Historicizing Secular Subjectivities: Conceptual Erasures and Subjective Multi-Hybridizations

Abstract

The “multiple secularities” framework may be regarded as a recent ambitious contribution to the comparative analysis of secularisms across Western and non-Western societies. While I argue in this article for the “historicization” of secularities as proposed by the framework, I also point out the latter’s lack of empirical attention to the subjective dimension of historical secularities. More specifically, the article attempts to show the theoretical relevance of analyzing historical secularities in post-colonial societies from the perspective of the subjects and their complex selves. Through a genealogical analysis of the subjectivities of three influential positivist intellectuals in 19th-century Mexico, I argue that the analytical axes of the multiple secularities framework may be refined and broadened. I discuss how the framework’s search for local forms of “conceptual distinctions” should be complemented by the search for conceptual erasures and how the analysis of “semantic hybridity” should be broadened and include the analysis of experiential and emotional forms of hybridizations. I also argue that the analyses of historical secularities should account for “sacred-secular” hybrids, as well as more specific hybridizations, such as ecclesiological–secular and theological–secular transpositions.

1. Introduction: Multiple Secularities

It is safe to argue that what has been termed the “re-emergence” of religion in contemporary societies in the second half of the 20th century (Beckford 1983; Berger 1973; Luckman 1967) is rather a series of phenomena taking place mostly in societies of the Western hemisphere.1 In Latin American societies, such as the one discussed in this manuscript, religions have had a constant and constantly transformed societal presence. Notwithstanding the above, it may be argued indeed that after the literature that addressed such a “re-emergence” of religion, there followed in the last decades a diverse body of literature that has turned the analytical gaze toward issues of secularization and secularism (Asad 2003, 2011; Cannell 2010; Casanova 1994, 2006; Dobbelaere 2004; Martin 1978; Taylor 2007). From a theoretically diverse spectrum of critical stances, these works have problematized a series of issues in classical modernist approaches, which, on the one hand, acknowledged the historical saliency of religions (e.g., Weber 1930; Durkheim [1912] 1995) and, on the other, conveyed the idea of secularism as an indispensable marker of modernity, and the concept of secularization as a socio-historical process necessarily leading societies toward modernization. The problematizations of classic perspectives include normative, Christian-centric revisions about unbelief and the new conditions of belief in Western societies (Taylor 2007), as well as critiques of the contingent Christian genealogy of the idea of the secular and processes of secularization (Asad 2003). While some approaches have problematized the reductionist views of secularization that do not distinguish between the decrease of religion, the privatization of beliefs, and the separation of secular and religious spheres (Casanova 1994), others have criticized the weaknesses in both the Eurocentric and the deconstructivist approaches to secularism in mainstream theoretical perspectives (Cannell 2010).

Although some of the critiques above have considered processes of secularization and instances of secularism that have taken place beyond Western societies, it can be said that one of the recent interdisciplinary attempts at not only problematizing classic theories of secularization but also researching comparatively the unfolding of secular practices, institutions and discourses in different societies across the globe may be found in what has been called the “multiple secularities” approach (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012; Burchardt et al. 2013, 2015; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021). In this paper, I attempt to correct what I consider to be the lack of empirical attention to the subjective dimension in the multiple secularities framework. By analyzing, from a genealogical perspective, the secular subjectivities of three influential positivist intellectuals who played crucial roles in the implementation of the first secular educational program in 19th-century Mexico, I argue that the multiple secularities framework’s analytical axes may be conceptually refined and broadened. To further introduce this paper, I outline next the multiple secularities framework’s first and most recent versions.

Paralleling the idea of “proliferating differentiations” in the early studies of Western secularism (Martin 1978, p. 288), the multiple secularities framework may be traced back to an initial proposal for analyzing different types of cultures of secularities by departing from church–state perspectives and focusing instead on the range of institutional as well as cultural, discursive, and symbolical processes and forms of “differentiation between religion and other social spheres” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, p. 881). Drawing on Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities, the multiple secularities approach first posed the non-reductive analysis of secularism and secularization through two conceptual axes—guiding ideas and reference problems—with four possible variations each. Accordingly, different cultures of secularities could be distinguished by looking into the reference problems they ultimately seek to resolve: the problems of “individual freedom”, “religious heterogeneity”, “national integration”, or the independence of “institutional domains” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, p. 887). Addressed similarly or differently by groups, institutions or nations, these four problems would be ideologically oriented by a corresponding set of modern socio-political maxims or what the authors called “guiding ideas”: freedom and individuality, tolerance and respect, progress and enlightenment, and rationality and autonomy (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, p. 890).2

After being applied to societies beyond Western countries, the theoretical-conceptual approach above yielded insights into the history and configuration of secular programs through a spectrum of traditions, institutions and agents. Regarding post-colonial societies such as India and South Africa, it was found, for instance, that “legacies” of liberation struggles and cultural “notions” of emancipation (Burchardt et al. 2013, p. 625) have shaped differently the discourses and counter-discourses of secularism in these countries. Regarding societies beyond the West more generally, the multiple secularities framework proposed the relevance of four general analytic dimensions that I found relevant to approach preliminarily the empirical objects that I discuss below. One of the dimensions concerns the global nature of secularities, more specifically, the “global interconnectedness” (Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013, p. 607) and the transnational circulation of secular ideological programs. A second analytical dimension, which is problematized further below, relates to the dynamics of conceptual translations and “semantic hybridity” that result from the variable adaptations of the (Western) secular into “vernacular categories” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 8). The other two dimensions concern the expansion of Western colonial regimes that may be considered early promoters of secularism and the resulting dynamics of competition over different “locations of the sacred” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 13).

