ABSTRACT
The secular, in other words, is imagined as the opposite of the religious, just as the religious is regarded as its opposite. This is the manner whereby the definition of the term, and its subsequent understanding, proceeds, with non-scholars and scholars alike casually and quickly differentiating, often all too neatly, between these two, for lack of a better term, “spheres”. Such an approach, however, may strike the critical scholar as data, inasmuch as it provides ironic evidence of just how successful this way of organizing a social world has been, given that the domains and associations that the religious/secular distinction generates are assumed to constitute a basic feature of the human. For as “the religious” was increasingly imagined as a private belief in the supernatural, requisite conceptual space was needed for the simultaneous imagining of “the secular,” such as those practices and institutions claimed first by the monarch and later by the newly forming nation-state.
