Here's an odd couple of readings, which ended up in my backpack as I flew to Denver: Dipesh Chakrabarty's essay "The time of history and the times of gods" and Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods (both candidates for the secularism class).
The former at least claims to explore "the problems a secular subject like history faces in handling imaginations in which gods, spirits, or the supernatural have agency in the world" (35). I say claims, because the "problems" are just the political and intellectual ones of "subaltern" historians who are committed to a Marxist or other form of "disenchanting prose" (and the concomitant historical consciousness) "required, let us say, in the interest of social justice," but still want to to "retain the subaltern (in whose activity gods or spirits present themselves) as the subjects of their histories" (40). Most Indian workers, Chakrabarty notes, wouldn't know what to do with a concept of "labor" which excluded the ways in which work can be a form a worship, and in which tools and other powers contribute to your work. Serious problems courageously addressed here - Chakrabarty takes his own earlier work to task for ignoring this problem. And he doesn't just recite the critique of modern "godless, continuous, empty, and homogeneous time" (39), but notes that physics has seen beyond it, and quotes a Paul Davis saying "I believe that the reality exposed by modern physics is fundamentally alien to the human mind, and defies all power of direct visualization" (38). But as a secular historian Chakrabarty doesn't trouble himself to consider that "the gods," here metonymically connected to particular cultures and languages inevitably traduced by any translation into a supposedly universal language, might really be at work in some way - might be ways of articulating, channeling, participating in the unvisualizable "reality exposed by modern physics" (perhaps because Davis' warning that we not try to take a "God's eye view" allows the conflation of modernity and theism).
Gaiman, meanwhile, narrates the waning of the Old World gods and spirits brought over to America by waves of immigrants (I thought this a fabulous idea when I first read this at the recommendation of a student three years ago, and still do) - as descendents of Africans, Europeans, etc. cease to worship, fear, believe in or even remember the powers so important to their ancestors - in gritty pulp fiction style. The protagonists of this story are "the gods" whom people no longer need or fear - though their Götterdämmerung doesn't necessarily mean that America is now disenchanted... but you'll have to read this book yourself to find out more about that. Interesting that Gaiman (a Brit, now residing in the US), one of the great graphic novelists, should have extended the aging and forgotten superhero narrative in this way... it works, re-enchanting the American landscape if in twilight hues. What's he really talking about - are these "gods" also just metonymic markers for the particular cultures and languages of a rapidly receding past?
Interestingly, Chakrabarty grants that "fiction, particularly of the nonrealist or magic-realist variety" (48) is one place in which the untranslatable singularity of "the gods" can be articulated - untranslatable at least into a generalized language or via "implicit universals," as opposed to the kind of "barter" we find in narratives of religious syncretism or pluralism (which he somewhat misleadingly calls "conversion" - the conversion here being not of devotees but of the objects of their devotion, Islamic figures revealed to be Hindu deities taking a new form).
