What exactly is the relationship between religion and culture? Is religion a subset of culture, a specific form in which culture is expressed? Or is culture brought forth by religion and its institutions, as some histories of “Western civilizations” might suggest? Are they perhaps so closely aligned as to be hardly distinguishable? After reading Lori G. Beaman's illuminating study, one realizes that these are indeed moot questions. Since both religion and culture are constructed categories, they are in constant flux and can be separated or conflated, depending on the strategy of the discursive actors involved. Instead, the question to be asked is this: What does categorizing something as religion do for that particular thing, and what does categorizing something as culture do? To answer this question, the realm of law might be the most salient one to look at, since such framings and categorizations are always integral to legal argument. A cultural phenomenon has access to different legal rights and interpretations than does a religious phenomenon. Beaman bases her comparative investigation on three legal cases, but her examination goes beyond the texts of the courtroom itself. Hers is a sociological approach accounting for the broader context of the legal cases, acknowledging the interplay of the law and society at large and thus drawing on both legal sources and debates in public discourse and media. The categories religion or culture are the focus, so it is the “discursive framing . . . not the law's logic” (25) that interests Beaman.

Many scholars from different backgrounds have noted the dynamic and often paradoxical relationship between religion and culture, but not many have devoted a book-length study to it. Beaman devotes her attention specifically to the strategic discursive transformations mainly in the one direction, from religion to culture, and focuses on majority religions being transformed into national culture, usually framed as cultural heritage. She examines three legal cases and the debates surrounding them in three countries: Canada, France, and the United States. Each of these cases involve a challenge to religion in the public sphere, and by comparing them in three different settings—each with a unique, but perhaps also paradigmatic, settlement of church-state relations—Beaman draws broader conclusions about global trends and patterns. Beaman's analysis is clearly critical of the tendency to shift religion to culture. Unlike Olivier Roy, who points to the dangers of the opposite move, which he sees as disembedding religion from specific locales and cultures and thus turning them into missionizing worldviews with a universalist claim,Footnote ¹ Beaman is concerned about the tendency to mobilize the affordances the heritage paradigm offers to protect and preserve a majority religion framed by its supporters as being under siege from secularization and migration (see, for example, 4–5). Both the decline in church affiliation and attacks from rising atheism, as well as the challenges of minority religions seeking to assert their place in the public sphere, are pushing defenders of Christian foundationalism to argue for an understanding of Christianity as cultural so that it might have privileged access to display in public spaces. Beaman concludes that this strategy is exclusionary, part of a “past preserving narrative” (24, see also 22–23) demanding that minorities fit into the majoritarian Christian-cultural framework.

Beaman has chosen her cases well in that they are commensurable enough to be fruitfully compared while also displaying some significant features that highlight the importance of each specific context. Each case was initiated by complaints brought by an atheist citizen against the government of a small town for the display of Christian symbols within the town hall or Christian prayer performed in the context of government meetings. All of them reached the supreme courts of their respective countries. The ultimate decisions on each case are less important for Beaman's argument than is the way that the decisions were discursively framed. Both the Québécois and French discussions revolve around the question of whether religious expression can be nonreligious—that is, cultural or artistic articulation. The French case of the display of the Christian nativity scene in the front lobby of the town hall during the holiday season could mobilize numerous registers (folk art, seasonal tradition, family values) against the notion that the crèche was purely religious. Though these appear to be classic conflicts over the separation of church and state, they are debated against the backdrop and often with explicit reference to religious “others,” particularly Muslim others (both cases were argued in 2015 and 2016, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis). The configuration of majoritarian religion as national culture thus also serves to exclude minority religions from it and to exclude persons ascribed to minority religions from full citizenship. The US debate revolved around a case argued some years earlier, in 2008, over the performance of a purportedly nondenominational prayer at the beginning of municipal board meetings. It diverges somewhat from the other two in that it transformed religion into culture indirectly. The claim was not that the religion on display is not religion, but that as such, it nevertheless does not constitute an establishment of one church as a state church. Thus, the strategy is to point to a US tradition of including religious components in legislative ceremonies, a tradition legitimated as constitutional (“framer's intention”). The US discourse drew more heavily on national history than on cultural heritage, and its religious “others” were more strongly connoted as nonbelievers rather than ethnic minorities with a “different” religion. Any religion, in the US context, is better than no religion at all. Nonetheless, the prayer being discursively transformed from a religious act to a ceremonial act overlaps strongly with the secularizing move from religion to culture.

