Charles Stewart asked us to respond to the following challenge: ‘Are the majority of anthropologists virtually card-carrying secularists?’ At first, this might seem the sort of outdated question that historians debated heatedly thirty years ago. On further elaboration, however, it turns out to be centrally tied up with the issues that have been puzzling so many of us over the past decade, concerning modernity and the role of anthropology in the negotiation of global hegemonies.