1 Introduction

Many material forms that human actors create, achieve things that their creators never imagined while failing to realize the intentions that went into their making. And yet, this surplus output becomes part, albeit variously, of the conventional ways in which material forms are used. Importantly, while these insights have been taken up in the study of religious materials, they have rarely been conceptualized explicitly with regard to things considered secular. Therefore, this special issue of Secular Studies is at once timely, conceptually innovative, and hence hugely important for the study of religion. In this epilogue, I wish to outline, in ways perhaps slightly more explicit than in some of the articles, why material secularities matter (pun intended) and how they change the study of secularization. Social scientific research on secularization, secularism and secularities has been, for the most part, excessively focused on what people (no more) believe in, how these beliefs have been conceptualized, made explicit and canonized, and how beliefs (and their transformation into knowledge qua evidentiary practices) relate to how people practice their religion, or cease doing that. As I will try to show below, materiality has played little to no role in that. But, as the articles in this collection demonstrate, materiality—objects, food, atmospheres, light, and dust—has palpable consequences for configurations of religion and secularity, folding its own temporalities and intensities into religious and secular experiences.

Importantly, as Birgit Meyer suggested in her contribution, the question of religion played a major role in the development of historical materialism, in particular in Marx and other young Hegelians such as Strauss, Feuerbach and Bauer. In that sense, associations of matter and the secular are not new. However, I would argue that historical materialism’s interest in religion was more political and empirical than conceptual. For historical materialists, religion mattered only inasmuch as it was a form and source of ideological projection, one among others. In addition, historical materialists were (and are), in some way, radically anthropocentric. Their rejection of idealism and their account of nature—primarily, its transformation through work—is aimed at rendering legible the relationships between humans and nature, just as those between humans and god, as social relationships. Yet, they cared little for the ways in which concrete material figurations shaped religious experiences and belief or even secularity. Therefore, there is indeed, as Meyer also notes, a need to re-materialize the study of secularity, and a need for more empirical research.

As mentioned, sociological theories of secularization have overwhelmingly focused on the decline of religious belief. Peter L. Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967) is perhaps the best example. In it, Berger argues, among other things, that the loss of the plausibility of religious belief is primarily a product of broader trends towards the pluralization of religion and other worldviews, and of the cognitive dissonance people experience between the hegemonic truth claims of their religious tradition and the existence of many alternative walks of life around them. Subsequent generations of sociologists of religion have measured the ebbs and flows of religious belief and identified patterns of secularization. But they paid only scarce attention to the role of human-object relations in the transformation, or even dissolution of beliefs, and in the ways in which material formations carry and configure ideational and nonmaterial elements of secularity. While cogent on many accounts, Berger’s and most other theories of secularization lack an understanding of how objects used in secular rituals of the state, the built environment or scientific renditions and significations of ‘nature’ affect secularization.¹

Similarly, studies of secularism—primarily the domain of political theory and comparative politics—have remained aloof from questions of materiality. In general, such studies explore the relationships between religion and the state, their historical sources, variations across countries and constitutional traditions, the governance of religious diversity, and the relationships of power and authority that church-state regimes express. Guided by questions around the particular values that orient such regimes (e.g. nondiscrimination, freedom of religion, state neutrality etc.), research on secularism is mostly focused on the realm of law and legal debates and normative controversies (e.g. Modood and Sealy 2024). But the materiality of the court room, of the attire of the judges with their black robes and white whigs as carriers of secular law, rarely calls the attention of political theorists, nor do the physical properties of the thousands of church buildings that church-state regimes handle.

As this special issue testifies, this has changed with recent research that has been inspired by the concept of multiple secularities (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012). With this concept, the focus has shifted towards the multiple, and historically and culturally contingent, ways in which actors draw distinctions and boundaries between religion and nonreligious spheres of action. Conceptual distinctions can be latent or explicit, institutionalized and legitimated by national, religious or secularist ideologies. But boundaries, even if they are construed as social or cultural boundaries (Bourdieu 2018, Lamont 2000), always have a tangible spatial substrate. Therefore, such an approach surely calls for attention to the spaces and spatial demarcations of secularity, as well as to the materialities that configure those spaces. Such demarcations may yield spaces in which religion becomes matter out of place (Douglas 1966). With this special issue, the editors have offered an important and highly perceptive contribution to the program of multiple secularities. Grounded in their expertise in theories of material religion, affect, and sacrality, they have succeeded to produce a much more pronounced and precise understanding of how objects located on the religious-secular boundary (see introduction) or in the “boundary zone” (Meyer) are re-signified and how those materialities have an impact on secularity.

