White secularity: the racialization of religion in Netflix’s Unorthodox

Abstract

ABSTRACT Unorthodox is a four-episode Netflix series that offers a compelling narrative of freedom from religion for feminine subjects. This paper interrogates the vision of freedom offered by the show through the lens of lived religion (which circumvents the secular/religion dichotomy by treating the moral meaning-making practices of everyday life as “religious.” A close reading of the lived religious practices in Unorthodox shows three, morally-valanced practices sustaining secular feminine freedom: making the private public, overcoming historical narratives, and taking pleasure. Because in Unorthodox the central barrier to freedom for feminine subjects is the racialized religious community, this paper builds on literature about the racial other and religious freedom to propose the concept of “white secularity.” White secularity is a belief system that assumes every individual can freely opt into good forms of religion, coded as white, and out of bad forms of religion. In white secularity, bad forms of religion are racialized because they make visible white dominance in the public sphere. In this way, white secularity divides the interests of women and racialized minorities by pitting feminine freedom against racialized communities.