More seriously, these papers put a finger on a tension many of us face in our work, whether conceptual or practical: namely, a sense that religious freedom, in principle, must surely be good, but that in practice it has many possible outcomes, intended and otherwise. Furthermore, these papers argue that the routinely problematic social lives of religious freedom agendas should cause us to reconsider the conceptual genealogy of the ideal itself. Indeed, these papers cut so deep as to have us ask: Is there a “principle” of religious freedom that stands above or beyond histories, political agendas, and the sundry entailments of these? In their own ways and in their conjoined force, these papers provide ample reasons for extreme caution when proceeding down the path of announcing, promoting, and analyzing religious freedom agendas.

I am sensitive to this cautionary message, but can imagine some good reasons for saying, “Hold on, might there be more to the story?” My work in indigenous traditions has conditioned me to be very sympathetic to native religious freedom claims, especially in contexts of land disputes, resource access, and burial protections. I continue to think religious freedom claims have a place—at least in the short run—if their primary role is to secure rights already enjoyed by majority publics by making otherwise inaudible concerns heard. But I am certainly persuaded by the common trajectory of these fantastic papers, which together amount to a multi-layered critical assessment of religious freedom, its current lives and undergirding sub-strata.

Reading these papers, I couldn’t help but think of religious freedom projects as a form of social eugenics. The sought-after outcome of such agendas is to produce and reproduce a healthy social body—as defined by those who have the power to manipulate society at the level of policy. As these papers do so powerfully, analyses of religious freedom discourse and practice should ask: Who are the engineers? Who are the subjects? What are the outcomes of these experiments, intended and not? And, as Elizabeth Hurd asks, might there be other discourses and registers for pursuing shared goals that steer clear of these troubled waters?

These sorts of questions were posed to me in sharp relief on a recent trip to Odessa, Ukraine. I was there as visiting faculty for the ReSet School, a multi-year seminar on the study of religion, the students of which are from throughout the former Soviet Union and who range from Ph.D. candidates to associate professors. The particular session I attended focused on law and religion. It was a rewarding experience at a number of levels, not the least of which was gaining an ear for religious freedom discourses articulated in ways quite different from what I’ve become accustomed to in the U.S. context. Over the course of our week together, three basics rubrics about religious freedom emerged from the group. One seemed to carry forward a Soviet-era suspicion of religion and announced the importance of secularism and freedom from religion; another was a comparatively new and almost boundless enthusiasm for religion of all stripes—though its champions faced the usual difficulty of distinguishing between religion and not-religion, a bind for any religious freedom agenda no matter how capacious its imagination; and the third was an interesting mix of nostalgia for and desire to protect historically dominant traditions (the Russian Orthodox Church, especially) while simultaneously warding off the threat posed by assertive proselytizing movements, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

As I discerned the contours of these positions I began to think of them in the following ways: No Cake, The Whole Cake, and Just Our Slice of the Cake. Of course, each of these positions wanted to eat their cake and have it, too. And that, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has argued in The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, is just the problem with religious freedom discourse in practice—it sets out its own conditions of impossibility and is constantly at counter-purposes with that which it proclaims to advance. In any case, each camp worked to articulate a vision for how its particular ideal of religious freedom could be designed, animated, and otherwise brought to life. From my position on the edges of the conversation—and I admit to having but a basic sense of the current social struggles involving religious life in the former Soviet Union—this all sounded quite a lot like social engineering. Such an ethnographic realization has the potential, of course, to catalyze self-recognition. So I began to puzzle over the ramifications of the politics of religious freedom contexts closer to home. I offer two brief reflections along these lines below.

