‘I Don’t Know If You Have Experience with Meditation?’

Abstract In 2020, during the height of COVID , I conducted research in the German-speaking area that revealed a complexity of power relations between the secular and the religious as well as between different religious branches. The aim of this article is a methodological contribution to post-secular research. Starting from the underlying question of how we interact with our participants in order to allow for unspeakable discourses from a secular/-ist perspective, the article engages in-depth with excerpts from qualitative empirical interviews and explores how discourses of cultural memory resonate in them. Based on an interpretative methodology inspired by diffractive reading, which takes the cultural history of secularisation and its discursive memory as a prism to differentiate power discourses, it focuses on the discourses of gender, colonialism, and pathologisation as well as on their entanglement with each other. While discourses of gender and colonialism have been the subject of a large body of research in empirical religious studies already, this article adds an analysis of pathologisation.