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Contemporary legal and political discourse on religious liberty makes a number of distinctive normative claims. Simultaneously invoking notions of neutrality, secularity, freedom, and right, the claim is to have located a vantage point of universality somehow above or independent of the contingencies and disorder of politics, culture, religion and, indeed, of history itself. As the essays in this section show, however, it is a mistake to conceive of religious liberty as a single, stable principle existing outside of culture, spatial geographies, or power relations. Rather, religious liberty is better understood as a fractious, polyvalent concept unfolding through divergent histories in differing political orders. Each of these essays illuminates how different historical trajectories and genealogies coexist within the broad language of religious liberty, each submerging and reemerging in at times surprising ways to refract contemporary political conflicts and struggles.
The most striking aspect common to the essays is the kind of politics and political subjectivity that emerges when religious liberty is understood and contested as a matter of right. The idea of a right to religious freedom is in fact quite distinct from genealogies premised on the religious, political, and juridical casuistries spawned in the context of national religious settlements. The relation between “the state” and “religion” is usually cast as a political matter of negotiation and contestation among state actors and institutions and existing religious communities, groups, and traditions. But the notion of “a right” implies a legal/moral relation between the state and an individual legal subject as rights holder, as well as a background justification not only of the right itself but its distinctive function of holding others to correlative duties.
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