Secular embodiments: body management, Protestant culture, and American secularism in the twenty-first century

American secularism is an inescapable aspect of life in the United States today. To participate in American public life is to engage with the particular secularism of the United States. And to engage with the particular secularism of the United States is to perpetuate a Protestant privilege embedded in the very fabric of this secularism on every scale, from institutions to individuals. Indeed, any serious attempt to understand the contemporary religious landscape of North America must address the complexities of American secularism. While a number of scholars have attended to America’s particular form of secularism as it circulates in institutions like law, politics, and economics, less attention has been paid to how individuals experience American secularism in their daily lives.

“Secular Embodiments” explores how both religion and secularism shape daily life at the site of the body by attending to Protestant culture’s profound yet often overlooked impact on public life in the United States. It argues that American secularism needs to be understood as fundamentally embodied and that this embodiment is made plain in contemporary body management cultures like direct-to-consumer genetic testing, biohacking, and the pro-ana movement. These case studies reveal how the relationship between individuals and culture is negotiated bilaterally at the site of the body through multiple mechanisms of power. Contributing to religious studies, cultural studies, and gender studies, this project demonstrates how American secularism is experienced in the gendered and raced body and how these experiences contribute to the construction of contemporary American culture.