Those of us who thought that we could safely use the term “secular” to describe a particular type of political regime will be surprised to learn in reading Ahmet Kuru's outstanding book, Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion, that purportedly secular states pursue very different policies toward religion. Kuru analyzes public policy toward religion in three states (France, Turkey, and the United States). What he discovers is that despite their apparently common secular orientation, there is great policy divergence among them. For example, France and Turkey have an official ban on students' religious symbols in public schools and the United States does not, while the United States and France have no religious instruction in the schools while Turkey does. Research in religion and politics has done a stellar job demonstrating the complexity of state regulation of religion, and as a result we know that states accommodate religion in myriad ways. Kuru's work, however, is one of the first to systematically demonstrate the corresponding point that not all secularisms are alike.

To explain the discrepancy among these states, Kuru hypothesizes that the presence of a dominant ideology (passive or assertive secularism) shapes public policy on religious-political questions. Assertively, secular states are those that “require the state to play an assertive role to exclude religion from the public square,” while passive secularism “mainly prioritizes state neutrality” [toward religion] (11). Kuru contends that this ideology is a result of historical conditions, most notably the presence or absence of an ancien régime, when states replaced their old state-religion regimes with newer more secular ones. The initial formation of hostile or neutral relations between religious and political institutions created a path dependent process that influenced state policies for generations. The difference in his three cases is that France and Turkey were born in church-state conflict, which helps to explain the presence of aggressively secular norms in those countries and the persistence of political conflict around such issues as the wearing of the hijāb in state-run schools or other public institutions. The United States, on the other hand, had far less institutional conflict between church and state at its founding, and passive secularism and greater tolerance for public religiosity has become the rule.

The book succeeds on many levels. It expertly details the historical processes by which these states have come to their particular “secular” policies, examines the struggles between aggressive and passive secularists at different moments in each country's history, and lays out a structure to understand the trajectory of religious-political relations in these countries in the years ahead. While there are a growing number of high-quality comparative studies of religion and politics, this book is also unique in its selection of case studies. Kuru's book is one of the few that compares economically diverse states and countries that are predominantly Christian and Islamic. The book also achieves the basic, but important, task of challenging any simplistic assumptions about what constitutes a secular state. Finally, the book is theoretically rich and offers a framework to understand how religious politics play themselves out in myriad secular states. In doing so, Secularism and State policies Toward Religion is a helpful addition to a growing and diverse literature on secularism in political science, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies.

The book also offers an interesting typology as a way to categorize the relations between religious and political institutions in states. Based on two criteria (the institutional separation between religion and politics and a constitutional guarantee of neutrality toward religions), Kuru identifies four possible regime types: religious states, states with an established religion, secular states, and anti-religious states. Kuru's typology is based on an institutional definition of secularism, but as Charles Taylor among others has noted, this is but one form of secularism. Another way to measure secularism is to analyze the erosion of belief at the popular level and the gradual privatization of religion, both of which have important social and political implications. In Appendix A, Kuru categorizes 197 countries of the world into one of the four types, but it leads to some rather curious results. For example, Nigeria, Kosovo, and Taiwan are similarly defined as secular, which is reasonable given his definition, but religion assumes a vastly divergent social and political role in the three countries. Nigeria might well be secular, in short, but the increased violence between Christians and Muslims, the formation of political parties along religious lines, and the growth of both faiths suggests that the country is anything but “secular.” Similarly, states with an officially established religion (e.g., Norway) are oftentimes less “religious” in terms of public policy than states that are secular (e.g., Lebanon).

These are the kinds of questions that naturally arise in a book like this that tries to establish distinctive patterns among states. Minor quibbles aside; I applaud Kuru for the work and highly recommend it to the readers of this journal.