Secular isn’t the view from nowhere. It’s a view from somewhere specific, that has learned to describe itself as nowhere.
The common assumption is that “secular” simply means neutral — reasoning stripped of religious bias, the default state everything else deviates from. A major academic reframing of secularism argues this is backwards: the secular is itself a particular historical formation, built out of specific Christian and European intellectual history, that came to present its own assumptions as universal and areligious while treating other frameworks — especially non-Western and Islamic ones — as the “biased” exception needing to justify itself. On this account, secularism isn’t the absence of a worldview; it’s a worldview that stopped calling itself one.
That reframing is the exact target of this essay’s repeated language about wanting output “shaped by non-secular assumptions” — the claim isn’t that secular reasoning is neutral and something else is being added to it, but that secular reasoning is already a specific frame, and the essay is trying to get a model trained almost entirely on that frame to produce output from a different one instead.
Source: Asad, T. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press.