Secularism or Democracy?

"Established institutions and policies of dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states are increasingly under pressure. Practical politics and political theory is caught in a trap: a fully secularized state based on an idealized version of American denominationalism or French republicanism with strict separation of state and politics from privatised religions, versus neo-corporatist or 'pillarized' regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religions. This book takes a conceptual, theoretical and practical approach to problems of governance of religious diversity. Drawing from diverse areas of scholarship, this work combines moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology and anthropology of religious and comparative institutionalism. From a multi-disciplinary, Bader thus proposes associative democracy - a moderately libertarian, flexible version of democratic institutional pluralism - are introduced and scrutinized whether they can serve as the plausible third way overcoming the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models in theory and practice."--Jacket.