Entangled Multiple Modernities and the Variety of Secular States

In this chapter I present the framework of multiple modernities, as developed by Eisenstadt, as a heuristic approach to appreciate the diversity of communities of shared meaning that large populations have developed about the influence should religions exercise or not in their societies and how political authority ought to manage that. I argue that a great analytical and political challenge is to resist the view that the idioms developed within each of the inter-subjective communities of Sinitic, Indic, Buddhist, and Indo-Malay modernities determine the choices societies have made about regimes of relations between religious and political authorities. I illustrate this point by drawing attention to the wide diversity of approaches to the ideal-types of secular states, states with a religious establishment, and states with multiple religious establishment, adopted within each of the four main approaches to modernity seen in Asia since the end of the colonial era

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