Relations between religions and the State are well known to take multiple forms throughout the world. Some countries know an officially watertight separation between the two; others give a primary place to a given religion in the social order, to the exclusion of all others; others still have a State religion or established churches while at the same time guaranteeing freedom of conscience as well as forbidding any faith-based discrimination. Between the extreme of State atheism and the other extreme of a system explicitly based on the precepts of a given religion, the range of relations between Religion and the State is very wide. The interdisciplinary bilingual (French, English) conference "Religion and State in the Public Sphere" intends to describe and to analyse this diversity.
Former colleague Niels De Nutte will present the results of his research at CAVA, his paper “Belgium favoring organized unbelief. Secular humanism, the subsidized church of Nones?”. It explores the background against which the struggle for equal rights for secular humanism took place.
The full programme of the conference can be found here.