The Religion-State Relation as Problem and Prospect

In the bygone era of traditional world, religion implicitly or explicitly served as an all-encompassing canopy under which every aspect of social life found its meaning and value. In other words, religion was the source and sustenance of social cohesiveness. With the emergence of the modern, secular and global culture, the myth of ‘religious canopy’ has progressively shrunk to one among the diverse competing sectors of societal life: religious, cultural, artistic, political, juridical, economic and ecological. While secularism has reduced religion to one of the autonomous sectors of public life, in its extreme instance, it can tend to obliterate, emarginate or silence religion into a private limbo. And hence the intricate question: How are we to envisage the rapport between religion and state in the contemporary secular world that upholds human rights as its own conquest (even if religions think otherwise) for regulating the interaction among the autonomous sectors of public life, including that between religion and state? Can the altered situation that seems to undermine religion’s privileged status turn out to be an occasion for redefining its specific critical and prospective function with reference to the state? Can religion have a better function than the one it played in the past, namely, dominating at times the political power, at other times being subservient to it or being hand-in-glove with the empire, state and ruling class? In order to explore the religion-state rapport in the contemporary milieu of human rights, of which religious freedom is a vital one, it is perhaps indispensable to grasp the complex nature of religion itself.