Church-state separation alone does not define secularism’s novelty

Evidence

Secularism as political doctrine arose in modern Euro-America. It is easy to think of it simply as requiring the separation of religious from secular institutions in government, but that is not all it is. Abstractly stated, examples of this separation can be found in medieval Christendom and in the Islamic empires—and no doubt elsewhere too. What is distinctive about “secularism” is that it presupposes new concepts of “religion,” “ethics,” and “politics,” and new imperatives associated with them. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: The load-bearing distinction: what makes secularism distinctive is not institutional separation (found elsewhere, even in medieval Christendom and Islamic empires) but the new concepts of religion, ethics, and politics it presupposes.
• XREF: Complicates the Cooper thread: if church-state separation is NOT the novel core of secularism, then the Cooper-Asad parallel must rest on these new category concepts rather than simple institutional separation.