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Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

The continued vitality of religion has motivated many scholars in sociology, anthropology, political theory, international relations, and philosophy to revisit their assumptions about how religion relates to their disciplines. Despite this robust re-examination in other disciplines, two outmoded paradigms about the relationship between law and religion —theocracy (pre-modern) and secularism (modern)—continue to dominate legal theory. Under the modern paradigm, the secularization of law—that the law is or should be independent of any religious foundation or values—arguably constitutes the most widely-held but least-examined assumption in contemporary legal theory. My thesis is that two quandaries or crises for legal theory—legal indeterminacy and …