More proof, if proof were needed : spectacles of secular insistence, multicultural failure, and the contemporary laundering of racism

In his essay on the ‘weaponization’ of atheism, Jeff Sparrow notes that ‘Anti-Muslim writers commonly declare that Islam needs its own reformation. But that’s a charge that should really be levelled at atheism’ (Sparrow, 2012 ). Regardless of the specific charge, Sparrow is correct that a movement that has settled into ‘a crude nineteenth-century positivism’ requires a resurgence of political antagonism, opening a critical space capable of untangling ‘new’ atheism’s investments in and affinities with neo-imperial rationality. In this chapter, we are arguing for a similar disruption of the terms of the opposition between progressive secularism and backward religiosity by insisting on the racializing dividend of this opposition in contemporary European societies, a dividend deepened and extended by the postracial certainty upon which the disavowal of multiculturalism, as the central axis of raceless racism, relies.