Daily news reports demonstrate that western conceptions of political secularism have fared poorly in many other societies. More surprising is that such conceptions and the secular states they underpin are under strain even in Europe, where until very recently they were believed to be securely entrenched

Secularisation of European states has meant that regardless of their religious affiliation, citizens enjoy a large basket of civil and political rights largely unknown in religion-centred states, past or present.

But two problems are rising. First, migration from developing countries and an intensified globalisation have thrown together in western public spaces pre-Christian faiths, Christianity, and Islam. The cumulative result is unprecedented religious diversity and rising mutual suspicion and conflict. This was dramatically highlighted by the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam shortly after the release of his controversial film about Islamic culture. His killer was a radicalised Muslim born in the Netherlands to immigrants from Morocco.

Second, despite substantial secularisation, the formal establishment of a dominant religion hinders better intercommunity relations and efforts to reduce religious discrimination. European states have continued to privilege Christianity in one form or another. Greater diversity exposes religious biases in Europe that are revealed in difficulties faced by Muslims, in particular. For example, in Britain, a third of all primary school children are educated by religious communities, yet applications for state funding by Muslim schools are frequently rejected. This is also manifest in how some western European states are dealing with the issue of headscarves (France), demands by Muslims to build mosques to properly practice their own faith (Germany, Italy, Switzerland), or to have their own burial grounds (Denmark). In coming years, as Islamophobia grips the imagination of several western societies, it is very likely that their Muslim citizens will continue to face disadvantages solely on account of membership in their religious community.

Arriving at a just and peaceful society will not be easy, not least because the dominant conception of political secularism in Europe prevents its people from seeing that many of their practices are anti-secular. How so?

Many church-state arrangements in Europe today were installed some 400 years ago after the Augsburg and Westphalian treaties required subject populations to adopt the faith of their sovereign. Political secularisation began in varying degrees in European societies only after religious homogenisation had been accomplished in each sovereign territory, motivated partly by emancipatory desires of individuals to defy the social and political power of churches. An emergent political secularism frequently took strong anti-religious overtones, although it was often focused on intra-religious domination.

Across the Atlantic, the situation was different. The United States adopted an attitude of passive respect towards all religions and was expected to neither help nor hinder any church or religion. This secularism was not anti-religious, but grew in order to prevent a different dimension of intra-religious domination, the official subordination of one sect over others.

Neither of these conceptions is suitable in conditions of deep diversity with prospects of inter-religious domination that obtain in Europe today. If European states are to end their institutional bias towards one preferred religion, they must, like the French, disestablish religion and become truly secular. But they need not understand separation and impartiality to mean non-intervention. This means that rather than stopping subsidies to their preferred religion, they should extend it to all. This would not make European states any less but only differently secular.

Europeans must reconceive their secularism as neither anti-religious nor as passively pro-religious, but instead actively and simultaneously as both. This must combat all forms of institutionalised inter- and intra-religious domination (for instance when male members of a religious community oppress their female co-religionists, or when Muslims are targeted, discriminated against or oppressed by Christians, Jews, or perhaps atheists, and vice-versa in whatever combination).

European states must adopt what, in the Indian context, I call a policy of principled distance — a flexible strategy that engages with religion or disengages from it depending on which of these helps reduce inter-religion or intra-religion domination. And they should be open to learning from non-western practices. The Indian conception of principled distance might be a good starting point.

Raveej Bhargava is director of the Centrefor the Study of Developing societies, Delhi, India