Cultural Secularization and Political Secularism as Mirror Processes. The Case of Chile

In recent decades, Chile’s religious landscape has changed considerably. From a historically mono-religious country in which the vast majority of the population declare themselves Catholic to a society where more and more people declare themselves non-religious. This paper claims that this process of progressive cultural secularization—which started even before the sexual abuse crisis experienced by the Chilean Catholic Church—goes hand in hand with the growing political secularism of its legal institutions, especially regarding family law, reproductive rights, and sexual morality in general, as if they were mirror processes. Recent presidential announcements to introduce changes in the restrictive legal status of abortion and euthanasia should be thus understood as part of a long-term trend that outweighs contingent political strategies, in which transformations at the cultural level are progressively recorded into the normative architecture of Chilean society. The paper finally discards that the recent constitutional attempt to expressly declare the Chilean state as secular could be understood as a misstep in this progression from cultural secularization to political secularism.