Obviously, you would be hard-pressed not to call evangelicals religious. JLM: My work on secularism gets at discourse, in an old Foucauldian sense: that there is a field of statements afoot in our world that determine how the concept of religion is understood, how people live it and breathe it. What, then, do you mean when you write of “evangelical secularism”? Evangelicals, for instance, are generally thought of as promoters of a religious social order rather than a secular one. NS: This approach leads to apparent contradictions. In the process, we find that the distinctions between the religious and the secular, or science and theology, aren’t quite as definitive as we would like them to be. This doesn’t negate agency, but it definitely makes things more complicated. What is it? Is it possible? If one takes into account technology, it’s no longer quite as clear that there is a single human actor that is determining what is in front of him or her. They each inquire into what constitutes agency. This has drawn me to writers and artists who are also interested in the relationship between technology and the way we practice our humanity: people like Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Pynchon, and Ralph Ellison. My academic interest in technology stems from a personal love/hate relationship with technology in general. I’ve always been taken with gadgetry in a lot of ways, but at the same time I’m also afraid of my television set. I also subject myself to mass mediation as co-host of a local radio show. Right now I’m trying to refurbish a pair of Epicure speakers from the seventies. JLM: I definitely have deep, deep ambivalence-well, ambivalence is always deep. NS: How did technology become such a central concern for you? Are you a tinkerer? Do you like gizmos, or fear them? This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.-ed. His book Haunted Modernity or, the Metaphysics of Secularism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His article “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan” appeared in the December 2008 issue of Church History. John Lardas Modern, an assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College, draws on Beat poets, phrenologists, prison reformers, and Moby-Dick to show why taking technology seriously forces us to think differently about the boundaries of religion.
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