Secularization and the Decolonial Option (original) (raw)
The question of secularization presents us first with the problem of definition, and second with the issue of methodology and conceptual approach. It also presents us with the question of the future of the postcolonial paradigm in its Latin Americanist vein. It is clear that postcolonial secularization can never be disengaged from what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to as the "civilizing process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world historical task" (1996, 61). But neither does it refer to a modern process of de-Christianization-or to the modern replacing the traditional-for secularization does not actually touch the ground of religious faith and practice per se (Chadwick). Clearly, if we were referring exclusively to Europe the conceptual genealogy of secularization would have to pass through, among others, Newton, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Diderot and Voltaire, perhaps with Marx as the most forceful philosopher of secularization in the nineteenth century. In Latin American postcoloniality, however, we are closer to the relation between certain legacies of the