A more recent version of the multiple secularities framework has emphasized the global comparative outlook of the approach while offering a modified conceptual-analytical grid (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2020, 2021, 2023; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021). This version focuses less on guiding ideas and reference problems and more on two types of basic analytical axes for the identification and explanation of the multiple processes in the construction of the “religious-secular divide” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, p. 880) in different societies: forms of “social” or “institutional differentiations” and forms of “conceptual distinctions” between what may be termed the religious and the non-religious (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021, p. 291; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021, pp. 45, 62). Whereas social or institutional differentiations may be found and observed in “social structures” across the cultural milieu or the organizational field of religious denominations, conceptual distinctions may be studied through “epistemic structures” (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021, pp. 59–64; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021, pp. 295–98). The latter are verifiable through “patterns of perception and interpretation” that may, in turn, include corresponding “classification systems” (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021, p. 59) or binary taxonomies.

Trying to avoid both the tendency to universalize the concept of (Western) religion and the critical perspectives that claim cross-cultural conceptual incommensurability in a dialogically self-defeating fashion, this version of the framework seeks to identify and explain the local or “endogenous” (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021, p. 49) social and epistemic structures of differentiations and dissociations in non-Western societies. The framework also seeks to account for the historical forms of institutional and discursive distinctions that in different societies may have predated the religious–secular separations conceived and instituted in Western societies in the context of modern secularism. One of the primary aims of such an approach is thus “the historicization of conceptual distinctions and institutional differentiations in the non-West” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021, p. 294; emphasis added). By identifying and explaining historical “non-Western” structures for the discursive and material separation of the religious from the non-religious and by giving causal properties to those local structures (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2020, pp. 37–38), the varieties of secularisms and secularization processes taking place in contemporary societies across the globe may then be explained.

Analyses of contemporary secularisms beyond the West that have taken into consideration the multiple secularities framework have found that collective and class-related identities are key explanatory elements. Regarding India, for instance, it has been argued how contemporary debates about democracy, the public sphere, secularism and the public role of religions are partly traversed by disputes between a traditional Indian identity that draws on Brahmanical cultural references and an “autonomous pan-Indian” identity (Renzi 2015, p. 70) defended by Dalit agents and collectivities. Indeed, the role of cultural and collective identities in the configuration of cultures of secularities has been theoretically considered since the framework’s first version (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012). The analytical centrality of “the sphere of everyday life” and people’s “multiple forms of embodying religious and secular ways of being, knowing and sensing” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 5) have also been suggested as part of the framework’s empirical targets. A more specific interest in the quotidian materiality of the secular and its entanglement with religious identity and “religious materiality” through items such as people’s clothing and food has also been proposed as part of the potential spectrum of empirical objects of inquiry (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2020, pp. 37–38, 40–41). However, except for the analysis of national and collective identities in some post-colonial societies, the framework’s plans for exploring the subjective dimension of the secular have not translated into relevant empirical findings.

The section below outlines major contributions in works on religious and secular identities and subjectivities; it also highlights those that, in line with the historical perspective of the multiple secularities model, adopt a historical view. The third section presents the non-normative methodological criteria that guided the genealogical exploration of the intellectuals’ subjectivities. After discussing the issue of the “elimination” of religious knowledge found in the textual materials authored by the aforementioned intellectuals, the fourth section presents the most relevant findings regarding the thinkers’ moral, pedagogical, civic and religious subjectivities and their counterintuitive religious references. The last part of this section suggests the search for both endogenous conceptual distinctions and endogenous patterns of conceptual erasures. This part also discusses the multiple hybridizations that are observable across the intellectuals’ subjectivities; more specifically, it suggests the analysis of semantic, experiential and emotional hybridizations and the analysis of sacred–secular overlappings, as well as ecclesiological–secular and theological–secular types of transpositions. The conclusion highlights the relevance of analyzing secularities from the perspective of historical subjects and their complex selves to better grasp the intricate interdependence, ambiguity, multipolarity and polyvalence of historical secularities across the globe.

2. Historicizing Secular Subjectivities

I start this section by outlining the literature on religious and secular identities. In line with the historical perspective of the multiple secularities approach that is being problematized in this article, I point out some of the works on identities that have adopted historical views. After this, and to substantiate the relevance of genealogical inquiries in the analyses of secular subjectivities, I summarize both Michel Foucault’s approach to the genealogy of the modern subject and Talal Asad’s genealogical take on the secular subject.

Aside from the classic Weberian literature on the historical extra-religious effects of religious (Protestant) convictions and habits, more recent scholarship has offered critical annotations on religions and identities from at least three types of analytical perspectives, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive: first, a type of perspective that tends both to conceptualize identity as the search for meaning and a sense of belonging and to focus on the process of religious identity formation through various stagist developmental models (Bell 2008; Peek 2005); second, a perspective that tends to conceptualize identity as a complex individual and partly institutional constructed phenomena and, thus, stresses ideas such as the “permeability” of religious organizations and correspondingly fluid religious identities (Ammerman 2003, pp. 218, 223) or the “intersectionality” of religious and other identities (Holmes 2011, pp. 192, 198–99); third, a perspective that leans toward collective or national identities and underlines, with different critical nuances, the importance of group membership, dynamics between majority and minority populations, and cultural and socio-political conflicts in the trajectories of and encounters between multiple identities, including religious ones (Basedau et al. 2016; Hickey 2010; Mitchell 2006).

