Global religion in a post-Westphalia world

This chapter explores how de-privatization of religion raises a major dilemma to Western constitutionalism, which rests on the acceptance of a clear-cut distinction between the realm of faith and that of reason and is committed to ruling the public sphere according to the dictates of reason. On the constitutional level, the unity of the Westphalian legal regime has increasingly given way to legal pluralism and to the need to accommodate and harmonize legal norms issued from different and sometimes competing regimes. From the standpoint of secularism, as a paramount organizing principle in the Westphalia constitutional order, there seems to be an equivalent transformation from unitary secularism towards a plurality of religious ideologies in competition with one another. These are parallel and at least to some extent related trends that raise the following key question: can legal pluralism in a globalized world successfully replace Westphalian legal unity? And can concurrently value pluralism as embodied in religious diversity successfully supplant state sponsored secularism?