This Article introduces the German Law Journal’s Special Issue on “Solidarity in Diversity? State Responses to Religious Diversity in Liberal and Non-Liberal Perspectives”. The major countries in comparative focus are Germany and Singapore, both self-avowedly secular countries that face the challenge of religious diversity: Singapore, from inception, and Germany, through more recent developments. A key issue the Article raises concerns liberal approaches towards regulating religion; it argues that the liberal model, taking Germany as an example, may serve as a productive starting point for comparative analysis, as the liberal focus on individual religious freedom impacts managing religious diversity, shapes national cultural identity, models of secularism and social solidarity. This is compared with non-liberal approaches, as exemplified in Singapore practice, where a more communitarian outlook underpin more interventionist approaches whereby public interests and the common good tend to be prioritized over individual freedom. The comparative angles offered in this Special Issue is furthermore buttressed in several articles in this Special Issue that make comparisons to other jurisdictions-United States and Canada. This introductory Article offers a brief overview to the various contributions to this Special Issue and identifies unifying themes.

This Article focuses on the extent to which the different legal approaches of Germany and Singapore to religious diversity were shaped by history. It first analyzes the development in Germany and describes four phases of the development of the law on the relationship between church and state. Starting with the consequences of reformation, it shows that—for centuries—the relationship between denominations had been the crucial matter of this body of law. Only later, the law dealt with conflicts between religion and atheism. This Article then presents the fundamental rights approach of the Basic Law and examines it against the backdrop of the historical development and recent challenges. Second, this Article offers a historical account of Singapore’s attempts at regulating and managing religious diversity. It starts with the establishment of a British trading post on the island in 1819 and runs up to the present day. As a result of mass migration in its early years, Singapore was to become, in the twentieth century, one of the most religiously and culturally diverse nations in the world. This Article shows that Singapore has sought to regulate and manage the various religious groups through a combination of legislation and state policy.

Religious harmony is an idea more commonly invoked in Asian countries, many of which are closely associated with non-individualistic or non-liberal approaches to law, ethics, and politics, than in Europe. As a constitutional norm, religious harmony not only directs state action involving the management of religious diversity but also has the potential to legitimate state action. As a result, harmony, including its subspecies of religious harmony, could be and has been criticized for imposing and legitimating an ideology of control over society, particularly over marginalized groups. While this is the case, I argue in this Article that religious harmony can mean many things and can be used in a myriad of ways that go beyond simply as a tool for state control. Religious harmony is not only a legal/constitutional principle, but has also become internalized as a social norm. Its regulating function extends to inter group relations and further grounds group demands on the state, thus imposing state obligations. To draw out the multiple and complex dimensions of religious harmony as a constitutional principle and social norm, I use Singapore, a self-avowed non-liberal communitarian state, as the primary case study in this Article.

Both Canada and Singapore express support for—and have the reality of being—multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious; and both jurisdictions have an avowed commitment to the freedom of religion. Yet, this commitment expresses itself in different ways in these two contexts. Although both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Singaporean Constitution guarantee the freedom of religion, juridical definitions of what this freedom means may differ quite profoundly.

This Article explores and analyzes these two different environments that nonetheless share important features. We argue that the approaches of Singapore and Canada do not fall simply into the categories of being “liberal” or “illiberal,” but instead invite reflection and reconsideration on the concepts of pluralism, secularism, and liberalism in interesting ways. This Article thus highlights the significance of contextual factors in understanding the ways in which religious diversity is dealt with, particularly in Canada and Singapore, but also more generally.

This Article seeks to explore the nature, function, source, and content of a constitutional civil religion (CCR) within Singapore’s constitutional experiment in managing the diversity of race and religion and promoting solidarity. CCR is constructed as a strategy to secure social harmony within the world’s most religiously diverse polity, through recognizing an irreducible plurality in ethnic and religious terms, while maintaining an indivisible unity through nurturing bonds of citizen solidarity. This dovetails with the function of the constitution as an instrument of social integration, involving the articulation and regular affirmation of shared community values and aspirations, as well as process and practices—or public rituals—which regulate dispute resolution or conflict management during instances or crises where racial and religious harmony is threatened. A functional approach is taken towards the idea of a civil religion, and the tasks of integration, legitimation, and inspiration it may play within a constitutional order. The nature of civil religion in general, and the sources of CCR in Singapore, as well as its expression as a public ritual in managing religious disharmony disputes is discussed.

