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Religious identity in constitutions

A new report has just been released by the Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the Annual Review of Constitution-Building Processes: 2017. One chapter caught my attention, W. Elliot Bulmer's "The Constitutional Recognition of Religious Identity".

Drawing from case studies from Sri Lanka (Buddhism), Israel (Judaism) and the South Pacific countries of Samoa and Tuvalu (Christianity), it contends that constitutional references to religion often serve political and socio-cultural functions rather than legal ones. Furthermore, religious and ethnic identities often intertwine and the vast majority of differences occur within the religious community itself.

In all cases the religious and the indigeneous (including the ethnic) intertwine: in Sri Lanka, Buddhist identity is linked to the ethnic Sinhala; in Samoa and Tuvalu, Christianity is integral to the value system of indigeneous people as can be seen in how the assembly of respective island chiefs, the Falekaupule pushed for the preservation of traditional and Christian values to defend unity amidst constitutional reform; and in Israel, its original foundation as a "Jewish state" now has to confront "liberal democratic" values which since 1992 had become part of its constitutional makeup.

Thus in all these states, the diverse traditional, religious, ethnic and indigeneous identities are set against the singular, monolithic, perhaps even homogenous "liberal democratic" as the very staple and default template of the nation-state system.

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