Political Theology and the Secular State

God is back', on the streets of a liberal democracy near you. But the return of public religion- its 'deprivatisation' - is generating deep anxieties among secularists who have long assumed that liberal democracy presupposes a 'secular state' and a religion-free public realm. Christians, too, are scrambling to make sense of the new but shifting spaces opening up for their own faith-based political engagement. Drawing on salient insights of contemporary political theology, the course will confront the challenges to, and opportunities for, the secular state presented by the resurgence of public religion in liberal democracies. It explores various concepts of 'secularism', 'secularization', 'the secular' and the 'post-secular', probes the nature and legitimacy of religious public reasoning, and reflects on the shape of constructive and critical religious citizenship in contemporary liberal states.