ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to contribute to the discussion on minority religions’ reactions to legal environments by focusing on a Japanese religion known as Tenrikyō as it operates in France. In the process of expanding into the new socio-cultural context in the decades after the 1960s, Tenrikyō faced a new legal environment that required relatively strict institutional demarcation between religious and other types of non-profit organisations. In employing cultural activities as a way to reach out to the public, Tenrikyō established two legally separate institutions that conduct religious and cultural activities, respectively. This chapter will explore the implications of this two-tier institutional arrangement by highlighting the distinctive ways in which the followers who have engaged in the propagation of Tenrikyō in France articulate the roles of the cultural association and its cultural activities in relation to the religious mission. The case of Tenrikyō sheds light on how a minority religion’s response to a particular legal framework defining a lawfully compliant institutional arrangement for religious organisations can reflexively have an impact on the ways in which an activity of the religious group is understood and negotiated in relation to its teachings.
