground for democracy and