Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork amongst Old Colony Mennonite settlements in Bolivia and Argentina, this paper argues that the Mennonites’ process of separation of domains, through the production of the 'superabundance of the sacred', constitutes a challenge to the secularist monopoly on emancipation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I propose the concept of the "superabundance of the sacred" as a means to explore the case of the Mennonites as one source of challenges to the secularist monopoly on emancipation. I argue that their holding of tenets such as sola scriptura, and separation of church and state, ought to be taken as early prefigurations that were later refracted by the secularist emancipatory project. These, have led them through a process of separation of domains distinct to that proposed by the modernist narrative of secularization and disenchantment through techne (which can be interpreted as an expansion of the natural over the supernatural, leaving the latter as the residual domain over which religion specialises). By contrast, I argue, the Mennonites project of emancipation is based on the disenchantment of the world arising from the naturalization of the supernatural as the consequence of the "superabundance of the sacred" and the externalization of the profane.