From the side of lived religion, religious freedom contexts may likewise be understood as projects in social engineering. Religious actors and institutions routinely refashion themselves to meet the conditions of law or to inhabit spaces framed by law, as Saba Mahmood and Peter Danchin have described in the case of Egypt, for example. The contributors to the Politics of Religious Freedom Project  illuminate how law provokes religion, often in the direction of ossification, or its discursive equivalent, literalism. Of this dynamic, one might say that law prefers to take others, religions included, the way it usually takes itself, which is to say literally. In this way, religious freedom produces religious dogmatism. Some “religions” resist, of course. But the costs of remaining flexible, metaphorical, and open-ended can be high, like not being seen or being dismissed out of hand. As Hurd points out, one cost of recalcitrance is illegibility.

The contemporary global propensity to engineer religious life in relation to states and publics is also a mixed bag for scholars of religion. On the one hand, our jobs got easier. We need not be half as perceptive as we are trained to be. The characters on the world’s religious stage are now outsized versions of themselves—puffed up on steroids, battle ready, and putting on a hell of a show. On the other hand, some of us can’t shake the sense that this is a bit too easy and, hauntingly, that somewhere along the way we got worked into the experiment in ways we haven’t adequately understood, as Sullivan has suggested. Whether through support for or criticism of religious freedom agendas, some of us worry about the degree to which we are engineers or have been engineered. Needless to say, we all have some sorting out to do.

Now I’d like to shift gears and suggest two ways the issues opened up by the Politics of Religion Freedom Project and by the essays collected here are relevant to contemporary Native Hawaiian religious life. My first brief example concerns articulations of genealogy in a contemporary legal context (which I have described in detail elsewhere). Suffice it to say that the shape of the family and family law in Hawai`i changed in the wake of colonialism: genealogy isn’t what it used to be. Missionary sensibilities and Victorian law completely reengineered these domains, as Sally Merry has described. But today Hawaiians are engaging vast realms of cultural life with deliberate emphasis upon restoring ancestral integrity to contemporary ways of being. This “renaissance” includes, among other things, subsistence practices, language immersion, hula, open ocean sailing, various forms of rejuvenated ritual practice, and the protection of ancestral burials, about which I’ll say more below. Some of these endeavors have yielded legal and political traction. By way of various federal and state laws, policies, and entities like the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, native cultural and religious ideals and practices inform day-to-day matters, like land use and fishing rules.

Unfortunately, the laws and policies that make room for Hawaiian voices have little capacity to comprehend the cultural content of the stories they have solicited. The stories connect to different times, to different sensibilities, to different sexualities. Royal incest, alternative spouse arrangements, and an incredible range of genealogical possibilities configure Hawaiian religious imaginations. Law is rather deaf to all of this. For one example of this mismatch—of law’s solicitations and foreclosures—consider the case of Mahi, which is a story about the costs of resisting law’s literalism. To be Hawaiian religiously is to read signs, to think metaphorically, to interpret oneself into history. Mahi did this and became illegible as a result.

The short version of Mahi’s story goes like this. A protracted repatriation dispute erupted in the early 2000s that involved the Bishop Museum and sixteen different Native Hawaiian organizations. The dispute centered on the so-called “Forbes Collection,” eighty-three extremely rare Hawaiian objects taken by non-natives from a burial cave near Kawaihae on the island of Hawai`i in 1905. For most of the twentieth century the objects were held by the Bishop Museum. In 2002, a group called Hui Malama, headed by Halealoha Ayau, received the objects on “loan” from the Museum. Members of Hui Malama then replaced the objects in their original burial cave location and sealed the cave afterward. Soon other Native Hawaiian organizations complained that they had not been consulted about the disposition of the objects and pointed out that the “loan” circumvented federal repatriation guidelines. The dispute became the subject of several Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Review Committee meetings and then a court battle. It is a fascinating story with many turns, including the fact that a federal judge ordered the cave opened in 2006 and had the objects returned to the Museum, where they remain today while the competing Hawaiian groups work toward an agreement about their proper future.

