Secularisms, religions, and law: a legal-cultural inquiry

This book addresses secularism and law from the premise that religion has become the enfant terrible of modernity.This characterization comes from its being mistaken for and reduced to institutional denominations, and the denominational more generally. Instead, this book argues, the religious cannot be extracted from its broader cultural embeddedness; if it has any hope of being understood, it must be analyzed from an anthropological/historical perspective capable of articulating its inevitable entanglement with the secular. Without such an approach, secularization, too, risks misconception and faulty outcomes. Engaging just such a legal-anthropological and historical analysis, the book develops a critical approach to past theories, revealing, through both theory and comparative case studies, the cultural incompleteness of Western processes of secularization. This incompleteness, it is argued, is the true source of a whole host of apparently insurmountable conflicts within contemporary multicultural societies. A critical view of secularization as conceptualized and actuated today motivates, then, a legal intercultural approach to finding new solutions to these conflicts.