Laicite today still operates on an Early Modern state-power principle

Evidence

Asad advances the interesting argument that today in France the sixteenth-century political rule (that the religion of the ruler is the religion of the state) is still the operating principle, and what continues to be significant is ‘not the maintenance or interdiction of a particular religion by the state … but the installation of a single power drawn from a single source and facing a single political task: the worldly care of its population regardless of its beliefs.’ The state takes it upon itself to determine signs of religion’s presence (rather than who is and is not of the religion of the ruler), and in this way manages various populations through its activities, populations marked as ‘religious’ for one reason or another. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 371

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does the ‘single power facing a single political task’ framing extend to other secularist states, including Canada’s sharia debate?
• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of temporal distance between 16th-century tolerance grants and 21st-century secular headscarf bans is paradigm-shifting for how liberalism narrates its own history.