Secular State

One route to preventing religious discrimination is working towards mutual enlightenment — education can help change people's mindsets, and individual acts of sharing and mutual help across communities can chip away at prejudice and suspicion. Stories of Hindus saving Muslims, or Muslims saving Hindus, in the middle of a communal riot are genuinely inspiring. But it is unrealistic to expect the personal goodness of a few individuals, on its own, to eliminate religious discrimination in modern societies. In the world we actually live in, states hold enormous public power, and how a state functions is bound to shape whether a society moves towards greater inter-community conflict or towards greater religious harmony. This is why the more pressing question becomes: what kind of state actually prevents religious conflict and promotes religious harmony?

Start with what a state must NOT be. A state run directly by the heads of a particular religion — a priestly order — is called a theocratic state. The Papal states of medieval Europe, or the Taliban-controlled state in more recent times, are examples. Theocratic states are marked by rigid religious hierarchies, real oppression, and a reluctance to allow members of other religious groups genuine freedom of religion. If a society values peace, freedom, and equality, religious institutions and state institutions must be kept separate.

But separation of religion and state, by itself, is not enough to make a state secular. Plenty of non-theocratic states remain closely allied to one particular religion — sixteenth-century England was not run by a priestly class, yet it clearly favoured the Anglican Church, which was the established religion of the state; Pakistan today has an official state religion, Sunni Islam. Such arrangements leave little space for internal religious dissent or genuine religious equality. …