Drawing on a rich thread in the Social Science Research Council's “Immanent Frame” blog (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/the-politics-of-religious-freedom), Politics of Religious Freedom offers 27 essays from both veteran and up-and-coming scholars. Pithier than typical articles or chapters, the essays may leave motivated students wanting more but can serve varied research and pedagogical purposes — sparking discussions in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, serving as jumping off points for further research, or introducing Ph.D. students to the short-form essays of public intellectuals. Each co-editor contributed both a chapter and a preface, introducing sections on religion, history, law and politics, and freedom.

A website provides open access case studies to expand on themes in the text, ideal for courses on religion and politics or law (http://politics-of-religious-freedom.berkeley.edu/case-studies). The case studies include disputes over a religious site in Ayodhya, India, the Jews' Free School in the United Kingdom, conversion and custody rights in Malaysia, and marriage law in South Africa, as well as a comparison of judgments by the European Court of Human Rights and the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court. Ranging from single articles to a set of materials (articles, bills, legal notes, and court decisions), these case studies, like the book, demonstrate that religious freedom has many trajectories around the world, rather than one underlying model that simply remains to be properly implemented.

The editors of Politics of Religious Freedom consider religious liberty as a historically located “technique of national and international governance” (145). Eschewing highly theoretical debates over the value of religious freedom, they examine its meanings and impacts in practice in various times and places. How do people experience religious freedom? Given the many chapters, I will focus on just three themes that emerge in several contributions: sincerity, agency, and policy.

“Sincere belief” has become a common litmus test in the practice of religious freedom. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd critiques the belief-centric conception of religion and choice-centric conception of freedom embedded in contemporary international religious freedom governance, also documented in her Beyond Religious Freedom. Many of the authors in Politics of Religious Freedom demonstrate that lived religion (even among Protestants) does not conform to the Protestant ideal of sincere believers. For instance, Michael Lambek's chapter on Madagascar reveals the liminal, layered identities of converts, and the centrality of practices, not just beliefs. Hurd champions the “dissenters, doubters, and nonorthodox.” But, in practice, questioning people's “sincerity” has curtailed their religious freedoms. To use Greg Johnson's phrase from chapter six: Who is “eligible for ‘freedom’” (80)? As Yvonne Sherwood writes in her compelling chapter, “Trials of depth or sincerity place the law in the simultaneously sinister and absurd position of playing omniscient deity and peering into the soul” (43).

Just as denying sincerity can undergird a denial of religious rights, so can denying someone's agency. An “arguably nonexistent freely volitional subject who chooses to believe” is the ideal of many religious freedom advocates, argues Hurd (48). The question of converts' agency is central to “religious freedom” laws against “forced” or “induced” conversions in India, for instance. Given judges' inability to peer into our souls, in practice, gender or other social categories (such as caste, tribe, or other marginalized minority designation) become shorthand for an assumed lack of agency. (Donald Trump's reading of Ghazala Khan at the Democratic National Convention is an extreme case of this tendency.) As Saba Mahmood revealed in her prior work in Egypt, people may not even see the “docile” agency of religious women when looking through a Western or liberal lens (Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject). Likewise, Yvonne Sherwood discusses the tightrope French Muslim women defending the veil must walk in order to claim their religious freedom — not too much agency (it must be a religious obligation) but not too little agency (or it becomes coercion) (43). The volume illuminates the ways the governance of religious freedom reinforces not only religious majority/minority hierarchies but also the intersection of those with gendered hierarchies.

To those looking for policy implications, this set of critiques is paralyzing. Winnifred Sullivan's prior work on The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, based on a trial in the United States, finds further support in this volume's chapters that document the many shape-shifting, malfunctioning, and discriminatory attempts to implement religious freedom in other times and places. Due to the “unstated and often opportunistic assumptions about what counts as religion,” religious freedom may indeed be impossible (7). Moreover, in her chapter Sullivan is skeptical of “those in the academic world eager to offer their work as a how-to manual for government” (238). As long as religious freedom policies exist, would attempts to reform them simply justify or prolong the life of this troubled concept? The book's editors are blunt: “To continue to use the word [religion] in law is to invite discrimination” (7). Robert Hefner's chapter suggests as an alternative to religious freedom, the idea of “civic pluralist freedom” (133), but coming after Courtney Bender's scathing chapter on the “power of pluralist thinking,” neither “civic” nor “pluralist” seem appealing conceptual alternatives.

Turning to minority religious rights, Greg Johnson, whose chapter discusses Native Hawaiian Religious disputes, pushes back a bit. He is reluctant to raze religious freedom altogether just when non-dominant groups are, in some instances, finally gaining some traction by using this concept (87). But, as Saba Mahmood points out, so far in modern Middle Eastern history, minorities constructed by state building, global geopolitics, and the “freedom of religion” itself — and supposedly the “greatest beneficiaries” of this freedom — have experienced a “freedom” that either (a) supported Christian proselytization or (b) “consolidated the majoritarian ethos of the emergent modern state” (145). This, she argues, is not a misuse of “an otherwise noble principle” but embedded in the “conceptual architecture of the right to religious liberty itself and its global history” (147). To students accustomed to religious liberty as an unquestioned principle, Politics of Religious Freedom will be unsettling. I highly recommend it.