The Anthropocene, many would argue, is a consequence of what Bruno Latour (1993) calls the modern constitution—that is, the divide between the natural world and the social world, with nonhumans and nature understood as things to be mastered by humans. This divide is a fantasy: all societies are comprised of what Latour calls natures-cultures. But it is a fantasy with catastrophic effects. We must therefore re-suture traditional scientific binaries between culture and nature, human and animal, subject and object. “There is no border where evolution ends and history begins,” Donna Haraway insists, “where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa. Instead, there are turtles upon turtles of naturecultures all the way down” (2004, 2).

By now, the natureculture turn is a bedrock of environmental anthropology and related fields like multispecies studies and science and technology studies. Many scholars have shown that nature and culture are not separable, that nonhumans act on the world, and that humans are deeply entangled in more-than-human worlds. But as a scholar of religion and secularity, I have been struck by how casually secular much of this scholarship is, how concepts like interspecies relations and multispecies ecologies leave out a host of beings—ancestor spirits, gods, goddesses, jinns, and other “supernatural” entities—that also comprise many of the worlds under threat on this planet. These are worlds that do not make a distinction between nature and supernature. How might we account for these worlds? This is not only a representational question (how do we voice our interlocutors?) nor a pragmatic one (how do we work with these communities?). Rather, it is also an epistemological and ultimately political one: what is the relationship between the Anthropocene and secularity?

I would argue that many of the ways of thinking about, making, and being in the world that produced the Anthropocene—the centering of (certain) humans as masters of the universe, the de-animation of bodies and the material world and their subsequent status as resources to be extracted, the instrumentalist logic of capitalist rationality—are an effect of secularity. I use Anthroposecular to mark this nexus of secularity and the Anthropocene. In so doing, I am not offering yet another, ostensibly better term for the Anthropocene. Rather, I am inviting us to think in more-than-secular ways about more-than-human worlds. I see the natureculture turn as getting us halfway there by dislodging the exclusive-humanist foundations of secularity. However, by limiting other-than-humans to lifeforms conventionally understood as nature, anchored in a materialist onto-epistemology, much of this work also reproduces the separation between natural (coded real) and supernatural (illusory) that was equally integral to the secularity that helped produce the Anthropocene.

It is worth remembering that the distinction between natural and supernatural emerged together, in relation to one another, and to Man. Modern conceptions of humanity were based on a simultaneous distinction from both “natural” and “supernatural” worlds, and the modern human emerged as Man by disentangling himself—and I use this gendered pronoun purposefully—from both nature and supernature. In fact, Latour’s formulation of the modern constitution notes the cleaving of theology from natural science and of both from social science. All this is to say that the hard distinction between natural and supernatural is an effect of these coeval separations. And this new ontology came with a new epistemology: as Marisol de la Cadena writes, nonhuman beings were “assigned to the sphere of nature (where they were to be known by science) or to the metaphysical and symbolic fields of knowledge,” that is, anthropology, religious studies, and theology (2010, 336). Fully undoing the nature/culture divide of the Anthropocene would therefore have to attend to that third domain—the so-called supernatural—still banished from our epistemological and ontological horizons. In other words, we need to overcome the divide not just between nature and culture but also between nature and supernature. Like the concept of more-than-human, which signifies phenomena that exceed but are not disconnected from human, a concept like more-than-natural is necessary to account more capaciously, and less secularly, for more-than-human worlds.

The more-than in more-than-human (and more-than-natural) also needs to be reconsidered to allow for sovereignties greater than the human—I’m thinking, for instance, of the devis and devtas who govern local landscapes in the Sundarbans (Mehtta 2022) and Central Himalayas (Govindrajan 2018); of the “animal-masters” of Indigenous North America (Hallowell 2010; Blaser 2025); and of the tirakuna, or “earth beings,” in the Andes (de la Cadena 2015). Multispecies scholars use terms like “mutual relatedness” and “relationality” to describe worlds they study, but those terms don’t always capture the interlocking series of more-than-multispecies obligations—debts and promises, gifts and sacrifices—that inhere between and amongst the various humans and nonhumans who inhabit those worlds. Relatedness can hinge on shared subjection to a more-than-human sovereignty, and the “webs of relation” (another common term) amongst persons, animals, and these more-than-human entities bind these entities to one another, with attendant obligations of care. And when these obligations are not met, there are consequences, often violent.

Attending to more-than-natural, more-than-human agents in these more-than-multispecies ecologies is not a simple expansion of the category of the other-than-human. Rather, it forces us to grapple with what the more-than entails, to make hierarchy, obligation, and sometimes violence integral to stories of human-nonhuman kinship. And taking all that into account analytically, as well as ethically and politically, destabilizes any enduring attachment to human non-subjection—and attendant ideas about subjection as the opposite of freedom, and as inherently punitive—that forms the basis of secularity as much as the culture-nature-supernature divide.

Amitav Ghosh (2016) has written that the Anthropocene is also a crisis of the imagination. He means that we do not have the narratives, vocabularies, and frameworks to comprehend the epic scope and accelerated temporality of the changes the planet is undergoing, and without those, we also do not have the means to generate the forms of care and community needed for this era. How might thinking in more-than-secular ways about the nature of both loss and survival in the Anthropocene begin to get us there?