Secularism in Comparative Perspective Religions Across Political Contexts

This book confronts the key questions surrounding comparative secularism in historical perspective. The contributions critically consider the normative ideas and alternative political arrangements that govern religion’s relation to politics and to the public and private spheres. 

Containing contributions by world-renowned scholars such as Michael Walzer, Asma Afsaruddin and Sudipta Kaviraj, this book recounts the arguments, debates, and disputations regarding secular arguments for accommodating religion. It does so in both critical and appreciative ways and describes some of the outcomes in actually existing institutions, policies, and practical arrangements. With the addition of many non-Western experiences and viewpoints on how secularism is theorized and lived, politically and historically and from Europe and Asia to Africa and the Americas, this volume is of great value political philosophers across the globe. 

Jonathan Laurence is Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He is author of Coping with Defeat: Islam, Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton, 2021) and The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims (Princeton, 2012), both of which received the Hubert Morken award for Best Book in Religion and Politics from the American Political Science Association (in 2013 and 2022). Laurence is also co-author of Integrating Islam: Religious and Political Challenges in Contemporary France (with Justin Vaïsse, Brookings, 2006). He is an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (PhD 2006), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a board member of Reset Dialogues US.