American Buddhism and Secularism

Abstract

Abstract Self-proclaimed secular Buddhists in the United States are gaining popularity, as evidenced by the over seven million downloads of the Secular Buddhism Podcast episodes and over a hundred thousand followers of the Facebook groups of the Secular Buddhism Podcast and the Secular Buddhist Association. This chapter examines their publicly available media—podcast episodes and internet articles—to describe how these Buddhists are presenting themselves as secular. The author argues that secularization happens in tandem with racialization, such that to understand secular Buddhists, there must be a discussion of whiteness and how race undergirds the construction and classification of one set of specific beliefs and practices as “secular,” “universal,” “rational,” “philosophical,” “pragmatic,” and “scientific,” in contrast to another set that is relegated as “religious,” provincial “culture”(-bound), “irrational,” “dogmatic,” “nonsensical,” and “superstitious.” This hierarchical construction is political in that classifiers adjudicate aspects of Buddhism deemed superior, denigrating the rest as inferior.