We take history to be an essentially worldly, secular, materialist, empirical discipline. We presume that the factors, human acts, dynamic forces that we invoke to explain why the world is as it is are of this earth and objectively discernible. And yet the discipline emerged from a search for meaning that adopted the eschatological structure of religious belief. It was built to endow morally questionable events with purpose and meaning revealed in the narrative end of history. As the anthropologist Talal Asad explains, the secular is ”neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it … nor a simple break from it,” but ”overlaps with ‘the religious (Satia 27-28).”
Satia, Priya. “The Progress of War.” Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire. Penguin Books Limited, 2020.