David Martin’s The Religious and the Secular (1969): an Underestimated Masterwork in the Study of Western Secularization

Abstract

This article considers the content and reception of David Martin’s The Religious and the Secular (1969), a brilliant text whose revolutionary implications were overlooked by most of the next two generations of secularization scholarship because it was so far ahead of its time. The young Martin was able to unmask the ideological nature of the secular project partly due to his knowledge of theology, partly due to his eclectic reading, and partly because he was writing at a time when secularity was only just achieving cultural hegemony in Anglophone cultures. Fifty years later, now that postsecular scholarship is beginning to deconstruct the secular project, Martin’s anthology re-emerges as a vital early text in the new paradigm in secularization studies.