Law in the secular age

Legal scholarship has been slow to engage the secular and post-secular, which is somewhat curious given the manifold ways in which law is shaped by a secular logic. This situation is beginning to change, however, with important new works considering the secular, particularly as it relates to law and religion. The three books discussed here demonstrate the creative possibilities of this development.

In A Secular Europe, Lorenzo Zucca proposes that Europe’s inability to manage diversity, especially religious diversity, represents a crisis in the secular state (p. 24). Zucca goes even further in arguing that this failure has encouraged ‘less-than-reasonable’ forms of religious fundamentalism to emerge (p. 33). Proposing a link between secularism and religious fundamentalism is not itself novel, but Zucca pushes the claim in a new direction by characterizing it as reflective of a failed secular politics. In his assessment, the emergence of fundamentalisms – religious and secular alike – is not the disease but rather ‘a symptom of the crisis confronting the secular state’ (p. 30).