As you could see here, this book was very long in the making. I wrote a first attempt on political theologies back in 2018, which was published in Hungarian as Politikai teológiák: a demokráciától az ökológiáig (Political Theologies: from Democracy to Ecology). I’ve been never satisfied with the wording, however. Of course, you can say that “everything is politics”, so ecology – or, for that matter, capitalism – are also “political” ideologies that resemble theologies; but what about celebrity cults or AI? (Yes, I wrote about AI years before the craze about ChatGPT.) And what about the ritual and symbolic – not strictly speaking theological – aspects of such things? So I finally decided to change the terminology to “secular religions”; even though this is a nonsense word, meaning something that is religious and non-religious at the same time. But what I try to expose is exactly this: that dividing the world into two distinct spheres called “secular” and “religious” is nonsensical. So this book is already something like a journey “across the great divide” of modernity. If I ever write a popular (OK, an even more popular version than this, its title would be something like this. And I also love The Band, by the way.)
Until then, here is the book “Secular Religions: The Key Concepts“, published today. Don’t let the title mislead you: it was just the publisher’s suggestion to promote it as part of an already well-known book series. But it is in fact more like a mini-encyclopedia containing more than a hundred entries. This is exactly why it was impossible to write as a traditional monograph (you know, in ten to twelve chapters). And that is why it took so long, for I myself experimented for years with different formats, until I returned to the original idea, a sort of collection or vocabulary. Which also means that I consciously avoided inventing “new” secular religions. (Although with some routine in the genre, you can easily describe any political, social, or cultural phenomenon as a form of religiosity.) In this book, there are only examples taken from the literature. Yes, there are more than a hundred, and my list keeps on growing since I finished the manuscript. So much for our “secular age”.
I also received my own copies yesterday. The hardcover is simple but expensive, but the paperback looks beautiful. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to choose a unique cover, and yes, it is part of the game that the reader can guess what the picture is about.
