Abstract: Political secularism in W. Europe has been destabilised by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant number of Muslims; a multiculturalist sensibility which respects ‘difference’; and a moderate secularism, namely that the historical compromises between the state and a church or churches in relation to public recognition and accommodation are still in place to some extent. Radical secularism or laicite seems to be struggling to cope but the dominant version of secularism, far from being in crisis, offers a resource – suitably multiculturalised –for accommodating the new religious plurality of the region. The ‘crisis of secularism’, then, is really the challenge of multiculturalism.
Published in: Sociology of Religion, June, 2012 full text here
Tariq Modood is a professor at the University of Bristol and the founding director of the University Research Centre for the study of ethnicity and citizenship:
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