My point in recounting this is to draw attention to Ayau’s next move. The sixteen contending Native Hawaiian groups had asserted their claims by way of “cultural affiliation.” A stronger claim under the law is by way of lineal descent. The law stipulates that lineal descent may be demonstrated by Western bureaucratic means—birth certificates, tax records, etc.—or by traditional genealogical means. In the dispute at hand, if anyone could articulate a persuasive lineal descent claim, they would trump all cultural affiliation claims and control the disposition of the objects. As it happens, in the late 2000s Ayau was made aware of the Mahi `ohana, a family from the region of the cave that asserted that the burial cave in question was their ancestor’s. In the course of researching their claim Ayau was told by a prominent genealogist the he too was related to Mahi. Ever resourceful and dramatic, Ayau gathered as much evidence backing this claim as he could and then presented it to the NAGPRA Review Committee in a most traditional fashion: he spoke as Mahi. This first person accounting of the ancestors is a classic Polynesian trope, something Marshall Sahlins has called “the heroic I.” Oratory in this capacity speaks the concerns of the present in the voice of the ancestors. It is also, manifestly, a discursive impossibility so far as scientific entities and legal bodies are concerned, judging from the baffled response of the Bishop Museum and the Review Committee. They didn’t so much reject Ayau-as-Mahi as ignore him. Flesh and blood genealogy was simply too much to take, or at least to take in. Law, it would seem, didn’t recognize whom it had invited to the table.

My second brief Hawaiian example responds through redirection to Sullivan’s emphasis on the Smith decision and its fallout. My point is: if Smith then Lyng. I think Sullivan is completely right to direct us to Smith and its progeny. Undeniably, this is the world Smith made; more modestly but significantly, this is also the world Lyng made. Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Association (1988) was a Native American sacred lands dispute from the Smith era that made clear that the U.S. wasn’t about to budge on the control of “its” lands. While devastating for American Indians’ claims upon public lands, what Lyng has yielded in some circles is increased attention to consultative processes between native groups and the government in the context of land use and access. This consultative spirit also configures repatriation and burial protections contexts, at least in the U.S. by way of the NAGPRA and state laws, including in Hawai`i.

Consultation between native groups, the government, and various other parties has rightly been celebrated as a step forward in taking indigenous claims seriously, especially with regard to religious evidence and oral tradition. In a substantial number of cases, contesting groups have reached mutually agreeable settlements that take into account religious sensibilities in ways lost by the rougher handling of law proper. But meaningful consultation necessitates a case-by-case approach and is therefore administratively cumbersome, time intensive, expensive, and very taxing on the patience and good will of all parties. My worry is that post-Lyng laws and policies that stipulate consultation do not adequately set out support for this process in the long run. Changing administrations, financial crises, and fading institutional memory, among other perils, can emaciate consultative processes, reducing them to a shadow of their former selves or, indeed, as is happening in Hawai`i, to nothing at all.

In Hawai`i, the state burial law enables considerable protection for Native Hawaiian graves and sets out a robust consultation model through monthly meetings of burial councils on the major islands. Historically, these councils have had strong Native Hawaiian representation and leadership. From the time of the law’s inception in 1990 to the near present, Hawaiian burials have arguably enjoyed more integrity than in any period since Cook’s arrival in 1778. However, in the last several years things have turned sour. The State Historic Preservation Division has dropped the ball on supporting the councils and has been weak in its implementation of the law in general. The state has failed to appoint council members in a timely fashion, regularly cancels meetings for lack of quorum or other administrative reasons, and otherwise has offered little oversight of key processes. Additionally and critically, the state has grown soft in its requirements of developers, particularly with regard to policing requirements for archaeological inventory surveys, a pillar of the law. Absent these surveys, developers can proceed as if the law doesn’t exist. In this context, then, we have the politics of religious freedom in another key: a dirge about administrative failure.

