Church and State, Church in State

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to briefly analyse the three existing models regulating the limits and the areas of intersectionality between the spiritual and the lay power, recognisable and identifiable in the countries of the European Community, that made possible the noticeable onslaught of secularisation in (post-)modernity. The first section will then be supplemented with a sociologically-informed analysis of the increasing desacralisation of our world, employing as a starting point Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, foreboding the perils of loss of faith as early as the nineteenth century.