Religious diversity is a key feature of countries across the world today, but it also presents governments with very real challenges. Controversies around religious free speech, symbols, social values and morals, and the role of faith leaders as critical voices, are just a few of the issues that have given rise to fierce social, political and scholarly debate. So how do states include and accommodate religious diversity and should this change? What are the key difficulties facing states when it comes to governing religious diversity?
Understanding this complex phenomenon means thinking through secularism, liberalism, multiculturalism and nationalism in theory and practice. In this new book, Tariq Modood and Thomas Sealy draw on original research to present new ways of analysing the governance of religious diversity in different regions of the world. Identifying the key challenges at stake, they also argue for a new statement of multiculturalism in relation to the governance of religious diversity, that of ‘multiculturalised secularism’, which represents a constructive and productive response to the reality of religiously plural societies.
Industry Reviews
"Modood and Sealy’s account of multicultural secularism is powerful, coherent and compelling, bringing a fresh perspective on an issue of urgent global relevance. This is an important book that takes seriously both existing models of secularism and the diverse empirical realities they seek to address."
Mathew J. Guest, Durham University
"This book skillfully addresses one of the most pressing issues of today: how to deal with the increasing diversity of religions and ethnicities. It offers helpful analytic approaches to understanding the range of multiculturalisms in relationship to their religious and secular milieu, and advances solutions to the governmental task of administering a world of baffling social and cultural variations. Essential reading for anyone concerned about maintaining social order in our increasingly globalized world."
Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State
"In The New Governance of Religious Diversity, Tariq Modood and Thomas Sealy pack a lot of analysis and argument into a relatively short book. Their ambitious aims are to develop an original typology of the diverse ways in which states govern religion, and also to offer a contextually sensitive argument about how religion should be governed. They achieve both of these aims with considerable aplomb, showing how it is possible to distinguish between five modes of religious governance, and also making a persuasive argument in support of their favoured normative mode of governance which they call multicultural secularism."
Simon Thompson, University of the West of England
"Modood and Sealy build on the theoretical and empirical debates about religion and secularism developed during recent decades. The New Governance of Religious Diversity synthesizes these debates, develops them into a comparative framework, and explains and exemplifies what a contextualist approach to them can mean in practice."
Sune Laegaard, Roskilde University
"A decisive and insightful intervention in the debates on the governance of religious diversity. Analysing different conceptions of secularism and frameworks of state-religion relationships, Modood and Sealy make a persuasive case for multiculturalising secularisms and pluralistic nationalism."
Gurpreet Mahajan, Jawaharlal Nehru University
“A rare and remarkable blend of sociohistorical analysis and policy prescription. At once sociologically rich and policy relevant, this is a book that deserves to be read by all scholars and analysts concerned with state governance of religion in an age of global religious revival”.
Robert W. Hefner, The Review of Faith and International Affairs
