When religion meets history of technology: Secularism and the problem of the sacred

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing scholarly work at the intersection of religion and technology, how to characterize their relationship remains a matter of dispute for historians of technology. This essay leverages a seminal piece by Jennifer Karns Alexander in a recent special issue of History and Technology on religion and technology for addressing the metatheory behind the subject. Alexander appears to believe that the problems affecting the scholarship of the religion–technology relationship are caused by inappropriate terminology and a certain primacy of technological knowledge over religious knowledge. This essay argues that those problems are rather caused by a clash of ontologies. The ontology assumed in the realm of history of technology is informed by secularization; the ontology of religion, when religion is not normalized, is rather based on a postsecular worldview that maintains and protects the sense of the sacred. The harmonization of religion and history of technology requires a reconsideration of the secularization argument, that is, the theoretical apparatus that governs the religion-secular divide.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• technology
• history
• secularization
• postsecularization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Alexander, “Introduction,” 165–86.

2. Stoeckl, “Defining the Postsecular.”

3. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §309.

5. Casanova, “Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms.”

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Mukharji, “Occulted Materialities,” 34.

9. Bateson and Bateson, Angels Fear, 12.

10. de Lubac, “Disappearance of the Sense,” 236. The original statement reads: “Is a theory that tends to separate the supernatural from nature a suitable instrument for penetrating the whole of reality and life of the authentically sacred?”

11. Oliver, To Touch the Face of God.

12. White, “The Historical Roots,” 1203–7.

13. I accept the vulgata in scholarship stating that “anachronism” is the adoption of modern forms of interpretation of the past. More accurately, however, anachronism is actually the opposite: it is to judge the world of today with the ideas of yesterday. The sin of scholarly anachronism would be better reframed in terms of “catachronism,” which is exactly using today’s categories to judge the past. The dictionary constructs “anachronism” by associating the prefix ana, which means out of, with the noun cronos, that is, time. The neologism “catachronis”: (the prefix cata plus cronos), however, is not included in the dictionary, and this absence may say something about a time past beneath something present.

14. Gillin, “Prophets of Progress.”

15. Hughes, Human-Built World.

16. Truitt, Medieval Robots.

17. Jones, Before Church and State.

18. Noble, The Religion of Technology.

19. Mayor, Gods and Robots.

20. Berger, The Desecularization of the World, 2.

21. Taylor, A Secular Age; Milbank, Theology and Social Theory; and Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.