Six - Reading religion through the lessons of legal decisions and 95 reactions to them

Summary

Introduction

The new diversity is presenting some important challenges for social scientists that require a recalibration of our tools. By new diversity I mean that the religious landscape has changed, prompted first by increased immigration that is bringing greater numbers of people whose religious practices are not confined to the majoritarian religions of the receiving countries (see Vertovec, 2007; Meissner and Vertovec, 2014; for a critique of these ideas, see Crul, 2016). Often this is accompanied by a fear of that ‘other’, who is frequently, although not always, Muslim. Second, majoritarian religions are rapidly transforming, losing members, for example, and experiencing declining attendance and participation in life rituals. At the same time, majoritarian religions are refashioning themselves as culture and heritage. Third, in some countries (especially Canada, Australia, the US and some countries in Latin America) this new diversity also includes a renewed attention to indigenous peoples and their spiritualities. In Canada, which is the country I am most familiar with, this attention is part of an awareness of the need to acknowledge the brutal legacy of colonisation for indigenous peoples. Finally, and related to the second shift, is the growing number of people who self-identify as nonreligious. All of these changes are shifts in degree rather than kind, but together they constitute a changing landscape in relation to religion. These transformations are resulting in increasingly complex societies that require trans-and interdisciplinary approaches to understand them.

As a scholar who is trained in Sociology and Law (and who is located in a department of Religious Studies) I am interested in how law imagines religion and its position in society. I am, following Beckford (2003), a moderate social constructionist, which means that I am not so much interested in what religion or non-religion are, or how they are defined, but in how they are constructed and imagined by social actors and social institutions. Legal cases often reveal a great deal about the process of that construction and what is at stake in the various configurations of religion. They draw our attention away from strictly academic definitions of, and debates about, religion, and offer a glimpse into policy and politics.