In recent decades, questions regarding the material, affective and corporeal aspects of religion have gained a central place within cultural theory. While the ‘material turn’ generated numerous works and established sub-fields within anthropology, sociology and the study of religion, there are still only a few scholars exploring secularity from a material and affective perspective. As explained in more detail in the set of introductory essays by the editors devoted to the relationship between secularity and materiality (Meyer), affectivity (Ural) and atmosphere (Echtler) respectively, we do not understand secularity as the opposite of religion. Rather, we see it as the principle of drawing boundaries through which the distinction between religious and non-religious is enabled and becomes tangible, yet is challenged, as becomes apparent once the material dimension of boundary work is taken into account.

Inspired by the ‘multiple secularities’ approach developed at the centre for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021), we take secularity to refer to the various forms in which the social differentiations and conceptual distinctions between the religious and secular realms are politically and culturally arranged. This approach multiplies the regime of ‘the secular’ as usually understood by Talal Asad (2003), while distinguishing it from both secularism, or the normative and political endeavour to limit the influence of religion, and secularization, or the process of the increasing differentiation of religion from other social spheres. The latter is a process that might but need not include a decreasing public role for religion, and/or a general decline in religious beliefs and practices. Hence, this special issue examines secularity, the secular and secularism as both scholarly and political categories that are always related to their co-constituent, namely the religious. The relationship itself varies, from strict opposition or the ideal of complete separation via interdependencies to incorporation in the form of the culturalization of religion as custom or heritage.

This special issue, which is based on this interdisciplinary approach, derives from a workshop entitled ‘Material Secularities’ held at Leipzig University from 21–23 June 2023. We started the workshop with a small exhibition, for which all participants provided an object (or its pictorial representation) that exemplified their understanding of material secularities. This yielded a wonderful line-up of things, including a sausage; an image of a mountain; an image of an equestrian statue; a metronome; a T-shirt with the imprint (in Farsi) of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’; buttons commemorating the young boys saved from the Tham-Luang cave in Thailand; a scarf; a dress; a mobile phone; an open lock; a Zulu shield called ihawu; and a picture of Legba figures from Ghana and Togo kept in a museum vitrine.¹ What came out clearly through this exercise is that things are not religious or secular by nature, but that their status is subject to framing and categorization.

‘Secular’ and ‘religious’ are attributes assigned to things through practices of signification. Yet, once a thing has become signified as religious or secular, this attribution sticks to the thing, becoming enmeshed with it and part of its perceived essence. This endows it with a certain agency, sometimes independent of its hermeneutic meaning, and with a material and affective character that humans may find difficult to eschew or ignore. Calling attention to the border zone in which the characterization of things as religious or secular occurs, as in the case of museum objects, piano or dust, this special issue pays special attention to practices through which secular objects are sacralized and religious objects are rendered secular. Both processes raise tensions and conflicts. Far from being unidirectional, these processes are bound to take new directions according to historical context and power dynamics. This special issue calls detailed attention to the actual ways in which objects on the religion–secular boundary are re-signified and shifted into new spatial configurations, and the tensions and uncertainties that are entailed by these processes. We argue that such processes cannot be fully understood by returning to theories of social differentiation which tend to reify categorizations on a once and for all basis. What is needed is a material approach acknowledging that differentiation and signification are not merely abstract and unidirectional processes, but always work on and with tangible materials that constitute worlds of lived experience. This is what we seek to convey through the concept of material secularities.

This special issue presents a selection of the papers presented and discussed during our seminar and revised subsequently. All papers address tangible things in the world that are situated in the boundary zone in which the distinction between religious and non-religious occurs, yet is also questioned: discarded Catholic statues set adrift with the closing down of churches in the Netherlands and spiritual artefacts from colonial collections kept in secular museums in Germany (Meyer); pork sacralized as an ultimate example of secular food in France (Ural); artificial lighting used to create the atmosphere of Nazi Party conventions (Echtler); monuments sacralizing white supremacy in the USA (Schaefer); the piano as an ‘affective artefact’ in nineteenth-century Europe (Bräunlein); dust winds and the difficulties in breathing in Khuzestan, Iran (Chavoshian); mosques and churches in religious miniature theme parks in the Netherlands and Turkey (Hemel); and the epics of Ali situated in the border zone between the secular and the Islamic in Turkey (Dinç).

