The modern nation-state demands its subjects to be disciplined and educated in a national curriculum. That curriculum contains the basic elements of modern science, required for educating an adequate workforce, but also basic elements of national culture, such as language and history. Religion can be regarded as part of national culture, but in secularist states students are taught to reject that part of culture, see it as a historical aberration and become atheist. I define here secularism as a project to remove religion from public life and,
if possible even from public consciousness, that can be in Communist societies, such as China. It bears family resemblance with secularist projects in non-Communist societies,
such as France, but it is much more extreme. Secularism as an ideology offers a teleology of religious decline and can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is important to examine the role of intellectuals in furthering this understanding of history but also their relation to sources of power: state apparatuses and social movements.
Secularism is a forceful ideology when carried by political movements that capture both the imagination and the means to mobilize social energies. At the same time it is important to attend to the utopian and,
indeed, religious elements in secularist projects in order to understand why many of these movements seem to tap into traditional and modern sources of witchcraft,
millenarianism, and charisma. Moreover, we need to consider the secular and the religious as mutually constitutive, so that also what is religious is shaped by secularism.
