Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2025
What role and place, if any, religion should have in public, especially in public institutions, is a vexed issue. Secularists of a variety of persuasions often see religion as something that can and should be separated from politics and public life. This might be because they see it as simply belonging to a different realm, one more personal and private, more other-worldly than this-here-and-now-worldly. Stronger versions may even see religion's presence in public life as inherently destabilizing, even dangerous, on the view that religion is particularly divisive, or even prone to intolerance and violence. Multiculturalists, or at least some multiculturalists, take a different view and emphasize the public good of religion and state-religion connections. Nevertheless, the argument was made in Chapter 3 that for multiculturalists there is a good deal of ambiguity about how religion relates to categories of ethnicity, and that multiculturalism should consider religion as a separate category from ethnicity, not because the two don't overlap in important ways but because conflating them obscures significant considerations and issues. This chapter picks up where Chapter 3 left off. It further elaborates the framework of post-multicultural recognition and develops it further with a focus on the vertical dimension and on dignity and religious freedoms. It introduces the feature of differentiation to the framework and how this relates to support for and interference in religious groups as part of their recognition. This chapter explores the significance of this for thinking about the inclusion and accommodation of religion in the public sphere; that is, in the law and public institutions.
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