Discover Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian challenging the boundaries of religion, politics, and intellectual culture today.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins isn’t the type of scholar who fits neatly into the academic mold. He’s a historian of modern political thought and religion, but also a public intellectual who moves between scholarly circles and mainstream cultural debates. His work doesn’t just recount history; it dissects how political and religious ideas travel across cultures, mutate in unexpected ways, and shape the present.
What makes him stand out is the refusal to separate theory from lived reality. While many academics keep their conversations behind university walls, Steinmetz-Jenkins consistently brings his voice into the public arena, through essays, interviews, and critiques in outlets like The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian. That blend of deep historical knowledge and public accessibility makes him both rare and vital in a world drowning in polarized hot takes.
What You'll Discover:
Academic Path and Intellectual Influences
Steinmetz-Jenkins’s academic journey tells its own story of curiosity and restlessness. Rather than staying locked into a single narrow subfield, he gravitates toward intersections, religion with politics, secularism with democracy, and liberalism with its critics.
At the core of his research is the question: how do political ideas about religion travel across borders? He’s especially interested in how concepts born in Europe get transplanted into South Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. His work reveals that religion and secularism don’t exist as static categories, they’re constantly being reinvented in different political contexts.
His intellectual influences are wide-ranging: from thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, to critics of liberalism such as Talal Asad. Yet, Steinmetz-Jenkins doesn’t merely repeat their arguments. Instead, he probes them, tests their limits, and points out where they fall short when confronted with global realities.
The Scholar Who Writes for the Public
One of the most radical aspects of Steinmetz-Jenkins’s career is his commitment to writing beyond academia. If you’ve ever tried to read a typical academic paper, you know how opaque and jargon-heavy they can be. Steinmetz-Jenkins takes the opposite route, he writes essays that unpack intellectual debates in a way that a curious but non-specialist reader can grasp.
For example, when discussing the rise of right-wing populism, he doesn’t just toss around abstract terms. He explains how these movements tap into older anxieties about secularism, identity, and belonging. Instead of reducing the story to “liberals vs. conservatives,” he frames it in terms of deep historical currents that stretch back centuries.
That’s what makes his writing relatable: it doesn’t assume you’ve spent years reading political theory. It assumes you’re living in today’s messy political world and want to understand how we got here.
Secularism, Religion, and the Liberal Order
One of his most recurring themes is secularism. Not the kind you see as a checkbox on a census, but secularism as a political project. He digs into how Western liberal democracies built their frameworks by sidelining certain religious voices while privileging others.
Take, for example, the common Western assumption that secularism is neutral. Steinmetz-Jenkins exposes how that “neutrality” often serves the interests of majority groups, while minorities find themselves policed or excluded. This matters not only in Europe or America but also in postcolonial states where secularism was imported as part of modern nation-building projects.
His research shows that the story of secularism is less about a clean break from religion and more about constant negotiation, sometimes peaceful, often fraught. By reframing secularism this way, he challenges one of the most ingrained assumptions of modern political thought.
Interventions in Liberalism and Its Critics
Another core focus of Steinmetz-Jenkins is liberalism, not the shorthand for center-left politics in America, but the broader philosophical tradition of individual rights, constitutionalism, and tolerance. He examines both defenders of liberalism and those who find it hollow or hypocritical.
In his work, liberalism isn’t treated as a stable or inevitable system. Instead, it’s a contested tradition, full of fractures. His critical lens shows how liberal states often fail to live up to their universal ideals, especially when it comes to colonial legacies, race, and religion.
What’s striking is his refusal to reduce liberalism to either total failure or untouchable ideal. Instead, he explores its messy contradictions, which makes his analysis both more honest and more useful.
A Voice in Contemporary Debates
Beyond academic writing, Steinmetz-Jenkins has made his mark as an interviewer and editor. He has conducted high-profile conversations with some of the world’s most important thinkers, Judith Butler, Samuel Moyn, Cornel West, and others.
These interviews aren’t just exchanges of questions and answers. They’re encounters that challenge readers to think differently. He asks the questions most interviewers shy away from, the ones that reveal the blind spots in even the most celebrated intellectuals’ arguments.
This role as a cultural mediator places him in a unique position: someone who doesn’t just analyze ideas from a distance but actively shapes how they circulate in public discourse.
Why Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins Matters Right Now
It’s one thing to analyze political theology in a university seminar. It’s another to bring those insights into a world wrestling with nationalism, climate crisis, and cultural polarization. Steinmetz-Jenkins does the latter.
His insistence on seeing religion and politics as intertwined is crucial at a time when debates about identity and belonging are dominating headlines. By historicizing these issues, he reminds us that they didn’t appear overnight. They have deep roots, and understanding those roots helps us avoid simplistic answers.
Moreover, his willingness to engage with critics of liberalism gives his work urgency. While many intellectuals rush to defend liberal democracy against authoritarian threats, Steinmetz-Jenkins points out that liberalism’s internal contradictions can also feed discontent. That perspective forces readers to grapple with uncomfortable truths instead of leaning on easy reassurances.
Relatability in an Intellectual’s Work
You might think: why should I, someone who isn’t a political theorist, care about Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins? Here’s the thing: his work isn’t confined to ivory towers. It’s about the tensions we all feel in daily life.
Think about how debates over freedom of speech play out on social media. Or how questions of religious freedom intersect with laws about education, healthcare, or public life. These aren’t abstract; they’re things ordinary people navigate constantly. Steinmetz-Jenkins helps trace the intellectual roots of those debates, showing why they remain unresolved and why they matter for everyday experience.
That’s why his writing resonates. It acknowledges the gap between high theory and lived experience, and then builds a bridge across it.
A Radical Approach to Intellectual History
What sets Steinmetz-Jenkins apart is his radical approach to intellectual history. He doesn’t treat ideas as sacred relics locked in the past. He treats them as live wires still sparking in today’s world.
By connecting, say, the colonial histories of South Asia with current debates about secularism in Europe, he destabilizes the idea that history is something neatly behind us. Instead, he demonstrates how intellectual traditions continue to haunt and shape contemporary politics.
This approach isn’t just academic, it’s political. It changes how we understand the world we live in.
Key Works and Contributions
- On Secularism: His writings show how secularism is not about erasing religion but about power struggles over which religions get privileged.
- On Liberalism: He critiques liberalism’s self-image as universal, revealing its entanglements with empire and exclusion.
- On Public Intellectual Life: Through interviews and essays, he makes complex ideas part of public conversation.
- On Global Exchange of Ideas: He shows how concepts migrate across borders, challenging the myth that Western thought develops in isolation.
Key Takings
- Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins bridges the gap between academia and public discourse, making intellectual history matter for everyday debates.
- His work on secularism reframes it as a contested, power-laden project rather than a neutral principle.
- He offers a nuanced critique of liberalism, exposing its contradictions without dismissing its ideals outright.
- Through interviews with leading thinkers, he shapes the public conversation on politics, religion, and philosophy.
- His radical approach to intellectual history insists that ideas remain active forces in contemporary politics, not relics of the past.
