ABSTRACT
By nearly all accounts a book such as this one should not have been possible. By the end of the last century nearly all leading social scientists – from Ferdinand Tönnies to Oswald Spangler, Émil Durkheim to Georg Simmel, on up to Max Weber – were lamenting the complete secularization of the public sphere and thus the emergence of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer mockingly referred to as the ‘fully enlightened earth’.1 Few if any anticipated that religion and spirituality would come to play so central a role in public life as they have over the past century. Yet, notwithstanding this central role, religion and spirituality and their relationship to public life are still widely contested. Many fear that the liberal democratic and pluralist political arrangements that predominated in the west from the end of World War II at least through the 1970s are giving way to new post-democratic and post-liberal regimes of political, social, economic and cultural regulation.2 However, even more people seem to feel that the religious ‘recolonization’ of the secular state has not been nearly as thorough as it needs to be. Our political and legal institutions are still governed by a ‘culture of disbelief’.3 As borne out by recent electoral results on both sides of the Atlantic, both sides of the Channel, and indeed throughout the developed world, mature capitalist society has become increasingly polarized between these two camps.4