The rallying cry of demonstrators, “irhal” (“leave”) is the best expression of what made the revolts so specific. Tunisians did not take to the street for the recognition of an essence (We are all “Islamists” or “proletarian” or “anti-French”). The ideal that emerged from the “irhal” movements is of the “whatever” individual, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms. “Whatever” here does not mean indifferent or deprived of substantial value, but rather of “being such that it always matters.” An insistence on equality, an irreverence towards any form of authority (sultat), and a suspicion of all types of privileges suggest that what Tunisians are now calling for is a “solidarity that in no way concerns an essence.” Claiming to speak in the name of Islam, laïcité, democracy, human rights, or the caliphate does not grant you privilege any more in Tunisian public debates. It does not give you support from the public. It simply gives you a right to argue “whatever.” No politician, activist, or intellectual is immune from the risk of being silenced by a sneering, angry, or weary “irhal.”

In this context, a major challenge for Islamists is to articulate a political and cultural project that is both consistent with their own principles and in tune with this polyphonic and somewhat opaque “coming community.” Tunisian and foreign secular organizations insistently call out Islamists on the issue of religious freedom, with the hope of exposing their duplicity or unveiling their double-speak. But religious freedom has actually a very limited part in Islamists’ current conversation, not because it is perceived as a divisive issue, but because it is viewed as unproblematic and irrelevant. A central concern within Islamist circles today is not of whether a sharia state must be established, but whether Nahda should primarily be a cultural movement (haraka) of reform or a government party (hizb).

When asked about religious freedom, most Nahda leaders give one of the following three explanations of why it needs to be protected. First, a theological rationale: there is no compulsion in Islam. Second, a historical-nationalist rationale: Tunisian culture is built on a very ancient history of cultural diversity that encompasses elements of Phoenician civilization, the Roman Empire, African traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and others. Finally, a political rationale: Islamists have experienced repression and torture under the regimes of Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. They know the importance of respecting freedom of expression and do not intend to submit any other group to the same type of arbitrary repression.

Nahda leaders do not argue over whether Tunisia should respect religious freedom or turn into a sharia state. While some of them, such as the philosopher Abu Yaareb Marzouki, argue that the maqasid al-sharia (objectives of sharia) could have been included in the preamble of the constitution, simply as a cultural reference, most Nahda members pay limited attention to this type of discussion. At the core of the movement’s project is cultural authenticity, not religious conformity. Philosopher Ajmi Lourimi, a member of the Bureau Executif of Nahda and a Levinas scholar, describes the current crisis in Tunisia as an “epistemological problem.” The main challenge for Tunisians—and people from the Maghreb, more generally—is to deal with the “inferiority complex” caused by colonization. “We need to work so that all citizens gain a sufficient level of culture and collective awareness, to make sure that there will be no going back,” he explained at a recent meeting organized in Tunis by the ReligioWest program.

Tunisian Islamists’ insistence on the imperative of cultural authenticity represents a moral narrative of modernity that is analogous to the Western narrative of modernity analyzed by Webb Keane, in which the category of sincere belief plays the central role. Just as Dutch missionaries defined interiority and sincerity as the core standard and site of modernity and true religiosity, Nahdawis insist on the re-appropriation of cultural authenticity as the defining standard of modernization and development. A return to what is imagined as authentic Tunisian tradition is presented as the condition of modernization. Collective consciousness and cultural reformation are here the active agents of progress, rather than individual conscience. But the idea of cultural authenticity serves also to mark a separation between what is deemed archaic (postcolonial laïcité but also alien forms of religiosity expressed within the Muslim world such as the Saudi or even Egyptian ones), and what is modern (unity, reconciliation, synthesis).

