ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the privatization of religion and the separation of public from private life. The interpreter of God's will or law is the only public figure; everyone else is a private person. The idea of civil religion is popular and intellectually respectable, and it holds promise of addressing the legitimacy problem. In making practical recommendations and in dealing with specific policy issues it is important to work within society's traditions, separation of church and state must be a significant part of any conception of religion and politics, at least in America. All four perspectives -secularization, theocracy, civil religion, and separation of church and state-fail to account for some of the important phenomena of private and public life and of religion and politics. Religion and politics challenge and test each other; that is their special dynamic.
