Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023, XX, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042 Roundtable Piece Epilogue: The Secular Incarnation of the God of Time: Postcolonial and Decolonial Insights from Beyond the Horizons of Euro-American Secularism Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm* A HINDU GOD was almost part of the secular state in Japan. This may seem like a contradiction, but beginning in 1875, Senge Takatomi—the hereditary priest of the Izumo Shrine— submitted a series of proposals to the Japanese government calling for official recognition for the deity Ōkuninushi (大国主神; Nitta 2000; Zhong 2016, 180–81). Ōkuninushi was then popularly identified with an incarnation of Shiva called Mahākāla ( Japanese Daikokuten大黒 天), a “Hindu” deity whose name in Sanskrit is often translated as either Great Black or Beyond Time (see also Chaudhuri 2003). Senge’s proposals had significant support, and, had they been successful, the god would have become a definitional component of the patriotic trappings of the secular state. Thus, Senge’s project failed when his shrine organization was officially recognized as a “religion.” Thus, ironically, the deity was actually disempowered by being recognized as a constitutionally protected religious belief. This case—like others in this roundtable—challenges a number of common assumptions about the nature of the secular state, the importance of religious freedom, and the relationship between religion and politics. Moreover, although there has been significant confusion between the categories of secularization, secular, and secularism, many theories of the latter two have historically focused on the history of the relationship between “church and state,” with highly Eurocentric notions about what kinds of beliefs and institutions fit into either category. Looking beyond Europe and America can help us see the contingency of these categories and begin to suggest new approaches to old problems. * Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Universität Leipzig, Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe “Multiple Secularities- Beyond the West,” Leipzig, Germany. Email: jaj1@williams.edu. © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042/7408051 by UB Leipzig user on 12 November 2023 Roundtable on Religion as Polity Formation: Revisiting Modern Religion in Imperial India 2 • Journal of the American Academy of Religion 1 For instance, despite a generation of theorists either celebrating or condemning the European “discovery” of universalism, appeals to universals are ubiquitous in not just European philosophy but also classical philosophies in East Asia and South Asia as well as in the Islamicate world. Indeed, much of what we have preserved of “pre-modern” African philosophy also makes claims to the universal. See Wiredu 1997. Another particular bugbear of mine is when scholars presume colonization was necessarily secularizing or disenchanting, as though the Ottoman and Japanese imperial projects never happened. 2 For instance, sometimes it has been asserted that Asia (or, more often, the Islamicate world) is so fundamentally different that it cannot be described in terms or concepts drawn from European languages. But despite purporting to be anti-orientalism, this line of argumentation is basically just a neo-orientalist portrayal of an inherently incomprehensible and “mysterious Orient” that Edward Said would have condemned. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042/7408051 by UB Leipzig user on 12 November 2023 For instance, while Senge was frustrated in his efforts to provide his deity with a secular incarnation, other Shinto leaders actually were successful in enshrining what amounted to an abbreviated pantheon—the Sun Goddess and the Three Gods of Creation—in the very same constitutional apparatus that officially safeguarded religious freedom for Christians, Buddhists, and Shinto “religions.” As I have argued elsewhere, the Japanese state actually produced something like a “Shinto secular” legally defined as not religious, which in turn allowed it to make the assignment of Shinto educational materials and participation in Shinto ritual practices mandatory without abridging guarantees of religious freedom. This was not mere hypocrisy. Shinto found its way into national ideological projects partly via appeals to scientific symbols. This meant, for instance, that gods ultimately incarnated in the secular state were in some sense “gods of science,” and indeed Japanese ideologues argued that the Sun Goddess represented a divinized heliocentrism and that the Three Gods of Creation corresponded to atomic particles, the force of gravity, and the primeval flow of time (see Sasaki 1994). This in turn suggests that— at least on a legal level—the idea of political commitments that are located in a secular state emerges directly from the globalization of certain notions of religion and its presumed opposites, like science and superstition. This has direct implications even for scholars who are not interested in Japan or India. The partitioning of Shinto resembles the bifurcation of American Christianity into churches protected by religious freedom, with an American secular constructed out of Christian symbols and ideals ensconced in the founding rhetoric of the state (Storm 2012, esp 137–39). Furthermore, the secular state is often presented as a scientific state. But while the secular typically functions to privatize “religion,” it works to eliminate