Over the past two decades, constitutional secularism has been under increasing pressure across Europe, warranting intense scrutiny and criticism. This book determines the normative potential and practical meaning of constitutional secularism, questioning its normative finality and capturing the origins of its normative weakness to better understand the responses triggering criticism. To do so, it first analyzes the principle in three jurisdictions with a constitutional commitment to it: France, Italy, and Türkiye. It thereafter looks at three historically contested areas indicative of its limits—education, religious symbols in the public sphere, and state funding of religion—through three levels of inquiry: conceptualization, legislative, and adjudicative.
To explain how its normative content changes through time, the book introduces the term normative flexing: a process of bending and shifting the principle's normative content without changing the constitutional framework under which it operates. Finally, to classify how courts adjudicate these cases, it introduces the dichotomy of the thinning and thickening of secularism, demonstrating how these processes drive a broader trajectory of reversed secularization, which reshapes the landscape of state-religion relationships and the boundaries of mutual power.
This book will be of interest to students and academics working in law and religion, and comparative constitutional law.