The Religious and the Secular in the Modern World

'The modern world, in its self-awareness, is the product of the disengagement of the secular from the religious, which makes the discussion of this issue particularly fraught. The religious overshadowed the secular at one point in the history of the Western world. The secular realm then emerged from under the shadow of the religious, by liberating the political, the legal, and the educational dimensions of public life from religious dominance. We have now reached a point, when the secular overshadows the religious to such an extent, that it is the secular constitutions which guarantee religious freedom. In the heyday of secularism, right after the Second World War, the progressive secularization of the rest of the world, along the lines it had occurred in the West, especially Europe, was considered axiomatic. This belief was shared by the otherwise rival economic systems of capitalism and communism, and also by the rival political systems of liberal democracy and totalitarianism. Liberal democracy saw religion as ultimately turning into a purely private affair, like one's appreciation of art and music; Marxism foresaw not merely its retreat from public life but from life itself. Thus the general intellectual climate, in the middle of the last century, saw religion as on its way out of the public square, if not out of life altogether.'

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