In this chapter, I develop a theoretical account to explain how and when civil spheres can become emancipatory, noting that they need first to become established in institutions but recognizing that their establishing can itself block further emancipation – unless they can somehow be wedged open to admit causes and constituencies hitherto deemed uncivil. Radical acts can, on occasion, help to wedge open civil spheres. Having set out my theoretical account, I go on to explain how it has been read through the case of the United Kingdom in which I was born and raised – the House of Lords inspired my concept of civil establishment – as well as the case of Mexico where I have conducted research over twenty-five years, here drawing on the Zapatista movement of the 1990s as an example of radical action.

This book focuses on modes of political action usually condemned, not only by government, but also by organizations from churches and charities to voluntary associations and social movements, as well as in the press – and not without reason. The acts that interest us are intended to disrupt, confront, and subvert public order. Their protagonists are not afraid to offend or to damage property, reputations, or persons. Examples mentioned in the volume include hacktivism; road or highway blocking; occupying public buildings; inflammatory cartoons; graffiti; querying the Holocaust; suicide bombing; setting oneself alight; calling for revolution; engaging in violence, rioting, and looting; wearing hoods and refusing to remove them; leaking large amounts of sensitive data; organizing marches without giving notice; mooning in public; and hunger striking.

Fitzgerald argues in the Introduction that secularism is best understood as a way of circumscribing ‘religion’, of marking it off from other things that we do. In this chapter I argue, following the anthropologist Michael Lambek, that secularism does this by looking in on ‘religion’ as if from the outside (2003: 3). I propose not just one but several reasons why people choose to take this secular perspective, I note that there are different varieties of it and I observe that a wide range of people, including Catholic priests, take such a perspective. I focus on secular knowledge rather than the secular politics on which most of the other chapters focus, and I look in particular at the knowledge of history, which also happens to be the key genre of this volume. I end by placing secularism within the broader politics of knowledge that the literary critic Walter Mignolo has termed “modern/colonial” (2000: 22). By this I mean that the secular perspective has developed, possibly since the sixteenth century, as a way of marking the difference between peoples.

It is often said of history that it is a secular kind of knowledge. I had taken that claim to mean that history banished divine agency from its narratives, thus contesting the previously dominant narratives of the church and other religious authorities. There are of course histories that do this, some of which are frankly anti-clerical. However, other histories do find a place for divine agency and yet I still want to call them secular because divine agency is placed outside the main body of the narrative.