Religion and Secularization as modes of Domination

Abstract

This article argues that the usual dichotomy between religion and secularization becomes illusory when we study it from a Latin American perspective. Rather than opposed terms, both concepts appear as different versions of colonial domination, the latter built—according to the Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres—on a racial line and the logic of the non-ethics of war. In addition, following the Muslim-Spanish thinker Abdennur Prado, we note the epistemological violence involved in projecting the concept of religion to other non-Western regions. Contrary to common sense, religion is not succeeded or replaced by secularization, but both originate and constitute each other; one and the other are born from a split in European society, a split that is then extrapolated through these categories to other realities, covering up and domesticating different ways of dwelling in the world. More than renouncing the category of religion, however, we seek to promote a reflective attitude in the use of these categories that we employ both to apprehend the religious phenomenon, and to glimpse a religiosity of liberation beyond coloniality.