How should governments relate to religion? Over the last four centuries many countries have moved toward some form of secularism, but the word covers several quite different arrangements.

Locke and toleration

Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was torn by religious wars and persecution. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the English philosopher John Locke argued that government serves civil interests, such as life, liberty, health and property, not the saving of souls. Moreover, force cannot create genuine belief: a ruler can compel outward conformity, but true faith requires inward persuasion, so persecution is both wrong and pointless. Locke's toleration had limits by today's standards: he did not extend it to atheists, whose oaths he thought could not be trusted, or to Catholics, whom he suspected of allegiance to a foreign power.

The American model

The First Amendment to the US Constitution (1791) begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These are the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” The image was older: the colonial minister Roger Williams had spoken of a hedge or wall between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, mainly to protect the church. Several states kept official churches for decades; Massachusetts ended its establishment in 1833.

The American model aims to keep government from sponsoring or controlling religion while protecting religious practice, and Americans continue to debate exactly where the lines fall.

French laïcité

France's 1905 law on the separation of the churches and the state established laïcité: no religion is recognized or funded by the state, freedom of conscience is guaranteed, and public institutions are strictly neutral. Laïcité grew out of a long struggle with a powerful established church, and compared with the American model it tends to emphasize keeping religion out of public institutions more than protecting religious expression within them.

Varieties of arrangement

• Established churches: England has the Church of England, with the monarch as its Supreme Governor, yet guarantees broad religious freedom.
• Cooperation models: Germany recognizes religious bodies, collects a church tax on behalf of their members, and offers religious education in state schools.
• Separation models: the United States and France, in their different ways.
• Religious states: some states base law or office on a particular faith, such as Iran's Islamic Republic or Vatican City.
• State atheism: the Soviet Union promoted atheism and persecuted believers; Albania declared itself an atheist state in 1967.

The secularization thesis

Many twentieth-century sociologists predicted that religion declines as societies modernize, in both influence and belief. Max Weber spoke of what he called the disenchantment of the world. In much of Western Europe, church attendance has indeed fallen sharply. But critics note that religion has remained strong in the United States and has grown in much of Africa, Latin America and Asia, and some prominent sociologists who once defended the thesis later revised it. Many scholars now distinguish several meanings of secularization: the separation of religion from other institutions, the decline of belief, and religion becoming a private matter. The first is widespread; the others vary greatly from place to place.

Worked example: religion in the classroom, four ways

Consider one question, how public schools should handle religion, and see how four democracies answer it differently.

• United States. Under the Establishment Clause, US courts have ruled since the 1960s that public schools may not lead students in prayer or devotional Bible reading. Students may pray privately and form voluntary religious clubs, and schools may teach about religion in history or literature classes. The aim is that government neither sponsors nor suppresses religion.
• France. Under laïcité, public schools offer no religious instruction and keep a strictly neutral environment. A 2004 law forbids pupils from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in public schools. Supporters see this as protecting a shared civic space; critics see it as restricting religious expression.
• England. State schools are required by law to teach religious education and to hold a daily act of collective worship, meant to be broadly Christian in character, though parents may withdraw their children. This reflects an established church combined with broad religious freedom.
• Germany. The constitution makes religious education a regular subject in most state schools, usually taught according to the principles of a particular faith community, with ethics classes as an alternative for those who opt out. This reflects the cooperation model.

Notice that all four are stable democracies that protect freedom of religion, yet they draw the lines in different places. Each arrangement grew out of a particular history: America's many competing denominations, France's long conflict with a powerful church, England's national church, and Germany's partnership with its major churches.

Notice too that each model has defenders and critics from both religious and secular sides. There is no single secular model, only different ways of balancing neutrality, freedom and history.