In the first chapter of this book, I picked up two ideas from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and ran with them. The first idea was that analyses of secularization should be pitched on the level of unarticulated assumptions underpinning collective practices and technologies. This, I suggested, untethers the process of secularization from the question of people’s conscious beliefs, articulated experiences, or preferred identity markers. The second idea was that secularity denotes a specific kind of time mediated on this level; in other words, that secularity is one kind of time that makes certain technological collective practices make sense. This untethers secularity from the concept of ‘religion’. Contemporary historiographies of the secular are more or less stuck in a conceptual blind alley debating identity markers and religion’s ‘others’. In this book, I have tried to show that these two elements of Taylor’s thesis, when pragmatically developed and combined with recent theoretical and historiographical turns, offer a possible way out.

Of course, many historians are interested in the development of ‘religion’, or concerned with affirming certain groups’ self-identification as ‘secular’ in the ‘nonreligious’ sense. I expect some of them might find the idea of removing these questions entirely from histories of secularization a little controversial. Of course, the ways that people articulate their experience of having ‘beliefs’ and ‘non-beliefs’ or being ‘religious’ or ‘nonreligious’ are important simply because so many are socially and politically affected by how these terms are applied and what they come to connote. Of course, there is much to be said for giving a voice to groups who have been overlooked or indeed actively silenced, whether past or present.

Nevertheless, I maintain that most current histories of secularity remain haunted by the problems associated with accepting people’s word for what they do or do not believe and/or with the concept of ‘religion’—a term notoriously hard to define and carrying a painful Christian colonial heritage—because their object of study remains defined according to a flawed schema. Even as some have sought to substitute the concepts of ‘worldviews’ or ‘existential cultures’ for ‘religion’, retaining a focus on articulated non-/beliefs does not really constitute a genuine alternative, since these terms operate according to the same logic as the term they are meant to replace or envelope.Footnote 1

Defining secularity instead as a specific kind of time is to return to a more original understanding of the term, one that predates the comparatively recent and increasingly contested understanding of it as the absence or negation of ‘religion’.Footnote 2 It allows us to move the study of secularity forward while avoiding the conceptual stalemates that continue to characterize the field. On this understanding of secularization, the religious/nonreligious distinction is no longer relevant. For instance, while I have told a story of how secular time was originally conceptualized in Christian scholastic angelology (which could at first sight be taken as advocating the concept’s ‘religious’ pedigree), it should be clear from that story that secular time does not fit into a schema of a ‘this-worldly’/‘immanent’/‘nonreligious’ realm on the one hand and an ‘other-worldly’/‘transcendent’/‘religious’ realm on the other. The scholastics conceptualized a saeculum located in an unprecedented ‘between’ concepts of world and divinity. Secular time is a distinct kind of time articulated as a response to specific conceptual problems related to created beings that move without changing. That is all. There is nothing ‘worldly’ or ‘divine’ about it.

I have presented three examples of networks emerging in England during the nineteenth century, none of which have formerly been considered particularly relevant to histories of secularization. These networks were all developed with a view to move certain entities in a way that made them impervious to change. Scholars (even Victorian ones) have associated public railway networks with modern temporal standardization and synchronization. I have tried to clarify how they were constructed and extended for the purpose of turning passengers into immutable mobiles, and how one effect of these efforts was the mediation of secular time. Modern newspapers do appear in some secularization histories, but these often either focus on middle-class reading habits (as a form of surrogate devotional ritual sundered from its ‘religious’ roots, again echoing Victorian commentators) or also tend to conflate several temporalities into a single one which is then declared modern and secular (and calendrical, and historical, and linear, and so on). Finally, ‘quasi-religious’ characteristics of money and financial markets have received some attention from scholars of religion or indeed theologians with an interest in modernity and the secular.Footnote 3 But Bank of England notes and what I have described as an effort to invest these with the abstract properties of the gold standard have generally been overlooked.

