Arnoldian Secularism

This chapter explores how Matthew Arnold’s major essays of the 1860s and 1870s took up the racialized readings of religion that Müller had opposed and used them to construct a liberal counter-paradigm for thinking about religion, race, and self-cultivation. In texts such as Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold calls humankind’s religious impulse “Hebraism,” a racial inheritance of the Semitic peoples that can contribute to the development of a many-sided selfhood if it is balanced against the Greek genius for art and knowledge, the Celtic genius for beauty and sentiment, and so on. Yet Arnold’s Hebraism also becomes subtly overdetermined in that it represents simultaneously one particular side of human life and an ideal of one-sidedness that positively rejects any larger pluralist framework. This is the ambiguity at the heart of this study: how race-based religion comes to figure a narrow energy that pluralism wants to incorporate, but also fears as a competitor.