Is religion politics or is politics religion?

What this means is either taking seriously an ideology's claim to be "religious" in nature (nationalism is the best example of an explicit claim) or treating passionately held, seemingly transcendent beliefs as implicitly religious (socialism-the God that failed). Burleigh might want to recognize, though, that the reigning "political religion" in America and Europe is led by precisely that self-congratulatory group of intellectuals whose faith-based confidence in "democracy" and "free enterprise" has led the US and the UK into a disastrous, endless war to which the only solution is to construct a secularized, liberal nation in which religious passions are held in check by a decided policy of separating mosque and state-by force, if necessary.