ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss these interpretations and tensions, starting with religious freedom itself and the tensions between the negative freedom o f religion from state control and interference and the positive freedom to believe and practice (sect. 4.1). Then, I address tensions and actual conflicts between associational or collective religious free doms and other important civil and political rights, particularly in cases o f illiberal and undemocratic religions. In section 4.2, I discuss the re levant distinctions between religious groups, issues and conflicts in this regard. I distinguish between three different hard cases o f such conflicts between the nomos and practices o f such groups and the core requirements o f minimal morality and o f liberal democratic morality, minimally understood, i.e. conflicts with principles and rights o f non discrimination and equal opportunities (sect. 4.3), with the core o f modern criminal law (sect. 4.4), and o f modern private personal law, ci vic marriage and divorce law in particular (sect. 4.5). In chapter 5, I turn from hard cases, characterised by basic-rights conflicts to softer cases that could and should be more easily resolvable, i f liberal democ racies were to actually live up to their proclaimed principles and rights, and the presumed relational religious neutrality o f states and policies. In both chapters, I argue for as much accommodation as is compatible with the standards o f moral m inim alism (though my standards con strain more than Renteln's ‘m aximum accommodation' (2004)) or the
more demanding but still miminalist standards o f liberal-democratic morality. Only in part IV do I also use the more demanding moral standards o f egalitarian liberalism and discuss different ways o f com bining moral m inim alism with more demanding liberal and demo cratic principles. I then hope to show that associative democracy pro vides more productive and flexible institutional and policy options for finding sensible balances and trade-offs in both hard and soft cases, compared with strict separationism and with other varieties o f liberal institutional pluralism and accommodationism.
