Secularisation as the Fragmentation of the Sacred and of Sacred Space

Abstract

Contemporary conflicts about secularity in ‘the West’ tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that public space is rarely exclusively neutral, conflicts continue to arise over the relationship between secularity and religious symbolism, and especially over those symbols which derive from religious minorities. This contribution critically considers the designation of space as either sacred or secular in political imaginaries, approaching processes of secularisation as part of a fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space. We introduce the concept of trans-liminal space: spaces which can contain multiple and potentially conflicting ascriptions of meaning. Conceptualizing public space as trans-liminal allows for contemporaneous and competing ascriptions of the secular, the sacred, the secular-sacred, and the sacred-secular, without being exclusively grounded in either. Trans-liminality does not preclude public space to be predominantly secular, but it does problematise the phenomenon of normative exclusions of religious symbols from public spaces.