The Politics of Secularism

This chapter describes two influential trajectories of secularism and explains why they are important to contemporary world politics: laicism, from the French laïcité, which distils a particular understanding of religion and bans it from politics, and "Judeo-Christian" secularism, which defines religion as a source of unity and identity within societies and civilizations and conflict between them. It draws attention to how secularism is constituted differently in different times and places, the contestation and challenges that surround and inhabit the various forms of secularism, and the lives that they take on in the world as they shape both analytic perspectives in social science and practical projects in politics and international affairs.