As the authors suggest, material objects become religious objects through practices of signification, and in similar ways, objects become secular objects through resignification and contestations of existing, perhaps dominant religious meanings. They also highlight how material objects form spatial figurations, and how their relocation in other spatial figurations, i.e. the spaces in which objects are placed, may lead to their emergence as secular objects. There are thus identifiable practices that produce material secularities, even as these practices are enmeshed with the inertness of material objects. Because, importantly, as the authors stress in their introduction: “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.” It is this stickiness, the physical properties of materialities, their aesthetic elaboration and appreciation, the aura of objects and their iconic force (Alexander 2010) that affords secular materialities their own temporality.

A few examples suffice to show that such an approach has the potential to stimulate an incipient research program. Across the world, globalization has led to a new desire to anchor collective identities in cultural patrimony and heritage, and thus to the identification of some sites and objects as central for a nation’s or community’s heritage. However, often such sites are religious or have powerful religious histories and it is unclear whether heritage-making affects their religious nature or secularizes them. The massive efforts that went into the reconstruction of Paris’ Cathedral Notre-Dame after its far-reaching destruction through fire illustrates this point (Burchardt and Ural 2024). Several contributors (Schaefer, van den Hemel) draw on notions of the sacred, sacralization or the “secular sacred” (Balkenhol et al. 2020, see also Knott 2016) in order to highlight the processes through which collectives are tied to places in ways that may transform them. In my view, the authors are right to insist on the continued value of these Durkheimian concepts, emphasizing as they do the radical coalescence of material objects and ritual in producing binding social energy. In addition, these concepts highlight the ability of acts of consecration to challenge existing meanings, and thus: to re-signify. Echtler’s notion of atmospheres at Nazi party rallies in Fascist Germany as secularized divine force is particularly felicitous in this regard. In her contribution, Chavoshian also mobilizes the concept of the atmosphere in its material, concrete manifestations in the form of dust winds as part of a secular ecological political approach in Iran that escapes the attempts of the Islamic state to impose a religious framework on everything.

There are also important questions of what happens to religious sites that fall out of use, either because of people turning away from religion, or because they decay from the ravages of time. Do they cease to be religious? Do they turn into secular sites, and who adjudicates such questions? Such concerns are further complicated when the status of materials as religious or secular is unclear, as Gökçen Dinç argues in her analysis of Alevi folk books in Turkey. In her contribution, Dinç demonstrates how, for a long time, official Turkish discourses conceptualized those folk books as superstition, in other words, as neither religious nor secular. Significantly, the status of such folk books—as superstitious, religious, or secular—also contributes to mediating the status of Alevism in Turkish state and society.

Such questions regarding the religious or secular status of objects may also be posed to the case of replica, or copies. In his contribution, van den Hemel explores the cultural logics of miniature theme parks. His main point is that such theme parks can be sites of serious anthropological research and that they serve to investigate the ways in which nations imagine collective identities, heritage and belonging and the close relationships between (miniature) reconstructions of history and national belonging. Thus, miniature theme parks tell us something about religious and secular materialities in national belonging, articulating as they do, heritage via copy or simulation.

Finally, the question of whether material objects are construed as religious, secular, or cultural plays a major role in organizing social hierarchies and power relations in societies characterized by migration and religious diversity (Burchardt 2020). The numerous debates around the status of crucifixes in public spaces in Western democracies as religious, political or cultural symbols are a case in point. What is always at stake in such debates is whether the designation of objects as secular or cultural legitimates their use as universal symbols, i.e. symbols of the whole nation. The idea here is that whereas religious commitments and the objects symbolizing them are particularistic, secular objects transcend such particularism. Nur Yasemin Ural’s analysis of the status of pork in school canteens in the French city of Chalon-sur-Saône with a comparative aspect of the interpretation of Muslim cultural/religious materialities of head and body coverings (in this issue) takes this discussion further. With this brief description, and in line with the contributor to the special issue, I also suggest that there are powerful resonances between research on material secularities and culturalization (see for instance Goshadze 2024). It is beyond doubt that, while there is need to further develop these lines of anthropological inquiry through more empirical research, this special issue provides a solid basis for that.