the dominant religion’s old enemies (such as, in a Christian context, belief in demons, spirits, witchcraft, and other echoes of a vestigial notion of paganism). Accordingly, even as American legal theorists were protecting religious freedom on a national level, local states had no problem criminalizing various forms of “superstition” (Storm 2018). Examples like this and those of the roundtable point toward the value of theorizing secularism and the relationship between religion and politics from outside the typical horizons of European and North American exemplars. Critiques of Eurocentrism are far from new, but in recent years a diverse chorus of scholars has called for going beyond postcolonial theory and actively engaging in the process of conceptual decolonization (e.g., in this journal Yountae 2020). This is a valuable initiative with which I have also joined my voice (see Storm 2017, 2021). Moreover, the significance of decolonization is not merely ethical and if done well has the potential to help make better theories, which look beyond the blind-spots bequeathed by imperialist and culturally chauvinistic legacies. But because decoloniality is frequently staged either as pure inversion of colonial ideologies or as tightly keyed to American historical frameworks, it often reduplicates the structures it is trying to undermine. There are a common set of critiques of Eurocentrism and settler colonial thought that are so trapped within the very things they deride that they criticize as Eurocentric things that actually originated in non-European societies and without European influence.1 Moreover, one-dimensional iterations of both postcolonial and decolonial thought have sometimes found themselves terminating in simplistic binaries that split the “West” off from the rest of the world.2 Storm: Epilogue • 3 3 Due to unforeseen circumstances, her contribution does not appear in this roundtable, but will be published in a future issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042/7408051 by UB Leipzig user on 12 November 2023 I see the articles of this roundtable making their most significant interventions by disrupting these (oft well-meaning) oppositions. To begin, Shruti Patel focuses on Swaminarayan Sampradaya to show how this early nineteenth-century Hindu movement articulated its own notion of sovereignty and political authority. In so doing, she disturbs the presumptive binary that anachronistically back-projects an idealized secular distinction between religion and politics to show how a devotional community was forged in response to unfolding political conflicts. Similarly, Malarvizhi Jayanth undermines simplistic oppositions between colonial and precolonial forms of domination to demonstrate how both Brahmin elites and British colonial officials elevated a Hindu text extolling bondage to the god Parasuram as a way to legitimate the institution of agrarian slavery in Kerala.3 Although a few postcolonial thinkers have occasionally insisted on a monochrome contrast between evil colonizers and blameless locals, Jayanth shows how local elites were sometimes co-opted by imperial logics to advance their own agendas at the expense of indigenous subaltern populations. (In that respect, it makes me think of Orland Patterson’s classic Slavery and Social Death (2018) as well as more recent work by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò [2022] on elite capture.) In his complementary article, Dwaipayan Sen rejects simplistic accounts of Euro-American missionary impositions on subaltern populations to explore how Namasudra (Dalit) activists appropriated and re-deployed Christian materials to advance their own positions over and against local forms of power and domination. Hence, we can see how the ideological forces of colonization could occasionally be reconfigured in at least locally counter-hegemonic modes. J. Barton Scott’s article demonstrates how the legal response to a 1925 text parodying the Prophet Mohammed contributed to the legal construction of a notion of the “religious” amenable to colonial rule. Taken together, this roundtable at least lets us invert Carl Schmitt’s famous dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” (Schmitt 1985, 36; discussed in Asad 2003, 189) to suggest that many significant concepts of modern theology are partially de-secularized incarnations of political concepts of the state. Many of these case studies have noticeable analogs in roughly the same period of Japanese history. Scholars have explored how devotional communities focused on the deity of Mt. Fuji enacted political projects (Sawada 2021); how indigenous Japanese forms of slavery were exploited by Portuguese slavers (de Sousa 2019); how burakumin, the group often described as Japan’s “untouchables,” have sometimes drawn on Christian theological resources (De Vos and Wagatsuma 1967, 98–99); and how Japanese new religious movements came to function as rival imitative states (see McLaughlin 2019); while I have explored how Japanese law codes were codified to limit inter-religious conflict (Storm 2012). All this is to suggest a suffusion of parallels. As the Japanese “Hindu” deity above hints, these similarities are no accident. In part this was because, first, South Asia and East Asia were previously linked in the networks of exchange that defined earlier multipolar world systems; and second, because by the nineteenth century, both Japan and India encountered the present-day iteration of the world system that secured the ascent