India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

by J. Sai Deepak

Interestingly, while the Enlightenment is celebrated for ushering in the Age of Reason through its supposed challenge to Christian dogma, it is the Enlightenment whose emphasis on Christianity’s Cartesian dualistic approach to humans and nature that advanced the idea of superiority of the ‘rational human mind’ over ‘non-rational nature’. This paved the way for the conquest of nature by the ‘superior’

Education was expressly employed to ‘shape the political, social, cultural, and economic direction of the colonies’25 and was designed to reinforce and reproduce racist structures.

Dr. Jakob De Roover’s book Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism

What is to be discerned from this history is that the distinction between the secular and the spiritual was drawn from within the Christian framework and not outside of it.

In other words, the apparatus of the State was a Christian necessity to enforce Christian morality through the instrumentality of the law, with the Church and the State working together to fulfill their respective Biblically ordained Christian obligations.

What needs to be appreciated is that the Peace of Westphalia did not result in the creation of ‘secular’ sovereign States as we understand them today, that is, States without an official religion. On the contrary, the war itself was fought for the right to have an official State religion, more specifically, to choose a State denomination within the Christian religion without having to dance to the writ of the Roman Catholic Church;