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.
De Vos, George, and Wagatsuma Hiroshi. 1967. Japan’s Invisible Race. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Krämer, Hans Martin. 2015. Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Leatt, Dhammamegha Annie. 2017. The State of Secularism: Religion, Tradition and Democracy in South Africa.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
McCrary, Charles. 2022. Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
McLaughlin, Levi. 2019. Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Pres.
Nitta Hitoshi. 2000. “Shinto as a ‘Non-Religion’: The Origins and Development of an Idea.” In Shinto in
History: Ways of the Kami, edited by John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, 252–71. Richmond, UK: Curzon
Press.
Patterson, Orlando. 2018. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, with a New Preface. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Rots, Aike P., and Mark Teeuwen. 2017. “Introduction: Formations of the Secular in Japan.” Japan Review
30:3–20.
Sasaki Kiyoshi. 1994. “Bakumatsu kokugaku ni okeru Amenominakanushi no kami-kan.” Nihon Daigaku
Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo kiyō 25 (March): 47–93.
Sawada, Janine Anderson. 2021. Faith in Mount Fuji: The Rise of Independent Religion in Early Modern Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge Mass: MIT
Press.
Storm, Jason Ānanda Josephson. 2012. The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
——. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
——. 2018. “The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary: Or Re-theorizing Secularism.” Method &
Theory in the Study of Religion 30 (1): 1–20.
——. 2021. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Sousa, Lúcio de. 2019. The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese,
Chinese, and Korean Slaves. Leiden: Brill.
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else).
Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Wiredu, Kwasi. 1997. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Yountae, An. 2020. “A Decolonial Theory of Religion: Race, Coloniality, and Secularity in the Americas.”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88 (4): 947–80.
Zhong Yijiang. 2016. The Origin of Modern Shinto in Japan: The Vanquished Gods of Izumo. New York:
Bloomsbury Publishing.