Giuseppe Giordan is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology at University of Padua (Italy).
This post is a part of a series on the sociology of religious freedom.
The book A Sociology of Religious Freedom coauthored by Olga Breskaya, Giuseppe Giordan, and James T. Richardson invites readers to explore how individuals understand and practice their personal freedom of choice in matters of religion or belief. At its core, the volume looks at how social institutions either create or fail to create the conditions that allow individuals and groups to exercise religious freedom, and what kind of conditions make this freedom easier or harder to realize. For instance, can greater religious pluralism lead to more equitable ways for individuals to perceive and exercise their religious freedom? What roles do religious and judicial institutions play in shaping individuals’ perception and religious exercise, and how do relationships between religion and the state influence them? And perhaps the most complex question of all: how can we measure religious freedom across societies, when it means such different things to different people and groups?
In this post I provide a few insights into the book, its methodology, and its main ideas.
Welcoming Tortellini
By addressing the central theoretical question of this book—What does thinking sociologically about religious freedom really mean?—we open up a conversation about how this freedom works in everyday life as a social practice possessing simultaneously a value-laden and normative nature.
The story of “welcoming tortellini” illustrates what we mean by a sociology of religious freedom. In October 2019, Archbishop Matteo Maria Zuppi suggested celebrating the Feast of San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, with a new version of tortellini. Traditionally, the food offered at the feast by the Catholic Diocese includes tortellini, a symbol of Bolognese identity since the Middle Ages. The archbishop proposed offering chicken-filled tortellini to respect the religious sensitivities of Muslim residents, calling them tortellini dell’accoglienza—“welcoming tortellini.” The idea divided the city and sparked national debate, with right-wing parties defending the traditional pork recipe as sacred to Italian culture. However, the message of the archbishop of Bologna was clear. It linked the right of believers to celebrate the day of the city’s patron saint with the value of integration of minorities.
Interestingly, the invitation to other religious groups to celebrate this holiday “together” has been legitimized by a leader of the Catholic Church, while the Italian State ensured the protection of religious freedom for Catholics to observe the Feast of San Petronio in accordance with established religious tradition.
Bologna’s welcoming tortellini speaks volumes about how religious freedom in everyday life can take on different meanings and challenge both political and religious identities. What we observed in the tensions surrounding the tortellini dell’accoglienza is that to effectively promote religious freedom, its principles must be integrated into the local political and religious culture in ways that support interreligious harmony, dialogue, and social cohesion. As one young Muslim participant noted about the recipe change, “I think mixed things are better,” adding, “Bologna is a very welcoming city. It always tries to combine elements from other cultures with Bolognese traditions. These tortellini prove it.”
In this case, the freedom of religious observance in dietary practices and equal participation in a religious feast by majority and minority religious traditions came to symbolize a particular social value of religious freedom—one that embraces inclusion and respect of diversity as an integral part of local identity, as reflected in the original intent of the Catholic Church’s initiative. At the same time, this example revealed forms of resistance to religious pluralism, showing how broader cultural value systems play a significant role in advancing or limiting religious freedom. Promoting religious freedom in practice, therefore, requires attention not only to the legal implementation of the right but also to its value-laden dimensions, through which communities negotiate differences and foster coexistence.
Main Aims of the Sociology of Religious Freedom
The tortellini story helps the authors invite readers to explore what we identify as the three main aims of the sociology of religious freedom:
First, sociology of religious freedom aims to examine the meaning of religious freedom as it is contextually rooted within specific societies. This involves analyzing the multidimensional nature of this freedom, recognizing that its sociological understanding requires attention to the historical, philosophical, legal, religious, and political dimensions of each society. This also helps us understand who defines religious freedom and for whom.
Second, the sociological approach to this fundamental right helps identify and analyze the structural conditions and social perceptions that shape how religious freedom is understood and practiced, particularly through the study of social practices and legal cases related to this freedom.
Third, sociology of religious freedom emphasizes the centrality of mechanisms of social implementation of religious freedom, indicating how organizational cultures and specific environments—such as schools, religious institutions, and urban communities—can contribute to its promotion in contemporary contexts. From this perspective, sociology looks beyond the state to include other key actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, religious communities, civil society and religious leaders, and members of both religious and nonreligious groups.
The Methodological Framework
The book is designed to guide readers through three methodological perspectives: the development of a sociological theory of religious freedom, a socio-legal analysis of religious freedom within European and North American judicial systems, and cross-national empirical studies of religious freedom.
In discussing the development of a sociological theory of religious freedom, we primarily focus on tracing its historical background and examining contemporary theoretical approaches, which have addressed the theme from multiple angles, sometimes without explicitly situating it within this subdiscipline. Readers will encounter a careful discussion of four theoretical perspectives that we consider central to shaping a sociology of religious freedom and formulating a definition, which serves as a “stipulative” for our approach.
The first perspective is from Peter Berger, one of the founding fathers of social constructionism, who articulated his definition of religious freedom in the context of pluralist societies. In his last work, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Berger states that the nature of religious freedom touches on the key perception of “what it means to be human” and inquires into the ultimate meaning of individual life. Against this idea, both religious and nonreligious individuals are involved similarly in the quest for life’s meaning, constructing knowledge about the self and society by relying on personal experiences and social norms.