Considering how well the case studies elucidate the advantages that majority religious institutions often have by adopting the religion-is-culture strategy, the question arises as to whether this strategy is as effective for minority religions. Beaman touches on this point in the conclusion, arguing that it does not necessarily do so. Her analysis clearly shows that the claim that religion is culture is a secularizing move that overwhelmingly favors the majority religion because the secularity of any given society is deeply intertwined with its majority religion and thus the claim is most plausible and convincing for that religion only. In other words, as Elayne Oliphant might phrase it, the banalization of religion is a privilege.Footnote ² Though Beaman does not devote much reflection on the concept of culture itself, it is apparent that a homogenizing, boundary-making concept underlies the notion that is being mobilized by the actors in question. This essentialist culture concept would also appear to create more advantages for large religious groups than for smaller ones. Furthermore, the religion-to-culture argument, as it is instrumentalized by majority religions, turns on the notion of loss and thus a desire to retain privilege rather than gain equity. Minority religions, on the other hand, have far less power to shape the narrative. If they mobilize the culture argument, it can quickly become twisted into a cultural-determinist interpretation, reducing religion to “mere” culture, in many cases a culture that is not seen as fitting in, rather than expanding its influence, as the religion-as-heritage argument does. Thus, it seems that minority religions can mobilize the argument only when they have powerful allies, so that the context of which religion is being transformed into culture in whose interest comes to the fore. Beaman illustrates this with the example of how yoga is discursively transformed away from religion by non-Hindus in order that the practice might be integrated into school sports (135–36). But as this example demonstrates, the result may be less an expansion of possibilities than indeed an expropriation. Within the legal framework, it would appear more effective for the symbols of minority religions to build their case on the freedom of religion, not on culture.

Here, the established churches would seem to agree, linking freedom of religion to their autonomy as institutions. Beaman points out in the conclusion that clergy have articulated opposition to the culturalization of their religion—for example when the state of Bavaria in Germany mandated the display of crucifixes in all public buildings in 2018 and leading bishops of both large Christian churches protested, arguing that religion was indeed not “mere” culture, but much more, and resenting the state's instrumentalization of their central symbol (126–27n2). For the churches, framing religion as culture, heritage, and tradition—though some clergy might draw on this argument in order to retain certain privileges as their numbers decline, as Beaman also points out (61)—is also highly ambivalent, since it carries with it a dusty odor of musealization: religion is heritage because it belongs to a presecular past and should be preserved as memory, not as a living practice. In a similar vein (which Beaman, however, does not systematically pursue) it might also seem ambivalent for some religions to see their practice reduced to values—an important mediating concept between religion and culture. The strategy or development that Max Weber called the ethicization of religionFootnote ³ is closely related to that of framing religion as culture, as Beaman's cases from France and Quebec show. The discursive power of the term values as such remains somewhat underexplored in this volume, though it is certainly the key to one of the most intriguing discursive twists in these cases: transforming the majority religion or culture into universal values that cannot, by virtue of being inclusive of all humanity, discriminate against any group. This is at the core of the prima facie counterintuitive claim that human rights include not only freedom of conscience but are also protective of culture. On the ground, this claim results in a struggle over which culture can make a claim to universal values, which ones receive that particular privilege, and which ones do not.

Notwithstanding its relatively tight focus, Beaman's study provides many stimulating insights into the broader relationship between religion and culture that will be interesting not only to legal scholars, but also to sociologists and anthropologists of religion. Beaman maneuvers deftly through a highly complex discursive field and avoids oversimplification. Her analytical framework, comparing past-preserving and future-forming narrative patterns (21–24), offers some helpful direction toward constructive solutions to highly fraught issues in multicultural societies that call themselves secular.