Immigration and secularization have radically increased cultural diversity around the world. What happens when ‘diversity’ evolves from a means of description into a mode of governance? In this cleverly designed comparative study of two ’stateless nations’, Marian Burchardt shows how the logic of ‘religious diversity’ is refracted through the logics of nationalism and bureaucracy at the macro and micro scales. Required reading for anyone interested in contemporary debates about religion, politics and secularity.
— Philip S. Gorski, author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe
“Fascinating and helpful…an absorbing and detailed study.”
— Roger Trigg, author of Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions
"Religious diversification and the rise of nationalism, coupled with increasing immigration and ever-contested state secularism, are dominant and far-reaching trends facing many societies today. Through an evocative comparison of Quebec and Catalonia, Marian Burchardt lucidly explores how these topics are framed in law, shaped by institutional practices and understood by political actors and ordinary members of the public. Regulating Difference is essential reading for anyone concerned with such profound issues marking our troubling times."
— Steven Vertovec, Editor of the Routledge international Handbook of Diversity Studies
"Burchardt’s study is illuminating in that it offers new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between national identity and religious identity. By examining the procedural and governmental frameworks that both enable and inhibit the inclusion of religious migrants, his study offers a needed corrective to studies that look to philosophical concepts such as “rights” to understand what it means for religious migrants to belong to a nation."
— Reading Religion
Two stateless nations, Quebec and Catalonia, with historically majoritarian Catholic confessions, have become deeply secular societies. But Catalan and Quebecois nationalists with similar conceptions of laïcité or secularism have offered divergent responses to the challenges that the religious diversity brought by large numbers of new immigrants present to their national projects. Burchardt's book examines this comparative puzzle deftly, while enriching our understanding of the ways in which religious and secular cleavages and religious and national identities may become differently entangled. An important contribution to the emerging field of multiple secularities.
— José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World
"Regulating Difference is a methodologically rich and theoretically versatile addition to the fast-growing field of comparative historical secularity."
— Journal of the American Academy of Religion
“An excellent contribution to the scholarly literature on Western secularities and on the regulation of religion."
— James Spickard, author of Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes
"Marian Burchardt’s Regulating Difference is historically informed, theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich. By juxtaposing Québec and Catalunya, the book makes important contributions to the literature on secularism and small nations. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism, the sociology of religion and secularism, and politics and religion more broadly."
— Geneviève Zubrzycki, author of Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec
