Everybody's Secular, Everyone's Religious

David Dark’s fourth book Life’s too short to pretend you’re not religious makes it pretty easy to guess his thoughts on this use of the word. “I’m not trying to encourage anyone to begin self-identifying as religious,” he writesâ??—â??or secular, presumably. “That’s as futile and redundant a move as calling yourself political or cultural.” Everyone is religious, in Dark’s calculus; it’s just that religion itself looks different today in the West than it did for our great-grandparents.