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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd : Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion . (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2015. Pp. 200.)
Book Reviews
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's Beyond Religious Freedom makes the case that promotion of tolerance, interreligious dialogue, and the institutionalization of religious minority rights are not pure and unalloyed goods. They can obscure forms of marginalization and the repression of particular individual and group identities. Moreover, when wedded to, and promoted by, powers of a modern, Western machstaat, they quickly ramify into subtle forms of domination and the interests of state building. Indeed, Hurd diagnoses precisely these dynamics in the United States' International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, ensuing work by the Office of International Religious Freedom, efforts by USAID to export moderate religion, and interventionist uses of military chaplains, among numerous other examples. The positive categories liberal states deploy in determining what counts as "religion" and which religious groups warrant protection (and which must be repressed) leave some identities silenced or altogether anomalous occluded "nonreligious" others who end up unrecognized and outside the sphere of the protections of religious liberty. Nearly as insidious, though less conspicuous, are the scholars of religion who, by accepting legally and academically authorized definitions of religion (which place a premium on "belief" as a hallmark of religiousness and rely on institutional and elite accounts of religion) contribute to the above dynamics of occlusion and domination (13). This is a danger especially for scholars who focus on "the realization of religious freedom, religious peacemaking, religious tolerance, interfaith understandings, and so on" (118).
Hurd's book offers important cautions and critical interventions in all these regards, though these are not entirely novel. To her credit, Hurd herself has been, among several others, at the helm of a research program now sometimes referred to as "secularism studies." This program has emerged largely in the wake of the widely influential work of the anthropologist Talal Asad and his distinctive appropriation of Michel Foucault's writings (e.g., Formations of the Secular [Stanford University Press, 2003]). This well-organized, Henry R. Luce Foundation-funded research program has produced genealogies of how manifestations of religion and secularization came to be seemingly...