This session seeks to interrogate how the various forms of crisis that mark our contemporary historical moment intersect with conceptions of religion and irreligion—terms that have themselves been profoundly shaped by Western secular epistemologies. The first paper examines how configurations of a “secular West” are invoked in the United States to excuse how the American military complex contributes to the climate crisis, while a second paper offers an ethnographic study of opposition to far-right American street preachers in order to scrutinize how religion and irreligion become salient categories within a secular state undergoing intense socio-political strife. Finally, a third paper probes how secular epistemes interact with rapidly changing technologies to inform understandings and experiences of time, highlighting possible avenues for responding to the new anxieties and uncertainties about futurity that these interactions provoke.
The escalating risk of climate change-related disasters serves as a justification for increased American militarism. Despite the United States military being a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, responses to climate threats fail to address its environmental impact. Policies like the Green New Deal frame climate change as a "threat multiplier," integrating military strategies into environmental initiatives. This approach perpetuates a cycle where military intervention exacerbates climate change, reinforcing the need for further militarization. The discourse surrounding oil, security, and the Middle East constructs a narrative of American intervention as necessary for a greener future, perpetuating a dichotomy between the rational West and the racialized Muslim "other." This paper calls for a reevaluation of climate action strategies to avoid reinforcing hegemonic structures and advocates for solidarity across climate, anti-militarism, and anti-colonial movements.
In this paper, I argue that an ethnographic approach to questions of non/a-religion requires moving away from the dominant sociological orientation that treats irreligion as a stable cognitive state and self-ascribed identity category and toward an anthropological orientation capable of registering the shifting tonalities of unbelief. Inspired by Andreas Bandak’s (2012) concept of “tonalities of immediacy,” I argue that questions of unbelief are best approached by examining the processes through which unbelief is foregrounded and backgrounded as a salient category in everyday life. In other words, while many people may be non-religious as a simple matter of negation, how and when is non-religion activated and intensified as a set of beliefs, affects, and sensibilities? Here, I focus on the ways that sensory rituals of religion out of place—religious practices designed to appear improperly public in ostensibly secular contexts—produce irreligion, generating the very thing they seek to challenge.
Reflection upon the role of technology in shaping our understanding—and experience—of time today calls forth tensions and ambiguities within contemporary life that should prompt us to revise widespread and long held assumptions about the meaning of secularity, the nature of religion, and relations between these two within a world now structured and driven pervasively by technology. Countering the flight from mortal fragility that one can see as much in seemingly secular technologies as in traditional forms of religion, and rejecting the certainties of both dystopian and utopian currents in our contemporary relations with technology, this paper draws on a range of thinkers—from Nietzsche and Heidegger through Michel Serres to Donna Haraway and Mary-Jane Rubenstein—to argue that a vital experience of temporality within today's technological world requires an affective orientation of care or of love toward the transience and insecurity of our social and natural worlds alike.