Reframing Secularist Premises: Divorce among Traditionalist Muslim and Jewish Women within the Secular State

Recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in scholarly attention to the subject of secularism. This body of work, theoretical and normative in nature, rarely addresses ethnographic data and the lived experiences of situated agents. Starting with a review of three major theoretical approaches to the study of secularism (i.e., the writings of the 19th century Freethinker George Jacob Holyoake, the research of scholars who work in post-Foucauldian traditions, and those beholden to more traditional liberal political assumptions), we ask how each of these theories interfaces with our own ethnographic discoveries. Our interviews with traditionalist Jewish and Muslim women seeking divorces in Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, challenge and complexify many of the assumptions that undergird each of the aforementioned theoretical schools. Our ethnography reveals interesting and unexpected patterns of women’s agency, religious critique, and navigation of parallel civil and religious structures.