2011 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture * Is There a Crisis of Secularism in Western Europe?

By secularism or more specifically political secularism, I mean institutional arrangements such that religious authority and religious reasons for action and political authority and political reasons for action are distinguished; so, political authority does not rest on religious authority and the latter does not dominate political authority. Support for such arrangements can be derived from a religion or a religious authority, and certainly are supported by many religious people.1 On this very broad conception of political secularism, there is no necessary, absolute separation of religion and political rule, let alone that the state should be hostile to religion, though of course such radical views are also amongst those recognizable as political secularism. Many different institutional arrangements and many different political views and ideologies, democratic and antidemocratic, liberal and illiberal, and proreligion and antireligion are consistent with this minimal conception of secularism: the nondomination of political authority by religious authority.