of European hegemony (see Abu-Lughod 1989). To underscore this last point, some of the similarities between Japan and India in the nineteenth century are the product of them both having been forced to confront the same Euro-American system of power and domination that was ensconced in international diplomacy, global capital, and the diffusion of a particular epistemic economy. Actually, by the end of the nineteenth century, the globe was more or less entangled into a single system of commerce and to a lesser extent ideas (see Storm 2012). As I 4 • Journal of the American Academy of Religion Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042/7408051 by UB Leipzig user on 12 November 2023 have long argued, central to this iteration of the world system was the discursive formulation of the categories religion, superstition, and science as well as the production of a new model for the nation-state. Regardless of power asymmetries, moreover, concepts did not flow only in one direction. To gesture at a concrete example, the self-conscious project of a political “secularism” is often portrayed as emerging out of a necessity to reconcile the conflict between Catholics and Protestant confessions or as a direct product of the internal evolution of European philosophical trajectories that came to render religion but one option among others. But I would argue that a political secularism emerged from a global system of exchanges between European and East Asian thinkers. Europeans began to imagine the feasibility of non-confessional states in the eighteenth century partially as the result of a productive misreading of East Asian—and occasionally South Asian—cultural forms. In one important case, having encountered the Chinese term sanjiao 三教 “three-teachings,” European scholars were convinced that there were three “religions” in East Asia and that China and Japan were multi-confessional empires, ruled by tolerant and enlightened literati. This was often taken as a positive model (e.g., think of the crucial role of China in Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance 1763) and accordingly contributed to the formation of notions of secularism and laïcité. The point I want to underscore is that while discussions of “secularism” originated in Europe, they were not wholly European in their formulation but drew crucial inspiration from Asian sources. To complicate matters, in the nineteenth century an idealized division between religion and a secular state was then (re)imported into East Asia, where it partially overwrote indigenous conceptions of the three teachings. In this period, East Asian leaders worked out a new division between religious and secular, which changed the meaning of “teachings” (教Ch. jiao, Jp. oshie), in some cases producing a linguistic split between secular state-teaching (治教Jp. jikyō, Ch. zhijiao) and “religion” (宗教Jp. shūkyō, Ch. zongjiao) (see Krämer 2015). Accordingly, multiple “secularities” and multiple “religions” were produced in East Asia that were partially reliant on both European examples and indigenous precedents. These two paragraphs provide a very incomplete sketch of a complex history, but my main point is that bidirectional, transnational exchanges like these problematize most parochial accounts of the history of secularism. Much recent theorization of secularism seems to be motivated by an interest in provincializing secularism, tracing its ligatures of power, or rendering visible a secular masked by its function as a putatively neutral and unmarked background. Recent scholars have made significant progress investigating the complex history of “secularism” in Europe and America (e.g., Blankholm 2020; McCrary 2022); while other scholars have explored local instantiations of secularism or religion and politics in other regions (e.g., Leatt 2017; Rots and Teeuwen 2017), but this scholarship has not yet had the attention from the field at large that it deserves. Various permutations of religion and politics are key to understanding a range of global issues both contemporary and historical. There is a lot more work still to be done, and as this roundtable suggests, scholars of secularism, religion, and politics cannot afford to ignore transnational patterns. Indeed, while Ōkuninushi was never enshrined as a secular symbol of political temporality, a specifically Christian calendar—literally a Gregorian calendar promulgated by a Catholic Pope—has been universalized as the secular and even scientific standard. The so-called “Common Era” of 2023 CE is nothing more than AD 2023. “Anno Domini” being itself a shortened version of the phrase “anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi” meaning “in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ” or two-thousand and twenty-two years since the incarnation of Jesus, as it was once reckoned. So it would seem that secular temporality incarnates a God after all. Storm: Epilogue • 5 REFERENCES Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfad042/7408051 by UB Leipzig user on 12 November 2023 Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony. New York: Oxford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity Islam Modernity. Stanford California United States: Stanford University Press. Blankholm, Joseph. 2020. “Remembering Marx’s Secularism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88 (1): 35–57. Chaudhuri, Saroj Kumar. 2003. Hindu Gods and Goddesses in Japan. New Delhi: Vedams Ltd. 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