Some of the works that have analyzed religious identities (e.g., Hickey 2010; Mitchell 2006) remind us that, more often than not, in contemporary societies, there are no religious identities without some form of a “secular” counterpart—and vice versa. It can be said that works that address secular identities may also be distinguished by the type of individual–collective (Creese 2019; Guenther et al. 2013; LeDrew 2013), collective–national (Kešić and Duyvendak 2020; Nagel and Staeheli 2011) or even continental (Casanova 2006) issues and phenomena they analyze. More importantly, this literature has pointed out the complex interplay between secular and religious identities, as well as other equally relevant processes and theoretical-analytical dimensions. Some of the approaches that have probed identities at the individual–collective level have highlighted, for instance, the multidirectional trajectories in the formation of secular identities (LeDrew 2013) or the complex processes of othering required for the latter (Guenther et al. 2013; see also Kešić and Duyvendak 2020). Other works have analyzed secular and religious identities in relation to the public and private dimensions and have thus observed the link between the public performativity of secular identities and the private enactment of religiosities (Creese 2019) or the modalities for the simultaneous articulation of secular and religious identities in a “fluid public sphere” with “multilayered” political subjectivities (Nagel and Staeheli 2011, p. 454). Other approaches have additionally underlined the constitutive link between secular identities and what can be regarded as the context’s historical “preconditions” (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021, p. 44). In this sense, some authors have suggested the shaping of secular identities via a secularist “historization of national identity” (Kešić and Duyvendak 2020, pp. 160, 169; emphasis in original). Other works have pointed out the “rarely verbalized” intertwining of secular and Christian “cultural identities” in Europe and the echoes of Enlightenment-era values such as “human dignity, equality, freedom, and solidarity” (Casanova 2006, pp. 66, 82) in those identities.

Regarding individual selves and subjectivities, it is safe to argue that an influential theoretical approach is Michel Foucault’s perspective on the formation of the modern subject (Foucault 2005) and the classic Greek and Christian genealogies of the ethics and care of the self (Foucault 2017). The Foucauldian approach to the self-departs from studies of identities, at least in three respects. Firstly, the concern for complexity in Foucauldian optics turns into an ambitious problematization of our very idea of the human holder of identity/ies: the subject itself. Accordingly, Foucault does not address the meanings and the notions of belonging in identities but attempts to locate and dissect the long-lasting knowledge “systems“ (Kendall 2011, p. 76) that have provided modern individuals with the epistemological grammar whereby normative meanings, norms of conduct and ethical codes may be conceived in the first place. Additionally, Foucault’s perspective is not a classic historiographical view ultimately guided by teleologies of modernity, such as the search for the type of Kantian universal reason and humanity’s linear historical progression. What Foucault deploys, through a Nietzschean methodological strategy, is a genealogical exploration of the past as encounters of non-linear historical trajectories, contingency, emergency and even historical reversals. Thus, Foucault’s genealogical analyses additionally position a view of the subject as a contingent historical construction that is “multiple and fractured” and an understanding of subjectivity as “nomadic, temporary, contradictory, and heterogeneous” (Kendall 2011, pp. 72, 73).

One of the most cited authors who has applied a Foucauldian genealogical approach to critically discuss secularisms and issues regarding the secular subject is Talal Asad (Balkenhol et al. 2020; Burchardt et al. 2015; Calhoun et al. 2011; Mapril et al. 2017). This author problematizes the secular as a “fixed” category (Asad 2003, p. 25) that has a “deep Christian historicity” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 3). A construct with fragmented historical origins that nonetheless is at the core of contemporary modernity (Mapril et al. 2017), the secular overlaps with the religious and, at the same time, “is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it.” (Asad 2003, p. 25) As a concept that carries “certain behaviors, knowledges and sensibilities in modern life”, the secular is also receptive to the sacred3 and, therefore, poses questions about the different ways the sacred “can become the object not only of religious thought but of secular practice too” (Asad 2003, pp. 25, 37; see also Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 4). Extending these ideas to the subjective dimension, Asad criticizes the taken-for-granted idea of the modern “self-owning secular subject” (Asad 2011, p. 283). In one of his genealogies, for instance, the author attempts to show that pain and suffering experienced by believers in Christian and Muslim traditions open up spaces for agency and that the same concept and experience in contemporary Western societies must be seen less as a vestige of religious irrational practices and more as persistent, contingent and contested phenomena (Asad 2003, pp. 113–24).

Summing up, the works on religious and secular identities have contributed to the understanding of the complexity of the individual dimension of religiosities and secularities. The works have shown the irreducibility of religious and secular identities to issues of “religious affiliation” and “membership” to secular organizations, or, as has been noted elsewhere, “a drop in church practice and beliefs” (Dobbelaere 2004, p. 38). They have also demonstrated that religious and secular identities are generally both context-dependent and phenomenological constructs that involve multiple experiential trajectories, heterogeneous generative processes, asymmetric relations, or open conflicts with other “multilayered” identities. More importantly, the studies on the modern notion of the subject and the inquiries into the secular subject, more specifically, have further expanded the understanding of the complexities above. These genealogical approaches have demonstrated the analytical relevance of probing both the experiential, emotional, bodily and cognitive components of secular subjectivities, as well as the different degrees of fragmentation, contingency and contradiction in the historical constitution of secular subjectivities. Such a range of subjective elements and non-linear historical dynamics lead to the next sections.

