To see how religion and secularism are historically and conceptually intertwined is to understand why those who are “secular” are no more necessarily progressive than those who are “religious.” Many major social justice and peace movements throughout the world—from Catholic base communities fighting poverty in Latin America, to the peaceful resistance of Tibetan Buddhism, to the civil rights movements of the United States—have religious roots. Secularism cannot save the world from colonial, racist, and sexist uses of religion because secularism is constitutive of and constituted by those very instantiations of religion. Religion has not faded away in modernity; rather, it is a constitutive category of the modern age. The question for anyone who would use “religion” as a term of analysis in American cultural studies is neither to distinguish the religious from the secular nor to ask “What is religion?” but to consider how the use of the term affects social relations and practices. Perhaps through such consideration our understanding of both the keyword “religion” and the myriad ways in which it constitutes social relations might change.

This is an excerpt from Janet R. Jakobsen’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 204).