Inclusion or Exclusion of Religion: What Does Secularism Require?

Secularism is a complex notion involving, on the one hand, different normative concerns about the relationship between politics and religion and, on the other, different policies for regulating this relationship. One liberal rationale for separating politics and religion is that this can be required for civic inclusion. According to such views, to the extent that a political affirmation of or support for religion fails to include all citizens as equals, politics and religion should be separated. The chapter considers what such a civic inclusion requirement might mean in practice, taking Cécile Laborde’s recent formulation of such a view as a point of departure. What civic inclusion means in practice depends on a specification of the principle of civic inclusion. The chapter discusses such a specification on the basis of Laborde’s application of her version of such a view to two prominent cases: The Lautsi case about mandatory crucifixes in Italian public schools and the Swiss ban on construction of minarets. These two cases highlight how a principle of civic inclusiveness can have both inclusive and exclusive valence in terms of what it requires. Furthermore, a principle of civic inclusiveness can apply at both the level of religious institutions or communities and at the level of individual citizens. The well-known cases about Muslim headscarves are a case in point at the individual level. A principle of civic inclusion can apparently have radically different implications in different cases. The question therefore is whether it indeed is the same principle across different cases and, if so, what then accounts for the differences in implications. The chapter argues that such a principle of civic inclusion should be based on more fundamental political principles, such as equality of opportunity or non-domination, that will then determine which inclusion or exclusion claims follow from it.