The Pitfalls of Believing in Separation of Church and State

Our orientation in the West also has infiltrated how we view religions (and, by proxy, religious people) across the globe, even though our assumptions about religion may not be universally true. And because of the West’s powerful role in academia, the media, and global affairs, we also may hold certain assumptions about other faiths and traditions ... See more

Coming from a Western perspective, it’s important to acknowledge how the concept of secularism may (1) have deceived us into thinking that religion doesn’t impact the public sphere and (2) have led us into assuming that the separation of church and state is a universal “good” that everyone in the world should emulate.

Said is helpful in summarizing the key message from this section: “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”

Islamophobia has a complicated genealogy—one that’s entangled with religious discrimination and racism—but this one, small example is a display of how Orientalism and the cultural allegiance to Christianity bred by secularism persists.

Muslim women in the mainstream media are constantly forced to show their credentials as “good Muslims” in order to be taken seriously by Western audiences who have no real conception of Islam.

These important distinctions about religion offer a real challenge to how we see other cultures and their traditions. If we’re only seeing them through our eyes, rather than challenging our gaze, how can they ever trust us to see them for who they are? How does this imposition of “religion” onto other cultures contribute to broader misunderstanding... See more

The common definition of religion is fraught and can hardly capture the full range and complexities of faiths, spiritualities, and traditions all over the world. Religion itself is an imperialist construct, one that still orients us towards a Western (read: predominantly Christian) understanding of faith. We cannot just apply our rubric of religion... See more

Orientalism helps us understand how the West—with its academy, its museums, its media—came to categorize the world. Other nations, peoples, and customs became subjects of the West, and that “knowledge” then became normative.

As Edward Said says in his seminal text Orientalism, “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Orientalism has several meanings, but for our understanding, it’s best to focus on this particular articulation: “Orientalism is a style of thought” that sought to make clear distinctio... See more