“Southern secularism is a greasy pig,” Chad E. Seales writes in The Secular Spectacle. It is an “elusive” subject that “easily slips the grasp” (1). That it is, but Seales attempts to drag it to the ground in this insightful case study of Siler City, a small town in central North Carolina.

Seales argues that whites in Siler City used secularism to defend racial privilege and craft visions of “the religious” in an industrializing New South. White privilege and racism had a sacred aura, to be sure, as was apparent in Lost Cause fixations on “southern sacrifice,” segregated churches, and segregationist purity rites. But secular agents—business and civic elites—also fused the religious to workplaces, local get-togethers (which featured, among other things, greasy pig-catching contests), blackface entertainment, and Fourth of July celebrations. Through such spectacles, white residents linked racial “normatives” to the public sphere, all while aligning “the religious” with the white elite's secular vision of a rational, ordered, “modern” society.

When faced at mid-century with black assertiveness, southern secularism proved as adaptive as a darting, well-greased pig. A civility discourse became “an institutional mechanism” for the secular, defining and defending white legitimacy against past means of disciplining and dehumanizing black bodies, such as “the religious rite of mob lynching” (68). Whites in Siler City also delegitimized black challenges to racial dominance in public spaces by characterizing black struggles as anti-secular; in other words, black politics were a violation of the town's “respectable” order and “egalitarian” set of privacy rights. Moreover, whites characterized black action as mere appeals to a debatable, transcendent “religious” subjectivity, rather than the “normative” (read “white”) secular discourses of the self-evident, civil, universal, and objective. Southern whites also used the state as a vehicle for maintaining a “religious privacy” discourse in and for the very churches where “men returned . . . to recover lost public power” (89). Therefore, the privatization of religious space—a key marker of secularization—invigorated racial and class-based privilege and power.

For Seales, whites also defined the terms of “equality” and civic redress, simultaneously “tolerating” black presence in the white public sphere (as per secular values) and delimiting black autonomy and power (as per the quieter violence of secularized courts and law, as apparent after the 1962 killing of Melvin Vernell White, a black man, by Joe Kucinic, a white cop, an event that can easily be read in light of recent events in Ferguson, Missouri). White secularism affected public memory as well, as whites “constructed a narrative of civic cooperation” between the races “that acknowledged a historical period of racial segregation but glossed over the harsher realities of that period” (99). The racial effects of Siler City's secular fixations and formulations were evident by the time Seales walked the town's streets roughly a decade ago. Murals around town reflected for white residents “the visual narrative of the modern South . . . of racial harmony as an eternal moment,” as another spectacle clearly at odds with its conflicted racial past (154).

Due to Seales's scholarly interests and writing style, The Secular Spectacle may require several re-readings of certain pages and paragraphs to follow his argument. His case for secularization's racial stakes seems theoretically sound and is certainly thought-provoking. The patchwork or dialogic arrangements of sacred and profane in Siler City subvert any easy Durkheimian spectrum in southern cultural studies (though fair warning: his descriptions of “the secular” and “the religious” can get unclear at times). A few historical matters also remain unaccounted for, somewhat to the detriment of his otherwise compelling and complex story of southern secularization.

For instance, Seales bypasses what happens—or happened in Siler City—when two or more secular discourses inhabit(ed) the town's public sphere. Historians have long noted the appeals of African-Americans to individuality, private/bodily protection, the state, equality, and toleration as facets of the southern black public sphere(s) constructed or expanded before and after World War II. Yet, in The Secular Spectacle, the white public sphere and white civility politics seem the only pigs in town, a surprising historical characterization that either conveys the inability of Seales to muster the necessary evidence from Siler City or an argumentative blind spot regarding the long, hard fight by southern blacks for non-white secularized sanctuary and supremacy over Jim Crow. The book's last chapter demonstrates this evidentiary or argumentative problem in more contemporary contexts. Focusing on Latino arrivals in the 1990s and early 2000s, and more particularly on a Catholic Good Friday procession in Siler City, Seales capably details how white secularism fomented white-Latino encounters, ostensibly on the grounds of civil understanding and toleration. But if we are persuaded that secular pursuits defined white sentiments, how then did blacks encounter (or even contest) Latino arrivals and white negotiations with immigrant assertiveness? Did blacks create a similar secularism or counter-secularism at that point? Similarly, did Latinos do so in other secular environs, such as in various businesses or private residences? If blacks or Latinos did or could craft separate or contrarian secular spheres, what were—or will be—the social or racial spoils for them?

Such questions and concerns are not intended to detract from The Secular Spectacle but to suggest the lines of inquiry it opens up. Race, in some ways, has been the elephant in the room (the pig in the room?) in recent considerations of American secularism. Seales addresses that issue head on while giving the developing field of secularism studies an organizing theme and method (race) and broader set of subjects (ordinary people over intellectuals or writers). Forthcoming studies of secularism, especially any tackling other regional contexts, will certainly benefit from Seales's book as an immediate prerequisite.