What these diverse material forms have in common in the context of this special issue is that they offer exciting entry points into the ways in which the boundaries between religion and non-religion are drawn. One set of material forms is employed as symbols of secularism (pork) or of white supremacy, as is the case with human remains and monuments heritagizing a sacralized Confederate past. Others are featured as the artifacts of a surrogate religion, such as the piano. These material forms may well be qualified as ‘secular–sacred’ in that they are elevated to a special sacred, religion-like status even though they are not directly traceable to a religious tradition. Other items evoke confusion and conflicts over their status: dust-winds that provoke competing Islamic and mundane interpretations, or epics of Ali framed as superstition rather than proper Islamic literature, which in turn evokes protests from their Alevi readers. Yet other things prompt questions about the ways in which a secular environment contains religious artefacts that have been severed from the religious traditions through which they originally belonged, whether or not this occurs through the de-churching or colonial appropriation of indigenous spiritual artefacts. Religious buildings in theme parks open up emergent imaginaries of the place of religion in secular societies. Clearly, the presence of religious artefacts in secular spaces is prone to stimulate conflict and feelings of being offended.

Thus, the interactions between artefacts, places and bodies that are central to this special issue are not definitely located on either the religious or the non-religious side of the boundary drawn in the name of secularity. Boundary-drawing appears to be a rather messy process, yielding indeterminacies and confusions. In approaching these interactions as instances of ‘material secularities’, we would like to bring a material, affective and spatial dimension to the extensively studied conceptual and discursive distinctions in textual sources. The study of material secularities yields deeper insights into the ways in which secularity, understood as the making of boundaries, becomes tangible than a more abstract approach to differentiation might suggest.

This volume starts with an introductory section, in which the three editors each offer a conceptual entrée into the study of material secularity. Birgit Meyer discusses the methodological and theoretical implications and benefits of analysing the materiality of secularity. Introducing secularity as a heuristic concept referring to the boundary work that separates the secular from the religious, she argues that the focus on materiality enables, first, a critique of the secular policing of its religious other, especially of Islam in Western societies, and second, a challenge to the neat distinction between religion and other, secular spheres that differentiation theory proposes on an abstract level. She illustrates this challenge by looking at what actually happens to artefacts when they move between spheres or rather actual places, such as crosses going from a church to a flea market, or Legba figures moving from an African shrine to a European museum.

In the second introductory essay, Nur Yasemin Ural argues that emotions and affects fundamentally shape the ways in which the secular distinguishes itself from religion. As neither emotions nor affects are internal to human selves, but rather result from the relationality of humans, non-human entities and things, secularity is first and foremost material. Ural shows how the focus on materiality provides critical leverage precisely because the secular of Western modernity is conceived as the rational, objective and controlled victor over irrational, subjective and affected religion. She illustrates her argument with the ways in which clothing—specifically veiling—frames the Muslim minority in France as religious, both emotionally and affectively, while food in the form of pork marks the culinary practices of the majority as cultural and hence secular.

In the third introductory essay, Magnus Echtler turns to the concept of atmosphere, the German contribution to the affective turn in the social sciences and humanities. He argues that atmospheres—that is, spatially spilled emotions that move selves corporeally—are conceptualized as a challenge to the dichotomies between subjective and objective, spiritual and material, the concept itself being the result of secularization as a subtraction story: the forces moving selves become atmospheric only once divine forces are disqualified. In their turn, human-made atmospheres lead to a somewhat paradoxical outcome: the concept might have been new to philosophical phenomenology and aesthetics, but politicians have long been busy creating atmospheres that move crowded selves emotionally. Echtler illustrates his argument with party rallies in Nazi Germany.

