The modernity of the very concept of "religion" and its pragmatic function within political discourse worldwide, is exemplified by the delineation of boundaries between the private and the public and, hence, the definition of legitimate politics. Or the nation-state as a major institutional framework of political modernity and its imaginations of a "secular" social space, within which various modes and degrees of differentiation between politics and religion institutional varieties of secularism are possible. And of course "religion" in this narrow modern sense, can be distinguished from what could be conceived of as ‘world’ religions. And of course, like other representations of transcendence, this one, too, can be perverted and challenged by profanization, experts not only offer their services to an eagerly demanding clientele of suffering victims, but they can also convince a possible clientele of their victimization, and thus create the demand their professional services are ready to satisfy.

In fact people who have little connection to each other and live their lives in quite diverse ways might be declared victims and represented by professional advocates without a mandate. A market for the representation of victims can emerge, identity entrepreneurs compete in the public sphere, and misery is staged in the media; ultimately, those who considered themselves to be happy citizens before come to see themselves as humiliated victims. Thus professional representation not only may leave authentic suffering unnoticed, but also may construct victims where there is no suffering.

This professional advocacy like elsewhere in the world today is framed by a new field of public politics: legal institutions define the rights and entitlements of victims, norms of political correctness demarcate the range of prudence in public expression and the occasions for publicly recognized offences. In this politics of victimhood the suffering of the victims is turned into a most profane cause. The transcendence of the void, too, cannot escape the volatility which is the mark of any form of transcendence. But like the forbidden and repressed core of social relations, the constitutive transcendence has to be excluded from regular communication. For only in situations of extraordinary crisis, when the fundamentals of social order are challenged and rational procedures decay, when routines fail and disorientation spreads, we turn to these hidden transcendental sources that however latently have always been there.

As for the diverse historical trajectories of state-formation and nationbuilding in early modern Europe and its current political situation next, cultural construction of a secular space and the institutional arrangements of politics and religion within it indeed took different forms. With the rise of the nation-state came an enormous shift of what religion means. Religion produces the secular as much as the reverse, hut this interaction can only be understood in the context of the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century.

In the literature however, institutional varieties of relations between politics and religion are often reduced to legal arrangements between State and Church, so as to distinguish regimes of separation, co-operation, and of State or national Church. Thus de-differentiation of politics and religion was a major phenomenon in early modern Europe, most notably within Lutheran territories, has been stressed by Philip Gorski in The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (2000: 150).

And while 2008.World-Journal.net concurs with his criticism of the differentiation thesis as a paradigmatic core of the secularization theory, we would stress that the de-differentiation takes place within the modern condition and its conception of a "secular" social space.

Drawing on a well-established typology in sociological neo-institutionalism, varieties of political modernity or polity models may be distinguished by cross-tabulating two institutional dimensions: (a) the degree to which the modern project of rationalization is carried by a centralized state; and (b) the degree to which the individual has substituted former feudal units as an autonomous actor. (Jepperson, 2002 and ). And four ideal types of modern polities have been distinguished here: statist/republican, liberal, state corporatist, and social corporatist.

In addition, these models are said to display elective affinities to different constructions of national identity, which can be symbolized in more universalistic or more particularistic codes. Each polity model provides a distinctive institutional environment for public policies, modes of citizenship, patterns of formal organization, and social protest movements. Furthermore, each model contains specific implications for the relations between politics and religion; for instance, the stronger the degree of state centralization, the more pronounced are the potential cleavages between political and religious authorities.

In liberal polities, no corporative units but only individuals are recognized as legitimate actors in the public sphere. However, the liberal polity refrains from incorporating individual actors into a centralized project of rationalization, and only provides the legal guarantees and political conditions for the individual's rational pursuit of interest in civil society. This implies recognition of a pluralism of individual religious orientations in the public sphere, while privileging an associational and voluntary mode of religious organization. Due to the weak degree of "stateness," conflicts between state and ecclesiastical authorities display only low profiles. Public religious policy is regarded less as a state affair, and more as a decentralized process of negotiations in civil society.

