Routledge Handbook on the Governance of Religious Diversity

Anna Triandafyllidou, Tina Magazzini, Anna Triandafyllidou, Tina Magazzini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367538262
• eBook ISBN: 9781000260410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically reviews state-religion models and the ways in which different countries manage religious diversity, illuminating different responses to the challenges encountered in accommodating both majorities and minorities. The country cases encompass eight world regions and 23 countries, offering a wealth of research material suitable to support comparative research. Each case is analysed in depth looking at historical trends, current practices, policies, legal norms and institutions.

By looking into state-religion relations and governance of religious diversity in regions beyond Europe, we gain insights into predominantly Muslim countries (Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia), countries with pronounced historical religious diversity (India and Lebanon) and into a predominantly migrant pluralist nation (Australia). These insights can provide a basis for re-thinking European models and learning from experiences of governing religious diversity in other socio-economic and geopolitical contexts. Key analytical and comparative reflections inform the introduction and concluding chapters.

This volume offers a research and study companion to better understand the connection between state-religion relations and the governance of religious diversity in order to inform both policy and research efforts in accommodating religious diversity. Given its accessible language and further readings provided in each chapter, the volume is ideally suited for undergraduate and graduate students. It will also be a valuable resource for researchers working in the wider field of ethnic, migration, religion and citizenship studies.

1

The governance of religious diversity

Challenges and responses

Anna Triandafyllidou and Tina Magazzini

Introduction

According to the Pew Research Centre 2015s The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, the role of religion in contemporary societies is all but declining, with global trends pointing at a shrinking percentage of atheists and agnostics. Such predictions are largely based on demographic trends, which see religious families having a higher fertility rate than non-religious ones.¹ In particular, while over the next decades Christians (currently representing almost one-third of the global population) are expected to remain the largest religious group – growing 35 per cent, about the same rate as the global population overall – Muslim communities are projected to grow faster than any other major religion.

Against this backdrop, this Handbook responds to the need for critically investigating how religion and religious diversity is governed today in different world regions, looking at historical trends, current practices, norms, and institutions, and assessing the different ways in which religious minorities and majorities can have their needs and requests satisfied while safeguarding social cohesion.²

Europe represents an exception compared to much of the world, including other parts of the ‘West’ such as the US, since European societies have undergone a long process of secularisation, reflected in the fact that participation in religious activities, including private prayer, has become a minority pursuit, particularly in Western Europe (Berger, 1999; Berger et al., 2008). While Europe is not the only part of the world to have undergone secularisation, it is the only place where this has not resulted from state ideology or coercion but from social and economic change, education, political argument, and the working of liberal democracy (Casanova, 1994). But both religion and religious intolerance are returning to European society and politics through multiple channels. These channels include the dynamics of international migration and the ‘new’ religions – notably Islam, even though there is a long pedigree of that faith and its adherents in Europe going back many centuries – that accompany such migration. They are also returning through the fervent religious practice of native minorities (for example, Evangelists and other Protestant groups), and the social and political antipathies this has generated among more secularly inclined social majorities. Last but not least, religion is returning to Europe through international relations. Religion in the early twenty-first century has become an important dimension structuring global governance through perceived hierarchies of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘modern’, ‘advanced’, and ‘backward’ cultures. Islam has been largely stigmatised in the public arena by the West, with a warped reading that provides part of the rationale for terrorist violence perpetrated a decade ago by Al Qaeda and its related affiliates. Today the stigmatisation of Islam is being violently exploited by insurgent extremist Islamist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the contrast and confrontation between an essentialised ‘West’ and even more essentialised ‘Islam’ has acquired a global dimension. Symbolically, politically, and militarily this confrontation has continued to grow, gaining strength after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and particularly after 9/11. In the absence of Communism and the Soviet threat, the West has found in Islam and Muslims a contemporary ‘Other’ against which to affirm the superiority of its cultural and political model (Triandafyllidou, 2001, 2017). At the same time, disenchanted or marginalised or both youth both within Europe and in Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries have found in extremist interpretations of religion and religiously contextualised terrorist violence a way to express their frustration, disenfranchisement, and struggle for change.

