Thinking about Religion, Law, and Politics in Latin America

• Published in: Revista de Estudios Sociales
• Main Author: Elizabeth Shackman
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Spanish; Portuguese
• Published: Universidad de los Andes 2015
• Subjects: Secularism; religion; law; Latin America; Inter-American Court of Human Rights; Charles Taylor; Social Sciences; H; Social sciences (General); H1-99; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7440/res51.2015.02; https://doaj.org/article/7ec56878f3644feabf5580eca821a880

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is both important and insufficient to the study of religion, law, and politics in Latin America. While aspects of the North Atlantic experience of secularity have become globalized, shaping legal systems and other forms of collective governance around the world, local and regional histories and experiences often depart significantly from Taylor’s account of secularity and conception of religion. Scholars of religion and politics in the region need to consider those aspects of local and regional history, such as indigenous and Afro-descendent histories and experiences, that challenge or may be indifferent to globalized Euro-American experiences of secularity and religion. To do so requires grappling with the global effects of the history charted by Taylor while also moving beyond it to account for practices, histories, and ways of life that work outside or against “secularity 3” and the presumptions about religion that it presupposes and produces.