Secularism’s public presence of religion varies across modern nation-states.

Evidence

In short, the assumption that liberal democracy ushers in a directaccess society seems to me questionable. The forms of mediation characteristic of modern society certainly differ from medieval Christian—and Islamic—ones, but this is not a simple matter of the absence of “religion” in the public life of the modern nation-state. For even in modern secular countries the place of religion varies. Thus although in France both the highly centralized state and its citizens are secular, in Britain the state is linked to the Established Church and its inhabitants are largely nonreligious, and in America the population is largely religious but the federal state is secular. “Religion” has always been publicly present in both Britain and America. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful concrete chart of three secularisms — France, Britain, America — as a framework for thinking about secularism as variegated rather than uniform.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 32
• XREF: connects to: Secularization in Belfast privatized institutions but not popular religion’s territorial marking. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2305