How Religious Freedom Makes Religion

Religious freedom has emerged in recent years as a pivotal topic for the study of religion. It is also the subject of heated debates within many countries and among human rights advocates globally, where competing groups advance radically different ideas about how religious freedom operates and what it protects. While for marginalized and minority communities, this freedom can provide important avenues of appeal, at the same time, governing regimes of religious freedom have most often served the interests of those in power and opened up new channels of coercion by the state.

This conversation with Tisa Wenger, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, starts with the question of how religious freedom talk functions to shape the category of religion and to transform what counts as religious in the modern world. Using Wenger’s ethnographic and historical research on the Pueblo Indians, we discuss how local, national, and international regimes of religious freedom have shaped (or even produced) new religious formations, ways of being religious, norms of good vs. bad religion, or distinctions between the religious and the secular. In short, how has religious freedom (re)produced religion and its others in the modern world?