Beyond the separation of church and state: Explaining the new governance of religious diversity in Spain (original) (raw)

Religious Governance and the Accommodation of Islam in Contemporary Spain

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2014

This article analyses the governance of Islam in contemporary Spain. Rather than presuming the existence of a singular and all-encompassing ‘Spanish model’ of religious governance, I focus on the critical role of actual practices of modelling in shaping the institutions and organisations implicated in the regulation of Islam, as well as the concrete strategies that have guided policies of Muslim accommodation. Modelling practices, I argue, have been particularly significant in Spain due to its late transition to democracy and the absence of viable frameworks for regulating religious diversity from within its own past. In determining which frameworks to use as models for religious governance, public actors have been influenced by a variety of factors, including (i) their respective political and social agendas; (ii) the professional networks, organisational fields and other means of knowledge circulation through which they have gained exposure to exogenous models; and (iii) religious, cultural, linguistic and historical factors that have made certain models more accessible or attractive than others. Given that these factors have varied at different levels of government, so too have practices of modelling influential in the development of national and sub-national approaches to governing Islam.

Completing the Religious Transition? Catholics and Muslims Navigate Secularism in Democratic Spain

In Europe, Muslims are often seen as the enemies of secularism and laïcité, the strict separation of church and state pioneered in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. Yet the Spanish experience shows that European Muslims should not prima facie be considered opponents of secularism. Indeed, a majority of devout Spanish Muslims have demanded, rather than opposed, state neutrality on religious matters—this in direct opposition to a concerted effort by the Catholic Church and its supporters to maintain a privileged position vis-à-vis other confessions. In the protracted debates over the role of religion in the public sphere in Spain, devout Muslims have shown a preference for the secular Socialist Party over the militant Catholicism of Spanish conservatives. The leaders of the Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic federations demanded in 2011 that Spain complete its “religious transition” so as to ensure the equal treatment of all religious confessions by the state. Muslims in Spain, while they have echoed Catholic demands for the preservation of religion in the public sphere, have opposed Catholicism’s privileged status in the country. By demanding consistency of treatment and state neutrality on religious matters, Muslims have assisted, rather than hindered, the construction of secularism in Spain.

Constitutional Politics and Religious Accommodation: Lessons from Spain

Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2015

This article sketches the struggles over and the shifting role of Catholicism in the Spanish body politic. It begins by providing a brief overview of the deep historical ties between Catholicism and Spanish identity. It continues by recounting the dialectical process through which a serious social cleavage on the role of religion in politics emerged and percolated over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This cleavage ultimately pit a militant and reactionary brand of authoritarian Catholicism on the right against an equally militant group of secularist ideologues associated with both bourgeois-republican and revolutionary working class (mainly anarchist) political forces. Following Juan Linz, the article emphasizes the nefarious role played by constitutionmakers who pursued a partisan secularizing agenda on questions of Church and state in the breakdown of democracy and tragic onset of Civil War. It then delineates the ideology and institutionalization of "national-Catholicism" under Franco, before turning to contrast republican-era constitution-making dynamics with those of the transition to democracy following Franco's death. It concludes with a discussion of the content of post-transition conflicts over religion and politics, highlighting the constitutional resources for coping with the somehow new yet very old challenge posed by the presence of Islam. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the once "axiomatic" assumption "that modernization inevitably leads to … secularization." In the process, it has begun to recognize that "religion can sometimes play" a positive, even "fundamental role in issues of political representation and

The end of the 'Iberian exception': religion and the new Spanish far right in the European Parliament

Religion, State and Society , 2023

This contribution analyses the role of religion in the attitudes, beliefs, and discourses of Spanish members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The aim is to show how MEPs relate to religion in their activity, against the background of the transformations experienced by the Spanish political party system in the last decade. One of the most important changes has been the emergence of Vox, a far-right political group, in 2018. The contribution discusses the main results of the Religion in the European Parliament and in European multilevel governance II (RelEP2) survey for the Spanish case and, together with other qualitative data, analyses how religion is an issue on the political agenda of Spanish MEPs, focusing on Vox and how other parties have reacted to the emergence of the far right. The contribution identifies two fields in which religion is mobilised as a symbolic resource for political activity: a) identity politics and EU external action, and b) morality policies and issues related to gender.

Responses to Religious Diversity in Spain

Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society – J-RaT, 2016

Thei ncrease in religious diversity is an indisputably clear trendi nm ost European countries.This transformationhas givenrise to challenges to the ways in whichstatesand secular institutions have traditionally provided their services.Our research is embedded in academic debates aboutthe responses of secular state-run institutions to the religious diversification of the population. We compare two different institutionalsettings:prisons and hospitals.D rawing on ethnographic research conducted in eight prisonsa nd six hospitals in two regions in Spain,weshow that there is no single nationwidepolicy that addresses religious diversity in public institutions.R ather we suggest that institutionspecificc haracteristics along with context-related factors help explain how these two types of institutions respond differently to religiousd iversity.T his showsh ow national regimeso fs tate secularism are deployed in differing directions,d ependingo nv arious organisational and contextual factors.

The Political Use of 'Culturalised Religion' by the Radical Right in Spain

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2022

The critique of the theory of secularisation has favoured the emergence of a series of concepts for the analysis of contemporary socio-religious transformations, such as 'culturalised religion'. These categories constitute, in turn, an opportunity to rethink the process of secularisation from the perspective of historical sociology. Against this background, this article carries out a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities of secularisation in Spain from which a cultural approach to religion ('culturalised religion') emerges and its potential connection to the expansion of the radical rightwing party Vox, which became the third-largest party in Spain's parliament in the 2019 national election. After analyzing this interrelation between 'culturalised religion' and the radical right on the basis of statistical sources, discourse analysis and bibliographical sources, the article concludes by stressing the importance of historical sociology for understanding phenomena like 'culturalised religion', which take us out of the binomial logic that has marked part of the interpretation of secularisation (revival of religions vs decline of the religious) and introduce us into the multiple interactions between the historical past and sociological reality.