ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political challenge coming from religion under three separate headings: the challenge of 'de-privatization', the challenge of 'confessional de-territorialization', and the challenge of 'global denominationalism'. Religions and the secular across the world are being transformed in multiform ways by global historical processes that people tend to conceptualize under the shorthand category of globalization. The best confirmation of the validity of the 'de-privatization' of religion can be found in the heartland of secularization, that is, in Western European societies. It is here that the challenge of 'de-privatization' is most keenly felt. The most astounding aspect of the European secular foundational myth is the often repeated assertion that the secularization of the European state system was a felicitous response, a kind of positive learning from the catastrophic experience of confessional inter-religious warfare. Trans-societal migrations and the world religions, at times separately but often in conjunction with each other, have always served as important carriers of processes of globalization.
