Religion and Legal Spaces--In Gods we Trust; in the Church we Trust, but need to Verify

The relationship between religion and law is inherently unstable and ambivalent.1 Religion professes faith in God’s (or some other higher being’s) law rather than man’s. Religions want the protection of the law for their manifestations and beliefs and for their social and institutional existence. However, they resist any incursion by the laws into areas where their beliefs and decisions are assessed for compatibility with national or international secular norms. Particular difficulties are created if courts try to assess religious doctrines and beliefs or subject them to secular standards of rationality, proportionality and non-discrimination.2 Thus, religions are always in a troublesome dialectical relationship with the law. Major judicial decisions can signal the ways in which that relationship is evolving.3 In particular, they can do so by revealing whether the law makes spaces to account for the forces of religion and how those spaces operate and interact with...

Ambivalence · Dialectic · Epistemology · Faith · Islam · Political science · Rationality · Religious Law · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Freedom and Discrimination · Social Psychology