For much of the 20th century, the consensus among the intellectual elite was that religion was on a permanent retreat. In 1902, William James dismissed it as a likely "anachronism"; by the 1950s, sociologist C. Wright Mills predicted the sacred would eventually vanish into the strictly private realm. These were not just observations but foundational assumptions of the modern liberal project: the belief that the "crosier" had been successfully and finally divorced from the "sword." The secularization thesis — the idea that modernity would inevitably erode the public authority of religion — became so deeply embedded in Western social science that it functioned less as a hypothesis and more as an article of faith.
That faith, it now appears, was misplaced. Across the globe, a "second marriage" of religion and state power is underway. This resurgence is not merely a revival of personal piety or congregational growth, but a strategic re-entry of religious claims into the machinery of governance. In the United States, this shift is embodied in initiatives like the Religious Liberty Commission, where the concept of "liberty" is being subtly redefined. Rather than protecting the right to private practice, the new ecclesiocracy seeks the freedom to project religious values onto the public square and the legal code.
The fragility of the secularist consensus
The secularization thesis drew its confidence from a particular reading of European history. The Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution's assault on clerical authority — all seemed to point in a single direction. By the mid-20th century, thinkers across the political spectrum treated the retreat of religion from governance as both inevitable and irreversible. The sociologist Peter Berger was among the most prominent advocates of this view before famously recanting in the late 1990s, acknowledging that the world was "as furiously religious as it ever was."
What the secularist framework failed to account for was the adaptability of religious institutions. Where earlier models assumed that modernization — urbanization, mass education, scientific literacy — would crowd out religious authority, the opposite often occurred. Religious movements learned to operate within modern media ecosystems, to adopt the language of rights and liberties, and to build political coalitions that rivaled or exceeded those of secular parties. The phenomenon is visible not only in the United States but across a wide arc of polities: from Turkey's recalibration of Kemalist secularism to India's entanglement of Hindu nationalism with state identity, to the growing political influence of evangelical movements in Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. In each case, the re-entry of religion into governance does not present itself as theocracy in the classical sense. It arrives instead through the vocabulary of democratic participation — religious communities asserting their right to shape law and policy on the same terms as any other constituency. This framing makes it difficult to oppose without appearing to argue that religious citizens should be excluded from democratic life altogether.
The rhetorical trap and its consequences
This difficulty points to the peculiar rhetorical trap at the center of the new ecclesiocratic project. When critics raise concerns about the merger of religious dogma with political authority, they are frequently accused of attempting to suppress religion itself. The accusation reframes the debate: the question is no longer whether the state should enforce religious norms, but whether secular critics are guilty of intolerance. It is a move of considerable tactical sophistication, and it has proven effective in shifting the burden of justification onto those who defend the separation of church and state.
The inversion suggests that the secularist triumph was perhaps more fragile than its proponents imagined — less a settled constitutional principle and more a temporary equilibrium sustained by specific historical conditions. As those conditions change — as trust in secular institutions erodes, as cultural anxieties sharpen, as identity politics of all kinds intensify — the space for religious authority to reassert itself widens.
What remains unclear is whether the liberal democratic order possesses the conceptual tools to absorb this challenge without either capitulating to it or overreacting against it. The 20th-century answer was to treat religion as a private matter and governance as a secular one. That settlement is now under sustained pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. The systems shaping the political future look less like the rationalist utopias of the past and more like a return to older, more volatile patterns of human organization — patterns in which the crosier and the sword were never truly separate, only resting between engagements.
With reporting from Liberties Journal.
Source · Liberties Journal
