by Michael Warner

About Michael Warner

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English at Yale University. He is a co-editor (with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen) of Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age and the author of a forthcoming book, The Evangelical Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America.

Secularism

book Keywords for American Cultural Studies

“Secularism” is a late coinage in English, dating from the 1850s, when it was adopted by reformers who regarded the church and capital as the joint enemies of the worker (Holyoake 1854). But because the word is used by cultural critics in many antithetical senses, it occasions great confusion. The United States is sometimes held to be the model of secular democracy and sometimes the most religious of all major modern democracies. Can both be true?