Tunisian Islamists have always had very little to say about religion. If they see religious freedom essentially as a non-issue, it is partly because they do not see religion as a problematic intellectual category, but simply as an obvious part of reality (waqa’) and life (hayat). Islamist intellectuals’ view on religion and politics is primarily informed by the writings of Rashid Ghannouchi, who has long considered that the key line of confrontation in Tunisia is not between religion and politics, but between society and the state. The crucial challenge is the protection of society from the state, not the protection of individuals from groups, or of true belief from heterodox practice. Tunisian Islamists hold an optimist view of society as a self-regulating and virtuous collective organization. Granted enough freedom, education, and economic opportunity, society will invent self-regulatory mechanisms that will lead to the development of piety and virtue, and allow non-Muslims to live according to their own beliefs. Now that Islamists have won 40 percent of the seats at the assembly and hold a prominent position within the transition government, their discourse has remained consistent with these previous preoccupations. The key questions for them are how to elaborate safe institutional mechanisms that will prevent the return of corruption (fasad) and despotism (istibdad), and how to establish social justice. In fact, Islamists are, in some sense, more secular than secularist groups. They advocate a high wall of separation between religion and the state, while secularist organizations and parties demand a close monitoring of mosques and religious institutions by the state.

The project discussed and promoted by Tunisian Nahdawi leaders today can be described as a historicist, hermeneutical project of cultural reformation. It is based on a teleological view of the direction of Tunisian history and the place of Islam in this history. After the ruptures of the colonial moment, and of the authoritarian regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, now is the time when Tunisians can regain consciousness of their history and re-appropriate their past to better progress towards modernity. “The priority,” Lourimi insists, “is not Islamization of society, but modernization.” Key intellectual figures and leaders of Nahda such as Ajmi Lourimi, Abu Ya’areb Marzouki, and Ghannouchi, describe the current context as a moment of dialectical synthesis that comes after a long period of estrangement and division. Their call for unity, reconciliation, consensus—of national healing—is not strategic double-speak; it draws upon a deeply rooted Islamist sense of history in the postcolonial Maghreb. Mehdi Mabrouk, the current Minister of Culture, a sociologist, ex-member of the secular party PDP (Parti Démocrate Progressiste), and now close to Nahda (but not an official member) insists on Malekite heritage, Tunisian patrimony, and genealogy. During the Tunis ReligioWest meeting, Mabrouk stressed the need for unity and synthesis: “We need to find our Immanuel Kant, someone who will reconcile skepticals and dogmatics. We cannot stay in a state of division.” Over the past months, Mabrouk repeatedly dismissed allegations that the Islamist led government plans to engage in a plan of “Islamization of culture.” He condemned those who resort to accusations of takfir to silence artists and artistic production.

Mabrouk did trigger heated debates within the Tunisian and Arab artistic scene when he argued against the inclusion of a couple of sexy Lebanese female artists in the programming of the next festival of Carthage, a national cultural festival that takes place every summer. But, interestingly, he did not justify this decision with reference to Islam, but to good taste and high culture. This is not the “dictature of the proletariat anymore,” he explained half-jokingly; there needs to be a “diktat of good taste.” This combination of nationalism, social conservatism, and elitism resonates with most intellectuals and leaders of Nahda, who reject both miniskirts and salafi outfits as expressions of alienation, romantically longing for the return of the Tunisian traditional jebba (robe). However adamant or undiplomatic the Minister’s statement may seem, it is much closer to, say, the position of the French Ministry of Culture on American movies and pop music, than it is to a theocratic form of cultural repression. Ultimately, among the public, statements of this type are welcomed as subjects of satire and derision, rather than as real sources of concern. When Mabrouk further explained what he meant by the “diktat of good taste,” citing Jauss and Adorno, the young journalist who was interviewing him gently made fun of him, and reminded him of the success of El General, the most famous Tunisian rapper. Here generational divides are as important—if not more so—as the so-called division between Islam and secularism.