3. Methodological and Contextual Notes

The descriptive findings that I present below are the results of a genealogical exploration of the secular subjectivities of an elite group of positivist intellectuals in the 19th century and the early 20th century in Mexico. This genealogical analysis had two initial objectives. First, it sought to probe not only the aforementioned intellectuals’ “multiple […] appropriation of meanings” of the secular (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 4) but also their experiential (emotional, affective, bodily) and cognitive (perceptive, intuitive, reflexive) notions, references and accounts of secularism. Second, the analysis sought to shed light on the discursive forms these intellectuals displayed to differentiate between religious and secular institutions and to distinguish conceptually the religious from the non-religious (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021). As a genealogical inquiry (Foucault 2003), the exploration I carried out was not oriented by the assumption of a successful progression of national history typical of mainstream academic narratives on Mexico’s state secularism (Salazar and Capdevielle 2013).4 The genealogical exercise was not guided, either, by an urge to evaluate the veracity of the intellectuals’ subjectivities, including their judgments on colonial Catholicism and their appraisals of the secular. The inquiry was premised upon a critical, context-sensitive genealogical strategy (Zavala-Pelayo 2022) focused particularly on the search for heterogeneous meanings, contingent experiences and multiple subjectivities that could shed light on the complexities and intricacies of cultures of secularities as lived by subjects in their “life-worlds” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 5).

To accomplish the above, I focused on three intellectuals: Gabino Barreda (1818–1881), Justo Sierra (1848–1912) and Porfirio Parra (1854–1912). They may be regarded as three of the most influential positivist intellectuals active in Mexico’s post-independence educational field in the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th (Ibarra 2013; Merrell 1990; Zea 1974). Together, they represent relevant empirical instances that may not only account for the development of the anti-clerical type of secularity that prevails in contemporary Mexico but may also shed light on the complex secularities that have developed in other societies formerly colonized by Catholic Spain or by other evangelizing regimes.

An avid attendee of August Comte’s Paris lessons, Gabino Barreda is regarded as the founder of Mexico’s first secular and positivist “system of education” (Zea 1974, p. 69) via the establishment of the country’s first upper-secondary educational institution in 1868, the National Preparatory School, which he headed from 1868 to 1878. A former student at the National Preparatory School and “follower” of Barreda (Zea 1974, p. 170), Justo Sierra graduated as a lawyer in 1871, drafted the bill for the creation of Mexico’s National University in 1881 and headed the country’s Ministry of Public Education from 1905 to 1911. Critical of hardline positivists’ dismissal of metaphysical thinking, Sierra is nonetheless described as a believer in science and positivist education as the primary means to achieve the “ultimate stage of political freedom” (Merrell 1990, p. 73). Considered Barreda’s “most eminent disciple” and “the positivists’ expert in Logic” at the Preparatory School (Martinez 2018, pp. 35–36), Porfirio Parra graduated as a physician from the National Medical School in 1878 and performed as head of the Preparatory School from 1907 to 1910. He was also a founder member of positivist associations and a member of the Mexican Parliament in different administrations (Alvarado 1988; Martinez 2018).

Barreda, Sierra, Parra and other positivist thinkers in the second half of the 19th century became visible during a relevant transitional period in the country’s history. They adapted French positivism as a master paradigm to the country’s educational system. However, they, and especially Barreda, were also the top officials who implemented the first major secular reform in the educational field of post-independence Mexico. This reform took place after the passing, in 1860 decade, of different bills that secularized the country’s public education field by explicitly placing the administration of public schools under state jurisdiction and by removing the teaching of the Catechism and other religious subjects in the curricula of schools from primary to upper-higher levels (Gonzalez and Arredondo 2017; see also Zea 1974, p. 40). Moreover, these educational reforms may be, in turn, regarded as one of the main outcomes of the first secular laws in the country, passed by the Mexican Parliament in the 1850s. The passing of these laws was not the result of imposition by external powers (Burchardt et al. 2015; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021); it was mostly the result of endogenous forces, more specifically, what may be regarded as the contingent political dominance of ideologically liberal forces. The four decades that followed Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain in 1821 saw the slow construction of a volatile field of institutional politics where armed forces and political factions that coalesced around “liberal” and “conservative” antagonistic parties quarreled in the Mexican Parliament and in the battleground. By defeating the conservative forces in warfare episodes, the liberal party in the Parliament managed to propose and obtain enough votes to pass a series of bills that considerably affected the economic and political capabilities of the Catholic Church. The aim of these major legal reforms, known as the Reforma, was indeed the separation of church from state business (Zavala-Pelayo 2020). It is safe to argue that Barreda, Parra and other positivist educators capitalized on the secular educational laws that derived from the Reforma and thus spread the first secular educational program in the country.

To explore the secular subjectivities of Barreda, Sierra and Parra through both their official public thinking and their rather personal and private thoughts—or what Foucault calls “formal systematizations” and “naïve knowledges […] below the required level of […] scientificity” (Foucault 2003, pp. 6–7)—I collected diverse textual materials authored by the agents themselves. The materials ranged from textbooks, official reports, work-related letters and public speeches to personal and family letters and speeches for private audiences, including funeral eulogies. Some of the texts were collected from anthologies or compilations published by private and public institutions; other materials or extracts were collected from academic publications. To approach the complex nature of these intellectuals’ secular subjectivities, the section below presents first the most relevant findings regarding their strong views on the separation between church and state politics and between religious and secular knowledge. After this, the subsections present the main findings of what may be regarded as the intellectuals’ moral, pedagogical, civil and religious subjectivities and their counterintuitive range of religious references.