This Article explores the contemporary governance of religious diversity in the United States and Germany through the case study of religious education in public schools. The United States and Germany have two very different approaches to teaching religion: The subject does not exist at all in American public schools, while in Germany, confessional religious education is explicitly mandated by the Federal Constitution and is still an integral part of the curriculum in the vast majority of Länder. Yet, both countries have recently been confronted with similar challenges—a growing diversification and politicization of religious identities—which have forced them to rethink the place and role traditionally given to faith in the sphere of public education. The Article thus examines how, and to what extent, the American and German historical models of religious education—and thereby, more broadly, the public governance of religion in both countries—have been transformed by the changes in their religio-political landscapes.

In Article 7, paragraph 3, the German Constitution provides that religious education shall be a part of the curriculum of public school. This is one of the three approaches of dealing with religious education existing today. Originally, religious education as a regular subject at public schools in Germany was only offered by the two Christian Churches—Catholic and Protestant. As the number of Christians decreased and the number of Muslims increased, the demand for Islamic religious education at public schools grew. Therefore, the question arose whether the constitutional law concerning religion is capable of facing the new challenges of religious diversity. This Article tries to answer this question with regard to the introduction of Islamic religious education as a measure of adaptiveness. In the first step, the requirements of Article 7, paragraph 3 of the Constitution posed to religious education will be outlined in order to be able to examine in the second step whether Islamic religious education may be introduced at public schools as a regular subject. In this regard, the issue of the qualification of an umbrella association as a religious society and the constitutionality of the advisory board model will be discussed.

The law on state-church relations is no longer exclusively a national concern of the EU Member States. Despite supposedly strict neutrality clauses in the primary law of the EU and rigid statements—inter alia—by the German Federal Constitutional Court, it is safe to assume the formation of a supranational EU law on religion, which also touches upon the status of the churches and religious associations. This becomes obvious when state-church relations in Europe are reconstructed as a double conflict of laws that comprises interlocked conflicts between ecclesiastical law and worldly law, as well as between EU law and national law. Within the triangular relationship of these different legal spheres, EU law steers state-church relations towards the non-discrimination principle. The controversy in German law on religion between the proponents of a collective, institutionalist understanding (classic “Staatskirchenrecht”) and advocates of a rather fundamental rights-centered, individualist reading of the Constitution (“Religionsverfassungsrecht”) hence needs to be reconsidered. EU law calls for including yet a third paradigm into the debate: Equality.

The accommodation of religious personal law systems is an issue that has arisen in many countries with significant Muslim minorities. The types of accommodations can range from direct incorporation into the state legal system to mere recognition of religious tribunals as private organs. Different forms of accommodation raise different types of legal, social, and political issues. Focusing on the case of Singapore, I examine one form of accommodation which entails the direct incorporation of this law regulating marriage, divorce, and inheritance for Muslims into the state system. Administered by the Administration of the Muslim Law Act, 1966, the Muslim law binds Muslims unless they abjure Islam. The resulting pluralistic legal system is deemed necessary to realize the aspirations of and give respect to the Muslim minority community, the majority of whom are constitutionally acknowledged as indigenous to the country. This Article examines the ramifications of this arrangement on the rights and well-being of members of this community in the context of change. It argues that, while giving autonomy to the community to determine its personal law and advancing group accommodation, the arrangement denies individuals the right to their choice of law, a problem exacerbated by traditionalism and the lack of democratic process in this domain. Consequently, the Muslim law pales in comparison to the civil law for non-Muslims. The rise of religious resurgence since the 1970s has but compounded the problem. How the system can accommodate the Muslim personal law without compromising the rights of individual Muslims is also discussed.