The Secularism Paradox of Interreligious Relations and International Relations

This chapter attempts to address the role of secularism in the rise of the modern nation-state. It challenges the claim that secularism’s so-called separation of religion and politics remains well suited to address conflict resolution in a postcolonial world of multicultural nation-states. This draws attention to a paradox of secularism, which shows how false assumptions grounded in post-Reformation Europe preserve a power dynamic between Christians and non-Christians through liberalism and its underlying Enlightenment ideologies. This understanding of liberalism shapes how we frame contemporary dissent and whether we legitimize peacebuilding and conflict resolution through the religious sphere of interreligious relations or the political sphere of international relations, as strategies that emerged from secularism for managing difference and diversity. This chapter will problematize the discourse on the secular in terms of its contested boundaries between religion and politics and show how their presumed separation in secularism is used to authorize liberalism by reproducing it. The implications of this on how dissent is managed, both in interreligious relations and in international relations, provides a basis for disputing what we consider secular and for questioning the epistemology of how we determine it.