https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00346

Editors’ Introduction:
Pious Technologies and
Secular Designs

MARÍA GONZÁLEZ PENDÁS AND WHITNEY LAEMMLI

The “science of spirits” that structured the taxonomy of the
Encyclopédie. Pierre Curie and Marie Curie’s regular séance
attendance. Spaceships engineered to “touch the face of God.”
Modernist office furniture designed to sacralize the corpora-
tion.1 In recent years, scholarship across disciplines has worked
to undermine the myths of Western disenchantment and secular
modernity, uncovering how the rational and the supernatural,
the mundane and the divine, have interacted in more complex,
simbiótico, and nonlinear ways than previously understood.
Studies of the modern period have shown the religious as any-
thing but absent from the public sphere and narratives about
reason and progress as tenaciously, and at times violently,
enchanted.2 At the same time, postcolonial scholars have
made clear how efforts to maintain a false binary between the
religious and the secular have served the same colonial and
imperial ends as earlier oppositions between the West and
non-West, the modern and the other. “Secularism,” as Talal
Asad notes, is not an entity but an ideology constantly in the
process of formation.3

Asad also notes, sin embargo, that illuminating the changing
contours of secularism has been a notoriously difficult project.
For one, there is still no consensus on whether secularism is,
by necessity, part of an imperial project of Christian hegemony
or whether it might hold other, more emancipatory, possibili-
ties.4 Moreover, precisely because the logic of secularism denies
the presence of sacred sensibilities and values in modernity, es
shifting shape has been particularly hard to discern. “Because
the secular is so much part of our modern life,” Asad warns, “it
is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it best pursued through
its shadows.” Given these challenges, he asks, “What might an
anthropology of secularism look like?”5

This issue of the journal offers one answer to Asad’s provo-
catión, grounding its exploration in the material world, in his-
conservador, y, more specifically, in the pious machinations of tools,
buildings, and bodies. Bringing together scholars in the history
de ciencia y tecnología, architectural history, and religious
estudios, the articles collected here scrutinize skyscrapers and
algoritmos, history books, automatons, and notation systems—

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tools that, in their close association with the ongoing march of
modernization, have often not been appreciated as religious.
As our authors make clear, sin embargo, these objects, así como
the forms of modern science, tecnología, política, and archi-
tecture that generated them, were sites where the sacred and
the supernatural mutated into new forms, producing so-called
secular cultures in the process. Computer programs were tools
for creating new kinds of pious neuroscientists, steel-frame
towers reconfigured the Protestant imagination, and a mechan-
ical chess-player birthed an entirely new class of spirits.

In this focus on the material and technological, we take
inspiration from scholars of media and of the material culture
of religion who have demonstrated how all religions—even the
most mystical—have required mediators to define and perpet-
uate their beliefs and practices. In studies of icons, relics,
embroidery, paintings, and rituals, as well radio waves and
television screens, this work has shown how beliefs are pro-
duced in part through such artifacts.6 Historians of technology
y arquitectura, también, have recognized the agency of objects,
the ways in which changing material formations embody and
produce novel social relationships, política, and ideologies—
including religious ones. Recent analyses, Por ejemplo, tener
revealed the ways in which the loudspeaker translated Islam
into the soundscape of Nigerian cities and how Orthodox
Jewish families negotiated the development of novel household
tools for “keeping the Sabbath holy.”7 A small but growing body
of scholarship has also begun to think about how the divine
and the technological have interacted beyond the boundaries
of traditional religious institutions. David Nye, Por ejemplo, tiene
followed nineteenth-century efforts to transform the American
frontier into a new Eden with the aid of mills, railroads, y
canals. Richard Wittman has revealed how architectural
theories of structural rationalism drew on the “rekindling of
interest in myth, the occult, and the sacred” during the French
Enlightenment.8

The following essays draw on this scholarship to further
explore how these kinds of “pious technologies”—ones that
traveled beyond the walls of mosques, churches, or temples—
functioned. Al hacerlo, they help us better see the gods in
the machines, buildings, and debates where the religious has
dwelled in secularism’s shadows, difficult to recognize. El
issue’s focus on Christian contexts, primarily in North America
and Western Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, is purposeful. As Josephson-Storm recently argued,
“While many of the old master narratives have been unravel-
En g, it is still widely supposed that the defining feature of
modernity is the departure of the supernatural.” In keeping
with this commonly held assumption, he contends that “if there