In spite of the establishment of the Anglican Church since the 1534 Act of Supremacy under Henry VIII, institutional arrangements of religion and politics have been oriented at the liberal polity model in Britain. In a tradition of legal exemptions for individuals belonging to religious minorities, which starts with the Toleration Act (1689) and continues until the Religious Exemption Act (1976), exempting Sikhs from having to wear motorcycle crash helmets, Britain, like other Anglo-Saxon countries, has seen the development of relatively pluralistic modes of organizational incorporation. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the privileges granted to the Church of England were successively expanded to other religious communities (1829 to Catholics, 1858 to Jews) without ever being anchored constitutionally in individual rights to freedom of religion. As a corollary to the establishment of the Church of England, Anglicanism was an important symbolic element in the construction of collective identity and of nation-building in Britain. Yet, with the inclusion of other religious communities, this element was continuously transformed so as to extend the symbolic boundaries of the British nation and to integrate Christianity more generally. This is reflected in the dominance of the second variant of the secularization narrative; in metropolitan Britain, Christianity was propagated as the foundation of modern civilization. At the same time, the discourses of the British Government in the colonies drew upon the first variant of the secularization narrative by criticizing social practices (e.g. Widow-burning) as "religious" and, hence, pre-modern.

In comparison with the British case, the French development of institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity and religion has taken a rather different course. The historical path of relations between religion and politics followed the institutional characteristics of a statist or republican polity model. Here, the cultural program of modernity is institutionalized in a central state, while individuals are incorporated into the collective project of rationalization without taking into account their respective position in civil society. The public sphere is regarded as homogeneous and as being composed of formally equal individuals, whereas the representation of particularistic identities, especially those that are categorized as "religious," are excluded and restricted to the private sphere. Conflict characterizes the relations between the state and ecclesiastical authorities, and public religious policies are aimed at controlling the symbolic boundaries of the state and on projecting relatively homogeneous national identities in various social fields, notably in the education system. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, the first variant of the secularization narrative dominated the political discourse in France, both on the part of the Catholic monarchists' reaction and on the part of the Republican laïcists, the two parties of what has been described as the "guerre des deux Frances.

In both cases, modernity was understood as a fundamental break with the religious past as exemplified by the French Revolution, evaluated either as threat or as promise. The impact of the secularization narrative on the formation of political order and on the construction of collective identity was particularly strong at the end of the nineteenth century. At the level of dominant discourse we may think of writers such as Ernest Renan, Jules Ferry, Charles Renouvrier and, not least, Emile Durkheim, who exhibit a similar combination of nationalist and secularist elements, often couched in orientalist terms. At the level of political institutions, the adoption of state secularism in the Third Republic, with the foundation of non-confessional state schools in 1882 and the constitutional separation of State and Church in 1905, was clearly legitimated by the cultural scheme of the secularization narrative in its first variant. Until today, the political conflict between the Republic and the Roman Catholic Church in the nineteenth century has left its imprint on the political vocabulary and public institutions of the French Republic, most notably by establishing the concept of laïcité.

In the state corporatist polity model, which is characteristic of the bi-confessional German-speaking region, individuals are incorporated into centralized projects of rationalization via corporative intermediate units. The situation of bi-confessionality was highly important both with respect to state-formation and the construction of collective identities. Religion(s) used to be regarded as a component of the public sphere, and religious organizations are even invested with public or state functions. It is in their capacity of being members of a corporative religious organization that individuals are perceived as religious actors. Hence, the state's public policy of religion is mainly concerned with regulating the public functions of corporative religious communities, even after formal separation of State and Church. In the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, the second variant of the secularization narrative, which was already drawn upon by the carrier groups of the German Reich founded in 1871, i.e. by Protestant Prussian elites propagating a nationalized and secularized form of Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) against both French secularism and, particularly in the Kulturkampf, against German Catholicism, was particularly informative.

After the Second World War, that narrative was re-formulated so as to conceive of (Christian) religion in general as factor of social or national integration. The state-corporative model is reflected by institutional arrangements of close cooperation between the State and the two Churches as set forth in the Weimarer Reichsverfassung and adopted in the Grundgesetz of the Federal Republic. The legal dimension of this model is epitomized by the complex set of constitutional, legislative and contractual regulation that constitute the so-called Staatskirchenrecht within which rules of a selective co-operation between the religiously "neutral" State and the Churches are laid out and the conditions for granting religious communities the status of "corporations of public law are specified. Its political dimension is the continuing strong influence of the two Christian Churches in the public sphere, notably in the fields of social welfare and education, but also with respect to public policies vis-à-vis religious minorities.