Material, affective and atmospheric secularities feature in all the articles of our special issue. Donovan Schaefer discusses in his article how a cemetery in Richmond, USA, was partly secularized, or rather reframed as a prime memorial site for the Confederate States of America. Driven by a memorial association of Richmond’s white upper-class women, the transformation of the cemetery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included the reburial of war heroes, the erection of monuments and the organization of yearly memorial-day performances. These activities turned a primarily religious site into the emotionally charged core of Confederate nationalism, reframed as the ‘lost cause’ of a fight for liberal values rather than in defence of slavery, as well as into a site of the secular–sacredness of whiteness, an assemblage of white corpses that had to be protected from profanization through the trespassing of living Black bodies.

From the graveyard, Peter Bräunlein takes us into the home of the bourgeois family in the second half of the nineteenth century and the position of the piano within it. The piano is both a mass-produced commodity and a prestige object. When played well, it fills the room with an atmosphere of artistic devotion that moves the audience emotionally; playing well requires exercise, and the training alters the body of the player; even listening to piano music requires a bodily habitus, an acquired taste that occupies an important place in the formation of bourgeois selves. Hence, argues Bräunlein, the piano constitutes a guiding fossil of Western modernity, as well as a boundary object that connects various spheres: private and public, artistic and religious, secular and non-secular.

While Bräunlein deals with a home-made atmosphere, Sana Chavoshian explores the atmosphere of dust storms that, while still partly the result of human activity, is clearly beyond human control. Starting from the role of dust in the remembrance of the soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, she analyses two opposing interpretations of the dust storms that have plagued Iran increasingly during the last decade. The first, a religious interpretation offered by state agents, links the ‘respiratory sacrifice’ of the suffering population with the soldiers who died in the desert in the war with Iraq, as well as with the martyrs of the foundational period of Shi’i history. The second, secular interpretation, offered by environmental and civil-society activists, points to the state’s failure to deal with environmental problems and insists on the immanent ‘right to breathe’.

From dust as a quasi-object that blurs the distinctions between the secular and the religious on the Iranian-Iraqi border, Dinç takes us to a neighbouring country, Turkey, where the distinction between legitimate religion, Sunni Hanafi Islam and the ‘superstitious Alevi tradition’ is materialized with and through popular books. In the first decades of the transition from empire to republic, the emerging secular Turkish republic strictly controlled and regulated the production and distribution of certain books of the Alevi tradition, especially the epics of Ali, and banned them as ‘superstitious’ and thus dangerous to the healthy and legitimate Sunni Islam. In the current context of the rise of political Islam in Turkey, however, attempts are being made to portray the latter as part of a religious, Islamic tradition. Dinç aptly shows how the ambiguous and shifting categorization of the Alevi epics as religious, secular or superstitious at different times by different actors reflects the fragility of Alevi identity and belonging within the politics of the so-called secular Turkish state.

The last article in this issue, by van den Hemel, also deals with Turkey and the politics of secular and religious division, but this time from a comparative perspective involving the Netherlands. As part of a larger project, van den Hemel examines the ways in which religion is constructed and portrayed in the miniature parks of Madurodam in the Hague and Miniatürk in Istanbul. The article argues that these miniature parks generally reflect a historical and political representation that privileges majoritarian religions in both contexts. By mostly excluding minority experiences, they also contribute to the constitution of a certain type of national religious and cultural heritage. The article also emphasizes the increasing material and experience-oriented nature of this process, with increasing recourse to immersive media such as 4D cinematic technologies and objects produced using 3D printers.

Although dealing with different historical and geographical contexts, all these contributions therefore consider the politics of secular and religious distinctions and differentiations in terms of their material ramifications. In sum, this special issue highlights the methodological and conceptual implications of a material approach to secularity. Secularity is not an abstraction that hovers above everyday life as a mere ideology, as it ‘matters’ when it inscribes itself in spaces, bodies and material culture. Nor is it a rational and sober process that is free from power relations, emotional, affective, personal attachments and experiences, as it is usually portrayed as being. It also attempts to decentralize the self-governing liberal individual, who is usually presented as the sole protagonist and creator of secularity. Yet this boundary work, whether in its material, affective or spatial forms, is a consequence of human practice and thought in the relationships it forms with other non-human animals, things and ideas.