Other networks could be analysed in the same way, networks whose associated practices included increasing strata of the population, and that centred on creating and maintaining immutable mobiles. Take, for instance, the emerging technologies and practices related to sports, which from the late eighteenth century turned from an emphasis on play and competition to focusing on the movement of ideal (male adult) human bodies measured in terms of time.Footnote 4 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, sport and physical exercise were ‘promoted as cures for degeneration’ (as well as blamed for the same thing, if performed too violently).Footnote 5 The construction of the ideal healthy human body which might move in such a way as to not deteriorate—or, to put it differently, the preservation and alignment of ancient energies in contemporary bodies—required mobilizing a network of gymnasiums, exercise equipment, stopwatches, public school curriculums, dietary advice, scientific experiments, and sports associations.Footnote 6

Or consider the realm of fashion—an often-neglected example Charles Taylor offers of a serially performed ‘space of… horizontal, simultaneous mutual presence [and] display’, carrying notions of secular time and involving a wide range of mundane technologies, not least clothes.Footnote 7 By mid-century, even as ‘off-the-rack clothing at modest prices was becoming readily available, […] the bulk of women’s and children’s clothing was still made at home’.Footnote 8 The sewing machine, patented in the 1850s, was an important technology in this story, but even more crucial were paper patterns. From the 1860s, full-size pattern pieces cut from light tissue paper was distributed in periodicals or by mail order. This simple technological object, meticulously manufactured to be light, mobile, and durable, helped collapse the temporal distance between the exclusive world of Parisian fashion and the one inhabited by English middle-class at-home sewers. This enabled a near-simultaneous consumption and adoption of performative identity which served to minimize the temporal delay and social ‘trickle-down’ logic that had for centuries characterized the fashion domain.

Another candidate might have been the networks involved in the production and distribution of fresh food. Towards the end of the century, Britain established an unprecedented worldwide network for importing fresh food from its colonies.Footnote 9 This came to depend on mechanical refrigeration, where specific entities—pieces of meat, for instance—were isolated from their environment, making it possible to move them from British-owned feeding farms in places like Iowa or Illinois to London. Inside this sealed capsule, the passing of time had been halted, or at least nearly so; the deteriorating effects of the world had been temporarily neutralized, and for as long as the meat remained within its icy chamber—so was the implicit assumption—it remained as fresh as it was the moment the animal was slaughtered. This technological mediation allowed the consumer to be co-present with and share in the meat’s moment of origin, which was in one sense what the mobile mechanical refrigerator was constructed to preserve.

Like the networks I have described in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5, these centred on creating and maintaining various immutable mobiles and, therefore, to the degree that they succeeded, mediated secular time. Histories of secularization in the sense I have been proposing could be written about any of these, and probably others.

So I am not pretending this book is in any way comprehensive with respect to which networks were more important, how many kinds of Victorian temporalities there were, or indeed the question of how to define the secular. I have drawn quite eclectically on philosophical perspectives medieval and ‘postmodern’ in order to rethink the development of certain nineteenth-century technologies and practices. Trying to combine into a coherent whole the complex historiographies of Victorian railways, news media, and monetary developments is admittedly ambitious. No doubt, in trying to highlight certain trajectories, I might at times have glossed over important details and glaring exceptions at the cost of a somewhat exaggerated teleology.

Still, I believe the approach, in addition to offering a new entrance point to the history of secularization, contributes to connecting Victorian England to the bigger picture of modernity and temporality. The juxtaposition of the three human-technological networks examined here suggests parallels that should be of interest to larger debates regarding Victorian modernity, in particular its definition and periodization. One striking point is simply this: that though their associated practices—train travelling, newspaper reading, and exchanging banknotes—became mass phenomena only towards the end of the century (or, in the case of notes, maybe only after the First World War), the emergence and consolidation of ‘the nation’, ‘public opinion’, and ‘the economy’ as technologized, temporally synchronized systems date to the three decades between 1830 and 1860. Though the book has avoided questions about the exact periodization of the ‘Victorian period’, this coincidence is nonetheless remarkable and suggests that on this level the early Victorian period (contra the thrust of some revisionist literature) was in fact crucial.Footnote 10 Indeed—and more speculatively still—it suggests that there is much value in historians (re)turning to more structural approaches and levels of analysis, rather than doubling down on questions of representation, discourse, or identity.

