The proliferation of secular religions

Abstract

The term ‘secular religion’ first appeared in the description of modern totalitarian ideologies but soon became a general category applied to other political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena. The first problem with this approach is the inherent contradiction of the term, since ‘secular’ by all modern definitions means ‘non-religious’, making a secular religion something like a ‘nonreligious religion’. The second is the wide range of examples from communism to liberalism, from capitalism to ecology, or from transhumanism to social media, which suggests that with some creativity almost anything can be described as secular and religious at the same time. The first part of the paper deals with the terminological difficulties, while the second outlines the history of drawing secular-religious analogies, concluding that the ultimate failure to give a coherent narrative of secular religions is rooted in the impossibility of giving an adequate definition of religion in the first place.

Patriotism as a Political Religion: Its History, Its Ambiguities, and the Case of Hungary

“…This article analyses patriotism as an example of a political religion. Although the concept of political religion and its heuristic value has remained the subject of debate (Maier 2004;Gentile 2005;Roberts 2009;Barry 2015;Nyirkos 2021), the enduring force of patriotism in contemporary politics suggests that it is not just a "special affection for" or a "sense of personal identification with" one's country (Nathanson 1993) but an ideology whose claims to loyalty and sacrifice show a profound similarity to religious devotion (Backhouse 2020). In what follows, I use the term "political religion" to mean a political ideology that implies belief in an absolute, the acceptance of a set of indisputable dogmas, expressed by sacred symbols and professed by the community of faithful.…”