ABSTRACT
In the interwar world, technological and social change, global conflict, and the collapse of religiously legitimated monarchy gave rise, on the one hand, to new globalized forms of religious thought and experience, and on the other, to new forms of racialization, nationalization, and minoritization of religion by colonial and national states. Relatedly, a Eurocentric concept of “religion” became more globalized and institutionalized, facilitating new essentializations of religion at the state level, though also encountering contestation from Muslim intellectuals, the founders of Africana religious studies, and other peoples whose experiences it purported to categorize. Geographically wide-ranging but thematically focused, this chapter defines secularization not as the gradual waning of religion’s supposed preexisting status, but as the determination of modern states that belief and culture, particularly of those who differ from the imagined majority, must be controlled.