4. Elimination of Knowledge and Multilayered Subjectivities

Similar to other national post-colonial cases (Burchardt et al. 2013), it can be argued that the positivist educators introduced above transposed the national independence movement’s idea(l)s of autonomy and emancipation into the secularism they witnessed emerging in the country’s legal dimension throughout the 1850s. If Mexico’s independence movement was considered the historical watershed that “had finally broken up the chain that had made Mexico a slave of Spain” (Barreda [1867] 1941, p. 87), the Reforma and the passing of the first secular laws in Mexico in the 1850s represented the victorious crystallization of a major “program of complete separation” (Barreda 1877b, p. 243, emphasis added; see also Barreda [1867] 1941, p. 91) between the Catholic Church5 and the Mexican state. This Reforma meant, to some extent, “cultural emancipation” (Burchardt et al. 2013, p. 614), but, more importantly, it was an emancipatory reform in itself in the eyes of the positivist intellectuals. The Reforma had allegedly “made secular [laico]” not only the institution of marriage but also civil institutions in general (Parra 1906, p. 158). From the educators’ viewpoint, the legal reforms were the outcome of a necessary internal war whereby “the [Catholic] clergy and the army as vestiges of the old regime” were defeated by an already “emancipated intelligentsia” (Barreda [1867] 1941, p. 89). The Reforma was seen as an actual “revolution” that brought about “antireligious emancipation” (Sierra [1906] 1919, p. 280); it represented “the most important step a nation could take” not only toward “civilization” and “moral progress” (Barreda [1867] 1941, p. 91) but also toward a “full freedom of conscience” (Barreda 1877b, p. 243). Whereas these discursive instances may parallel discourses of secularity in other post-colonial societies striving for functional autonomy and national independence (Renzi 2015), the positivist educators’ view of the educational field and religious knowledge offer further insights into the type of hardline, confrontational secularity they envisaged in a post-colonial society that just five decades earlier had achieved political independence.

As the first educational program implemented by state authorities since independence from Spain was declared, the positivist school of Barreda, Sierra, Parra and other positivist officials sought to institute an equally emancipatory curriculum. In the words of these intellectuals, the secular public school had first to emancipate from its former “ecclesiastical tutelage” (Parra 1906, p. 158); that is, the diocesan and the regular clergy that had become “the supreme chief” of education and had in their hands “all the means to eliminate” alternative knowledge (Barreda [1867] 1941, p. 74). Facing this state of affairs, the positivist educational program had to provide a new scientific education “emancipated from all metaphysical and theological concepts” (Parra 1906, p. 159). Metaphysical propositions and theological postulates were allegedly the building blocks of a field of beliefs subservient to a clerical authority that had inhibited the development of “the field of reason” (Barreda [1876] 1941, p. 158). In political debates, some of those clerical authorities were occasionally acknowledged as mentors, benefactors and even as political leaders. An instance of this is Parra’s deferential description of bishop Manual Abad y Queipo (1751–1825) as a wise and judicious “stateman” (Parra 1906, p. 32). However, clerical authorities in the educational field were perceived differently. Moreover, these particular clerical authorities, together with metaphysical and theological knowledge, were seen as instruments of a colonial religion whose objectives were “killing dissidents morally when they cannot kill them physically; killing ideas with anathemas; killing resistance with excommunication” (Sierra [1906] 1919, p. 308).6 Alongside emancipation, the primary goal was thus the “elimination of all theological and metaphysical elements” (Sierra [1891] 1919, p. 22; emphasis added) and the overthrowing of the type of “divine authority” that in colonial times begot “universal propositions” without reasoned verification (Barreda [1870] 1941, p. 30). In the imaginaries of the positivist intellectuals, I argue, the goal of their educational program paralleled the “elimination” of alternative knowledge in the hands of the colonial Inquisitorial church.

At any rate, how was the “emancipation” of the new secular educational field lived by the intellectuals in charge of the institutionalization of secular education in the country? How was the “elimination” of metaphysical and theological knowledge actually carried out in the individual subjectivities that headed Mexico’s first secular educational institutions? If the positivist school was to educate and form emancipated secular subjects for an independent nation, how were those subjects’ secular selves imagined? The subsections below offer exploratory answers to these questions.

4.1. Moral Subjectivity: Paul’s Moral Self

Echoing the discourses of national independence and the desires of political emancipation, Barreda saw an unmistakable “independence” and “a complete […] separation” (Barreda [1863] 1877, pp. 107–8) between non-religious and religious morals. The difference, however, seemed to hinge on a rather conservative and certainly ambivalent distinction expressed by Barreda: whereas moral religious principles changed across religious denominations and historical periods, the most relevant and fundamental non-religious moral norms were not supposed to change. In addition, to prove the existence of unchangeable moral norms across history, Barreda pointed to what he thought were moral principles shared across different intellectual and religious traditions over human history. In his view, classic Greek philosophers, Chinese ancient literati, and Jesus Christ shared the principles of “equality, humbleness and loving thy neighbor” (Barreda [1863] 1877, p. 108). Moral norms like these were allegedly timeless and crucial for the development of a secular subject. In this, Barreda joined other positivist intellectuals who similarly asserted, with a solemn tone yet without substantial explanation, that moral “maxims” such as “loving thy neighbor” were worthy of being saved from the “shipwreck of [old] dogmas;” these maxims could be “humanized by science” in a similar way they had been “divinized by Christianity” (Sierra [1881] 1919, p. 10).

Indeed, the positivist educators imagined the moral consciousness of the secular subject and her “benevolent” and “evil inclinations” (Barreda [1863] 1877, pp. 109, 114) as residing within the subject herself and, more specifically, in a physical organ within the subject’s mind. If the human body could be trained, the bodily organ of the human moral compass could be trained and developed as well. This approach to morals drew on the views of French philosopher Condorcet on the perfectibility of human rationality and morality and the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall and his phrenological view on the material and physical site of morality within the human brain (Barreda [1863] 1877, pp. 108–10). However, it is safe to argue that Condorcetian philosophy and Gallian physiology were not the only theoretical bases informing the positivists’ views on morals.

