I'm guessing the secularism debate here has mostly run its course. If anyone is interested in reviving it, though, this article by Mark Lilla, a humanities prof. at Columbia from the New York Times magazine, while not without its faults, is a decent, very quick overview of the history of church-state separation in the west and some current challenges it faces. It touches briefly on what I see as one of the biggest problems with mixing politics and religion: Religion is most compelling when it's least democratic.
Describing the mild-mannered Protestantism dominant in Germany in the late 1800s, Lilla states: "Liberal theology had begun in hope that the moral truths of biblical faith might be intellectually reconciled with, and not just accommodated to, the realities of modern political life. Yet the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth." This younger generation, especially after the pointless slaughter of World War I, "...craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order...When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse — one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine."
While the situation today is nowhere near as grave as in 1920s Europe, we're still stuck, as I've said before, with a bland, vague "faith" on the one hand and an intolerant, authoritarian fundamentalism on the other. When I think about what religious belief does for people then the fundamentalist or apocalyptic version makes more sense as religion to me (and apparently I'm not the only one as Evangelical and Pentacostal churches are winning converts away from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism all over the world, and Islamic fundamentalism is gaining on its mellower forms), but as a model for governing a diverse, modern society they're horrible.
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Shoot. I started to read this article, but now it's been archived and you need a Times subscription or something to get it. If someone has a copy could they send it my way?
It seems to be permanently locked away, at least unless you want to shell out $5 to the NYTimes. It wasn't that interesting an article, and I don't really want to discuss secularism in politics again (though a straight up talk about our thoughts on religion might be interesting), so I wouldn't recommend it. There's a fair amount of commentary on the article out there if your interested; you could probably piece together most of the article, certainly the main points, by searching around a little.
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