Locating Religion and Secularity in East Asia Through Global Processes: Early Modern Jesuit Religious Encounters

Abstract

The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization. While most of the recent scholarly work on the globalization of the categories of religion and secularity focuses on the second Western hegemonic phase of globalization, this essay focuses on the early modern phase of globalization before Western hegemony.

Keywords

• globalization
• East Asia
• Western hegemony
• Jesuits
• religion
• religiosity
• secularity