Secularism and the Problem of Sincerity: A New Approach to Ritual

This paper seeks to reframe somewhat the way we conceptualize issues of religious identity in the contemporary world. Rather than the over-used concepts of the religious and the secular, the paper repositions our understanding in terms of ritual and sincerity as useful corrections to an overwhelming emphasis on belief and unbelief as the primary components of a religious and secular consciousness. These later are seen as rooting in a very particular Christian understanding of what religion is about. The paper further posits a correlation between certain modernist orientations and the sincere outlook, while arguing for the continuing importance of ritual in teaching us how to live in a fractured reality.