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17 pages, 266 KB

Open AccessArticle

Understanding Struggles About Material Religious Forms in Terms of Resonance and Loss

by Christoph Baumgartner

Genealogy 2026, 10(4), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040121 - 1 Sep 2026

Viewed by 240

This article examines emotional and practical responses to the damaging, demolition, or repurposing of church buildings in contemporary Western Europe. Drawing on research on the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam, it explores why [...] Read more.

This article examines emotional and practical responses to the damaging, demolition, or repurposing of church buildings in contemporary Western Europe. Drawing on research on the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam, it explores why even individuals who do not, or no longer, identify as Christians may experience such developments as profound losses. Using Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss, I argue that culturalized religious forms can acquire ethical significance because they become part of the social and material world through which individuals develop their practical self-understanding. This perspective helps explain experiences of belonging, resonance, and loss associated with Christian material forms. However, I also argue that such experiences do not by themselves justify preservation politics or the privileged status of historically dominant religious traditions. The article therefore combines an interpretation of attachments to culturalized Christian forms with a critical reflection on their political ambivalence in contemporary religiously diverse democratic societies committed to political equality and freedom of religion or belief. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

21 pages, 340 KB

Open AccessArticle

(Un)Fair Play? Secularism as a Mode of Racialised Governance in French Sports

by Nadia Kiwan

Genealogy 2026, 10(4), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040119 - 1 Sep 2026

Viewed by 356

Abstract

This article examines how laïcité (secularism) discourse regarding the need for neutrality in sport acts as an enabler of racialised governance in contemporary France. I first provide a brief contextual discussion of Republican political culture as a ‘perpetual civilising mission’, which is founded [...] Read more.

This article examines how laïcité (secularism) discourse regarding the need for neutrality in sport acts as an enabler of racialised governance in contemporary France. I first provide a brief contextual discussion of Republican political culture as a ‘perpetual civilising mission’, which is founded on an abstract universalist framing of the concepts of equality and liberty. The article subsequently discusses how the mobilisation of what I call a ‘civilising secularism’ in contemporary France has shifted from a primary fixation on schools, universities and the workplace to sports and sporting practices, thus illustrating how its ‘civilising’ work is never done. However, in the face of sustained efforts to mobilise laïcité as a civilising concept, I also demonstrate how Muslim women are resisting secularist calls for ‘neutrality’ through collective action against their exclusion, notably via campaign groups such as Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes. Furthermore, I argue that their resistance needs to be understood not only empirically but also conceptually. My analysis of these two collective campaigns therefore illustrates how they are actively contributing to a re-evaluation of Republican conceptions of equality and liberty. I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar regarding ‘equaliberty’ in order to analyse the campaigns of Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes before proposing an extension to his concept that more fully reflects their activism. I propose the concept of ‘sororal equaliberty’ to capture this contribution. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

22 pages, 353 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Political Theology of Germany’s Staatsräson: Exception, Enmity, and the Exposure of the Liberal Order

by Schirin Amir-Moazami

Genealogy 2026, 10(4), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040118 - 1 Sep 2026

Viewed by 343

Abstract

Germany’s unconditional support of Israel is encapsulated in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état” (Staatsräson). Shaped after World War II and formally articulated by Angela Merkel in her speech at the Knesset in 2008, the confession to Staatsräson has [...] Read more.

Germany’s unconditional support of Israel is encapsulated in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état” (Staatsräson). Shaped after World War II and formally articulated by Angela Merkel in her speech at the Knesset in 2008, the confession to Staatsräson has been intensified amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. This article conceptualizes the consolidation of this extra- and paralegal doctrine through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. A politico-theological approach lays bare how modern sovereignty rearticulates divine attributes like omnipotence, supremacy and the power of decision in a secularized form at the heart of liberal constitutional orders. First, the article argues that Staatsräson operates through the selective displacement of legal constraints by subordinating specific international and constitutional norms to a politico-theologically defined superior political commitment. Second, building on the Schmittian premise that the sovereignty of decision is inseparable from the sovereignty of distinction, the article examines how the German–Israeli bond of “friends” is constituted through the designation of enemies. Friend–enemy distinctions appear on the performative level in speeches of state representatives who ritually confess Staatsräson, independently from Israel’s atrocious actions. Moreover, they materialize in directive documents like resolutions or modifications of punitive or citizenship law. In the third step, the paper therefore foregrounds the distinctly racializing components of Staatsräson in its disproportionate target of minoritized populations—above all Palestinians, Arabs, and/or Muslims, as well as anti-Zionist Jews—as threats to the political community. Finally, the article suggests moving beyond conventional framings of Staatsräson solely as a response to the Holocaust by situating it within a longer European genealogy of political–theological friend–enemy distinctions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

19 pages, 288 KB

Open AccessArticle

Genealogies of Race and Religion in Kant

by Tahir Rashid

Genealogy 2026, 10(3), 102; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10030102 - 4 Aug 2026

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Abstract

Immanuel Kant is synonymous with modernity, enlightenment and secularity. This reputation is earned through the incredible influence of his three weighty critiques, which have laid the intellectual, moral and aesthetic foundations for modern philosophical thought. Despite this reputation, many scholars in recent years [...] Read more.

