As we enter Interfaith Week, Tariq Modood and Thomas Sealy share their analysis of religious diversity around the world.
Religious diversity is a key feature of countries across the world today, but it also presents governments with very real challenges. Controversies around free speech, religious symbols in public institutions, social values and morals, minority rights, racism, nationalism, the rise of populism, and the role of faith leaders as critical voices are just a few of the issues that have given rise to fierce social, political, and scholarly debate. So how do states include and accommodate religious diversity, and should this change? What are the key difficulties facing states when it comes to governing religious diversity? This is the context of our book, The New Governance of Religious Diversity.
The book is oriented by two questions: an empirical one of how states govern religious diversity, and a normative one of how, in our view, religious diversity should be governed. Indeed, our approach is oriented by a position that sees the relationship between the empirical and normative as one of close entwinement.
Eschewing Euro-Americancentric perspectives that define secularism in terms of religious freedom in general, or treat a particular country as a paradigm (typically the USA or France), we argue there are multiple secularisms, present across different global contexts.
We apply it to two regions, comprising: four countries in Western Europe (Belgium, Britain, France and Germany) and three countries in South and South East Asia (India, Indonesia, Malaysia). Our strategy is to approach each region, indeed country, contextually and to argue that the two regions have to be respected as embodying two different modes of governance. We do not rank one above the other or make one approximate the other, though we do think each can learn something from the other. We approach that kind of learning via a multicultural normative evaluation. This leads us to the view that moderate secularism becomes multicultural by being open to a certain multicultural, inclusive ‘thickening’, while pluralistic nationalism becomes multicultural through an inclusive ‘thinning’. Our analytical framework is not designed to merely capture specific countries or enable comparative empirical understanding. It also constitutes the basis for a normative engagement with modes of secularism. Our empirical-normative interdisciplinarity, what may be called normative sociology or normative social science, is based on the Bristol school of multiculturalism. And so, we ask ourselves what the situation would be if secularism were to be multicultural.
States do and must necessarily make choices, pass legislation, and develop policies to govern religious diversity and the social and political issues that follow. According to some sources, government restrictions on religion have been rising globally (Pew Research Center, 2022). While some of this trend has been presented in our study, we have also shown that different states, especially in Europe, engage with religion in new, accommodating styles. There are several notable and sometimes divergent factors that lie behind these findings, including matters of religious freedoms, equalities, and nationalisms.
Despite increased attention to a variety of global contexts in which the issue of political secularism is embedded, a sustained attempt at developing a comparative framework for these multiple political secularisms has not yet been made – let alone one that could account for different patterns of similarity, difference, and shifts over time. It offers an original theoretical framework for both comparatively analysing and evaluating, by reference to a political theory of multiculturalism, how religious diversity is governed within different modes of political secularism.
We start with a minimal definition of political secularism as the separation of political and religious authority and the subordination of the latter to the former. But above these, a whole variety of arrangements and dynamics might be present. One arrangement is institutional autonomy. The minimal definition itself is that of a one-way autonomy, in which the superiority of the state is asserted. But this could also be a two-way or mutual autonomy, in which state–religion connections are a significant feature.
Another important dimension is that of freedom of religion, where different emphases are to be found; a key difference being between freedom of conscience or freedom of belief on the one hand and, on the other hand, freedom to manifest or practice, and freedom to live according to one’s religious convictions. Another kind of distinction is the freedom of different religious groups to assert their rules versus the freedom of individuals to want freedom from such authority. A further significant dimension is that of national identity and how states relate to their citizens; to what extent is national identity conceived of in terms of one religion, for example, or in secular or plural terms?
These are the dynamics and questions that we have addressed throughout this book. In treating the governance of religious diversity in this manner, we are guided by an approach that is deeply contextual. Our minimal definition and our attention to the variety of and within these sets of dynamics have allowed us to analytically approach how political secularism operates in different contexts, including non-liberal contexts where the place of religion and its importance are very different, and where different historical, social, and political cultures mean that the relationship between religion and politics take very different forms.
Our analytical framework is not designed to merely capture specific countries or enable comparative empirical understanding. It also constitutes the basis for a normative engagement with modes of secularism. We do not rank the two regional modes of governance one above the other or make one approximate the other, though we do think each can learn something from the other. We approach that kind of learning via a multicultural normative evaluation. This leads us to the view that moderate secularism becomes multicultural by being open to a certain multicultural, inclusive ‘thickening’, while pluralistic nationalism becomes multicultural through an inclusive ‘thinning’. ‘Thickening’ here means extending the recognition and accommodation of religion, historically confined in Western Europe, to one or more Christian churches, to the new post-immigration religious formations, such as Muslims and Hindus, and revising national identity accordingly. While ‘thinning’ means not seeing citizens and social relationships as always mediated by a religious group identity and of defending individual freedom in relationship to religious authority.
Currently, both regions that are home to these two modes are threatened by majoritarian populist forces – threatened, that is, in their historical mode and, a fortiori, in the multiculturalising of that historical mode. This has been going on for longer in South and Southeast Asia than in Western Europe, and has become more intense and violent there. If the situation persists, multiculturalism will be a less likely prospect, or will be weakened. So, paradoxically, in each region the first step, albeit a minimal step, is to protect the historical mode against majoritarian populist nationalism. This falls short of our goal of achieving multiculturalism, but sometimes a conservative yet necessary step like this may be all that is possible.
Whatever optimism one can muster here about various parts of the world, we hope we have at least shown that rethinking secularism has to recognise that there is no single model of it (such as the idealised church–state separation) but that there are multiple secularisms. This rethinking must proceed contextually, yet without losing the aspiration to develop a comparative analytical framework, which should not be merely about categorisations or taxonomies but should be the intellectual framework in which citizens can evaluate the nature of their polities and the possibilities of reform in relation to the accommodation of diversity.
The New Governance of Religious Diversity is now available at Polity books. Use the code MOS30 for a 30% discount.
Photo by Catalin Pop
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Religion and Global Society nor the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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