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is one thing we’ve been taught to take for granted, it is that the
contemporary industrial, capitalist societies of Western Europe
and North America have lost their magic, and that it is this
absence that makes them modern.”9 These articles challenge
this perspective. Just as important, sin embargo, they also demon-
strate the instability of “religion” itself. They show a wide variety
of ways in which the supernatural and spiritual appeared in
new spaces, used new mediators, and served new ends, de
the ongoing march of industrial progress to the construction of
new cityscapes and professional disciplines. They reveal that
efforts to promote technological innovation, scientific reason,
and material progress were often simultaneously projects of
evangelization and redemption. In effect, these essays show
not merely how the religious has persisted in these specific
contexts but how the technological helped it not only to operate
in new realms but also, at times, to abandon its former bound-
aries in favor of novel spiritual forms.

We will learn, por ejemplo, how the discipline of the history
of science was—in ways not yet fully appreciated—shaped by
efforts to reimagine the history of religion. As Lorraine Daston
reveals, many of the founding figures of the field rooted their
work in the presumption of a mentality driving modernity,
a framework they drew from the contemporaneous study of
systems of religious belief. In so doing, Daston shows how reli-
gion and science were, to contemporaries, analogous realms of
reasoning and action. Tracing an expansive historical arc, John
Modern shows how efforts to define and regulate the loci of
religious beliefs have long been at the center of the brain sci-
ences, matemáticas, and cybernetics. Training his attention, para
ejemplo, on Warren McCulloch’s mechanics of mind and Kenneth
Mark Colby’s PARRY algorithm, Modern shows how these tools
helped engineer new religious ideologies while also playing a
crucial role in professional self-definition. The relationship
between modern work and religion is also central to Whitney
Laemmli, who turns to the labor not of scientists but of factory
workers. In unpacking the history of Industrial Notation, a
recording system devised to control workers’ movements in
mid-century Britain, she shows how the tool was intended to
redeem Taylorism, turning the mechanistic movements of the
factory workers into a kind of embodied religious ritual.

Expanding this history of Christianity and modernization
into architecture, Courtney Bender illuminates how the sky-
scraper was not only central to the North American urban land-
scape but also to the universalist aspirations of Protestantism
in the first decades of the twentieth century. To others, el nuevo
typology relocated and redefined spiritual fulfillment, situating
it in the view of the world from above rather than in the
otherworldly beyond. Similarmente, in nineteenth-century Brazil,

Pendás and Laemmli | Editors’ Introduction: Pious Technologies and Secular Designs

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a technological assemblage that at first appears as anything but
godly—Ajeeb, a chess-playing automaton—inspired new beliefs
about the relationship between electricity, audio media, y
spiritualism. Además, as Paul Johnson shows, the secrecy
of Ajeeb’s mechanical workings provided an opportunity for
imagining the Christian ethnic other in the wake of widespread
immigration to Latin America from Syria and Lebanon.

As the diversity of these examples should make clear, estos
kinds of stories are not historical aberrations, religious atavisms
in an increasingly secular age. Much work, sin embargo, remains
to be done. Though many scholars of technology, media, y
architecture would agree with the general principle that reli-
gion and technology have interacted dynamically in the modern
era, these relationships have yet to be studied with the histor-
ical specificity that their importance warrants, particularly
when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth century “West.”
We hope, por lo tanto, that these articles will serve as a spur for
those in our own fields to more regularly engage the religious
as well as the secular as fundamental categories of historical
análisis, alongside more familiar analytics like race, género,
and class.10 The historical actors chronicled here—from Warren
McCulloch to Ajeeb to the industrial notators—did not neglect
the gods in their modernizing schemes. For historians to do so
not only replicates faulty binaries between divine and mun-
dane; it profoundly misconstrues the history and politics of
modernity, foreclosing analyses that help us understand the
true aims and full impact of these powerful tools.

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Notas
This issue originated in a conference of the same name held at Columbia
University in October 2017. We thank all of the participants for their engag-
ing and thought-provoking contributions as well as Eileen Gillooly and the
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.
We also thank the presenters and audience members at a 2018 Society for the
History Technology conference panel on “Technological Rituals,” especially
Jennifer Alexander.

1. Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic,
Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (chicago: Universidad de
Chicago Press, 2017); Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred,
the Profane, and the American Space Program (baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Prensa universitaria, 2013); and Kathryn Lofton, “The Spirit in the Cubicle: A
Religious History of the American Office,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory
Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally Promey (nuevo refugio: Yale University
Prensa, 2014), 135–159.

