The Myth of Normative Secularism: Religion and Politics in the Democratic Homeworld

April 2016 | paper | ISBN: 978-0-8207-0491-3 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist Modern political thought — at least in the West — has long presupposed that religion and politics constitute two distinct spheres with clearly demarcated boundaries. However, recent political developments, such as the rise of global Islamism and the American religious Right, have challenged the assumption that the progress of democracy within a society requires the increasing secularization of its government. In this work, Daniel D. Miller takes up the problem of how to think outside the flawed logic of this “normative secularism,” as he identifies it, and how to then articulate a theory of the social that can truly account for the complex relationship of religion and politics. Miller’s quest for such an understanding leads him to first consider three diverse contemporary sociopolitical theories that depart from normative secularism: the Radical Orthodoxy of Graham Ward and John Milban