The secularization thesis and the secular state: reflections with special attention to debates in Australia

Introduction Contrary to the modernist expectation that religion would recede from the public sphere, José Casanova has identified a recent social and cultural shift that he calls the “deprivatization of religion” or the rise of “public religion.” In short, Casanova (1994: 65–6) describes “a process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing the boundaries.” Reflecting on similar phenomena, Jürgen Habermas (2008: 116) has recently observed that “Viewed in terms of world history, Max Weber's ‘Occidental Rationalism’ now appears to be the actual deviation.” Indeed “religious traditions appear to be sweeping away with undiminished strength the thresholds hitherto upheld between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern societies…” While it would seem queer to say that there has been no secularization at all, religion has proven far more resilient and adaptive than classical sociologists imagined. This chapter considers how political theorists can apply the lessons of the secularization debate to the problem of defining the secular state. Advocates of political secularism have tended to assume a single model of the secular state as the state and its institutions <italic>emptied or exclusive of</italic> religion. I show this by offering a case study on the debate on religion and politics that has been taking place in Australia since the mid-1990s.