Secularism in much of the Western world was never the abstract, universal principle it is often assumed to be. It emerged from a very specific historical confrontation between the Christian church and the modernising state, where institutional disentanglement was the primary goal. Over time, this struggle produced a public sphere that appeared “neutral”, but only in relation to Christianity. The cultural norms, civic rituals, legal assumptions, and political vocabulary of secular neutrality grew out of a society whose dominant religious reference point was already established.
As long as European societies remained demographically homogeneous, this framework appeared stable. But as the continent has transformed into one of the most religiously heterogeneous spaces in the world, that inherited secularism now finds itself under profound strain.
The Paradox of Secular Neutrality
This tension is playing out most visibly in France, where the principle of laïcité has increasingly shifted from a framework for protecting freedom of conscience to a tool for regulating religious visibility in public life. The move to ban “ostensibly religious” clothing from all competitive sports across the country, including the Muslim headscarf. Rights groups, including Amnesty International, have criticised this move as a violation of fundamental freedoms and a measure that disproportionately targets Muslim women and girls.
The French government insists that such restrictions are necessary to preserve secular neutrality in public spaces, but the argument reveals the underlying paradox: a secularism designed to restrain the power of the church is now being used to curtail the liberties of minority religious communities. The bill follows a series of decisions by national sports federations that had already prohibited the hijab, a trend that is now being standardised through law. Supporters describe this as a defence against “communitarianism” and “Islamist separatism”, while critics argue it is secularism transformed into an instrument of exclusion.
How Europe’s Right Wing uses Secularism as a tool of Cultural Exclusion
This dynamic is not limited to France. Across Europe, demographic realities are rapidly changing. According to Eurostat, the European Union issued over 3.7 million first residence permits in a single recent year, the highest on record, with significant inflows from Muslim-majority countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. These patterns have diversified the public sphere in ways the traditional European secular model was never designed to accommodate. What once seemed like a neutral civic environment now appears, to many minorities, as a cultural order that privileges Christian-derived norms while insisting on erasing the public markers of other faiths. This is not merely a matter of symbolism; it has concrete implications for rights, access, social inclusion, and belonging.
European courts are increasingly entangled in these debates. In May last year, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a Belgian school’s regulation that banned visible religious symbols, including the hijab, for its students. The Court reasoned that the rule applied neutrally and fell within the state’s margin of appreciation in safeguarding secular education. Yet in other cases, European courts have judged such bans to be discriminatory or disproportionate. The outcome is a fragmented jurisprudence where similar cases receive different rulings depending on national context, political climate, and judicial interpretation. The law, which is expected to be a stabilising force, instead reflects the tensions and uncertainties surrounding secularism in an era of intense pluralisation.
The ‘Right’ turn of Europe
These institutional questions unfold alongside a profound political shift. The 2024 European Parliament elections saw significant gains for right-wing and far-right parties across multiple states. Analysts widely recognise that anxieties about immigration, demographic change, and cultural identity have fuelled this ascent. In this atmosphere, secularism has been reframed by certain political actors as a project of cultural defence rather than civic equality. Some leaders explicitly position themselves as the guardians of a secular Europe under threat from “Islamisation”, even as they simultaneously champion the cultural primacy of Europe’s Christian heritage. The consequence is a contradictory but politically potent narrative: one that uses the language of secularism to advance goals that are neither neutral nor inclusive.
A Trend of Strained Secularism in the US
Across the Atlantic, the United States offers its own version of secular strain. Though constitutionally grounded in church–state separation, contemporary American politics reflects a growing pressure to collapse this divide. A 2024 survey by the Pew Research Centre revealed that nearly half of American adults believe the Bible should influence U.S. law, and a non-trivial proportion support declaring the U.S. a Christian nation. This trend illustrates how secularism, even where it is constitutionally embedded, is vulnerable to political reinterpretation. Far from disappearing, religion, especially the majority religion, reasserts itself when citizens feel economically insecure, culturally threatened, or politically polarised.
