Cécile Laborde is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford. She is one of the leading scholars working on religion and political theory. Her celebrated monographs include Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy (Laborde Reference Laborde2008) and Liberalism’s Religion (Laborde Reference Laborde2017). They have been widely discussed in edited volumes and Symposia (e.g. Bardon and Howard Reference Bardon and Howard2020; Renzo Reference Renzo2021). Laborde studied political science in France and completed a DPhil at Oxford in 1996. She held positions at the University of Exeter, King’s College London, and UCL prior to joining Oxford in 2017. This interview was conducted on February 9, 2026.

Svenja Ahlhaus: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. It is part of the Special Issue on “Religion and Democratic Theory” that I am co-editing with Iman Al Nassre for Democratic Theory, and I am excited to talk to you about your current research.

You have recently finished a first draft of a new book on secularism, for the Cambridge Elements series. Could you say a bit more about the idea of this book?

Cécile Laborde: Thank you very much, it’s nice to speak to you too. It’s a very short book in which I try to defend the theory of “minimal secularism” more systematically. I have introduced it in my last book, Liberalism’s Religion, in Chapter 4, but it raises a whole set of issues. I’ve had quite a lot of discussions with critics when Liberalism’s Religion came out, and I try to strengthen this theory at various points. That’s a kind of a clearing-up exercise.

I also try to locate the idea of minimal secularism a bit better within the literature. On the one hand, there is a group of important scholars in various disciplines, including for example Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, or Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, who have challenged secularism, not necessarily for its content, but for its epistemic, sociological, anthropological, and historical assumptions, and particularly what kind of picture of religion it was implicitly working with. So that’s one school I engage with. On the other hand, I try to show that there is a reasonable response to that school already in the literature, which is broadly the school of liberal neutrality, including for example John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Taylor, Chris Eisgruber, Larry Sager, or Jonathan Quong. Neutral or neutralist political philosophers are not vulnerable to the critique, at least at first sight, because they don’t actually need to define religion. Because someone like Rawls just says that the state must be neutral toward all conceptions of the good. I show that this is a fine answer as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far, because to call religion a conception of the good is just very vague. It doesn’t do much work.

What I do in the rest of the book is that I look at different dimensions of religion to see how each of them engages the liberal democratic state in a different way. Instead of having just one principle of minimal secularism, I think we can disaggregate secularism into three principles. The first is in the accessible state, the second is the limited state, and the third is the inclusive state. The book basically clarifies what I mean by these three ideals, and how they are connected to the three dimensions of religion.

Svenja Ahlhaus: Why do you call your approach “minimal” secularism?

Cécile Laborde: I see minimal secularism as a model that sets out a minimal benchmark that any state would have to meet if they are to qualify as liberal democratic. But once you meet that threshold, there are a variety of permissible models of state-religion relations. I think a multiplicity of countries might meet the criteria of minimal secularism. It could apply equally to Great Britain, to India, or Belgium, or the US, or Senegal. I try to illustrate how minimal secularism can provide a transnational model for secularism, which doesn’t rely on any Western history of secularization, a Protestant view of religion, or a church-state model of separation.

I try to show that the French model of laïcité, republican laïcité, is also a permissible model of minimal secularism, and I engage with France at various points in the book. That allows me to connect my more recent work on Liberalism’s Religion to my earlier work on French laïcité. I am a bit more explicit about the fact that minimal secularism, as I understand it, is a liberal-republican model of democratic justice. France fits in, but other countries do as well. And minimal secularism allows us to explain when the secular arrangements in this or that country actually fall short of liberal democratic ideals (I think this is true, for example, of the French ban on the wearing of visible Muslim signs).

Svenja Ahlhaus: Could you say more about this “liberal-republican” account of political justice or democratic justice that you just mentioned? I had the feeling that you re-engage more with republicanism in this book than in Liberalism’s Religion, taking up ideas of your earlier book on Critical Republicanism.

Cécile Laborde: I talk about a republican interpretation of liberalism, because I’ve never thought that republicanism and liberalism were opposite schools. I think they’re very compatible. I might actually write another chapter to show that it’s one of the most persuasive interpretations of Rawlsian political liberalism—it’s a very republican liberalism. I’ve never worked with an opposition between the two schools. I tend to think of liberalism as the dominant framework of thinking about equality, individualism, the state, and so forth. But when you try to specify what it means to treat citizens as free and equal, as soon as you start filling it in, many Rawlsians agree with republicans on how you do that. So I really don’t think there’s a contradiction.

