The ongoing secularisation debate(s) rarely focus on state secularisation, seemingly because of the assumption that the state is definitionally secular and so logically not subject to secularisation. From a less compromised perspective, the secular state appears as an American late-eighteenth century invention while the present day states of Europe retain significant features inherited from the formative period of the modern state when it took a distinctively confessional form -that is, they remain still in part religious.
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