This article considers, in two steps, how such a research program might be conceived. It begins with an introduction to Charles Taylor’s account of the emergence of exclusive humanism in Europe in A Secular Age. Taylor steps outside of the familiar selfpresentation of secularism as a form of governance that emerges naturally once religion has been privatized, marginalized or superseded. As Bonnie Honig observes, and as Taylor shows, “the universal is never really as we
imagine it: truly unconditional, context-transcending, and unmarked by particularity and politics” (Honig 2006, 116). Claims to the secular are contingent and context-bound, and marked by particularity and politics, in Europe as elsewhere.3 Provincializing North Atlantic moral order as Taylor does suggests that the experience of what he describes as a “closed spin” on the immanent frame does not signal the achievement of secular legal or political neutrality “after” religion. It is, rather, a specific historical and cultural formation emerging from European Christendom that was, to varying degrees, imposed, transformed, ignored and rejected in other parts of the world.