Prof. Dr. Marian Burchardt

In my project I explore how religious diversity is regulated and examine the processes whereby religious diversity is becoming part of the institutional realities and administrative landscapes of nation-states and how divergent understandings of secularity underwrite these regulations. Suggesting that concepts of nationhood are central for understanding the governance of religious diversity, I employ a transatlantic comparison – focused on the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec – to show how ongoing processes of nation-building and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity.

Across the Western world, as well as beyond it, transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led – in tandem with processes of secularization especially among host populations – to profound changes in the religious make-up of society. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge to craft ways of accommodating new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks that define the place of religion in the public sphere. This has led to controversial public debates surrounding a multitude of questions: Should Muslim women be allowed to wear face veils in public? Do municipalities have the duty to provide land for minority places of worship? To what extent are displays of Christian symbols on the part of the state authorities, or the maintenance of institutional privileges for majority religions, discriminatory or exclusionary of religious minorities and atheists, rather than being legitimate ways of maintaining national cultural heritage and producing social cohesion? In dealing with religious diversity, states are typically caught between rising demands for greater religious freedom or equal treatment from religious minorities and world-societal pressures around human rights, on the one hand, and the emergence of nationalist, sometimes xenophobic, mobilizations against these demands, on the other. Fundamentally, what is at stake here are the ways in which religious identities are promoted or constrained through concepts of nationhood and national citizenship. In order to move away from monolithic and ahistorical understandings of secularism in the analysis of such processes, I draw on and further elaborate the concept of “multiple secularities”.