The founder of the Preparatory School asserted that his model of a secular moral subject also drew on the duality of human nature as set out by Christianity. In his words, “the true founder of Catholicism, the incomparable Saint Paul, had already established this human dualism.” (Barreda [1863] 1877, p. 114). Paul had noted correctly our inclinations for good and evil deeds; his mistake, however, was to place the individual’s dispositions toward good deeds outside the individual herself and in need of a divine grace that had to be asked to and given by God. “What the apostle [Paul] placed outside us, that is, our benevolent inclinations—love, veneration, goodness, humbleness—science has found within ourselves after eighteen centuries of laborious search” (Barreda [1863] 1877, p. 114).

Barreda’s argument for universal moral precepts, including those of Christianity, as well as his explicit acknowledgment of a “Pauline”7 human duality at the base of his secular morality, seemed to transcend the level of rhetorical discourse and could be partly found in what can be regarded as the positivist educators’ moral judgment and sensibility. During his speech at Barreda’s funeral, Sierra commended the oeuvre of the Preparatory School’s founder by pointing out “the austere and holy drive” in the life of Barreda, as well as the “intense love” and the “very pure maxims of love of the good” he disseminated among students (Sierra [1881] 1919, p. 8). Regarding the colonial period and drawing not only on Christian morals but on specific Catholic commandments, Parra ascertained, in an academic essay on the Reforma, how the Mexican clergy itself,

“who at the beginning of the Spanish domination showed so many virtues […], had insensibly degenerated, falling into idleness and even vice […]. [W]hile there were exceptions in virtuous, selfless, charitable and very worthy priests, there were many other [priests] who lived in public concubinage”.

(Parra 1906, p. 162)

4.2. Pedagogical Subjectivity: Teachers, Missionaries and Holy Science

While the positivist educators deemed necessary the elimination of metaphysical and theological knowledge, their broader views of the educational field and the pedagogical profession did not dispense altogether with religious meanings. With a seriousness and a vocabulary that paralleled Comte’s in 19th-century France (Comte [1865] 2009, pp. 340–426), the masterminds of the positivist project in 19th-century Mexico described the vocation of the secular teacher within the new positivist school through religion-related identity labels. Barreda imagined teachers undergoing a process of training that was described as a “complete consecration […] into their social priesthood”8 (Barreda 1877b, p. 242). According to Sierra, the positivist school teacher was “the apostle and the missionary of the new humanity” (Sierra [1883] 1919, p. 15; see also Sierra [1900] 1977, p. 58). These colonial-era identity categories were also assigned to the positivist founders themselves. During his eulogy at Barreda’s funeral, Sierra noted how Barreda, “the apostle”, had signaled the way to progress by pointing to “a land emerging from the [biblical] flood” (Sierra [1881] 1919, p. 8). The names of the religious officials above were also used to name the secular teachers as a group and as an organized collectivity. In his proposal of a union-like organization for teachers in Mexico, Barreda, not surprisingly, referred to teachers as a collectivity that had to “rise up to the category of a true priesthood and constitute a spiritual power” and whose missions had to be the “noble priesthood of education” (Barreda 1877b, p. 242; see also Comte [1865] 2009, pp. 344–46)—and this particular type of “priesthood” leads to the next point.

It is safe to argue that the use of “priest”, “apostle” and “missionary” as identity labels may not have strictly complied with their biblical meanings but indeed transcended a merely nominal function and had a substantial role in the intellectuals’ perception of the teacher’s profession or mission. In the view of Sierra, the teacher was the new humanity’s missionary because this agent was perceived as destined to be “the author of the diffusion of progress in our century” (Sierra [1883] 1919, p. 15). In addition, the school teacher was thought of as a missionary because “the work of the great Christian missionaries in New Spain” was contributing to the dissolution of idolatry among the indigenous population, and this “divine work” (Sierra [1900] 1977, p. 58) had apparently not ceased after independence from Spain, hence the need of a new positivist kind of evangelizer. It is not coincidental that Parra’s pedagogical style during his term as the Preparatory School’s head has been accounted as one based on the idea of the teacher as “a director of souls” (Martinez 2018, p. 47). This particular role is not explained but it is mentioned explicitly by Sierra. In his eulogy to Barreda, Sierra addressed the deceased and his work as follows: “You knew that for someone who accepts a priestly mission, the responsibility is enormous; you were assigned the care of souls” (Sierra [1881] 1919, p. 9). It may be argued that the care of souls, in Sierra’s view, was a responsibility that included the formation of a “collective soul destined to be the fatherland’s soul itself” (Sierra [1902] 1919, pp. 194–95). In his inaugural speech at the National University in 1910, Sierra expounded on this type of missionary and soul-caring educational work:

“Cultivating wills to harvest selfishness would be the bankruptcy of pedagogy. It [education] requires infusing love to the temperaments; it requires to saturate man with the spirit of sacrifice in order to […] make him a moral being […]”.

(Sierra [1910] 2004, pp. 12–13)

If the nominal identity and the professional self of the secular positivist teacher appear counterintuitively infused with references from the colonial Catholic church, a parallel transposition could be observed in the extra-theoretical notion of science, too. In Sierra’s vision, the “holy” mission of science, carried out by the missionary teacher, represented, just like the colonial Catholic mission, the suppression of and emancipation from superstitions (Sierra [1900] 1977, p. 58). Such a rational and emancipatory new role did not prevent science from being described also as “an immaculate theory of truths” that advanced “projecting its light” and “seeking the truth” (Sierra [1910] 2004, pp. 12–13). Similarly, science was imagined as the redemptive “land” that, according to Sierra, Barreda had marked out prophetically, a land from where “concord and life will spread to the Earth” (Sierra [1881] 1919, p. 8).