The international confrontation between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ also finds local expression in Europe. Local integration challenges are interpreted within the global context, with Muslims being stigmatised as ‘alien’ and ‘unfit’ for European liberal democracies (Lindekilde et al., 2009; Mouritsen & Olsen, 2013; Triandafyllidou & Kouki, 2013). Some scholars have called this the rise of ‘liberal intolerance’ (Lindekilde, 2014) or the ‘end of tolerance’ (Hervick, 2012). In some ways Western European polities have developed forms of moderate secularism – supporting organised religion without an historic national identity controlling or being subordinated by it – which have fostered social cohesion, democracy, and freedom of religion. Yet this has historically been achieved in the context of the presence of a single religion, Christianity. The growing public salience of religion and of religiously inspired radicalisation and violence, and the related ‘failure of integration’, raise questions about whether models of moderate secularism can further adapt to multi-religious diversity, and what form that adaptation should take.

This Handbook covers different countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South and Southeast Asia, and Australia to enquire in the historical trends, policies, and practices in these regions and compare with each other and with European approaches. The book thus seeks to highlight the rich experiences outside Europe in places where religion is closely related to politics and occupies an important position in public life.

Beyond secularism or adopting multiple secularisms?

This Handbook offers a sociological reflection on what can be viable forms of governing religion and religious diversity in a large variety of countries and world regions. This country-specific and comparative (in the last chapter) discussion of how different countries seek to govern religion and accommodate religious diversity feeds into an analytical reflection on what is the normative basis for state-religion relations (see also Modood & Sealy, 2019, GREASE concept paper 1.1). The case studies provided in this Handbook lend themselves to an analytical discussion that is also iterative with a view of identifying appropriate versions or models of secularism that can function in a variety of contexts (Modood & Thompson, 2018).

The analytical and normative debate on how to govern religion and religious diversity in Europe has been dominated by the notion of political secularism. The core idea of political secularism is the idea of political autonomy, namely, that politics or the state has a raison d’être of its own and should not be subordinated to religious authority, religious purposes, or religious reasons. This is a one-way type of autonomy. Secularism may also involve a two-way autonomy, where there is some government control of religion, some interference in religion, some support for religion, and some cooperation with (selected) religious organisations and religious purposes. Such state control and support, though, must not compromise the autonomy of politics. In other words, it must be largely justifiable in political terms, not just religious reasons, and it must not restrict (but may support) political authority and state action (Modood, 2012).

Political secularism is not necessarily democratic (see also Bader, 2007). In the West it has largely been conjoined with liberal democracy (but not necessarily, as the USSR illustrates), and it has been linked to a two-way mutual autonomy written into relevant constitutional arrangements so that both state and religion enjoy their independence. This mutual autonomy is what Alfred Stepan (2000) calls ‘twin tolerations’. Mutual autonomy – but not strict separation – has historically emerged as the liberal democratic version of secularism and is the one that is most widespread today. For such secularists, religious freedom is one of the most essential and cherished political values. It must be noted though that in Muslim majority countries such as Turkey, Algeria, or Egypt secularism often has an anti-democratic, anti-popular character, but may be cast as more accommodating of minorities than alternatives in order to promote support for secularism.

Taylor (2010, also 2014 discussed by Bilgrami, 2014) has suggested that secularism is, at its core, really about ‘managing diversity’. While the importance of secularism for managing religious diversity should not be under-appreciated, it should be noted that even if there was no religious diversity in a country or in the world, if only one religion was present, there would still be a question about the relationship between religion and politics, and ‘political autonomy’ would still be a suitable answer. Moreover, secularism is not an answer to questions about any kind of diversity; it arises specifically in relation to the power and authority of religion, and the challenge it may pose to political rule or to, for instance, equality among citizens (Bilgrami, 2014).

Indeed, one can go further and say that secularism and religion are correlative concepts. If there was no religion in the world, not merely that it had passed away, but if it had never existed in the first place, so that there was no concept of religion, then secularism would have no reference point and there would be no concept of political secularism. In that sense, secularism is a secondary concept, dependent on the concept of religion. However, once there is a concept of secularism – with advocates, promoters, or indeed critiques – then it engages into a dialectical relationship with religion. In other words, secularism also intellectually and politically redefines religion to suit secularist values and purposes (Asad, 2003). What we regard today as religion (an ‘inner life’, a ‘belief’, a private matter) in secularist countries is a much more socially restricted set of activities, relationships, and forms of authority than was the case before secularism’s widespread adoption, or than what prevails in non-secularist countries today.