For Tunisian Islamists, obstacles to a collective reappropriation of national identity do not come mainly from the West or the North, but from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, or even Egypt and Turkey. While most Nahdawi leaders refrain from engaging in overt critique of salafi groups or of the Islamist politics of neighboring countries, they strongly emphasize the originality and wealth of Tunisian cultural heritage, citing Tunisian Islamist reformers from the early twentieth century such as Tahar Haddad and Mohamed Fadel Ben Achour. In addition to this nationalist emphasis on Tunisia’s own historical resources, Nahdawi intellectuals and leaders call for a comprehensive hermeneutical reformation. This, they argue, is more than a mere issue of random ijtihad: Islamists, in collaboration with their supporters, need to develop a new methodology to reinterpret the past and see the present. “We need more than splinters of ijtihad, more than tinkering with the texts, we need a unified methodology,” argues Sami Braham, an intellectual “compagnon de route”—but not an actual member of Nahda. While most of them more or less openly admit that an integralist view of how Islam can inform political and current events is now passé, they also recognize the need for elaborating an Islamic ethics, not simply as the negation of alternative worldviews, but in positive terms.

The way Nahda leaders and intellectuals define Islam today, as the source of an ethical and cultural project of collective introspection and reformation, echoes the way in which Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce talked about the Christian identity of Europe in 1942. In his essay “Why we cannot help calling ourselves ‘Christian,’” Croce did not argue that “we” are Christians, or that “we” must call ourselves Christians. The phrasing of his title was an acknowledgement that Christianity as an unquestioned set of norms and institutions was dead. But the pamphlet was also an attempt to demonstrate why Christianity could still have something to say to, and about, Europe. Christianity here was not opposed to secularism, atheism, or Islam, but to the fascist and imperial politics of 1942 Europe and to the complicity of the Christian institutional church with this politics. Croce’s “Why we cannot not” is not a demand, but a proposition—almost a plea. It combined hope for a better future with nostalgia for a time when people were “all the more intensely Christian than they [were] free.”

A similar combination of nostalgia and hope can be found in the discourse of contemporary Islamist thinkers and politicians. Longing for a golden age of Tunisian history and culture sustains a hope for emancipation from an era defined by postcolonial politics, authoritarian secularism, and state Islam. No matter how fierce Nahda’s opponents are, there is wide support for Nahda’s message and project, one that can be summarized in the same terms as Croce’s statement: “We cannot not call ourselves ‘Muslims.’” Such a performative statement stems from a realization of the inadequacy of the ideology of shumuliyya (integralism) to Tunisian society, but also from the conviction that Islam still has something to say about that society. The reference to Islam and the Muslim appellation are indeed polysemous, and may appear as empty signifiers to many. But this is precisely what defines Nahda’s project; the reference to Islam is conceived as constraining, performative, and self-reflective, rather than as imposed by some external force or institution. Only through this reference to Islam, Nahdawi argue, will Tunisians be able to re-appropriate a sense of their own history. Ultimately, what matters is retrieving control of their history, more than adopting Islamically-correct ways of being and governing. “Our existence depends on God,” writes Gianni Vattimo, “because here and now we can’t speak our language nor live our historicity without answering to the message that the bible has transmitted to us.” Ajmi Lourimi, an admirer of Vattimo, says something similar when he insists on the need for Tunisians to regain a consciousness of their history. The reference to God and Islam matters primarily as the enabler of “our” existence, “here and now.”

Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christian.”

One of the key words in the religious freedom lexicon in the United States has been “establishment,” generated by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”; Establishment has become the base criterion by which the possibility of religious freedom has been measured. Discussing the relationship between these two concepts has become something of an intellectual cottage industry, which has been transformed into a national export. Nations that do not espouse the sort of constitutional disestablishment embraced in the US example are often suspect, as is their ability to support any sort of meaningful religious freedom. But disestablishment as a conceptual touchstone and ultimate goal does not translate especially well into other contexts, nor, perhaps, even in the American context. A number of scholars, especially Sullivan, have seriously dented the establishment armor, pointing out that religious establishment has immobilized social institutions like law, preventing them from engaging in creative thinking about religious freedom. Nonetheless, the myth of disestablishment continues to hold sway as the place from which to begin discussions about religious freedom. Further, there is some evidence to suggest that religious establishment, defined in US terms, has created space in some jurisdictions for religious minorities in public discourse. And, equally important, it has created space for the non-believers, atheists, agnostics, humanists, and the indifferent. The UK provides perhaps the best example of this, although the situation there is informed by historical and global confluences and tensions over who has a voice that are too complex to review here.

