Religion and Politics

Abstract

This panel aims at exploring the constitutional, epistemological and societal implications of the relationship between religion and politics. For the national implications of secular political rule, the case of France and laïcité is chosen to raise the question whether such a rule is promoting counterproductive outcomes as to increasing support to religion. The international implications include epistemological understanding of the religion and politics through the secular/religious binary and the constitutional validity of the accession and coronation rules of the Commonwealth Queen for Canada and Australia. Conceiving the relationship between religion and politics through the secular/religious binary is limited and unjust because it generalizes the contextually-specific Euro-American Enlightenment approach to the rest of the world. This amounts to ignoring other existing accounts from anthropology and global justice literatures. The problem of constitutional validity, in its turn, questions whether the religious nature of appointing a Queen according to the British law causes a validity problem for the cases of Canada and Australia. Such an exploration of the subject will doubtlessly foster a more comprehensive analysis and interdisciplinary exchange.

Title	Details
The Constitutionality of the Religious Tests Governing the Royal Succession – Australian and Canadian Perspectives	View Paper Details
Ontologies, Cosmologies, Worldviews, Truths: Exploring alternatives to the secular/religious framework in approaches to global justice	View Paper Details
Is Secularization Bringing Back Religion? A Social Policy Analysis	View Paper Details