Governing Religious Diversity in Western Europe: Moderate Secularism and Conceiving Freedom of Religion

Western Europe, it has been said, has been undergoing a crisis of secularism in its struggles to include religious minorities that have arrived since the mid-20th century. While this may be something of an overstatement, newly established religious minorities have sparked fresh questions about the public and political place of religion and state-religion connections. The responses and answers to these questions might be either conducive or limiting of religious diversity as well as freedom of religion. This paper considers these responses in relation to four Western European states: Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK. It identifies key norms that can be seen in operation in the region in order to draw out similarities as well as important differences in approach between the four country cases and, furthermore, in what ways and to what extents the region can be characterised under ‘moderate secularism’. On the one hand, accommodations and exemptions have been claimed and made for certain aspects of dress, funeral practices, religious buildings, ritual slaughter and educational provision, for instance. There have also been informal workarounds where formal modes of accommodation have proven difficult. Yet, on the other hand, these have been controversial and subject to political variation and change. The current situation in the region reflects a certain agonism over the place of public religion and its relation to liberal secular order in general. This has especially been the case for the region’s Muslims and Islam in a context marked by fears of radicalisation and extremism. These issues have stretched the existing arrangements and forced, in some instances, renewed thinking and attention to how accommodation and inclusion might be achieved, or in other instances, a contraction in pro-diversity arrangements and policies. The paper explores the contested norm of freedom of religion that at once forms the region’s core similarity but is also the ground on which its divergences and differences when it comes to norms of state-religion institutional connections can be found. It looks at how whether or not freedom of religion results in recognition of religion as a public good or as in need of regulation, remains politically contingent and is often applied in unsystematic ways. It also explores how, on account of this, religion can be positively encouraged and may lead to further pro-diversity features and policies, such as difference sensitive recognition and institutional accommodations, and/or how religion and its connections to the state form mechanisms of state control. A question that therefore lingers over the issue of the governance of religious diversity in the region, and that this paper engages, is whether and when, and in relation to whom, the governance of religious diversity comes to reflect diversity enhancing or diversity limiting features and how this shows that moderate secularism itself should be thought of as a project, ongoing and never quite fully settled or achieved, but whose parameters are to some extent under constant negotiation