ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an overview of the postsecular landscape, exploring differences and similarities between religion and spirituality and tensions between secularism and the postsecular. It offers a global perspective on the return of the sacred and how this is impacting societies, human identity and political life. This chapter questions the popular assumption that spirituality and religion should be completely separated, but agrees that a parting of the ways is evident at present and may continue for some time. Eventually, however, the postsecular will need to draw on the traditions currently repudiated, even as it reconstructs them for its own purposes. The chapter attempts to recover the true meaning of religion, as distinct from institutional attendance, and explores the phenomenon of religiousness rising in nations that have been committedly atheist. It argues that when the religious is banned or suppressed, it emerges with virulent force and secular ideologies assume quasi-religious forms with often disastrous results.