Fighting Fire with Fire: Why Post-Secularity Matters for Safeguarding Liberal Democracy and Inspiring Societal Transformation

Scholars interested in safeguarding liberal democracy and inspiring societal transformation are increasingly turning their attention to the role of the imagination and culture in both maintaining the status quo and triggering change. However, accounts of the imagination are often quite shallow. Drawing on theories of the post-secular, this article offers an accessible means of identifying the fundaments of an imaginary and of considering how it can be transformed. It does so in four steps. First, it explains how some of the most influential cultural theories of stasis and change emerge from the study of religion and that regaining their interpretive power requires applying categories from the study of religion to secular institutions and individuals. Second, it outlines a religious repertoires approach to characterizing the fundaments of an imaginary, focusing on magic, myth, and ritual. Third, it makes these enigmatic categories easy to understand and apply by offering the Splash-Ripple Frame for articulating how magic, myth, and ritual can connect to form a ‘chain of meaning’, and observing where these chains are and are not completed. Finally, by way of demonstrating its explanatory power, it applies this frame to understanding the liberal imaginary, rebutting common misconceptions about its fundaments, offering an alternative interpretation, and suggesting ways in which it might be transformed.