How secularism feels

In Donovan Schaefer’s earlier book, Religious Affects, the religion theorist  considered the role of emotion in shaping self-understanding and belief. Because that book focused on religion, he worried that he left the impression that religious people’s beliefs are uniquely shaped by emotion in a way that nonreligious people’s beliefs are not. In this book, which focuses on secularism as a regime of feeling, Schaefer sets out to correct that potential misinterpretation.

This kind of correction is necessary because of two problematic assumptions often inherent in discourse about religion and secularity, both hangovers from the Enlightenment. One is that religion is the realm of the irrational, while nonreligious people base their understandings of the world on reason. The other is that thinking and feeling are two separate functions of the human brain.

Wild Experiment breaks down these binaries. All thinking, says Schaefer, is also feeling. Feeling thinks and thinking feels. And secularism is based every bit as much on the interplay between thinking and feeling as religion is. Certain explanations of the world come to feel right for reasons rooted in our emotional and physical lives. Once we understand that, we are then ready to reevaluate the tradition of secularism, from Darwin to the New Atheists. Schaefer sets out to do this by looking at a range of conflicts between religion and the secular throughout modernity.