Accommodating transnational religious diversity: Liberal secularisms, multiculturalized secularism and transnational religion

This paper examines competing liberal and multiculturalist theories on the state’s recognition of religion to address the accommodation of transnational religious diversity in the liberal democratic context. The three liberal theories examined include nonestablishment, minimal secularism, and liberal establishment. While coherent within liberal political thought, these theories encounter persistent limitations when addressing the complex realities of transnational religious diversity. The Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM) provides a necessary but insufficient corrective by emphasizing multicultural citizenship, multiculturalized secularism, and the recognition of religion as a public good. This paper, however, argues that both liberal secularisms and the BSM overlook the significant role that transnationalism plays in shaping religious identities and belongings. This neglect of transnational dimensions of religious diversity undermines their ability to address the lived realities of cross-nationally connected religious communities. Accommodating transnational religious diversity involves more than domestic struggle for recognition, it also encompasses transnational religious identities, engagements and attachments that shape contemporary religious minority subjectivities. The paper offers a critical multiculturalist intervention that expands BSM’s framework to include the role of transnational religion in liberal democratic contexts, which retains BSM’s strengths while transcending its nation-state-bound limitations.