Contrary to conventional theories of secularization, different varieties of secularism emerged within European modernity that are characterized by different patterns and degrees of differentiation between "politics" and "religion." These patterns continue to affect struggles over the legitimate place of religion within the public sphere today.

For example an  analysis of the incorporation of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe shows that the way in which nation-states respond to new forms of religious diversity is, on the one hand, shaped by the institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity and religion characteristic of the historical trajectories of modern nation-states and their specific polity model. (See "Weltgesellschaft, Menschenrechte und die Transformation des Nationalstaats" by Matthias Konig  In: Zeitschrift for Soziologie, 34, 2005)

On the other hand, in spite of such path-dependencies, it also points to convergent trends, which correspond to the development of cognitive and normative expectancy structures at the transnational level and amount to a decoupling of political organization and national identity. Hand in hand with the emergence of multicultural modes of incorporation, we witness new struggles for public recognition, which are characterized by the inclusion of religion as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere and by successive symbolic boundary-shifts between the "religious" and the "secular." Thus various modes and degrees of differentiation between politics and religion institutional varieties of secularism are possible. And its pragmatic function within the modern political discourse happens there, where the nation-state imagines its "secular" social space through various modes and degrees of differentiation between politics and religion.

Thus also the main argument in Jürgen Habermas Dialektik der Säkularisierung (Juni 2005) a return of religious languages into the public sphere of rational discourse and, hence, a relativization of secular or secularist arguments, is misleading on several accounts. First of all, religion had never been entirely privatized within the framework of the classical nation-state. Multiple patterns of differentiation and even de-differentiation between politics and religion were possible within the nation-state. Moreover, the "secular" sphere was itself invested with charismatic or sacred qualities in the emergence of political modernity. Conventional theories of secularization have ignored these aspects to the degree that they did not problematize the cultural constitution of the nation-state as an institutional framework for processes of functional differentiation. Furthermore, contemporary transformations in the relation between politics and religion, epitomized by struggles over the recognition of religious identities, are far from constituting an exit from the secular and modern condition; rather, they indicate a shift of charisma from the nation-state to human rights, as a result of which new particularistic identities, including religious ones, are sanctioned as legitimate expressions of the universal. Far from challenging the major premises of political modernity, claims to the recognition of religious identities contribute, in other words and perhaps paradoxically, to a disenchantment with the classical instrument of disenchantment: the modern nation-state.

For one thing, the biological differentiation of the human being takes place in shortened periods of time. Measured against the five billion years of the Earth's crust, and the one billion years of organic life, the roughly ten million years of ape-like human beings is a short span of time. And the two million years for which we for which we have evidence of the existence of man-made tools appears against this as even more negligible.

Next, compared to the two million years of demonstrable human history, the products of an independent and differentiated art in the last 30,000 years have, in retrospect, occurred in a comparatively short time. From the perspective of cultural history, the time spans keep getting shorter: the introduction of agriculture and husbandry 12,000 years ago, and finally the unfolding of high culture roughly 6000 years ago, again measured against prehistory, refer to ever shorter periods of time in which the new appears at an accelerated rate. Even if this appearance of the new in the world of culture has by now become a durable precondition of our own life, measured against the whole of human cultural history it is a matter of progressively shorter spans of time in which arise ever greater aggregations of organizational accomplishments.

Finally, we can see another exponential time-curve if we focus on the roughly 6000 years of high culture. What we have come to know as post-Christian, technological-industrial, specifically historical-temporal acceleration has only taken place for about the last 200 years. Since then our life-world has been technologically and industrially restructured so that the question of further acceleration has become the question of our future as such.

So it may well be that we have to concentrate our energies more on stabilizers and the natural preconditions of our worldly existence. Then it could turn out that previous acceleration was only a transitional phase, after which the shares of duration and survival versus change and transformation have to be reordered. For now, the important thing is to know who accelerates or decelerates whom or what, when, and where.

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