Unequally yoked: the antinomies of Church-State separation in Europe and the USA

The ongoing secularisation debate(s) rarely focus on state secularisation, seemingly because of the assumption that the state is definitionally secular and so logically not subject to secularisation. From a less compromised perspective, the secular state appears as an American late-eighteenth century invention while the present day states of Europe retain significant features inherited from the formative period of the modern state when it took a distinctively confessional form – that is, they remain still in part religious