Scholarly Insights : Asad and Casanova
This is where insights from scholars like Talal Asad and José Casanova become critical. Their work helps explain why secularism as practiced in the West cannot be assumed to be a universal model. Asad shows that secularism is not merely a constitutional arrangement but a “technology of governance” shaped by historical contexts, power relations, and assumptions about the role of religion in public life. Casanova demonstrates that the secularisation thesis, the notion that modernity inevitably produces the decline of religion, has been repeatedly contradicted by empirical realities. Together, their work points to an uncomfortable truth: Western secularism is neither ideologically neutral nor historically universal. It is a product of a Christian-majority society attempting to regulate religion in a way that serves its own historic self-understanding.
For further reading on this topic : Why we must move towards a post secular world
Warnings for Indian Secularism
For plural societies like India, which have always inhabited a different relationship between state, society, and religion, the Western crisis of secularism offers both lessons and warnings. India’s constitutional vision recognised that diversity was not an aberration to be disciplined, but an enduring reality to be accommodated.
Indian secularism, at least in its normative conception, does not require the erasure of religious identity from public life. Rather, it aspires to ensure that the state does not privilege one faith over another while allowing individuals and communities to express their beliefs openly. This model, while imperfect in practice and strained by contemporary politics, acknowledges something that Western secularism historically did not: that equality does not necessarily demand homogeneity, and that religious expression in public life can coexist with civic neutrality.
Limitations of Religious Neutrality
The Western model’s current struggles show the dangers of equating neutrality with invisibility. When states insist that the public sphere must be stripped of visible religion, the burden falls disproportionately on those whose religious identity is materially embodied. Muslim women who wear headscarves, Jewish men who wear kippahs, Sikh men who wear turbans. The supposed neutrality becomes, in effect, the cultural norm of the majority. In Europe, the Christian symbols that were once removed from public life were part of a majority tradition that had already been deeply internalised. But for communities whose presence is more recent and whose religious expression is more visibly embodied, this neutrality now demands a form of cultural assimilation.
The consequences are not only legal but also psychological and social. Young people from minority faith communities increasingly report feeling that their identities are unwelcome in public institutions. Women, in particular, bear the brunt of these restrictions, as bans on religious clothing disproportionately affect them. In sports, education, and public employment, the message is clear: participation is conditional upon conformity. This conditional acceptance clashes with the democratic promise of equal citizenship and reveals the limits of a secularism shaped by a single religious inheritance.
A Need for Secularism to Evolve
If Western democracies are to preserve both religious liberty and social cohesion, they need to move beyond inherited models and confront the structural biases embedded within them. A secularism designed for homogeneous Christian societies cannot be simply extended into plural ones without generating conflict. True neutrality in the 21st century requires not the suppression of religious difference but the fair accommodation of it. This means crafting laws that focus on genuine threats to public order rather than symbolic displays of religious identity, engaging minority communities in policy-making processes, and educating citizens about the historical contingencies of secularism rather than treating it as a fixed universal doctrine.
For India, too, this moment invites reflection. While the Indian model of secularism is, in theory, better suited to pluralism, it faces its own challenges, especially when political forces attempt to redefine secularism along majoritarian lines. The Western crisis is a reminder that the erosion of secular pluralism does not begin with dramatic legal changes but with subtle shifts in public norms, political rhetoric, and administrative practice. The lesson is not to reject secularism but to continually renew it by grounding it in equality, dialogue, and recognition of difference.
As Europe and the United States attempt to navigate unprecedented diversity, the limitations of their inherited secular models have become increasingly visible. What this moment demands from the West, from India, and from all plural democracies — is a secularism that does not confuse equality with sameness, and neutrality with erasure. The future of democratic coexistence depends on recognising that diversity is not a deviation from the norm, but the norm itself, and that secularism must evolve accordingly.