Focusing on the construction and maintenance of immutable mobiles allows a more detailed, less sweeping account of the developments often associated with the historical emergence of modern temporality. The standardization of time associated with public railways was directly connected to the desire to move passengers over long distances at high speeds, safely and without interruptions. The uniform grid of daily newspapers described by Benedict Anderson as manifesting the simultaneity underpinning modern imagined communities was an effect of specific technological adjustments needed to move newsworthy events without deterioration across the surface of the earth and onto the surface of paper sheets in the hands of readers on a daily frequency. The gradual acceptance of Bank of England notes as ‘real’ money was effected by an explicit combination of state monopolized technological sophistication and human artistic skill which imparted to flimsy paper slips properties long associated with gold. Even if they effected a sense of the universal, abstract, and global, these processes were specific, material, and local.

In turn, while highlighting Victorian innovations and developments, establishing a more precise definition of secular time and articulating its conceptual connection to immutable mobiles serves to highlight important continuities between the nineteenth and preceding centuries. So-called local time was not a state of nature violently overrun by the alienating temporality of industrial modernity, but in fact a precursory development of a concept which the railways only served to expand beyond city borders to a national and eventually international scale. The public sphere in which people were invited to participate and contribute to the current of ongoing social and political events likewise shifted to a larger scale as printing and telegraphic technologies made it possible to represent—indeed, ‘make present again’—events occurring beyond the geographical reach of a day’s journey by coach. And already at the end of the eighteenth century the state monopoly on violence and complex technological innovation had served to drastically reduce the circulation of counterfeit metallic money, thereby beginning the integration of a national economy under an abstract gold standard long before Victorians achieved the same thing with more easily moveable Bank of England notes.

In these ways, and bypassing with deliberate indifference debates about ‘religion’ and its ‘others’, I have proposed in this book a new way of treating secularization as a topic of research in its own right, one that avoids the conceptually superficial conflicts associated with current histories of secularization, as well as the theoretical blind alleys of non-/religious studies.

Secularity is a distinct kind of time: an abstract and isochronic time independent of motion. It is conceptually connected to immutable mobiles, things moving far and rapidly without undergoing change. Socio-technological networks whose function is premised on moving certain entities without deterioration mediate secular time. When these networks expand in size and complexity, so that increasing numbers of people participate in their associated practices more frequently, we might call this process secularization. This process is implicit in the functioning of the expanding networks regardless of how the people taking part might describe themselves or their experiences. Finally, because immutable mobiles and secular time are two sides of the same conceptual coin, scholars seeking to trace the process of secularization in modernity can focus their attention on how specific networks construe and maintain immutable mobiles in order to function as intended.

A Victorian gentleman paying for his ticket before settling into a railway carriage to read a daily newspaper on his way home from work would be participating in several overlapping and interwoven networks mediating—among multiple other temporalities—secular time. His own micro-practices—trusting the clerk to accept his coins, remaining in his seat as instructed, and reading his paper quietly to himself—supported large assemblages of technologies and collective choreographies directed towards maintaining the immutability of specific mobile entities: the money, the news, and his body and mind. Whether this hypothetical traveller identified with a religious or nonreligious ‘worldview’ is irrelevant. The study of secularization is no more about people’s experiences or identification with various forms of belief or non-belief than it is about counting churchgoers or timing religious declines or resurgences. It is about the mediation of secular time in technological networks and their associated mundane practices.