Concluding remarks

Abstract

The relation between church and state, and between the appropriate boundaries of the religious and the political has posed a challenge for scholars and statesmen alike for centuries. Much of the work done on this issue posits a fundamental opposition of modernity and religion and predicts that the practice of the latter inexorably declines as the former progresses (Wilson 1998: 48-49). Calling this “the secularisation theory”, Berger (1999) argues that “modernisation necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals; as societies modernize, increasing commitments to scientific rationality and individual autonomy lessen the influence of ‘the sacred’ and of religiously oriented institutions, leading to an inevitable process of secularisation” (Berger 1999: 201-202).