ABSTRACT
Political secularisms first became fully operational in the early twentieth century. The point is that secularism came into being inadvertently. The tweak concerns Christianity’s role in this story. Standard scholarly accounts portray political secularism as born exclusively of European Christendom. Secularism, so goes the narrative, is a Western export. It thus arrived in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America through one of two routes: colonialist invasion of the western powers or the rise of Soviet successor states in the twentieth century. The equality principle stipulates that, in the eyes of the secular state, all human beings are equal. In broad terms, this means that a government cannot establish gradations or hierarchies among law-abiding citizens for any reason. Muslim and Hindu citizens in a secular country with a Christian majority must be granted exactly the same rights as Christians and be treated in exactly the same way.
