Issues of religion in public life seem rarely too far from the headlines across Western European liberal secular states. There have been a number of by now well-known and much debated social and political controversies over various issues. These have included the presence of religion in public places and spaces, in relation to acts like praying (in schools or near abortion clinics), or to religious signs and symbols in public institutions; or the presence in the landscape of religious buildings, for example, mosques and minarets, or in the soundscape of the call to prayer issuing from them. Issues of gender equality and equality around sexuality have also been prominent, whether in the workplace, education or perceptions of how these ideas are baked into religious doctrines. Free speech and hate speech, and the right to criticize and satirize religion, religious beliefs and religious figures have also been prominent, and at times with tragic effects (one immediately thinks of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo or beheading of Samuel Paty in France, for instance).

All these controversies provoke deeper debates about religious freedom, equality and attitudes to the place, role or even very idea of religion in contemporary society, and they cast a bright light on inevitable and inescapable tensions when it comes to the place of religion in public life. These debates and controversies point to a set of anxieties in liberal secular societies related to religion that are at once new but which are also haunted by history.