© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2019, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX IR 22.1 (2019) 42–49 Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955 https://doi.org.10.1558/imre.40117 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697 Secularism is Not a World Religion TENZAN EAGHLL Mahildol University Eaghll@hotmail.com In Donovan Schaefer’s podcast on the question of whether secularism is a world religion, he suggests that incorporating secularism as an “object of study” within the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) could be a useful pedagogical tool to challenge it from within, but I think this is the wrong approach. e reason for my rejection of Schaefer’s solution is not because I think incorporating secularism in the World Religions Paradigm would muddy the sanctity of the category “religion,” nor because Schaefer’s pro- posal fails some more critical defnition of religion, but simply because it would only end up reifying religion even more. In my view, incorporating secularism in the WRP doesn’t challenge this paradigm from within, as Schaefer suggests, but merely gives it more life by expanding its scope and reach. He presents this option as a means of deconstructing the WRP, but to me, it sounds more like a reconstruction. I think his proposal is like try- ing to fx the eurocentrism implicit in the WRP by expanding the various cultures and histories that fall under its domain, which is exactly the same error that thinkers made in the twentieth century. In contrast to Schaefer, I suggest that the way to challenge the WRP is not by incorporating more diverse or contradictory phenomenon into its structure, but by continuing to historicize the category and showing how it operates at an ideological level. To begin, let me assert that I recognize and respect the general scholarly position from which Schaefer is coming. At the beginning of the pod- cast he notes that a lot of recent scholarship has challenged the idea that secularism stands in contrast to religion, and on this point, he is certainly correct. In the past century, prominent theorist like Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, Marcel Gauchet, Charles Taylor, and Jean-Luc Nancy have all challenged the traditional narrative that pits modernity against reli- gion and frames Western history as an increasing process of secularization which is slowly liberated from religion (Löwith 1969; Blumenberg 1983; Gauchet 1997; Taylor 2007; Nancy 2008). 1 For instance, Blumenberg tries 1. For a recent critique of this literature by a religious studies scholar, see Jason A. Josephson-Storm’s work Te Myth of Disenchantment (2017) or Correspondence: