José Casanova

The Secular and

Secularisms

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN, FIRST, BY INTRODUCING A BASIC ANALYTICAL

distinction between "the secular" as a central modern epistemic
category, "secularization" as an analytical conceptualization of modern
world-historical processes, and "secularism" as a worldview. Then, in
the remainder of the paper I would like to elaborate on the distinction
between secularism as a modern statecraft principle and secularism as
an ideology.

THE SECULAR, SECULARIZATIONS, SECULARISMS

All three concepts—"the secular," "secularization," and "secularism"—
are obviously related but are used very differently in various academic-
disciplinary and sociopolitical and cultural contexts. One may
differentiate between the three concepts simply as a way of distin-
guishing analytically in an exploratory manner between three different
phenomena vdthout any attempt to reify them as separate realities.
The secular has become a central modern category—theolog-
ico-philosophical, legal-political, and cultural-anthropological—to
construct, codify, grasp, and experience a realm or reality differenti-
ated from "the religious." Here one could recapitulate all the debates
over the "legitimacy" and "autonomy" of this modern reality, from the
Karl Loewith (1949)/Hans Blumenberg (1983) debate to more contem-
porary debates between Charles Taylor (2008), Talal Asad (2003), and
John Milbank (1993). Phenomenologically, one can explore the differ-
ent types of "secularities" as they are codified, institutionalized, and

social research Vol 76 : No 4 : Winter 2009 1049

experienced in various modern contexts and the parallel and correlated
transformations of modem "religiosities" and "spiritualities." But this
is an area that has been well addressed by many other presentations in
this issue.
Secularization, by contrast, usually refers to actual or alleged
empirical-historical patterns of transformation and differentiation of
the institutional spheres of "the religious" (ecclesiastical institutions
and churches) and "the secular" (state, economy, science, art, entertain-
ment, health and welfare, etc.) from early modern to contemporary
societies. Within the social sciences, and particularly within sociol-
ogy, a general theory of secularization was developed that conceptu-
alized these modern European historical transformations, which later
became increasingly globalized as part and parcel of a general teleologi-
cal and progressive human and societal development from the primi-
tive "sacred" to the modem "secular." The thesis of "the decline" and
"the privatization" of religion in the modern world became central
components of the theory of secularization. Both the decline and the
privatization theses have undergone numerous critiques and revisions
in the last 15 years. But the core of the theory—the understanding of
secularization as a single process of differentiation of the various insti-
tutional spheres or subsystems of modem societies, understood as the
paradigmatic and defining characteristic of processes of moderniza-
tion—remains relatively uncontested in the social sciences, particu-
larly vdthin European sociology.
It is important to open the debate to explore and recognize the
particular Ghristian historicity of Western European developments as
well as the multiple and very different historical patterns of seculariza-
tion and differentiation within European and Western societies, partic-
ularly across the Atlantic. This recognition in turn will make possible
a less Eurocentric comparative analysis of patterns of differentiation
and secularization in other civilizations and world religions; more
important, it facilitates the additional recognition that with the world-
historical process of globalization initiated by the European colonial

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expansion, all these processes everywhere are dynamically interrelated
and mutually constituted. But secularization is a field I have treated
extensively elsewhere (Casanova 1994, 2003, 2006). The focus of my
paper is instead on secularism.
Secularism refers more broadly to a whole range of modern secu-
lar worldviews and ideologies that may be consciously held and explic-
itly elaborated into philosophies of history and normative-ideological
state projects, into projects of modernity and cultural programs. Or,
alternatively, it may be viewed as an epistemic knowledge regime that
may be unreflexively held and phenomenologically assumed as the
taken-for-granted normal structure of modern reality, as a modern
doxa or as an "unthought." Moreover, modern secularism also comes
in multiple historical forms, in terms of different normative models
of legal-constitutional separation of the secular state and religion, or
in terms of the different types of cognitive difi^erentiation between
science, philosophy, and theology, or in terms of the différent models
of practical differentiation between law, morality, and religion.

SECULARISMS
It is to this broad area of secularism that this paper wants to make a
contribution by exploring the distinction between secularism as ideol-
ogy and secularism as statecraft principle. By secularism as statecraft
principle, I understand simply some principle of separation between
religious and political authority, either for the sake of the neutrality
of the state vis-à-vis each and all religions, or for the sake of protect-
ing the freedom of conscience of each individual, or for the sake of
facilitating the equal access of all citizens, religious as well as nonreli-
gious, to democratic participation. Such a statecraft doctrine neither
presupposes nor needs to entail any substantive "theory," positive or
negative, of "religion." Indeed, the moment the state holds a particu-
lar view of "religion" one enters the realm of ideology. Secularism
becomes an ideology the moment it entails a theory of what "reli-
gion" is or does. It is this assumption that "religion," in the abstract.

The Secular and Secuiarisms 1051

is a thing that has an essence or that produces certain particular and
predictable effects that is the defining characteristic of modern secu-
larism (Asad 1993).
One can distinguish two basic types of secularist ideologies.
The first type are secularist theories of religion grounded in some
progressive stadial philosophies of history that relegate religion to a
superseded stage. The second type are secularist political theories that
presuppose that religion is either an irrational force or a nonrational
form of discourse that should be banished from the democratic public
sphere. They can be called respectively "philosophico-historical" and
"political" secularisms. I am not interested here in tracing a history of
ideas of the origins of both forms of secularism in early modern Europe
and how they come together in Enlightenment critiques of religion and
become separated again in the different trajectories of positivism, mate-
rialist atheism, atheist humanism, republican laicism, liberalism, etc. I
am also not interested here in examining the secularist "philosophico-
historical" assumptions permeating most theories of secular moder-
nity, as in Juergen Habermas's theory (1984, 1987) of "rationalization
of the life-world" or "linguistification of the sacred," or the "political"
secularist assumptions permeating prominent liberal democratic polit-
ical theories such as those of John Rawls (1971), Bruce Ackerman (1980),
or Habermas (1989).

PHENOMENOLOGICAL SECULARISM
As a sociologist, I am interested in examining the extent to which such
secularist assumptions permeate the taken for granted assumptions
and thus the phenomenological experience of ordinary people. Crucial
is the moment when the phenomenological experience of being "secu-
lar" is not tied anjmaore to one of the units of a dyadic pair, "religious/
secular," but is constituted as a self-enclosed reality. Secular then stands
for self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, when people are not simply
religiously "unmusical," but closed to any form of transcendence
beyond the purely secular immanent frame.

1052 social research

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor (2007) has reconstructed the
process through which the phenomenological experience of what he
calls "the immanent frame" becomes constituted as an interlocking
constellation of the modern differentiated cosmic, social, and moral
orders. All three orders—the cosmic, the social, and the moral—are
understood as purely immanent secular orders, devoid of transcen-
dence, and thus functioning etsi Deus non daretur: "as if God would not
exist." It is this phenomenological experience that, according to Taylor,
constitutes our age paradigmatically as a secular one, irrespective of
the extent to which people living in this age may still hold religious or
theistic beliefs. Indeed, in a secular age, belief in God becomes increas-
ingly problematic, so that even those who adopt an "engaged" stand-
point as believers tend to experience reflexively their own belief as an
option among many others—one, moreover, requiring a explicit justifi-
cation. Secularify, being without religion, by contrast tends to become
increasingly the default option, which can be naively experienced as
natural and, thus, no longer in need of justification.
This naturalization of "unbelief" or "nonreligion" as the normal
human condition in modern societies corresponds to the assumptions
of the dominant theories of secularization, which have postulated a
progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices wàth increasing
modernization, so that the more modern a sociefy the more secular;
that is, the less "religious" it is supposed to become. But the fact that
there are some modern non-European societies, such as the United
States or South Korea, that are fully secular in the sense that they
function within the same immanent frame and yet their populations
are also at the same time conspicuously religious, or the fact that the
modernization of so many non-Western societies is accompanied by
processes of religious revival, should put into question the premise that
the decline of religious beliefs and practices is a quasi-natural conse-
quence of processes of modernization.
If modernization per se does not produce necessarily the progres-
sive decline of religious beliefs and practices, then we need a better

The Secular and Secularisms 1053

explanation for the radical and widespread secularity one finds among
the population of Western European societies. Secularization, in this
second meaning of the term secular, that of being "devoid of religion,"
does not happen automatically as a result of processes of moderniza-
tion, but it needs to be mediated phenomenologically by some other
particular historical experience. Self-sufficient secularity (that is, the
absence of religion) has a better chance of becoming the normal taken-
for-granted position if it is experienced not as an unrefiexively naive
condition, as just a fact, but actually as the meaningful result of a quasi
natural process of development. As Taylor (2007: 269) has pointed out,
modern unbelief is not simply a condition of absence of belief, nor
merely indifference. It is a historical condition that requires the perfect
tense, "a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief."
Intrinsic to this phenomenological experience is a modern "stadial
consciousness," inherited from the Enlightenment, which understands
this anthropocentric change in the conditions of belief as a process of
maturation and grovv^h, as a "coming of age" and as progressive eman-
cipation. For Taylor, this stadial phenomenological experience serves in
turn to ground the phenomenological experience of exclusive human-
ism as the positive self-sufficient and self-limiting affirmation of human
nourishing and as the critical rejection of transcendence beyond human
flourishing as self-denial and self-defeating.
In this respect the historical self-understanding of secularism has
the function of confirming the superiority of our present modern secu-
lar outlook over other supposedly earlier and therefore more primitive
religious forms of understanding. To be secular means to be modern,
and therefore by implication to be religious means to be somehow not
yet fully modem. This is the ratchet effect of a modem historical stadial
consciousness, which turns the very idea of going back to a surpassed
condition into an unthinkable intellectual regression. The function of
secularism as a philosophy of history, and thus as ideology, is to turn
the particular Western Christian historical process of secularization
into a universal teleological process of human development from belief

1054 social research

to unbelief, from primitive irrational religion to modem rational secu-
lar consciousness. Even when the particular role of internal Ghristian
developments in the general process of secularization is acknowledged,
it is in order to stress the universal uniqueness of Ghristianity as, in
Marcel Gauchet's (1997) expressive formulation, "the religion to exit
from religion."
I would like to propose that this secularist stadial consciousness
is a crucial factor in the v^ddespread secularization that has accompa-
nied the modernization of Western European societies. Europeans tend
to experience their own secularization, that is, the widespread decline
of religious behefs and practices among their midst, as a natural conse-
quence of their modernization. To be secular is not experienced as
an existential choice modern individuals or modern societies make,
but rather as a natural outcome of becoming modem. In this respect,
the theory of secularization mediated through this historical stadial
consciousness tends to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is, in
my view, the presence or absence of this secularist historical stadial
consciousness that explains when and where processes of moderniza-
tion are accompanied by radical secularization. In places where such
secularist historical stadial consciousness is absent, as in the United
States or in most non-Western postcolonial societies, processes of
modernization are unlikely to be accompanied by processes of religious
decline. On the contrary, they may be accompanied by processes of reli-
gious revival.
The different ways in which European and American publics
respond to public opinion polls trjdng to measure their religiosity—
namely, how strongly they believe in God, how frequently they pray,
how frequently they go to church, how religious they are—may serve
as a confirming illustration of my thesis. We know that both Americans
and Europeans lie to pollsters. But they tend to lie in opposite direc-
tions. Americans exaggerate their religiosity, claiming to go to church
and to pray more frequently that they actually do. We know this for
a fact because sociologists of religion, trying to prove that modern

The Secular and Secularisms 1055

secularization is also at work in the United States, have shown that
Americans are less religious than they claim to be and that one should
not trust their self-reporting religiosity (Hadaway 1993). But the inter-
esting sociological question is why would Americans tend to exagger-
ate their religiosity, claiming that they are more religious than they
actually are, unless they somehow believe that to be modern and to be
American, which for most Americans means exactly the same thing,
also entails being religious.
Europeans, by contrast, if and when they lie to pollsters, tend to
do so in the opposite direction, namely, they tend to undercut their own
persistent religiosity. I cannot offer general evidence for all of Europe,
but there is clear evidence for this tendency in the case of Spain. The
2008 Bertelmann Religion Monitor (Casanova 2009) offers overwhelming
confirmation of the drastic secularization of Spanish society in the last
40 years. There is a persistent and consistent decline in self-reported
religiosity across all categories of religious belief, church attendance,
private prayer, and importance of religion in one's life. But I find most
interesting the even lower figures in religious self-image. The propor-
tion of Spaniards who view themselves as "quite religious" (21 percent)
is much smaller than the proportion of those who express a "strong"
belief in God (51 percent), significantly smaller than those who attend
religious services at least monthly (34 percent), and much smaller than
those who claim to pray at least weekly (44 percent). I am inclined to
interpret the discrepancy between self-reported religiosity and reli-
gious self-image as an indication that Spaniards would prefer to think
of themselves as less religious than they actually are and that being reli-
gious is not considered to be a positive trait in a predominantly secular
culture.
The natural response of Europeans to the question whether they
are "religious" would seem to be: "Of course, I am not religious. What
do you think? I am a modern, liberal, secular, enlightened European." It
is this taken for granted identification of being modern and being secu-
lar that distinguishes most of Western Europe from the United States.

1056 social research

To be secular in this sense means to leave religion behind, to emanci-
pate oneself from religion, overcoming the nonrational forms of being,
thinking, and feeling associated with religion. It also means growing
up, becoming mature, becoming autonomous, thinking and acting on
one's own. It is precisely this assumption that secular people think and
act on their own and are rational autonomous free agents, while reli-
gious people somehow are unfree, heteronomous, nonrational agents,
that constitutes the foundational premise of secularist ideology. It
entails in this respect, both "subtraction" and "stadial" theories of secu-
larity.
Taylor characterizes as "subtraction" theories those accounts of
secular modernity that view the secular as the natural substratum that
is lefr behind and revealed when this anthropologically superfiuous
and superstructural thing called "religion" is somehow taken away. The
secular is precisely the basic anthropological substratum that remains
when one gets rid of religion. Stadial theories add genealogical or func-
tionalist accounts of how and why this superstructural thing, religion,
emerged in the first place (usually in the primitive history of human-
ity), but has now become superfiuous for modern secular individuals
and for modern societies.

POLITICAL SECULARISMS
Political secularism per se does not need to share the same negative
assumptions about religion, nor assume any progressive historical
development that will make religion increasingly irrelevant. It is actu-
ally compatible vdth a positive view of religion as a moral good, or as an
ethical communitarian reservoir of human solidarity and republican
virtue. But political secularism would like to contain religion within
its own differentiated "religious" sphere and would hke to maintain a
secular public democratic sphere free from religion. This is the basic
premise behind any form of secularism as statecraft doctrine, the need
to maintain some kind of separation between "church" and "state," or
between "religious" and "political" authorities, or between "the reli-

The Secular and Secularisms 1057

gious" and "the political." But the fundamental question is: How are
the boundaries drawn and by whom? Political secularism falls easily
into secularist ideology when the political arrogates for itself absolute,
sovereign, quasi-sacred, quasi-transcendent character or when the secu-
lar arrogates for itself the mantle of rationalify and universalify, while
claiming that "religion" is essentially nonrational, particularistic, and
intolerant (or illiberal) and as such dangerous and a threat to demo-
cratic politics once it enters the public sphere. It is the essentializing
of "the religious," but also of "the secular" or "the political," based on
problematic assumptions of what "religion" is or does, which is in my
view the fundamental problem of secularism as ideology.

POLITICAL SECULARISM AS IDEOLOGY

The focus of this paper is not modern political theory, so I am not
going to analyze here the "secularist" prejudices built into some of the
dominant contemporary democratic political theories, such as those of
Rawls and Habermas, nor am I interested in reconstructing how in later
formulations of their ovm theories they have tried to revise, indeed to
question their most explicit secularism. In any case, it is interesting to
notice that, as Alfred Stepan (2001) has pointed out, neither secular-
ism nor separation of church and state enters, either as a condition
or as constitutive characteristic of democracy, into any of the promi-
nent empirically based comparative political theories of "really exist-
ing" democracies, such as those of Robert Dahl, Juan Linz, or Arendt
Lijphart. My interest lies in examining the secularist prejudices built
into ordinary public opinion in the more secularized societies of
Westem Europe.
It is indeed astounding to observe how widespread is the view
throughout Europe that religion is "intolerant" and "creates conflict."
According to the 1998 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) public
opinion survey, the overwhelming majorify of Europeans, practically
over two-thirds of the population in every Western European coun-
try, held the view that religion is "intolerant" (Greeley 2003: 78). This

1058 social research

was a widespread view, moreover, already before September 11. Since
people are unlikely to expressly recognize their own intolerance, one
can assume that in expressing such an opinion Europeans are thinking
of somebody else's "religion" or, alternatively, present a selective retro-
spective memory of their own past religion, which, fortunately, they
consider to have outgrown. It is even more telling that a majority of
the population in every Western European country, vdth the significant
exception of Norway and Sweden, shares the view that "religion creates
confiict."
It should seem obvious that such a widespread negative view of
"religion" as being "intolerant" and conducive to conflict can hardly be
grounded empirically in the collective historical experience of European
societies in the twentieth century or in the actual personal experience of
most contemporary Europeans. It can plausibly be explained, however,
as a secular constmct that has the function of positively differentiat-
ing modem secular Europeans from "the religious other," either firom
premodern religious Europeans or from contemporary non-European
religious people, particularly from Muslims.
So when they think of religion as "intolerant," obviously
Europeans are not thinking of themselves, even when many of them
may still be religious, but rather they must be thinking either of the
religion they have left behind or of the religion of "the other" within
their midst, which happens to be Islam. Insofar as they identify reli-
gion with intolerance, they seem to imply that they have happily left
their own intolerance behind by getting rid of religion. The argument
for tolerance becomes in this sense a justification for secularity as the
source of tolerance.
Most striking is the view of "religion" in the abstract as the
source of violent conflict, given the actual historical experience of
most European societies in the twentieth century. "The European short
century," from 1914 to 1989, using Eric Hobsbavrai's (1996) apt charac-
terization, was indeed one of the most violent, bloody, and genocidal
centuries in the history of humanity. But none of the horrible massa-

The Secular and Secularisms 1059

eres—neither the senseless slaughter of millions of young Europeans
in the trenches of World War I; nor the countless millions of victims
of Bolshevik and communist terror through the Russian Revolution,
Givil War, collectivizations campaigns, the Great Famine in Ukraine,
the repeated cycles of Stalinist terror and the Gulag; nor the most
unfathomable of all, the Nazi Holocaust and the global confiagration
of World War II, culminating in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki—none of those terrible conflicts can be said to have been
caused by religious fanaticism and intolerance. All of them were rather
the product of modern secular ideologies.
Yet contemporary Europeans obviously prefer to selectively forget
the more inconvenient recent memories of secular ideological conflict
and retrieve instead the long forgotten memories of the religious wars
of early modern Europe to make sense of the religious conflicts they
see today proliferating around the world and increasingly threatening
them. Rather than seeing the common structural contexts of modern
state formation, interstate geopolitical conflicts, modern nationalism,
and the political mobilization of ethnocultural and religious identities—
processes central to modem European history that became globalized
through the European colonial expansion—Europeans prefer seemingly
to attribute those conflicts to "religion," that is, to religious fundamen-
talism and to the fanaticism and intolerance supposedly intrinsic to
"premodern" religion, an atavistic residue modern secular enlightened
Europeans have fortunately left behind (Gasanova 2008, 2009b). One
may suspect that the function of such a selective historical memory is
to safeguard the perception of the progressive achievements of Western
secular modernity, offering a self-validating justification of the secular
separation of religion and politics as the condition for modern liberal
democratic politics, for global peace, and for the protection of individ-
ual privatized religious freedom.
Yet really existing European democracies are not as secular as
secularist theories of democracy seem to imply. European societies may
be highly secular, but European states are far from being secular or

1060 social research

neutral. One only needs to point our that every branch of Christianity,
vdth the exception of the Catholic Church, has privileged establish-
ment, and not only a symbolic one, in some European democracy: the
Anglican Church in England, the Presbj^erian Church in Scotland, the
Lutheran Church in all Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Iceland,
and Finland, with the exception of Sweden), and the Orthodox Church
in Greece. Even in laicist France, 80 percent of the budget of private
Catholic schools is covered by state funds. Indeed, between the two
extremes of French laïcité and Nordic Lutheran establishment, all across
Europe there is a whole range of very diverse patterns of church-state
relations, in education, media, health and social services, that constitute
very "unsecular" entanglements, such as the consociational formula of
pillarization in the Netherlands, or the corporatist official state recog-
nition of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany (as well as of
the Jevwsh community in some Länder).^

SECULARISM AS STATECRAFT DOCTRINE

One should focus less on secularism as an allegedly prescriptive demo-
cratic norm or as a functionalist requirement of modern differentiated
societies and more on the critical comparative historical analysis of
the different types of secularism that have emerged in the process of
modern state formation. As a statecraft doctrine, every form of secu-
larism entails two principles, which are well captured by the dual
principle of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, namely the
principle of separation (that is, "no establishment") and the principle of
state regulation of religion in society (that is, "free exercise"). It is the
relationship between the two principles that determines the particular
form of secularism and its affinity with democracy.
On the first principle there are all kinds of degrees of separa-
tion between the two extremes of "hostile" and "friendly" separation.
Indeed, in places in which there was no ecclesiastical institution with
monopolistic claims, such as the Catholic Church before the Second
Vatican Council, nor compulsory confessional state churches, such

