Disagreements over the "right way" to talk about God and, more broadly, the place of religion in the public sphere have led to protests, revolution and untimely death; recent battles between secularists and pious actors across the world compel us to urgently reconsider the following: What forms of secularist critique spark violence and which lead to laughter? What role does genre ideology play in the interpretation of something as playfully agonistic or dangerously antagonistic? Many secularists take faith seriously, but discuss it in genres that capitalize on agonistic modes of communication rather than consensus-seeking ones (Asad 2009). The British secularists I studied, for example, value genres that encourage a critical perspective – in the language of performance studies, a Brechtian frame break (Boyer and Yurchak 2010) - in order to challenge long-standing political and communicative convention that considered God-talk a private matter, "off the table" for public discussion. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at sites of secular-pious communication in London (and among British secularists abroad), I highlight the importance of understanding to what ends secularists engage in public God-talk. I discuss genre ideologies – deeply held beliefs about the relationship between content and form – and how they create different expectations about the right way to talk about God and, further, what these ideologies mean for the basic terms of public debate about religion.

(*)El autor o autora no ha asociado ningún archivo a este artículo