ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence in critical studies of secularism. In the late 1990s, as the recognition that post–Cold War triumphalist visions of the world—be they neoconservative like Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man or neo-Kantian like Jürgen Habermas's Postmetaphysical Thinking and John Rawls's Political Liberalism—failed to manifest themselves in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the centrality to and inevitability of secularism to conceptualisations of modernity were reexamined. 1 The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia along religious and ethnic lines was perhaps the most obvious catalyst for this resurgence among Western scholars given its location in the heart of Europe and its disturbingly violent clashes, including genocide. However, the re-emergence of the Orthodox churches in Russia (along with Islam and Judaism) and other Eastern European countries and the significant role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Polish revolution were also important factors. Interestingly, earlier indicators that secularism needed a critical re-evaluation, such as the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Christian Right in U.S. politics, were widely overlooked. 2
