Introduction

Religion is a universal phenomenon in human evolution: it characterizes all historically known societies (Bellah 2011; De Waal 2013: 437). ¹ The universality and historical success of religion have most probably to do with the creation of meaningful orders and the contribution to social integration, yet there is no scientific consensus over why and how exactly religion has maintained such a vital and constant role throughout human evolution (Watts and Turner 2014). In the history of human society, modernity and Enlightenment introduced an important caesura that still shapes the problematic of contemporary political philosophy. While secular political arrangements predate modernity and Enlightenment and are not specifically Western, ² it was during this period that secularism emerged with its multiple forms and implications. As a political and intellectual trend, secularism has had an enormous impact, propagating the notion of the modern constitutional practice of the state separated from godly matters and, more radically, opening up the possibility of a society without religion. Great secularist thinkers from Marx and Freud to Parsons and the early Habermas were deeply convinced that the advancement of modernity would lead to the death of God and the fatal unravelling of religion. ³