The Pitfalls of Believing in Separation of Church and State

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

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.

Religion played a pivotal role in how the West came to organize the world, as Tomoko Masuzawa points out in The Invention of World Religions.

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

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.

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

Secularism Is Complicated: the most crucial challenge to the promise of secularism—ie, that by separating church and state, religion became restricted only to the private sector. While it is true that secularization did happen at a specific point in European history (thus resulting in the Church being formally removed from political rule in Eu... 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

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