When religion meets history of technology: Secularism and the problem of the sacred

Despite the growing scholarly work at the intersection of religion and technology, how to characterize their relationship remains a matter of dispute for historians of technology. This essay leverages a seminal piece by Jennifer Karns Alexander in a recent special issue of History and Technology on religion and technology for addressing the metatheory behind the subject. Alexander appears to believe that the problems affecting the scholarship of the religion-technology relationship are caused by inappropriate terminology and a certain primacy of technological knowledge over religious knowledge. This essay argues that those problems are rather caused by a clash of ontologies. The ontology assumed in the realm of history of technology is informed by secularization; the ontology of religion, when religion is not normalized, is rather based on a postsecular worldview that maintains and protects the sense of the sacred. The harmonization of religion and history of technology requires a reconsideration of the secularization argument, that is, the theoretical apparatus that governs the religion-secular divide.