4.3. Civic Subjectivity: School Temples and the Immaculate Republic

Whereas the positivist intellectuals’ central objective was the emancipation of the political and educational public institutions from the Catholic church’s tutelage, the new civic spirit they imagined as companions did not seem detached from the entire repertoire of Catholic institutional elements. The redemptive idea of science briefly described above was functional to a corresponding discourse about schools as religious temples. If the positivist educator was named and explained as a new priest whose mission was to cultivate souls, save them from superstitions, infuse them with dispositions to love and sacrifice and turn them into the fatherland’s collective soul, the positivist school as a material and tangible institutional entity was also aligned to such goals. For Sierra, the school had to constitute a new “temple” where a new cohort of “Mexican children” were to “sing songs of love and hope” (Sierra [1883] 1919, p. 16). Furthermore, Sierra imagined the public university as a temple where students would congregate “to worship […] the science that defends the fatherland” and also “to hold the immaculate host of the truth as a promise of freedom and redemption” (Sierra [1910] 2004, p. 45). Sierra’s nominal and substantial religious metaphors did not seem fortuitous. Schools were described as sites for learning but also for the diffusion of new beliefs. It has been argued that Barreda tore an essay by of one of his students at the Preparatory School because the text argued for God’s non-existence. Barreda reportedly reacted by saying, “We come here [the Preparatory School] to enlighten ourselves not to attack beliefs.” (cited in Gonzalez 1970, p. 7). During a student awards ceremony at the National Preparatory School, Barreda declared before his audience that the Preparatory School did not seek to “hurt respected beliefs” but “to awaken them in those that do not have them” (Barreda 1877a, p. 247).

If the positivist school was depicted as a temple of beliefs, the workplace of missionaries and the site for the creation of a secular soul for the fatherland, the latter was to be described in equivalent terms. Sierra depicted the fatherland as a “sacrosanct effigy” (Sierra [1895] 1919, p. 118), a human creation that had to be nurtured through “a religion of love,” and founded upon “the memory of […] heroes,” who had to be in turn “surrounded by the august liturgy of a cult” (Sierra [1895] 1919, p. 106). From his perspective, the fatherland could also be referred to as both a “temple” and a “religion” itself (Sierra [1893] 1919, p. 52). Regarding the notion of a republic, Sierra imagined a positivist school as a site that would see “the immaculate figure of the Republic emerging,” just like the biblical “Mary” emerged “in the canvas of the Spanish painter,” that is, “having around a cloud of angels and […] the Sun of the time to come.” (Sierra [1883] 1919, p. 16). In addition to this graphic parallel between the idea of the Republic and the portrayal of the Virgin Mary in Spanish art, Sierra also drew a type of theological link between the former and the Christian Eucharist. In a school ceremony for the celebration of the New Year, before a group of primary-school students, Sierra asserted the following:

These religious celebrations are for you, sons of democracy who approach the Altar of the Fatherland, your first civic communion: here, the entire soul of the Republic is given to each one of you, like Christ in the fragments of the Eucharistic bread; from now on and until your death, it [the Republic’s soul] is bound to you, it lives in you.

(Sierra [1883] 1919, p. 13)

4.4. Religious Subjectivities: Prayers, Majestic Preachers and Jesus Christ’s Flesh

The hardline secular subjectivities of Barreda, Sierra and Parra appear oddly traversed by practices, feelings and memories substantially related to the Catholic doctrine. It has been noted that Barreda might not have necessarily been a practicing Catholic (Gonzalez 1970). However, he has also been described as an intellectual who “accompanied his wife, children and domestic staff in their night prayers […] and even reprimanded those who were inattentive” (Gonzalez 1970, p. 13). Statements by Parra give further insights into the complexity of the positivist intellectuals’ counterintuitive religious subjectivities. Next is a passage of Parra’s written memories of the religious school he attended and of the school’s head priest:

The figure of the preacher […], his majestic attitude, his very correct gestures, his […] kind and expressive face; his very white skin that stood out against the background of the temple, everything contributed to deeply touched believers pouring a torrent of tears. I joined my tears to theirs and I swear I have never poured purer and more soothing tears.

(cited in Alvarado 1988, p. 184)

A letter by Sierra addressed to his daughter after he and his wife returned home from a visit to the sanctuary of Lourdes in France is more explicit regarding the intimate religious beliefs, experiences and emotions of the positivist top officials. In his letter, after recounting the mortifying faces and pleas of the sick individuals asking for miracles in the sanctuary and after describing the site’s “vulgar” religious imagery, he found it opposite to that of “the workshops” of medieval “holy men” (Sierra [1912] 1947, p. 66), Sierra confessed to his daughter the following:

And there you have me, son of my time and my century, and yet son of my mother above all, who […] raised me with the belief of the supernatural as the most natural thing in the world; [so that] every time I get in touch with such sincere manifestations of the Catholic faith, I resurrect in the religion she taught me. And the thoughts my heart holds and my reason does not comprehend, are those my mother […] is telling me, inside me, from eternity.

(Sierra [1912] 1947, pp. 70–71)

Some of those “thoughts” of the heart were expressed frankly and more specifically by Sierra in the same letter as follows:

Poor, poor humanity, my God! From all the believer hearts, and thinking more about martyrdoms than about miracles, arises my plea quietly and trembling: Save them, Lord, save them! You were [Jesus] Christ. You were human like them; [you had] the same flesh, the same bones. You sanctified them because you instructed them in giving your divine spirit a bodily clothing. Save them Lord, redeem them […].