The political secularism adopted in the majority of European countries is a moderate one (Modood, 2010, 2019) which allows for privileged state-religion relations in line with the history and contemporary experience of each of these countries. Thus, for instance, in Germany, the Catholic and Protestant Churches are constitutionally recognised corporations, on whose behalf the federal government collects voluntary taxes and grants large amounts of additional public money. In Belgium, a number of religions have constitutional entitlements and a national Council of Religions enjoys the support of the monarch. Norway, Denmark, and England each have an ‘established’ Church; Sweden had one until 2000, and Finland has two (Stepan, 2011; cf. Koenig, 2009). The UK also has two state recognised national churches, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, but the latter is independent of the UK state, including of the Scottish state in which it plays no formal role. Yet, it would be difficult to dispute that these countries are not among the leading secular states in the world. They adopt, however, a moderate or flexible form of secularism.

The question arises as to whether frameworks of secularism, both ‘rigid’ secularism (Bouchard & Taylor, 2008) such as that adopted by France in the form of laïcité and ‘moderate’ secularism (Modood, 2010) such as that of most of the European countries reviewed in this volume, are adequate for addressing the issues raised by religious minorities. The challenge is that these secularism models invariably adopt the liberal language of choice. While they help to secure freedom of belief and conscience for all, their attitude towards religious practices of minorities is often ambiguous, if not outrightly hostile. Secular states can be particularly reluctant to change existing public norms to accommodate the practices of post-migration minorities, and even when they have done so, they have considered them as if they were a set of lifestyle preferences or freely chosen beliefs. In this way, they have tended to ignore that religious observances are closely tied to a person’s inner sense of dignity and respect, a constitutive element of their very self, and hence experienced as something more than merely a question of freedom of ‘choice’ (Mahajan, 2017).

To underscore this point, we will take an example from India (Mahajan, 2017). In Jawaharlal Nehru University (like many other public institutions) there are no separate prayer rooms. This does not mean that there are no devout religious believers at the university. Religious believers who wish to offer prayers during the day assemble (among other places) on the sixth floor of the university library. Administrations have changed and so have librarians, but the practice of keeping a little space clear and clean for offering prayers is a practice that has continued. While there is no formal notification for this, the concerned authorities understand that several Muslim students would need to offer prayers at specific times during the day. They also recognise that not accommodating this need for religious worship is likely to be read, by both those wishing to offer prayers and those who do not observe the fast, as hostility to the community as a whole. For this reason, practice-related needs are often accommodated. The fact that this is a practice involving, by and large, worship in accordance with religious norms means an extra effort is made to accommodate the concerns of the devout.

Similar accommodation is not made, however, for ‘choice-driven’ activities. It is highly unlikely that space would be provided in the library for, say, table tennis players who have no other place to practise and are strongly committed to winning the upcoming tournament. The point is that matters of religion are often treated differently from other kinds of actions in India. To some extent this is because religion continues to play an important role in individual and social life, but also because religious and cultural diversity are values recognised and inscribed in the Constitution. The framers of the Indian Constitution did not merely envision a ‘secular’ polity, where the state would not be aligned with any religion and everyone would enjoy freedom of conscience and belief; rather they conceived of a state where different religious and cultural communities would, to a considerable extent, be able to live in accordance with their beliefs and practices. It is this commitment to diversity that has made the crucial difference and encouraged greater willingness to accommodate religious practices of the minorities as well as of the majority. In the chapters of this book we can find similar considerations in Indonesia and Malaysia where the primacy of religion is recognised to the extent that one cannot not have a religion. Indeed, non-Europe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The governance of religious diversity: challenges and responses
• Part I Western Europe
• Part II Southern Europe
• Part III Central Eastern Europe and Russia
• Part IV South-Eastern Europe
• Part V The MENA region
• Part VI South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific
• Index