ABSTRACT
The first part addresses the question as to whether an alternative secularism or an alternative to secularism provides the most plausible solution to the democratic governance of the religion-politics relationship. It explores how we can define and study secularism in a comparative perspective in chapters focusing on the construction of oppositions between the religious and the secular as part of concrete historical and political processes and power play. On the basis of the explorations of the normative implications of the various conceptions of secularism and the post-secular, pluralism and democracy, the second part includes concrete comparative studies and analyses of secularism in the Western world and outside the West. What follows is in three parts: The first clarifies this difference in analytical framework; the second examines the laws and debates in the early twentieth century that are said to constitute the legal framework, suggesting that lake city functions as an object of struggle rather than an agreed-upon ideal.
