ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a parallel argument about the religious and the secular, namely that underlying rival versions of religious freedom are rival accounts of the religious and the secular. It covers a very brief, if necessarily ambiguous, history of the religious and the secular in the West. The chapter shows that shifts have occurred in the religious and the secular, and that these shifts often accompanied transformations of social and political order. The religious problem, argues Smith, is assuming that religio means through all time what it came to be defined as in the modern period. The religious problem, says Cavanaugh, is not just "that all phenomenon identified as religious are historical specific" but rather that "the definitions themselves are historical products that are part of specific configurations of power". A small industry has emerged on the role of the Reformation in the transformation of the religious and the secular.
