In this book I have defined political secularism as the development of a normative account of the place of religion in politics and society and a series of disciplinary interventions that seek to secure that religion is put and kept in that place.

This definition, which offers a basis for the comparative analysis of secularism across the world, includes interlocking elements derived from a range of historical and contemporary forms of secularism. The first element is a configuration of relationships between religious and state bodies through which religious institutions are excluded from the exercise of state power. The second concerns the foundations of political authority. While secular regimes may appropriate religious language and rituals, they are basically authorised by some mode of representation of the will of the people, mediated by parties, constitutions or elections.

Examining political secularism outside the transatlantic world, and beyond the historical trajectory of Christianity, reveals three moves in the establishment of this form of governance. The first, and often least visible to political analysis, is the differentiation of the religious from the political. The second involves the separation of religion and politics as institutions as well as forms of thought and practice. The third concerns the forms of relationship once they have been differentiated and separated. Political secularism is not, therefore, the absence of religion. Instead, it is a range of quite specific forms of relationships such that religion does not contest political power.

This theory of political secularism has been used in this book to track and analyse the negotiations through the 1980s and 1990s that led South Africa from apartheid to a secular democratic dispensation through a process of constitution-making. I have found this a useful way of understanding the operations and ideals of political and religious actors and the historical contingencies of the political power of religion during this transition.

My hope is that this understanding of secularism provides a way of analysing the often complex power and authority negotiations in contemporary postcolonial government. It can also help to identify conditions for the continuation of political secularism – the capacities of contemporary states to mobilise ideological, administrative and institutional means to frame and discipline religion and to govern on secular terms.