Constitutions and Religion. Edited by Susanna Mancini. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020. Pp. 464. $285.00 (cloth); $65.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781786439284.

Abstract

Although secularization was postulated to drive religion into the private sphere, on the contrary, the re-politicization of religion is posing a challenge across the world. In this context, Susanna Mancini’s Constitutions and Religion, a collection of thematic and thorough analyses of religion, is a timely contribution to scholarship on the relationship between religion and the state. In developing this project, which is part of Elgar’s Research Handbooks in Comparative Constitutional Law series, Mancini takes a broad view of resurgent political religion. Unlike Jose Casanova, the eminent sociologist who claimed the Iranian revolution led to a resurgence of strong religions in the public sphere, Mancini aims to place the “resurgence of strong religion ... in the broader context of the historical processes of secularization, globalization, mass migration and democratization” (5). According to Mancini, the privatization of religion has resulted in its secularization, universalization, and incorporation into a liberal political ideology. Therefore, the separation between the public and private spheres has changed how the state approaches religion, but it has not divorced religion from politics. Throughout the volume, this relationship is illustrated in diverse contexts using examples from different nations worldwide. Mancini organized this comprehensive collection of work on comparative constitutional law and religion into five parts comprising chapters by twenty-four leading scholars on the subject. In her introduction, Mancini explains that the European Enlightenment influenced the formation of secular society through “privatization [that] resulted in secularization and universalization of religion, and thus in its penetration and amalgamation into liberal political theory” (3). Mancini argues further that when Western modernization was transplanted into non-Western societies through colonialism, it ignored those countries’ different cultures and traditions. In the postcolonial context, however, she says, “modernizing societies have rejected the homogenizing path of the Western model of secular modernity, and have relied on religious tradition to distance themselves from the colonial past and pursue autonomous projects of social transformations” (5), which have given rise to different modernities.