There are three requirements for religious–state relationships to be secular. The first is a clear, well-understood and administratively mobilised differentiation between the religious and the political. The second is a separation of ‘church and state’, as it is referred to in Christian terms. More inclusively, this refers to a separation of religious and political institutions. Separation immediately implies their relationship. The third requirement is exclusion from contestation for political power. Political secularism does not, therefore, denote an absence of religious institutions in public life. Instead, it is best understood as a form of unequal relationship between religion and politics in the political public and the institutions of the state.

All three elements of secular institutional relations were decisively instituted during the period of state formation in South Africa in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, at least with respect to ‘world religions’, and secular institutional relations were entrenched in South Africa's postapartheid Constitution. Religious institutions became subordinated to political authority during the negotiations through the co-optive mechanisms of human rights and constitutionalism.

NEGOTIATING THE TRANSITION

Political negotiations led South Africa out of apartheid and into a regime that, for the first time in the nation's history, was not based on race. The negotiations were conducted in three phases. In the first, the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) engaged in ‘talks about talks’ in which they felt their way towards a negotiated settlement of the increasingly intractable conflict. During the second phase the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) and then the Multiparty Negotiation Process (MPNP) secured a framework for a settlement, the form of a future government and an interim constitution. The democratic elections of 1994 and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president ushered in the last phase of negotiations, one in which the final Constitution was written by a democratic Parliament acting as a Constitutional Assembly (CA). This final democratic Constitution came into effect in 1996.