Offering an account of Victorian secularisation which does not depend on the definition of the term “religion,” this article draws on a strand of secularisation studies often neglected by Victorian scholars. In particular, it develops two key aspects of philosopher Charles Taylor's work: the concept of social imaginaries, and the association of secularity with a particular kind of time. Emphasising the human-technological networks through which the notion of a Victorian public sphere was constituted, the article highlights how the function of these networks was premised on a concept of secular time regardless of participants’ conscious or articulated (non)belief. In these particular networks, the notion of immediacy and absolute simultaneity — which both presuppose a concept of secular time — were constituted through the mobilisation of a wide range of mediators, human and nonhuman. Here, the term “secularisation” denotes this process of increasingly investing and embedding secular time on the level of unarticulated assumptions. This allows scholars to recast the question of Victorian secularisation in a manner which avoids the problems associated with defining secularity as an absence of “belief” or “religion.”

中文翻译：

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“如果它教，它在不知不觉中教：”重塑维多利亚时代公共领域的世俗性

本文不依赖于“宗教”一词的定义，对维多利亚时代的世俗化进行了说明，并借鉴了维多利亚时代学者经常忽视的一系列世俗化研究。特别是，它发展了哲学家查尔斯泰勒工作的两个关键方面：社会想象的概念，以及世俗与特定时间的联系。文章强调了构成维多利亚时代公共领域概念的人类技术网络，强调了这些网络的功能如何以世俗时间概念为前提，而不管参与者有意识或明确表达的（非）信仰。在这些特殊的网络中，即时性和绝对同时性的概念——两者都以世俗时间的概念为先决条件——是通过动员广泛的人类和非人类中介而构成的。在这里，术语“世俗化”表示在未阐明的假设水平上越来越多地投资和嵌入世俗时间的过程。这使学者们能够以一种避免将世俗性定义为缺乏“信仰”或“宗教”的问题的方式重新审视维多利亚时代的世俗化问题。