Discussion

The book traces the experiences of religion and secularity in eleven countries not primarily shaped by Western Christianity (Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco), and examines how the status of religion and the emergence of secularity have evolved in the course of the 20^th century in these societies. All chapters do so in conversation with Charles Taylor’s grand narrative of the North Atlantic world in his A Secular Age(2007). The case studies indicate that in all eleven cases, the state – building on colonial and imperial legacies – highly determined religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education, and/or law. The book identifies the major critical junctures and path dependencies that have led to the various levels of religious regulation and discusses the consequences of these for the possible emergence of something approaching Taylor’s core condition of secularity – namely, the social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III). The discussants will engage with the book's main theses from the perspective of their own work on the topic.