Immanuel Kant is synonymous with modernity, enlightenment and secularity. This reputation is earned through the incredible influence of his three weighty critiques, which have laid the intellectual, moral and aesthetic foundations for modern philosophical thought. Despite this reputation, many scholars in recent years have argued that Kant’s intellectual contribution to secularism, moral universality and political republicanism ought to be approached more critically. The ‘other’ Kant is also one of the progenitors of the modern concept of race. Kantians have defended Kant against charges that race is essential to his entire critical project. This essay moves beyond the stalemate between race scholars and Kantians by reading his concept of race together with his philosophy of religion. Drawing on critical approaches to religion, race and secularism, this essay argues that race is constitutive of his philosophy. More specifically, it demonstrates how race and religion are deeply entangled in Kant’s construction of Jews and Judaism as the constitutive outsiders of Euro-Christian modernity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

22 pages, 355 KB

Open AccessArticle

Decolonial African Agency and Same-Sex Relations: Beyond the Religious-Secular Divide

by Josias Tembo

Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020068 - 1 Jun 2026

Viewed by 2274

Abstract

In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ [...] Read more.

In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ and the critics who rightly challenge this view—are circumscribed by what I call the religious-secular divide. This divide continues to entrap discussions of African humanity and agency within racial-colonial strictures of tradition/religion and secularity/modernity. Instead, by engaging with the work of Amilcar Cabral and Aimé Césaire, I develop a notion of decolonial or emancipatory African agency and a way of understanding African humanity as an alternative basis for engaging with the question of same-sex relations in Africa, African traditions, and African indigeneity, and with questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more generally. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

15 pages, 241 KB

Open AccessArticle

Plurality of the Secular: Uncovering African Forms of Secularity

by Donald Mark C. Ude

Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020064 - 29 May 2026

Viewed by 681

Abstract

The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than [...] Read more.

The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Two interconnected objectives define the article. The first is to show shows how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,” drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, may contribute to a pluralistic conception of secularity. The second is to furnish concrete instances of secular forms of life in African societies by exploring the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity. In foregrounding African forms of secularity, the article not only challenges Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of social analysis. Ultimately, the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

14 pages, 265 KB

Open AccessArticle

Islam, Modernity, and the ‘Problem-Case’ of Religion

by Nasar Meer

Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020062 - 26 May 2026

Viewed by 1210

Abstract

This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social [...] Read more.

This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal to Europe’s self-narration, a limit-case through which stalled secularisation, anxious liberalism, and contested universals are rendered intelligible and governable. The article returns to canonical texts that helped establish such comparative imagination, including Hegel’s philosophy of history, Weber’s typologies of religious ‘bearers,’ and Gellner’s account of Islam as a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ of social order, to show how durable contrast effects were installed and later reactivated in contemporary debates on secularism, gender, security, and belonging. Drawing on Asad’s critique of the category ‘religion’, the article theorises ‘disruption’ as a recurring genre through which Islam is made exceptional, disruptive to secularisation theory, to accounts of modern differentiation, and to liberal self-understanding. It concludes by appealing to a reflexive sociology of religion that historicises its own categories, compares entanglements rather than civilisations, and treats Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely empirical ‘data’. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

21 pages, 288 KB

Open AccessArticle

In the Space Between Words: Speech–Silence Dynamics, Religio–Racial Formations, and Christian–Muslim Relationships in The Netherlands

by Deniz Aktaş

Genealogy 2026, 10(2), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10020043 - 10 Apr 2026

Viewed by 1099

Abstract

In Western Europe, and particularly in The Netherlands, speech is rarely neutral: to talk is to participate morally and civically, while silence is frequently marked as evasive, passive, or suspect. The capacities for speech, for being heard, understood, and responsive, are widely regarded [...] Read more.

In Western Europe, and particularly in The Netherlands, speech is rarely neutral: to talk is to participate morally and civically, while silence is frequently marked as evasive, passive, or suspect. The capacities for speech, for being heard, understood, and responsive, are widely regarded as hallmarks of autonomous, transparent, free-thinking, and sovereign subjectivity, celebrated as expressions of a shared progressive modernity. These ideals of subjectivity are routinely placed in tension within the so-called secular–religious binary framework, in which the compatibility of non-secular sensibilities or non-Christian religions, especially Islam, with such Dutch societal values is persistently and heavily problematized. Within such accounts, speech becomes a criterion Muslims in Europe are then expected to meet, not merely by speaking but by doing so in ways deemed proper and intelligible. To complicate and deepen understanding of these dynamics, this article draws on ethnographic insights from (secular) Christian–Muslim couples in The Netherlands, looking at how the dynamics of speech–silence function within intimate contexts, where they take place, where they break down, and ultimately where their limits lie. Attuned to the cacophony of multivocal gestures, whether in acts of refusal, the quiet eloquence of silence, or the directness of vocal protest, the article reveals the intricate and consequential interplay between these dynamics and the structuring and affective forms of secular and religio-racial norms in everyday life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Secularism and Race-Religion Entanglements)

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