Svenja Ahlhaus: You focus more on the republican dimension in the new book, and you mention democratic contestability, non-domination, and civic standing as core ideas of republicanism. Could say more about their role for your approach to minimal secularism?

Cécile Laborde: Perhaps I can try to explain how each of the ideals of secularism—the accessible state, the limited state, and the inclusive state—implicitly relies on a more republican interpretation of liberalism. Looking more closely at the three ideals and the kind of work that republicanism does in each.

The first is accessibility. Here, I have a critique of standard liberal public reason where the only thing that state officials can invoke are so-called public reasons, but they’re very narrowly described by my liberal colleagues. They are usually simply general principles of justice. But I think that when you look at how actual societies function, it would be too restrictive to say that the only thing that state officials can appeal to are reasons of justice. We should allow a broader set of reasons. They can have to do with all kinds of reasons related to the tradition of the country, cultural coherence, traditions of citizenship, which may vary in different countries, but they provide a public language that is accessible. That is, everybody can engage with it, to a varying degree, they can disagree with it, but they can understand it. That’s what I mean when I say that public reasons only need to be accessible. It doesn’t have to be directly endorsed as a positive value. Perhaps we don’t need to go into the technicalities here. Just to answer your question: I have a broader view of public reason, because I think the liberal view is too narrow. I consider accessible reasons, and I think republicanism is more amenable to thinking of self-governing communities of citizens that have a shared public language. An example is laïcité in France as a shared language. That’s the work that republicanism does in the first ideal of minimal secularism.

The second ideal is the limited state. This is about liberty and how we think about liberty. Here, there might be a difference between liberals and republicans as currently understood in the literature. It’s often said that liberals are mostly interested in what the state does, and not the virtues and civic dispositions and education of citizens, whereas, of course, republicans have historically been interested in the latter. I do think, however, that many political liberals have written on this. Many political liberals have written on education from what I take to be a very republican perspective, so again, I don’t think the two are contradictory.

I think that it is one of the tasks of the republican state to make sure that citizens are not dominated, including within religious groups. Here I go back to the republican way of thinking about education. Education is also about providing each child with the tools of emancipation, so they can decide to emancipate from whatever religion or culture they’ve been brought up into. So non-domination is different from a direct education to autonomy. Again, it gets a bit complicated, and I’ve written about that in the past, but this is one of the reasons why I’ve been a critic of the French ban on headscarves in schools.

My position on liberty is to say that, of course, it’s a perfectly legitimate aim of secular schools to inculcate every child with a kind of toolkit to be able to live as an autonomous citizen when they grow up. But this doesn’t mean that the state should take a position on their lack of autonomy when they’re children, particularly, say, if they wear a hijab, which is the usual argument that is put forward in France. There’s a sense in which children are never autonomous anyway. They tend to follow whatever their parents want them to do, whatever their peers want them to do. I think non-domination is useful here as an alternative to wider claims about individual emancipation in the sense that we could emancipate children by forcing them to remove signs of religious belonging. That’s the republican take on liberty.

And finally: on inclusiveness. Here, I return to work I did in the early 2010s, about establishment and separation. What was lacking in some liberal writings was a sense in which a state that established a religion, even though it respected rights of religious freedom and gave each citizen accessible reasons, could still fail to respect them if it contributed to reinforcing existing relations of hierarchy or subordination in society. Again, I have a republican take on inclusion. Inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean that the state should not recognize any religious identities, although in some contexts, that might be the right way. In a French context, with a history of anti-clerical conflict, the kind of “neutral” state might be the best way to go. Although I wouldn’t use the term “neutral” here, but a state that doesn’t recognize any religious identities. In other contexts, inclusiveness may either require the positive recognition of religious minorities, like Muslims in India, or it might be compatible with the recognition of the dominant religion when it doesn’t thereby contribute to excluding minorities from citizenship. And here I’ve drawn on examples from England, but also from Senegal.

Sometimes we worry a lot about religion, and we think there’s nothing wrong with culture as a way of excluding minorities. But I argue that sometimes culture can be as exclusionary as religion. I refer to the example of crucifixes in public places in Germany, Austria or Italy—religious symbols that are no longer considered as religious, they have been culturalized. From a perspective of republican inclusion such symbols can be exclusive—even if they are seen by the majority as cultural, they can contribute to the subordination of minorities. From that point of view, I just don’t think the fact that something is called “religion” or not, is what makes a difference. That’s how republicanism comes in at different points in the book.

