ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the reasons for political and legal pluralism—or its functional equivalent—should guide disputes about ecclesiastical authority. Given the permissible plurality of contemporary normative moral orders, religion should be admitted to this respected, if problematic, source of legal contestants. Religious organizations are just such orders and should be recognized as such by the legal order of the state. That does not mean that the state needs to defer to religious organizations, but it means that the state can and should treat religious legal systems not as mysterious and inscrutable symbolic structures, but as legal orders akin to foreign legal jurisdictions. The paradigm for adjudicating ecclesiastical disputes should be more similar to what civilian jurists call “private international law” or common lawyers call “conflicts of law” rather than that of (mere) voluntary associations.
