Politics of religious freedom / edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin -- Imagining the Hebrew republic : Christian genealogies of religious freedom / Robert Yelle -- On the freedom of the concepts of religion and belief / Yvonne Sherwood -- Believing in religious freedom / Elizabeth Shakman Hurd -- What is religious freedom supposed to free? / Webb Keane -- The power of pluralist thinking / Courtney Bender -- Reflections on the politics of religious freedom, with attention to Hawaii / Greg Johnson -- Traditional, African, religious, freedom? / Rosalind I.J. Hackett -- The problem with the history of toleration / Evan Haefeli -- Religious minorities and citizenship in the long nineteenth century : some contexts of Jewish emancipation / David Sorkin -- Varieties of religious freedom and governance : a practical perspective / Robert W. Hefner -- Religious freedom between truth and tactic / Samuel Moyn -- Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics / Saba Mahmood -- Ceylon/Sri Lanka : the politics of religious freedom and the end of empire / Benjamin Schonthal -- Liberty as recognition / Nandini Chatterjee -- Postapartheid treatment of religious freedom in South Africa / Waheeda Amien -- Religious freedom in postrevolutionary Tunisia / Nadia Marzouki -- Beyond establishment / Lori G. Beaman -- The bishops, the sisters, and religious freedom / Elizabeth A. Castelli -- The world that Smith made / Winnifred Fallers Sullivan -- Religious freedom in the Panopticon of Enlightenment rationality / Peter G. Danchin -- Everson's children / Ann Pellegrini -- Protecting freedom of religion in the secular age / Cécile Laborde -- Freeing religion at the birth of South Sudan / Noah Salomon -- Is religion free? / Michael Lambek -- Religious freedom and the bind of suspicion in contemporary secularity / Hussein Ali Agrama -- Religious repression and religious freedom : an analysis of their contradictions in (post- )Soviet contexts / Mathijs Pelkmans -- Religious freedom's oxymoronic edge / Wendy Brown.

Religious freedom has achieved broad consensus as a condition for peace. Faced with reports of a rise in religious violence and a host of other social ills, public, and private actors have responded with laws and policies designed to promote freedom of religion. But what precisely is being promoted? What are the assumptions underlying this response? The contributions to this volume unsettle the assumption that religious freedom is a singular achievement and that the problem lies in its incomplete accomplishment. Delineating the different conceptions of religious freedom predominant in the world today, as well as their histories and political contexts, the contributions make clear that the reasons for violence and discrimination are more complex than is widely acknowledged. The promotion of a single legal and cultural tool meant to address conflict across a wide variety of cultures can have the perverse effect of exacerbating the problems that plague the communities often cited as falling short. -- from back cover.