Excavating the political weaved through religious freedom

Abstract

Politics of Religious Freedom brings together some of the most prominent scholars working on the intersection of religion, politics and law. The result is a very well crafted collection that unsettles many preconceived ideas around religious freedom. It is an essential read for anyone seeking to better understand recent debates on religion, secularism and politics. Not unlike secularism a decade ago, religious freedom is increasingly understood by policy makers as the new remedy to fight religious violence, and an essential ingredient to ensure that democracy and peace prevail globally. This has resulted in the multiplications of laws, programs, reports and policies both at the national and international levels promoting religious freedom. Religious freedom is often portrayed in those discussions as a stable, inclusive, easily defined and “universally valid” concept (Introduction, 9). The central objective of Politics of Religious Freedom is to disturb this precise understanding and to ask a series of important questions, including: “What exactly is being promoted through the discourse of religious freedom, and what is not? ... How might we describe the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underlie this frenzy, and what is its longer history?” (Introduction, 1). To embark on this ambitious task all the contributions to the collection participate in tracing the genealogies of the right to religious freedom. Many authors draw on case studies beyond Western Europe or North America, which adds to the richness and complexity of the discussion. Contributors underline the importance of situating religious freedom historically, politically and socially. Indeed, its meaning is far from being stable. It changes in relation to historical, national and international political contexts (Introduction, 9), as well as in function of who uses it and who has the power to “decide what counts” as religious freedom (Hurd, 51). While most contributions share the common assumption that religious freedom is a “shape-shifter” (Hurd, 103) and therefore refrain from providing a universal definition of the term, most also work with the conceptual premise that religious freedom is a technique of governance. To be precise, they understand it as a project that is the result of particular power-configurations deeply enmeshed in realpolitik concerns (Mahmood, 145), and that aims to locate, delimit and define the boundaries of religious freedom (including what it should and should not protect) in function of these power relations.