Jack Crosswaite
Research
Title of Research:
Rethinking the Secular
Brief overview of research topic:
Secularisation describes an historical process. It is the account of how we got from there, a medieval Christian past, to here, a modern secular liberal present. It stands at the centre of the dominant understanding of modernity, portrayed as an objective and gradual development in which religion steadily retreated, thereby revealing a distinct and autonomous sphere of political thought.
This project challenges that account. It argues that what was contested in early modern Europe was not the necessity of religion as such, but its role (its jurisdiction, language, and authority) redefined through protracted clashes between legal and theological vocabularies and through cumulative crises of church and state. Rather than merely narrating the aetiology of Christian decline, the project describes two poles of the story of secularisation: one of apparent change, the other of structural continuity; one described as religion, the other as the secular. Using conscience as an analytical anchor, it constructs a genealogy that traces the evolution of Puritan liberty of conscience into a critique of modern liberalism’s claim to have completed and extended that very project.
In doing so, the project seeks not merely to reject secularisation but to destabilise its authority as a paradigmatic immanent eschatology, a metanarrative that renders modernity a presupposed necessity. In doing so, it reopens questions of political authority and legitimacy that secularisation, as the horizon of historical intelligibility, has foreclosed.
Qualifications
Qualifications:
MA Early Modern History, University of York
BA History, University of Durham
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