by Christopher Lane
Huffington Post<\/p>\n
On both sides of the Atlantic, a debate about the scope and limits of secularism has begun to collide once more with those wanting to increase the power and presence of religion in the public sphere.<\/p>\n
The debate isn\u2019t of course new, and in many cases never really went away. Almost three decades ago, to offer just one example of its cyclical quality, Richard John Neuhaus wrote \u201cThe Naked Public Sphere: Religion and Democracy in America\u201d in an attempt to understand what was driving renewed religious mobilization on the right, including by the then-ascendant power of the Rev. Jerry Falwell\u2019s Moral Majority. Still, with Baroness Warsi (Britain\u2019s first female Muslim Cabinet minister) recently decrying what she called the UK\u2019s and Europe\u2019s \u201cmilitant secularization\u201d and Rick Santorum now serving as standard-bearer for those who view the separation of church and state in the U.S. as an unacceptable deviation from \u201cGod\u2019s law,\u201d it\u2019s clearly time to revisit both the idea and practice of secularism, to determine when it works, why it sometimes fails, and what\u2019s at stake in its underlying premises.<\/p>\n