My argument is not simply for a critical assessment of whether or not establishment exists, but for a shift in analytical focus from the constitutional discourse on establishment and its attendant discussion of church-state relations to one that begins with different assumptions and questions. If the state is always assumed to have a relationship with religion in one form or another it might then be possible to move out of the binary of establishment-disestablishment, which would in turn shift the focus to mapping the contours of the myriad and dynamic ways in which that relationship works. It might then also be possible to step away from the freedom-disestablishment association that stifles critical and creative analysis. This in turn could prompt a more sophisticated treatment of power that would embrace a relational understanding of power relations rather than a narrowly hierarchical one. Although it might be objected that an assumption of a relationship goes too far, evidence from a number of liberal Western democracies suggests that this sort of acknowledgement is realistic and accurate.

An example of the type of analytical shift in direction being suggested is illustrated by the work of James Beckford in “The Return of Public Religion? A Critical Assessment of a Popular Claim.” In this article Beckford reviews the relationship between the British state and organized religion. He reflects on the often heard yet contradictory statements that religion is enjoying a resurgence in the public sphere and that religion is systematically excluded from public life. Beckford addresses this contradiction by pointing out that the state, political society, and civil society have never been neatly divided in Britain. He then outlines the British government’s strategy for engaging with religion as a strategy for both blurring the line between state and civil society, and for managing religious and ethnic diversity. He doesn’t use the word “establishment” or “religious freedom” once in his article, and only a couple of times specifically mentions “church-state” relations. Yet the analysis is rich in insight in terms of the ways in which religion, spirituality, state, public, and private are layered through each other. Beckford also highlights the relational rather than hierarchical nature of these engagements.

It might be useful to complicate the discussion about religious freedom, then, by embracing two assumptions: first, that religious freedom means different things in different contexts, and thus an interesting analytical launching place might be engaging in an exploration of how (or whether) religious freedom is being used and by whom, rather than whether a state has an established religion; and second, that all states have a relationship with religion(s) and that it is not, in fact, always possible to make clear distinctions between the state and civil society in the first place. What emerges as being important, then, is the exploration of the nature of that relationship, the framing of interests, and the ways in which interests collude or clash. Does this mean that an analysis of (dis)establishment is never relevant or should be completely displaced from discussions of religious freedom? Not necessarily, but decentering establishment can yield some fruitful results. To illustrate, I’ll draw on a Canadian example.

Is there a religious establishment in Canada? Yes and no. The constitution does not explicitly address establishment, but instead guarantees religious freedom in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the preamble to the Charter states: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” and in Section 29 recognition is given to the historic compromise that supports state funding for Protestant schools in Québec and Roman Catholic schools in Ontario. Public discussions of religion sometimes casually mention that “we have separation of church and state” in Canada, even though this is not constitutionally true, and, in fact, evidence from the constitution itself as already noted would support the opposite conclusion. David Martin has argued that there is a shadow establishment, and others have suggested similar conclusions. I have argued that there exists a Christian hegemony, which is embedded in social institutions and which shapes not only the ways that religion is imagined, but also the construction of nation, values, citizenship, conceptual drivers like multiculturalism, and Othering discourse.

As Beckford argues is the case in Britain, in Canada too the divisions have never been clear between state and civil society. The services of religious organizations were called upon by the state, for example, to deliver schooling to aboriginal children. This was a collaboration that met the needs of both religion and state, the former to save the souls or missionize those they viewed as being uncivilized and in need of being saved, the latter to civilize and nation-build. Does disestablishment make sense in the Canadian context? Not really. The ongoing relationship between the state and religion, and their close intertwining to the point of being indistinguishable mean that religion is so embedded in the social structure and institutions of this nation that it is impossible to untangle them from each other. Therefore, any claim to disestablishment ignores the historically embedded power relations that shape contemporary developments. One of those developments has been the decision by the Canadian government to establish an office of religious freedom.

