Introduction

The introduction surveys this book’s stakes in debates within queer theory, critical race studies, early modern studies, and postsecular studies. Discussing the affordances of taking seriously the religious metaphors that continue to shape discourses of secular love, it outlines the ways in which Renaissance love lyrics provide a valuable archive to modern queer challenges to norms of monogamous coupledom and sovereign subjectivity. It proposes that rather than assume the coherence of faith, this poetry explores an ethics of promiscuity in which awareness of shared vulnerability entails a more challenging acceptance of shared propensity to change, ambivalence, and self-deceit. It further traces the history of the concept of secularity from its Protestant roots and, joining a number of postsecular theorists, argues that attending to the persistence of religious thought in modern culture can compel a confrontation with the racial dimensions of queer views of the autonomy of desire. Moreover, in suggesting that we may never have been secular, the introduction shows how attentiveness to Christian theology’s queer assumptions can help to contest normative associations of Christianity with unique innocence and morality, and a progressive periodization that sets modernity off from its others.