Religion or Belief is essentially an extended report on the findings of large research surveys and fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 on discrimination and equality in England and Wales that were funded by the AHRC and ESRC. The research questions were focused on the extent and character of discrimination and unfair treatment on grounds of religion or belief, and also looked critically at the extent to which the law should be involved in this area and in what context. To conduct this assessment of the role of law, the research project examined 130 relevant legal cases where issues concerning discrimination were involved. The research also makes useful comparisons with an earlier study commissioned by the Home Office in 1999‒2001 on religious discrimination in England and Wales, which had been conducted by the University of Derby. The construction of the project and the analysis of the data were sensitive to the difficulty of arriving at a valid definition of ‘religion’ and to the problem that in actual examples of discrimination it is virtually impossible to separate out ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’. The research made perfectly sensible decisions about these two difficulties. Thus, religious identity was defined in terms of self-definition and the mix of religion and identity was approached through the notion of ‘intersectionality’ to describe how various dimensions of oppression tend inevitably to be interconnected. People are often discriminated against simultaneously on a various dimensions of ethnicity: religion, age, gender and so on. These distinctive traits are referred to as ‘protected characteristics’ (in Chapter 4) which in law have traditionally included discrimination on grounds of sex, age and race. These characteristics have expanded in British law on a piecemeal basis as new qualities have been recognised to embrace sexual orientation, religion or belief and gender reassignment. With this broad empirical basis, coverage of legal concepts and theoretical sensitivity to key concepts such as religion, discrimination and legal developments, Religion or Belief offers by far the most satisfactory analysis of the extent of and legal responses to discrimination in Britain over the last decade, and as such it is a major resource for social scientists, lawyers and for those responsible for social policy.

British society is of course no stranger to discrimination on the basis of religion. One consequence of the Protestant Reformation in England was to intensify conflicts over belief. What followed was the separation of church and state, the privatisation of religion and the origins of secularisation in the so-called Westphalian solution to the wars of religion in the doctrine of cujus region, ejus religio which basically meant that the monarchs would decide which religion was acceptable as legitimate in the realm. Dissenting belief was seen as a threat to the state and hence the struggle for religious liberty was a persistent theme in British political culture in the ensuing centuries. Given the cultural hegemony of the Anglican establishment, both Roman Catholics and Jews have been targets of discrimination and suffered civil disabilities as a result. In recent time, conflicts in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants were the occasion for considerable legislative change such as the Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act of 1976 and the Prevention of Incitement to Hatred Act (Northern Ireland) of 1970. From the 1980s onwards, Muslims arriving primarily from South Asia have experienced discrimination and a new term – Islamophobia – entered into the popular vocabulary in the late 1990s. The controversy over The Satanic Verses in 1988 deeply divided public opinion, but in retrospect served to demonstrate that laws surrounding blasphemy afforded much greater protection for the Christian religion than any other tradition and reinforced the belief among Muslims that they were disadvantaged as British citizens.

The major changes in this social and cultural landscape were brought about by social transformations – migration, multiculturalism and attendant social diversity – but perhaps more significant were developments in the law, namely the impact of human rights legislation on Britain, European Union laws and by the Equality Act of 2006 and then by the Equality Act of 2010. Another landmark development was the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. However, the legislative momentum came at first not from a concern for religious issues but from equality legislation relating to women's rights and racial discrimination. Contemporary interest in religion and belief was a by-product of the general broadening of equality legislation.

The principal findings of this research are that ‘there is evidence that over the past decade there has, in general, been a reduction in the reported experience of unfair treatment on the basis of religion or belief’, and where unfair treatment persists it is ‘occasional rather than frequent’ resulting from the ‘attitudes and behavior of individuals rather than from the policies of organizations’ (p. 208). Another important finding is that in education there is a more inclusive treatment of the diversity of religions, and secondly that relations between religious groups and organisations has improved since 2001. Perhaps one negative finding is that respondents do not support equal treatment as such and a ‘substantial proportion of respondents from religious organisations clearly favour exemptions from equality laws on matters of gender, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation and religion or belief itself’ (p. 213). This finding rather confirms the view of critics that modern enthusiasm for defending cultural and religious differences undermines equality as a fundamental value of democracies

While these largely domestic improvements in the legislative framework reinforcing the protection of individuals and groups from discrimination are to be welcome, the international environment has had adverse effects. Although the sub-title of this volume is Britain in Global Contexts, there is in fact little serious discussion of the negative consequences of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombings in London and Madrid, or the Danish cartoon incident. These international crises have clearly continued to fuel domestic expressions of Islamophobia and fear of ‘creeping Shari'a’.

Finally, this excellent report is based on the assumption that legislation is ultimately the best guarantee of tolerance (or at least the absence of systematic discrimination), but this position is radically challenged by the so-called ‘Boeckenforde Paradox’ which states that, while a liberal secular state rests ultimately on liberal democratic values in civil society, the modern state cannot produce those values by the usual means at its disposal, namely those relating to ‘law and order’. We can only hope that the recent British legislative experience can disprove the paradox.