The Pitfalls of Believing in Separation of Church and State

Secularism is an important cornerstone of America and the West more broadly. It’s how we distinguish ourselves from other nations, and how we assert ourselves as modern and others as backwards. This has led us to believe that Western nations are more progressive (in part, because of their ability to diminish the role of religion in politics) while ... See more

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

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

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.

The binary of the Eastern World and the Western World is particularly fraught; these very terms imply a separation of identities, borders, and ideologies. It implies that we in the West all believe in one set of values, while the others in the East believe in a different value system. The West assumes that our view of the world and its many diverse... See more

< Note: This is 3/x in a series of essays > 

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.

Nevertheless, the move toward secularism has allowed the white, Western world to see ourselves as modern—and any foreign land, government, or people that do not embrace secularism as not modern, and therefore, other. Secular nations view themselves as superior to nations that still have religion involved in their governments—even if those cultures’... See more

What kinds of power did we relinquish when we assumed that religion could be relegated to the private sector? How did our belief in this universalist claim—that there’s a separation of church and state—lead us to our current moment of religious resurgence?