post-Reformation “religious wars” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe: The Enlightenment (1650–1800), particularly in France, opposed the dominance of the “state church.” Prior to the rise of modernity in the West, church and state had been bound together. Indeed, as we observe below, we cannot tidily separate “religion” and “politics” or the “sacred” and the “secular.” It was the Enlightenment that helped create a sacred-secular dichotomy, and secularists often lay claim to the influence