State Recognition and Religious Minority Agency in a European Context (original) (raw)

This contribution will discuss, mainly from the perspective of the state, the implications of religious minority faiths reimagining their agency and of their working openly within civil society in European multicultural contexts. It will focus on how and why the developments outlined above inevitably shift the role of the state from ‘neutral’ moderator of the public space to partner in the effort to ‘accentuate the positive’. It will also place emphasis on how the recognition of minority faiths and religious actors is connected to the new parameters within the role of the state in religious diversity management. The discussion of the evolution of the role of the state in the management of religious diversity from a European perspective will unfold as follows: first, a theoretical connection between religious minorities and state recognition will be sketched, in order in a second stage to develop the link between religious minority agency (covering actors per se as well as related minority institutions) and state recognition. As a third step, the contribution will focus on the evolution of the role of state to respond to the changing sociolegal conditions of minority claims-making. The example of religious minority education within state-supported schools will be used as an illustration of the challenges connected to state recognition of religious minority groups. The concluding part of the discussion will attempt to demonstrate how the interaction between religious minority agency with recognition can function as a precondition towards inclusive law- and policy-making in religiously plural societies.