Among the greatest challenges in thinking about secularism is that although the term acquired its significance from the development of Christian culture, it was globalized in the period of the European empires to apply to cultures where local religions did not have the same tradition of distinguishing themselves from the secular. Thus in many parts of the world, including the Islamic world, secularism and Christianity are often presented not as opposites but as twin faces of Western dominance. Some of the strongest critiques of secularism have come from postcolonial India (Bhargava 1998). Secularism might thus be seen as a mode of political organization closely connected with global capitalism, and it is ironic but not simply inconsistent that secular governance in other countries is promoted with missionary and even violent fervor by the most evangelical Christian wing of U.S. politicians.

This is an excerpt from Michael Warner’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 213).