The “science of spirits” that structured the taxonomy of the Encyclopédie. Pierre Curie and Marie Curie’s regular séance attendance. Spaceships engineered to “touch the face of God.” Modernist office furniture designed to sacralize the corporation. In recent years, scholarship across disciplines has worked to undermine the myths of Western disenchantment and secular modernity, uncovering how the rational and the supernatural, the mundane and the divine, have interacted in more complex, symbiotic, and nonlinear ways than previously understood. Studies of the modern period have shown the religious as anything but absent from the public sphere and narratives about reason and progress as tenaciously, and at times violently, enchanted. At the same time, postcolonial scholars have made clear how efforts to maintain a false binary between the religious and the secular have served the same colonial and imperial ends as earlier oppositions between the West and non-West, the modern and the other. “Secularism,” as Talal Asad notes, is not an entity but an ideology constantly in the process of formation.

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