(Sierra [1912] 1947, pp. 69–70)

4.5. Conceptual Erasures and Multiple Hybridizations

The subsections above do not exhaust the description of the positivist officials’ subjective complexities. The paragraphs above do not explain either the specific factors and individual conditions that originated and shaped those complexities. However, the genealogical exploration of the three intellectuals’ multilayered subjectivities above suggests relevant findings at the conceptual level. The first finding relates to the multiple secularities framework’s vernacular patterns of “conceptual distinctions” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021, p. 294). As noted at the beginning of this section, the intellectuals’ celebratory statements of the Reforma and their expectations of the secularism to come conveyed not only a conceptual separation between the religious and the secular but also the elimination of the theological and the metaphysical in the arena of formal knowledge. Their aim was not merely to distinguish discursively the religious from the secular but to overthrow the types of religious knowledge they considered harmful to the development of secular rationality. It may be argued that the strategic goal of their secular subjectivities was not the conceptual distinction but the conceptual “erasure” (Binder 2020, p. 70) of colonial Catholicism and what they perceived as its damaging discourses.

Another relevant finding relates to the “semantic hybridity” (Burchardt et al. 2015, p. 8; emphasis added) that, as mentioned in Section 2, has been identified as the result of the overlapping of the religious and the secular. The findings above show that such a hybridity cannot be reduced to conceptual translations. In the cases above, I argue that the subjective religious elements being hybridized with secular meanings also have experiential, emotional and perceptive natures. In a sense, they are hybridizations of epistemological, experiential, sensorial and “bodily ‘grammars’” (Michel 2019, p. 10; Martin 2018, pp. 186–87), which result in multiple subjective hybridizations. The latter are multiple for a second reason, too. The apparently contradictory overlapping of the religious and the secular does not only take the form of a generic “sacred secular” hybrid (Burchardt et al. 2015, pp. 12–13, 239) or of “secular-sacred identities” such as those that have been described for the case of contemporary India (Binder 2020, p. 72). The evidence presented above suggests that the transpositions of the religious and the secular may take at least two more specific hybrid forms.

The first is an ecclesiological–secular hybrid, whereby religious institutional–functional structures or their individual components are subjectively translated into the sphere of the secular. In the empirical cases above, these ecclesiological elements include indeed a Christian-Comtean concept of a secular “priesthood,” either in its individual–sacramental or clerical–corporativist versions. However, the evidence suggests other elements, too. There is also a concept or, more specifically, a context-dependent belief and imaginary of the colonial mission and the colonial missionary and their corresponding evangelizing roles being transposed into the thinkers’ interpretations of their pedagogical selves. The notion of the secular school as a temple-like functional institution for the diffusion of the positivist doctrine is yet another ecclesiological component in this particular hybrid.

The second type of hybrid is, in a sense, the most paradoxical and counterintuitive one; it may be termed a theological–secular hybrid (Schmitt [1922] 2005; Luczewski 2018). This particular transposition is evident across the educators’ moral, civic and religious subjectivities. What is transposed into secular grammar is not only a vague or popular version of Christian-Cartesian dualism but what one of the intellectuals explicitly attributed to a “Pauline” view of the moral subject. Similarly, the critical religious subjectivities of the three thinkers seem to depart from ordinary religious practices such as mandatory praying; however, there seem to be residues of the doctrine of the Trinity and the human nature of Christ in prayer-like manifestations of religious belief and sentiment. However, perhaps the clearest link may be observed in the civic subjectivities above. The host and the Christian Eucharist are not only mentioned metaphorically in their ritual sense. Regarding the Republic, it is the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the body and the blood of Jesus Christ through the sacred host during Christian communion that is additionally transposed to a parallel imagined process of transubstantiation, a “civic” transubstantiation, of the very “soul” of the Republic, not through a host but through what seems to be the students’ inner selves.

5. Conclusions

Theoretical-analytical frameworks constructed for the comparative analyses of secularities across different societies, such as the one proposed through the multiple secularities approach, would benefit not only from the search for historical local patterns of institutional and conceptual separations of the religious from the secular but also from analyses of those endogenous precedents from the perspective of historical subjects and their complex selves (Asad 2003; Balkenhol et al. 2020; Nagel and Staeheli 2011; cf. Dobbelaere 2004). Adopting this diachronic analytical angle may allow for the identification of both blueprints of institutional differentiation between the religious and secular spheres (Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021), as well as more specific patterns of “emancipatory” differentiations that may explain the particular configuration and development of secularities in different post-colonial societies. More importantly, an analytical framework for the analysis of secularities may productively adopt a subjective perspective to search for endogenous epistemological precedents whose target is not only the conceptual distinction between religious and secular spheres but the conceptual erasure of what is perceived as undesirable religious knowledge vis-à-vis secular or rational knowledge.

The positivist subjectivities analyzed in the sections above also suggest that inquiries into cultures of secularities across post-colonial societies should not only rely on analyses of patterns of “emancipatory” institutional differentiations and epistemological distinctions/erasures. Inquiries that seek to delve into the historicization of secularities have to be carried out, as well as dedicated analyses of the multiple hybridizations operated by/through the subjects. These analyses may shed light not only on what has been called sacred–secular hybrids or entanglements (Asad 2003; Burchardt et al. 2015; Balkenhol et al. 2020) but also on what may be termed, more specifically, ecclesiological–secular and theological–secular transpositions. Through these refined conceptualizations that account for the multiple subjective entanglements between the religious and the secular, we can further our understanding of the intricate interdependence, ambiguity, multipolarity and polyvalence of historical secularities across the globe.