Svenja Ahlhaus: In the chapter where you discuss the culturalization of religion, you also mention the idea of “Christian nationalism.” How can minimal secularism help us understand and evaluate Christian nationalism, for example in its current form in the US?

Cécile Laborde: I suppose a standard view for liberal or democratic theorists, would be to say, of course Christian nationalism is going to be problematic because it’s both religious and nationalist. I try to give a more fine-grained account of where exactly Christian nationalism becomes illiberal and undemocratic.

What is quite interesting is that Christian nationalism is often not incompatible with public reason. That’s why many liberal public reason theorists might not object to Christian nationalism, insofar as it gives reasons that do not pertain to a particular faith. Because it’s often not based on faith. It’s more based on a kind of rewriting of a national culture and that’s why the combination of Christian and nationalism is so powerful.

When Christian nationalism is used to undermine basic freedoms of minorities, such as women and LGBTQ minorities, it’s clearly incompatible with the liberty-protecting ambitions of secularism. That’s pretty straightforward, it seems to me. Christian nationalists campaign on an assault on women’s rights, on abortion, on trans rights, and that would clearly be incompatible with what I call the liberty criterion.

More interesting is the third principle. Christian nationalism appeals to a cultural tradition, how can this be exclusive? How can it function as an exclusionary ideology? I think that’s really what’s most pernicious about this strand of thought. It doesn’t actually need to appeal to faith or creed, or the Bible to be exclusive. It can just appeal to conceptions of community: “this who we are.” It functions by drawing boundaries between those who belong and those who don’t. It doesn’t matter whether those who are inside believe in anything. It doesn’t matter whether those who are outside believe in anything. That’s where we see that the category of religion really doesn’t do much work. Muslims, for example, are excluded from Christian nationalism, not because they believe in Allah and the Quran, but because they’re racialized—they’re constituted as people who are not European, who are not belonging to the same civilization. It’s a much broader civilizational and cultural claim. And likewise, you can be a Christian nationalist without being a Christian yourself. That’s quite striking as well. Hence the paradox in European societies, which are increasingly secularized: Many people who identify with Christian nationalism are probably not practicing Christians themselves.

This is something that sociologists and anthropologists, scholars of religion and immigration, have studied for a long time, but I think it’s about time political theory caught up, because we tend to think of religion as a particular problem, and therefore look at other things under other registers, so typically in terms of multiculturalism. I really think we need to apply what we’ve learned from the study of religion and secularism to things like Christian nationalism.

Svenja Ahlhaus: You have worked on religion for many years, discussing its role for liberalism and republicanism, as you have just mentioned. More recently, you have started working on discrimination law (Reference Laborde, Laborde, Tebbe and Schwartzman2026 forth.; Reference Laborde2026), and on “being free and feeling free” (Reference Laborde2024). Do you see these topics as belonging to one overarching question, or as distinct projects? In other words: Do you see yourself as a fox or a hedgehog?

Cécile Laborde: I’m not sure. There was a review of my work in France by Alain Policar (Policar Reference Policar2024), who called me a hedgehog, and I wasn’t sure I agreed. But I’m animated by a set of core questions, and I just see them popping up in different ways, in different literatures. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in what would be a more republican, more democratic, more egalitarian form of liberalism and that very much comes from my dual inscription in a kind of French republican and Anglo-American liberal framework. I’m interested in what they can learn from each other, but also how their combination can help us when we run into specific issues.

Sometimes I feel I’m making sense of what I’ve done retrospectively. When I had published my two books and I presented them, a lot of people said: “Oh, now you’re a liberal, but you were a republican before. Have you changed your view?” I knew I hadn’t. I knew I was asking slightly different questions, but it took me a while to retrace my steps and remember why that mattered to me. Moving to liberalism mattered to me, because I wanted to look at a broader view of religion and the state in liberal thought, because I think, ultimately, that also informs republicanism. I follow my intuitions, and it’s only retrospectively I realized how it fitted with previous things. But this small book has been useful for me. It’s useful sometimes to pause, take stock, and see what you’ve been trying to do, even if it wasn’t obvious to you when you were doing it.