2. For theoretical approaches to the subject, ver, Por ejemplo, Jürgen
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy
14 (2006): 1–25; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World
(chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Bruno Latour, On the Modern
Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke University Press, 2010);
and Jonathan Skolnik and Peter Eli Gordon, editores., “Secularization and
Disenchantment,” special issue, New German Critique, No. 94 (Invierno 2005).
For examples of recent historical scholarship, see William Inboden, Religión
and American Foreign Policy 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment
(Cambridge, Reino Unido: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2008); Bethany Moreton, A
Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
(Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 2009); and Jenna Supp-Montgomery,
When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious
Origins of Network Culture (Nueva York: New York University Press, 2021).

3. Ver, especially, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (stanford, California: Prensa de la Universidad de Stanford, 2003); y
Talal Asad, Secular Translation: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative
Reason (Nueva York, Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2018). From the perspec-
tive of decolonial studies, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Secularism and
Religion in the Modern/Colonial World System: From Secular Postcoloniality
to Postsecular Transmodernity,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and
the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos
Jauregui (Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke University Press, 2008), 360–387.

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4. Maldonado-Torres, “Secularism and Religion," 370; and Etienne
Balibar, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypothesis on Religion
and Politics (Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2020). An early version of
the argument in the latter first appeared in this journal as “Cosmopolitanism
and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations,"
Grey Room, No. 44 (Verano 2011): 6–25.

5. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 16, 21.
6. The most recent and comprehensive efforts to place the material world
and its analysis at the center of religious studies include Birgit Meyer,
ed., Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (Nueva York: Fordham
Prensa universitaria, 2012); Sally Promey, ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory
Cultures in Material Practice (nuevo refugio: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 2014);
Jeremy Stolow and Birgit Meyer, editores., “Light Mediations,” special issue,
Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Arte, and Belief 16, No. 1 (2020);
Brian Larkin and Charles Hirschkind, editores., “Media and the Political Forms

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Pendás and Laemmli | Editors’ Introduction: Pious Technologies and Secular Designs

of Religion,” special issue, Social Text 26, No. 3 (2008); and Richard Kieckhefer,
Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Nuevo
york: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2004).

7. Brian Larkin, “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers
in Nigeria,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, No. 4 (Caer 2014): 989–1,015; y
Amy Sue Bix, “‘Remember the Sabbath’: A History of Technological Decisions
and Innovation in Orthodox Jewish Communities,” History and Technology
36, No. 2 (2020): 205–239.

8. David Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives
of New Beginnings (Cambridge: CON prensa, 2004); and Richard Wittman,
“The Church and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36, No.
1 (2007): 235–259. For other examples of this type of work, see David Noble,
The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
(Nueva York: Penguin Books, 1999); James Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religión,
Tecnología, and the Things in Between (Nueva York: Fordham University Press,
2013); Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Occulted Materialities,” History and Technology
34, No. 1 (2018): 31–40; Jennifer Alexander, "Introducción: The Entanglement
of Technology and Religion,” History and Technology 36, No. 2 (2020); Bernard
Dionysius Geoghegan, ed., “The Spirt of Media,” special issue, Critical Inquiry
42, No. 4 (Verano 2016); R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Arte,
Tecnología, and the Meeting of East and West (nuevo refugio: Yale University
Prensa, 2014); Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the
Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge: CON prensa, 1991); Renata
Hejduk and Jim Williamson, editores., The Religious Imagination in Modern and
Contemporary Architecture (Nueva York: Routledge, 2011); Jorge Otero-Pailos,
Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern
(Mineápolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and María González
Pendás, “Enchanted Transfers: MoMA’s Japanese Exhibition House and
the Secular Occlusion of Modernism,” in Rethinking Global Modernism:
Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial, ed. Vikramaditya Prakash,
Maristela Casciato, and Daniel E. Coslett (Nueva York: Routledge, 2022), 47–
69. See also endnote 1.

9. Josephson-Storm, 4.
10. As models for this kind of rethinking, ver, Por ejemplo, Joan W. Scott,
“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical
Revisar 91, No. 5 (1986): 1,053–1,075; and Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II,
and Mabel O. wilson, editores., Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History
from the Enlightenment to the Present (pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Prensa, 2020). See also Kathryn Lofton, “Why Religion Is Hard for Historians
(and How It Can Be Easier),” Modern American History 3, No. 1 (2020): 69–86.

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