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This essay describes the historic ideals of Christian higher education, the complex history of church‐related higher education in America, and the diversity of approaches that exist today. Rejecting a simplistic distinction between secular and religious higher education, the Jacobsens discuss the different roles that religious advocacy and religious neutrality can play at schools rooted in different religious traditions. The notion of tradition‐enhanced learning is used to describe the variety of ways that church‐related colleges and universities incorporate religion into their work as educational institutions.

In March 2008, Britain's Christian Research organization disseminated a study that made the following projection: By 2020, the number of Catholics attending Sunday mass will have been surpassed by the number of Muslims worshiping in mosques in Britain. This study came out in the middle of growing tensions about the place of Muslims in British society and fanned some alarmist flames about the changing face of Britain. This backlash was not far off the heels of a lecture given at the Royal Courts of Justice, in February 2008, by Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which also ruffled British feathers. He suggested that British Muslims be allowed to live freely under the shari'a law, signaling that there is something more than just the official British legal system alone. This speech not only highlights the significance of legal pluralism; it also raises the question of what it means to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice. This chapter discusses how some Muslim intellectuals have dealt with the question of the religious neutrality of the liberal state. It examines the question raised by official recognition of a shari'a council in Britain: To what extent should religious identity and practice be accommodated under a liberal legal framework? The chapter explores the related questions of power and representation at this significant site, where the diaspora intersects with the national spaces that it continually negotiates.

Over the last few decades, there have been three competing views of the meaning of the Establishment Clause held by members of the Supreme Court. One, favored by the liberal justices, is that the Establishment Clause should be understood as creating a wall separating church and state. An alternative view, favored by the conservative justices, is that there should be “accommodation” between religion and government. Under this view, the government violates the Establishment Clause only if it creates a church, coerces religious participation, or discriminates among religions in giving financial benefits. A third position is that the government acts unconstitutionally if it endorses religion or a specific religion. The chapter argues that separation is the best view of the Establishment Clause and applies this to prayers at government activities, religious symbols on government property, and government aid to religious institutions.

This chapter focuses on a series of conflicts between Burmese and Europeans over demonstrations of respect that encoded broader issues of subordination and the politics of colonial difference, with particular emphasis on the “shoe question” and shikho in schools. It explores how Burmese Buddhists used the changing terms of official religious neutrality to stake claims to autonomy. It also considers how the issue of what counted as religion and religious practice changed over twenty years through clashes across the colonial divide. It shows how these conflicts became a means to realign the status of the moral community and create space for contingent autonomy in relation to colonial power. It argues that the ambiguity of the category of religion enabled both Burmese Buddhists and colonial actors to actively contest “religion” as a means of promoting or resisting the power of the state and the cultural projects of colonialism.

The question of what religious practices modern democracies should accommodate is urgent and widely discussed. This essay provides a framework for dealing with accommodation issues in pluralistic societies. It does this in part through examining Kevin Vallier’s Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, which defends an accommodationist liberalism. His view is more permissive than this chapter’s both in accommodationist policy and on some broad normative questions; for example, this chapter gives a larger role to natural reason as a capacity shared by normal human beings and a basis for reasons not dependent on theology or religion. For secular citizens, identifying and appraising natural reasons for lawmaking is valuable both for clarifying their own thinking and communication; for religious citizens, seeking such reasons is also beneficial and need not be unduly burdensome. The essay concludes with applications of the proposed ethics of citizenship to both politics and public education.

This chapter tests the theoretical solution worked out in the previous chapter in relation to Indian religious pluralism. After considering some relevant features of religious pluralism in the Indian context, the chapter presents two of the most influential theories that have tried to accommodate it (Rajeev Bhargava’s and Neera Chandhoke’s). These views, despite their merits in trying to defend a specifically Indian understanding of secularism, are quite demanding and criticizable. The notion of equality they employ is too substantive. Indeed, this egalitarian impulse pushes the role of the state well beyond what PT liberalism requires. The problem is that the effects of the expansion of the state’s powers have not always been conducive to social peace. Thus, the constraints imposed by PT liberalism to the exercise of state power are particularly required in this discourse on secularism.

This chapter explores secularism as a paradoxical principle intertwined with the evolution of the Catholic Church in France. It challenges a common definition of secularism as religious neutrality, arguing that its very guarantee of religious existence and expression, in the name of the freedom of conscience, connects rather than separates state and religion. The chapter shows how the Catholic Church was forced to learn to operate as one religion among many in accordance with the principle of the equality of religions as spelled out in the 1905 Separation, whose one significant effect is that the Catholic Church can no longer legitimately claim special status.