The Secuiar and Secularisms 1061

as the ones that became institutionalized through the Westphalian
system of European states under the principle cuius regio eius religio, one
does not need, properly speaking, a process of disestablishment, and
one may have a process of friendly separation, as was the case in the
United States.
As Ahmet Kuru (2009) has shown, the type of separation at the
formative period of the modem state will be very much determined by
the particular configuration of relations between religious and political
authorities during the ancien régime. Postcolonial states are likely to
have their own particular d5mamics. In colonial America, for example,
there was no national church across the 13 colonies from which the
new federal state needed to separate itself. But as Noah Feldman has
pointed out in this issue, the separation was friendly not only because
there was no need to have a hostile separation from a nonexistent
established church, but, more importantly, because the separation was
constituted in order to protect the free exercise of religion—that is, in
order to construct the conditions of possibility for religious pluralism
in society.
Ultimately, the question is whether secularism is an end in itself,
an ultimate value, or rather a means to some other end, be it democracy
and equal citizenship or religious (that is, normative) pluralism. If the
secularist principle of separation is not an end in itself, then it ought to
be constructed in such a way that it maximizes the equal participation
of all citizens in democratic politics and the free exercise of religion
in society. Taking the two clauses together, one can construct general
gradual typologies of hostile/friendly separation, on the one hand,
and models of free/unfree state regulation of religion in society on the
other.
One could advance the proposition that it is the "free exercise"
of religion clause, rather than "no establishment" clause, that appears
to be a necessary condition for democracy. One cannot have democ-
racy vwthout freedom of religion. Indeed, free exercise stands out as a
normative democratic principle in itself. Since on the other hand there

1062 social research

are many historical examples of secular states that were nondemo-
cratic—the Soviet-type regimes, Kemalist Turkey, or post-Revolution-
ary Mexico being obvious cases—one can therefore conclude that the
strict secular separation of church and state is neither a sufficient nor
a necessary condition for democracy. The "no-establishment" principle
appears defensible and necessary primarily as a means to free exercise
and to equal rights. Disestablishment becomes a necessary condition
for democracy whenever an established religion claims monopoly over
a state territory, impedes the free exercise of religion, and undermines
equal rights or equal access of all citizens.
Given the focus of the conference on the U.S. case, it is under-
standable that we have been having an internal Western Christian-
secular debate about patterns of Ghristian Western secularization. As
Noah Feldman has pointed out in this issue, this is basically a debate
as to how we got from Saint Augustine to where we are today. But
we should be cautious in trying to elevate this particular and contin-
gent historical process to some general universal historical model.
Indeed, we should remind ourselves that "the secular" emerged flrst
as a particular Westem Ghristian theological category, a category that
not only served to organize the particular social formation of Western
Ghristendom, but structured thereafter the very dynamics of how to
transform or free oneself from such a system. Eventually, however,
as a result of this particular historical process of secularization, "the
secular" has become the dominant category that serves to structure
and delimit, legally, philosophically, scientifically, and politically, the
nature and the boundaries of "religion."
Moreover, this particular dynamic of secularization became
globalized through the process of Western colonial expansion enter-
ing into dynamic tension with the many different ways in which other
civilizations had drawn boundaries between "sacred" and "profane,"
"transcendent" and "immanent," "religious" and "secular." We should
not think of these dyadic pairs of terms as being synonymous. The
sacred tends to be immanent in pre-axial cultures; the transcendent is

The Secular and Secularisms 1063

not necessarily "religious" in some axial civilizations. The secular is by
no means profane in our secular age. One only needs to think of such
sacralized secular phenomena as nation, citizenship, and human rights.
Indeed, we would need to enter into a much more open analysis of non-
Western civilizational dynamics and be more critical of our Western
Christian secular categories in order to expand our understandings of
the secular and secularisms.

NOTES
1. John Madeley (2007) has developed a tripartite measure of church-
state relation, which he calls the TAO of European management and
regulation of religion-state relations by the use of Treasure (T: for
financial and property connections). Authority (A: for the exercise of
states' powers of command), and Organization (O: for the effective
intervention of state bodies in the religious sphere). According to his
measurement, all European states score positively on at least one of
these scales, most states score positively on two of them, and over
one-third (16 out of 45 states) score positively on all three.

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