Governing Religious Diversity in Theory and Practice: a case study of the burial domain in France, the Netherlands and Norway.

This dissertation inquires how three secular states: France, the Netherlands and Norway give form to religious diversity in the burial domain in a general sense and burial for Muslims in particular. All three countries subscribe to religious freedom of be lief and practice on the graveyard. Yet, Islamic sections on a public graveyard and Muslim graveyards are illegal in France, they are a legal right in the Netherlands and Norwegian law allows for confessional graveyards, yet it is silent about the possibi lity of Islamic sections. Why? Taking a "grounded approach"; focusing on what governments on all levels actually, and not only legally, "do to religion", the project investigates the (normative) reasoning about state and church in relation to cemeteries at the national level, as well as the reasoning of a variety of non-state actors; graveyard owners, municipal officials and burial agents, at the municipal level. This juxtaposition of national theory/ideology versus local informal practice, results in t hree, separate, yet interrelated, arguments. 1) Our academic and political theorizing about secularism and religion in the public sphere is often too focused on formal constitutional models, ignoring the informal accommodations that occurs by non-state ac tors. Explaining variation in the ways in which these countries accommodate religious needs on the graveyard in terms of a historical institutional state church legacy is therefore a good, yet only partial explanation, while emphasizing a different effect when des-aggregating the legal sphere from local practice. 2) Normatively, a contextual approach to questions of religious governance is to be preferred over strict principled reasoning. 3) Conceptually, framing question of religious governance in terms of secularism is unhelpful, prescriptively, as well as for descriptive purposes, in contexts where people do not actively use the term (and it has no historical or constitutional reality).