Keeping Religion in the Closet: How Legible Religion Shapes Multi-Faith Spaces

This dissertation focuses on multi-faith spaces and the tendencies in approaching religion that lie behind them. It argues that an overarching conceptual framework exists that conditions these tendencies, and which is described in the dissertation as “legible religion.” Such a framework results from the broader administrative attempts to make different phenomena “legible,” that is, simplified and reduced only to the features relevant from the administrative perspective. Legible religion is a framework that reduces the phenomena labeled “religious” for administrative purposes and promotes two central administrative tendencies in approaching religion: religion as a potential threat, with attempts to control it and limit it to the preferred types of religiosity; and religion as a utility, with attempts to functionally utilize its resources. Indifference is a third approach regarding those religions that were readapted to the administrative preference. The dissertation discusses this framework in three parts. Part 1 discusses its theoretical aspects: the prerequisites, the narratives that established it and allowed it to function (secularization and the “return of religion”), and their policy implementations (secularism and its re-adaptation to increasing diversity). Part 2 discusses how the normative assumptions described in part 1 are implemented in the practice of multi-faith spaces. It shows that the perception of multi-faith spaces is as much conditioned by the normative assumptions inherent in their materiality as by their context and the imposition of meaning by the beholders. Part 3 discusses the implication of the legible religion framework. It argues that such a framework is problematic because it impacts the vitality of the affected phenomena by depriving them of features that make them valuable for non-administrative stakeholders. In response, it argues that subsidiarity, conflict re-conceptualization, and encounter may provide three fruitful directions to pursue in search of solutions to the highlighted problems.

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