State Norms, Religious Norms, and Claims of Plural Normativity under Democratic Constitutions

Abstract

Contemporary democracies are open to cultural and religious diversity, but encounter problems when prevailing values and norms are questioned in the name of religious or cultural beliefs and practices. In many Western liberal democracies, legal pluralism is high on the agenda of law and religion scholars because State centred legality fails to do justice to the complexity of social and normative interactions. Legal pluralism provides the intellectual tools for understanding how cultural and religious identities and norms are shaped in different sectors of society. Nonetheless, legal pluralism provides no direct and clear answer to the question of how social order and equality can be upheld under democratic constitutions. Pluralism alone does not guarantee that coexistence among people who live their lives in different groups can be sustained by prosocial attitudes, rather than undermined by conflict. Social psychology, cultural anthropology, and political science investigate how those attitudes can be nurtured. This chapter argues that to understand and manage the tensions generated by the intersection of state norms and religious norms, the law should also make use of the insights provided by these disciplines on human behaviour in society.