MF CASR Annual Lecture 2025 - Tariq Modood

The New Governance of Religious Diversity – A new Analysis

This talk is based on Prof. Tariq Modood`s new book with Thomas Sealy, The New Governance of Religious Diversity (Polity, June, 2024). The book has been oriented by two questions: an empirical one of how do states govern religious diversity, and a normative one of how, in our view, religious diversity should be governed. Indeed, our approach is oriented by a position that sees the relationship between the empirical and normative as one of close entwinement.

Eschewing Euro-Americancentric perspectives that define secularism in terms of religious freedom in general or treat a particular country as a paradigm (typically USA or France), we argue there are multiple secularisms, present across different global contexts. Our analytical framework is not designed to merely capture specific countries or enable comparative empirical understanding. It also is the basis for a normative engagement with modes of secularism. This interdisciplinarity is, then, quite different from standard political theory as well as standard political science or political sociology.

We apply it to two regions: to four countries in Western Europe (Belgium, Britain, France and Germany) and three countries in South and South East Asia (India, Indonesia, Malayasia). Our strategy is to approach each region, indeed country, contextually and to argue that both the regions in our study have to be respected as embodying two different modes of governance, ‘moderate secularism’ and ‘pluralistic nationalism’ respectively. We do not rank one over the other or to make one approximate to the other, though we do think each can learn something from the other. We approach that learning by a multicultural normative evaluation, based on an understanding of multiculturalism developed by the Bristol School of Multiculturalism.