ABSTRACT
The separation between religion and politics may be done in two ways, speaking in terms of principles. On the one hand, there is the conception of the lay sector in society, guaranteed by the legal separation between Church and State, as well as by the neutrality of the state and the principle of religious freedom. A church in the sense of a community of believers has existed in all religions, but the key question is why the major world religions did not arrive at the Occidental solution with the Church as a formal organisation apart from the political organisation of society. The intellectual polemics around the notion of the secular as well as identification of Islam as a State religion lend credence to the argument that Islam has become too mixed up with politics, making the religion neither completely religious nor sincerely lay.