In its election platform released in April 2011 the Conservative Party announced that it would pursue the establishment of an office of religious freedom. In the June 2011 Throne Speech the (by then) conservative majority government announced that it was indeed establishing such an office. On October 3, 2011, the government held its first consultation meeting about the office. Subsequently the government came under criticism, primarily for its limited, conservative-Christian-heavy consultation process and for the suspicion that the office would be primarily aimed at securing and protecting Christian missionizing. Several things are of interest for the purposes of this discussion: first, one of the 6 people consulted was Thomas Farr, who was the first director of the US International Office of Religious Freedom; second, through ministers’ speeches the government has consistently linked democracy and religious freedom, stating that “The long history of humanity has proven that religious freedom and democratic freedom are inseparable.” Finally, both establishment and disestablishment regimes (Canada being the former, the US the latter) have been able to support the idea of an office of religious freedom. In the Canadian context the accusation that the inclusion of an office of religious freedom violated the principle of separation of church and state was countered with the fact that Canada does not, in fact, have a separation of church and state and that this idea is imported from the US. In the US, with its official disestablishment, the office of religious freedom has been justified as an expression of the commitment to this ideal. It is clear that establishment, quasi-establishment, or disestablishment are of little relevance in this. The more telling discussion relates to how religious freedom is being defined, by whom, and for what purposes. Preliminary descriptions of the Canadian office, for example, state that the office will “monitor religious freedom around the world, to promote religious freedom as a key objective of Canadian foreign policy, and to advance policies and programs that support religious freedom.” But it remains unclear what exactly this means: Will the office of religious freedom concern itself with Latter-day Saints who proselytize globally? Will it worry about Jehovah’s Witnesses forced into military service in South Korea? Will the office of religious freedom worry about Muslims in Switzerland who cannot build minarets, or Muslim women in France who cannot wear the niqab? Or will it concern itself with matters closer to home, like niqab-wearing women in Canada who must strip off their face coverings to take the oath of citizenship? Whose religious freedom will be defended and where?

Finally, while a critical analysis of the various ways in which religious freedom is deployed is important, equally crucial is suspicion about the ways in which religion is constructed by majorities as “culture,” thus displacing discussions about religion and religious freedom altogether. The 2011 Lautsi and Others v. Italy decision in the European Court of Human Rights, developments in the Canadian province of Québec, and case law in both the US and Canada serve to make the point. In Lautsi, a crucifix and Roman Catholicism were transformed in arguments by the Italian state from religious symbol and religion to cultural symbol and universal values. Thus, the crucifix in an Italian classroom wall was not ‘religious’ but ‘cultural’ and part of Italian heritage. A similar sleight of hand occurs in the Canadian province of Québec when the Bouchard Taylor Commission Report recommended that the crucifix be removed from the Salon Blue, which is the provincial legislature. The day the report was issued the National Assembly voted unanimously to keep the crucifix, stating that it was an important symbol of Québec’s heritage; Québec historically has had a Roman Catholic hegemony. Early post-Charter Sunday closing cases in Canada engaged in similar transformative exercises, most notably in R v. Edwards Books and Art Ltd., when the Supreme Court of Canada declared that Sunday as a day of rest had nothing to do with Christianity. A similar transformation of religion to culture occurs in the United States, perhaps most famously in the Lynch v. Donnelly case.

By constructing the practices of religious majorities as culture rather than as religion they become a benign presence in the face of the (dangerous, offensive, alien) religious practices of the Other or of the (also dangerous) godless atheist. By pushing past establishment frameworks and exploring the ways that particular religious traditions/practices/beliefs are woven though social institutions and practices, a richer exploration of religious diversity and religious freedom becomes possible.