With its increasingly secular and religiously diverse population Australia faces many challenges in determining how the state and religion should interact. Australia is not unique in facing these challenges. States worldwide, including common law countries with shared legal and religious heritages, have also been faced with the question of how the state and religion should relate to one another. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States have all had to grapple with how to manage the state-religion relationship in the present day. This book provides a comprehensive historical review of the interaction of the state and religion in Australia. It brings together multiple examples of areas in which the state and religion interact, and reviews these examples across Australia’s history from settlement through to present day. The book sets this story within a wider theoretical context via an examination of theories of state-religion relationships as well as a comparison with other similar common law jurisdictions. The book demonstrates how the solutions arrived at in Australia is uniquely Australian owing to Australia’s unique legal system, religious demographics and history. However this is just one possible outcome among many that have been tried in common law liberal democracies.

"The Australian Constitution contains no guarantee of freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. Indeed, it contains very few provisions dealing with rights — in essence, it is a Constitution that confines itself mainly to prescribing a framework for federal government, setting out the various powers of government and limiting them as between federal and state governments and the three branches of government without attempting to define the rights of citizens except in minor respects. […] Whether Australia should have a national bill of rights has been a controversial issue for quite some time. This is despite the fact that Australia has acceded to the ICCPR, as well as the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, thereby accepting an international obligation to bring Australian law into line with the ICCPR, an obligation that Australia has not discharged. Australia is the only country in the Western world without a national bill of rights.4 The chapters that follow in this book debate the situation in Australia and in various other Western jurisdictions.' From Foreword by The Hon Sir Anthony Mason AC KBE: Human Rights and Courts

Prevailing stories about law and religion place great faith in the capacity of legal multiculturalism, rights-based toleration, and conceptions of the secular to manage issues raised by religious difference. Yet the relationship between law and religion consistently proves more fraught than such accounts suggest. In Law’s Religion, Benjamin L. Berger knocks law from its perch above culture, arguing that liberal constitutionalism is an aspect of, not an answer to, the challenges of cultural pluralism. Berger urges an approach to the study of law and religion that focuses on the experience of law as a potent cultural force. Based on a close reading of Canadian jurisprudence, but relevant to all liberal legal orders, this book explores the nature and limits of legal tolerance and shows how constitutional law’s understanding of religion shapes religious freedom. Rather than calling for legal reform, Law’s Religion invites us to rethink the ethics, virtues, and practices of adjudication in matters of religious difference.

The book is unique in bringing together leading scholars and respected religious leaders to address contemporary issues in the relationship of law, religion and the state. The book highlights the interaction between secular law and religion with particular attention being given to the implications for law and society, religious tolerance and freedom. The book focuses on the practical and topical issues that have arisen in recent years in Australia. As one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, a pioneer of multicutural policies in immigration and social justice, Australia is a revealing site for contemporary studies in a world afraid of immigration and terrorism., issues that are affecting much of the globe.

Discussion of the way in which law engages with religious difference often takes place within the context of a single jurisdiction. Religion and Law: An Introduction, presents a comprehensive text for students, drawing on examples from across key Anglophone jurisdictions – the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, as well as international law, to explore a broad range of issues. Aimed at a non-legal readership, this book introduces the use of legal sources and focuses on factual situations as much as legal doctrine. Key issues arising from interaction of the religious individual and the State are discussed, as well as the religious organisation or community and the State. The interaction is explored through case studies of areas as diverse as the legal regulation of religious drug use, sacred spaces and sacred places, and claims of clergy misconduct. Taking a broad, non-jurisdictional approach to the key issues, in particular providing insights differing from the dominant US experiences and paradigms, this student-friendly textbook includes a clearly structured bibliography and clear guidance on how to approach relevant legal materials.

In recent years, law and religion scholarship in Canada has grown significantly. This distinctive collection of 18 papers addresses, from a variety of angles, the jurisdiction and the limits of law ¿ an important but often overlooked aspect of settling the boundaries of church and state, religion and law. The volume draws the insights of 19 authoritative contributors of diverse background and examines changes in the role and meaning of religion in society, the dimensions of law and religion and finally, the conflicts between freedom of religion and other freedoms as looked upon as fundamental rights of a liberal society.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this convenient resource provides systematic information on how Australia deals with the role religion plays or can play in society, the legal status of religious communities and institutions, and the legal interaction among religion, culture, education, and media. After a general introduction describing the social and historical background, the book goes on to explain the legal framework in which religion is approached. Coverage proceeds from the principle of religious freedom through the rights and contractual obligations of religious communities; international, transnational, and regional law effects; and the legal parameters affecting the influence of religion in politics and public life. Also covered are legal positions on religion in such specific fields as church financing, labour and employment, and matrimonial and family law. A clear and comprehensive overview of relevant legislation and legal doctrine make the book an invaluable reference source and very useful guide. Succinct and practical, this book will prove to be of great value to practitioners in the myriad instances where a law-related religious interest arises in Australia. Academics and researchers will appreciate its value as a thorough but concise treatment of the legal aspects of diversity and multiculturalism in which religion plays such an important part.

When the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, the first of its fundamental freedoms seemed less significant and less interesting than many of its other rights. However, the Salman Rushdie affair, the 9/11 attacks, and later the publication of the "Danish Cartoons" helped to move religion or religious difference to the forefront of public consciousness. These events seemed to confirm that religion, or at least particular religions, represented a threat to the values of liberal-democratic society. Religious freedom issues that may have been minor and easily resolved "on the ground" were increasingly seen through this lens of intractable conflict, and as opening the door to a broader threat to Western democracy. In Canada, anxiety about religion has been far less acute than in Europe or in the United States. Nevertheless, concern about the character of religion has shaped the public reaction to religious diversity and freedom. This has been most powerfully so in Quebec where, as in Europe, national identity remains a concern, and the political role of the Catholic church in the recent past has caused many to be wary of the visibility of religion in the public sphere. The book reviews the basic history of religious freedom in Canada; looks at state support for religion, including the place of religious practices and symbols in public institutions and the role of religious values in public decision making; the restriction or accommodation of religious practices by state action; religious restriction in particular contexts; state support for religious schools; freedom of religion in the context of the family, and in particular, the parent-child relationship; and freedom of conscience component of section 2(a)

This book draws together leaders in science, the health sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences to investigate the role of religion, its meaning and relevance, for their area of specialization. It provides a much-needed fresh perspective on the way in which religion operates within the modern, neo-liberal world. The book approaches the topic by way of a critical engagement between religion, broadly defined, and the individual disciplines in which each of the contributors is expert. Rather than simply taking the dogmatic position that religion offers something to every possible discipline, each of the chapters in this collection addresses the question: is there something that religion can offer to the discipline in question? That is the value of the book – it takes a truly critical stance on the place of religion in contemporary society.

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.