Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West

2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion) Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people's everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces. This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

Table of Contents:
Contents   Introduction Religious Diversity, Secularism and Nationhood 1 Theorizing Religious Diversity and Secularism 2 Contesting Religious Diversity and Secularism      3 Spatializing Religious Diversity: Urban Administration, Infrastructure and Emplacement 4 The Limits of Religious Diversity: Regulating Full-Face Coverings            5 Making Claims to Religion as Culture: The Rise of Heritage Religion Conclusions     Notes List of Laws and Cases Bibliography   Index  

About the Author :
Marian Burchardt is a professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig. He is the author of Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa.  

Review :
Immigration and secularization have radically increased cultural diversity around the world. What happens when 'diversity' evolves from a means of description into a mode of governance? In this cleverly designed comparative study of two 'stateless nations', Marian Burchardt shows how the logic of 'religious diversity' is refracted through the logics of nationalism and bureaucracy at the macro and micro scales. Required reading for anyone interested in contemporary debates about religion, politics and secularity.— Philip S. Gorski, author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe "Fascinating and helpful…an absorbing and detailed study."— Roger Trigg, author of Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions "Religious diversification and the rise of nationalism, coupled with increasing immigration and ever-contested state secularism, are dominant and far-reaching trends facing many societies today. Through an evocative comparison of Quebec and Catalonia, Marian Burchardt lucidly explores how these topics are framed in law, shaped by institutional practices and understood by political actors and ordinary members of the public. Regulating Difference is essential reading for anyone concerned with such profound issues marking our troubling times."— Steven Vertovec, Editor of the Routledge international Handbook of Diversity Studies "Burchardt's study is illuminating in that it offers new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between national identity and religious identity. By examining the procedural and governmental frameworks that both enable and inhibit the inclusion of religious migrants, his study offers a needed corrective to studies that look to philosophical concepts such as "rights" to understand what it means for religious migrants to belong to a nation."— Reading Religion Two stateless nations, Quebec and Catalonia, with historically majoritarian Catholic confessions, have become deeply secular societies. But Catalan and Quebecois nationalists with similar conceptions of laïcité or secularism have offered divergent responses to the challenges that the religious diversity brought by large numbers of new immigrants present to their national projects.  Burchardt's book examines this comparative puzzle deftly, while enriching our understanding of the ways in which religious and secular cleavages and religious and national identities may become differently entangled.  An important contribution to the emerging field of multiple secularities.— José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World "Regulating Difference is a methodologically rich and theoretically versatile addition to the fast-growing field of comparative historical secularity."— Journal of the American Academy of Religion "An excellent contribution to the scholarly literature on Western secularities and on the regulation of religion."— James Spickard, author of Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes "Marian Burchardt's Regulating Difference is historically informed, theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich. By juxtaposing Québec and Catalunya, the book makes important contributions to the literature on secularism and small nations. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism, the sociology of religion and secularism, and politics and religion more broadly."  — Geneviève Zubrzycki, author of Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec