Richard Madsen, writing at The Immanent Frame:
In form, all modern East and Southeast Asian governments are secular in the first sense of the term defined by Taylor. They are based on constitutions that do not ground the state’s legitimacy on beliefs in realities that transcend this world and do not privilege any particular kind of religious belief. They relegate religious belief to the private sphere. Even the constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees freedom of religious belief as long as it is kept private—so private that it is not expressed in any venue that is not approved and regulated by the state. East and Southeast Asian governments arrived at their present-day secular constitutions through various, often tortuous, paths throughout the course of the 20th century, but, in formal terms at least, they conform to North Atlantic models of state neutrality with respect to religion. This is an example the sociologist John Meyer and his collaborators would call global “institutional isomorphism,” a tendency of political, economic, and cultural institutions around the world to assume a uniform style of formal organization (based on Western templates).
