In this article, the authors attempt to show what it means to think about democracy and education "within" society, culture, and religion. They use the term religion to discuss both "religion" as a social phenomena and "religiosity" as a spiritual, aesthetic individual commitment to the transcendent, eternal, and divine. They focus on what has been most left out, the relation between democracy and religion and education and religion. They do this in several ways. They first offer a brief reminder of the centrality of religion in classical social theory, which continues to pattern academic thinking in sociology and education, however ambivalent the classical, modern view was about the future of the secular-sacred relation. Then, they examine contemporary historical research to argue for the ongoing, integral, internal relation between politics and religion, beyond and on the other side of the stereotypical view that the "return to religion" is mostly about "fundamentalism." After setting out the case for "taking religion seriously," they provide an extended empirical case study of the complex interweaving of politics and religion in Israeli society. To some extent, in focusing on an Israeli case study for the contemporary "postsecular" emergent society, the authors follow leading historians such Dan Diner (2003) and David Myers (2003) who accentuated modern Jewish history as a paradigm for modern European history to its so-called discontents. (Contains 1 note.)