The second perspective comes from the religious-economy framework developed by Roger Finke and colleagues in the 1990s[1]. Their work emphasizes the importance of state noninterference in the religious market, allowing religious communities to freely organize and compete within the public sphere. By arguing that religious freedom is beneficial for religious vitality, specifically considering the context of North-American religious history, the religious economy approach suggests that when the state refrains from interfering with the autonomy of religious groups, the activities of these communities tend to expand. This, in turn, increases competition with other religious and even secular organizations across various areas of social and political life, including education, recreation, social services, youth programs, and more.
The third approach, advanced by James T. Richardson[2], introduces the concept of the judicialization of religious freedom, emphasizing how court decisions shape and define its societal meaning. He broadly adopts a social constructionist perspective, arguing that the nature, origins, and spread of religious freedom must be understood within concrete social contexts and situations—that is, in relation to the structural and cultural conditions of the modern world. He highlights the role of socio-legal conditions under which certain ideas arise at a given time and place, illustrating in his work that many regions of the contemporary world still offer little or no religious freedom.
The fourth perspective, rooted in political secularism and articulated by Jonathan Fox[3], examines how government-based religious discrimination and “unreasonable interference” lead to unequal treatment of religious groups, revealing the sociopolitical dimensions of religious freedom. With the focus on areas of state governance of religion, this perspective also addresses the non-state actors that regulate this freedom at individual and institutional levels (for example, the dominant religion, religious/nonreligious associations, and culture at large). It questions various meanings of religious freedom within the public sphere.
These four perspectives—Berger, Finke, Richardson, and Fox—together illustrate why a sociological lens is essential for understanding the complex meanings of religious freedom in modern societies.
Definition of Religious Freedom
Building on the above-mentioned conceptual framework, the authors introduce our own working definition of religious freedom as a multidimensional concept, located at the intersection of five areas of meaning: (a) the autonomy of individuals and religious groups, (b) the societal value of freedom of and from religion, (c) the normative principles of state-religion governance, (d) international human rights standards, and (e) the socio-legal impacts of the judicialization of religion.
The multiple dimensions of religious freedom reflect a continuum of legal and social implementation. This perspective underscores that the translation of international human rights principles into societal norms and values cannot be fully understood without examining the spiritual needs of individuals and communities, the boundaries of individual and institutional religious autonomy, and the broader cultural systems in which they exist. In this context, the work of sociologists is crucial, as it reveals how various religious and secular traditions evolve within contemporary societies and to what extent they incorporate the principles of religious freedom. Furthermore, our definition highlights the pivotal role of political and social institutions, such as states and courts, in governing, communicating, and shaping the contemporary meaning of religious freedom within a society.
More generally, the first three chapters of the book open up a perspective on the sociology of religious freedom as a developing field of research, questioning why sociology was late in engaging with this field and what the main constraints were to this delay. We describe the main elements of the sociology of religious freedom in an attempt to construct the bridge between sociology and law in understanding the main theoretical debates in both fields—defining religion and religious freedom sociologically while simultaneously searching for the interpretations of “legal” religion and its juridification.
Toward a New Paradigm of Religious Change
The sociological theory of religious freedom, according to us, offers a novel lens for analyzing the socioreligious transformations of modern societies. It provides a conceptual framework that connects two major debates: the discourse of secularization, which dominated explanations of religious change after World War II, and the perspective of religious pluralism, which focuses sociological analysis on the legitimization of religious diversity and peaceful coexistence both across religious traditions and between religious and secular worldviews. And it goes further.
This theory of religious freedom advances both perspectives by introducing new analytical tools drawn from secularization and religious pluralism, but it shifts the focus toward recognizing the entitlements of individuals and communities in the socioreligious sphere. This approach encourages examination of certain phenomena—such as the growing number of religious “nones,” the rise of alternative spiritualities, multiple religious belonging and practices, and the increasing pluralization within religious traditions—through the prism of rights and entitlements. Accordingly, sociology of religious freedom foregrounds the role of political, legal, social, and religious institutions, and the protective mechanisms they provide, highlighting how freedom, equality, and non-discrimination are essential dimensions for understanding forms of religious and non-religious identities and experiences in contemporary societies.
The authors emphasize that this book represents only an initial exploration of religious freedom through a sociological lens. At the same time, it serves as an invitation—for sociologists to expand research in this area and for legal scholars to engage more deeply with sociological perspectives in their work.
The latter is reflected in the book’s effort to confront the challenges of developing legal definitions while taking into account the sociological dimensions of religion and the ongoing processes of religious change. It is further expressed through analyses of key sociological elements of the juridification of religious freedom and guiding theories of the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as through the synthesis of empirical findings that deepen our understanding of individual awareness of religious freedom.
References:
[1] See, e.g., Finke, R. and R. Stark (1992) The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Iannaccone, L. R., Finke, R. and R. Stark (1997) “Deregulating Religion: The Economics of Church and State.” Economic Inquiry, 35: 350–364.
[2] See, e.g., Richardson, J. T. (2006) “The Sociology of Religious Freedom: A Structural and Socio-Legal Analysis.” Sociology of Religion 67(3): 271–94; Richardson, J. T. (2015) “Managing Religion and the Judicialization of Religious Freedom.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion54(1): 1–19.
[3] See, e.g., Fox, J. (2015) Political Secularism, Religions, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data. New York: Cambridge University Press; Fox, J. (2020) Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.