STEFAN FISHER-H YREM “If It Teaches, It Teaches Imperceptibly:” Recasting the Secularity of the Victorian Public Sphere Offering an account of Victorian secularisation which does not depend on the defi- nition of the term “religion, ” this article draws on a strand of secularisation studies often neglected by Victorian scholars. In particular, it develops two key aspects of philosopher Charles Taylor’ s work: the concept of social imaginaries, and the asso- ciation of secularity with a particular kind of time. Emphasising the human- technological networks through which the notion of a Victorian public sphere was constituted, the article highlights how the function of these networks was premised on a concept of secular time regardless of participants’ conscious or articulated (non)belief. In these particular networks, the notion of immediacy and absolute simultaneity — which both presuppose a concept of secular time — were consti- tuted through the mobilisation of a wide range of mediators, human and nonhuman. Here, the term “secularisation” denotes this process of increasingly investing and embedding secular time on the level of unarticulated assumptions. This allows scholars to recast the question of Victorian secularisation in a manner which avoids the problems associated with defining secularity as an absence of “belief ” or “religion. ” Introduction In most attempts to introduce new theoretical frameworks into the historiog- raphy of British secularisation, the proposed understanding of the term “sec- ularity” hinges on the definition of “religion. ” Callum Brown’ s influential account of The Death of Christian Britain, for instance, rested on a distinc- tion between various forms of religion — institutional, intellectual, func- tional, diffusive, discursive — whose decline could be timed differently. 1 Before this, Sarah Williams’ study of the poorer working classes in South- wark argued that “religiosity” was more a question of inner identity Dr. Stefan Fisher-Høyrem is a Researcher in the Department of Religion, Philosophy and History, University of Agder, Norway. 1. C. G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 1 © 2017 Religious History Association Journal of Religious History Vol. ••, No. ••, 2017 doi: 10.1111/1467-9809.12452