Political Secularism: Crisis, Continuity and Change

Over the last few decades the relationship between church/organised-religion and the state, and between religion and politics, has been a matter of public debate and contestation and has risen in political salience in many parts of the world – a phenomenon that some refer to as a ‘crisis of secularism’. Drawing on a major Horizon2020 study, we briefly examine two world regions, Western Europe and South and South-East Asia and show that there are elements of crisis, continuity and change, though unevenly so in the two regions and across different countries in each region. We do so by creating an original, analytical framework and showing that at the heart of the phenomenon under study is a varying dialectic between nationalism and diversity and be-tween individual freedom and group identities. We suggest the different, contextual multiculturalist responses that best meet the needs of the historic governance of religion and current dynamics in the two regions.