This panel examines political secularism, atheism, and religious pluralism across diverse national contexts. The first paper explores how Mexico’s new policy for engaging religious groups marks a shift from church-state separation to a collaboration with religious organizations that empowers evangelicals while marginalizing minority religions. The second paper offers a typology of models of state approaches to religious pluralism in six Arabian Gulf nations, highlighting how religious tolerance is shaped by governments based on sectarian politics, economic incentives, and geopolitical positioning. The third paper investigates the historical contingencies that have shaped religious pluralism in Hong Kong’s education system, highlighting how pluralism emerged from pragmatic governance choices and shifting social conditions. The final paper reveals findings from a comparative study of nontheism, focusing on the beliefs, identities, and morality of atheists and agnostics in China. This panel offers a critical understanding on how secularism and pluralism are shaped, experienced, and transformed globally.
As part of broader anti-violence efforts, in 2019, the López Obrador administration launched Creamos Paz (Let’s Create/Believe in Peace) through the Office of Religious Affairs. This initiative promotes peacebuilding by collaborating with officials, scholars, and interfaith actors, challenging Mexico’s secular tradition. This paper examines how Mexico’s new religious policy is implemented and negotiated locally. Using a mixed-methods approach—including multivariate analysis, participant observation, interviews, and archival research—I identify two trends: while the Catholic-majority Bajío region remains less engaged, southeastern states, with higher Indigenous and non-Catholic Christian populations, show greater interest. Evangelical actors have strategically leveraged religious affairs offices to strengthen governmental ties. Despite its pluralistic rhetoric, Creamos Paz may advance Evangelical expansion while offering limited engagement—and veiled exclusion—to non-Christian minorities that misfit world religions frameworks. I argue that these developments reflect a broader shift toward Protestant-inflected secularism in Latin America, where religious freedom discourses reshape religious power within secular regimes.
Religious pluralism in the Arabian Gulf is not simply permitted or restricted but actively shaped by state policies that regulate, accommodate, or brand religious diversity. This paper examines five models of state-managed religious pluralism: Saudi Arabia’s restrictive monoconfessionalism, Bahrain’s sectarian pluralism, Kuwait and Qatar’s pragmatic accommodation, the UAE’s branded tolerance, and Oman’s subtle inclusivity. While the UAE has pioneered religious tolerance as a diplomatic and economic tool, Qatar is cautiously adopting similar strategies. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain manage religious diversity through controlled sectarian governance, while Oman sustains a low-profile, historically embedded pluralism. These models suggest that innovation in religious governance doesn't necessarily lead to greater freedom but often reinforces state control. By comparing these models of pluralism, this paper argues for expanding research beyond high-profile interfaith diplomacy to examine whether less visible, embedded models such as Oman’s—whether innovative or not—may offer a more durable foundation for religious pluralism.
Religious institutions have been central to Hong Kong’s education system, yet its religiously diverse school sector arose inadvertently as a byproduct of colonial governance and persisted into the postcolonial era. This paper contends that religious plurality in Hong Kong’s schools emerged not from deliberate policy but as an unintended consequence of administrative practices under British rule—shaped by laissez-faire oversight in education, reliance on religious bodies, and demographic shifts, notably migration, within evolving sociopolitical conditions. Through historical and institutional analysis, it traces the evolution of religious education from early Christian schooling and the establishment of Hong Kong’s first non-Christian (Buddhist) school in the 1930s to the transformative mid-20th century. It further examines how the educational system solidified existing pluralistic structures despite post-handover ideological tensions and constraints on Western religious influence. The paper analyzes how governance approaches, regulatory frameworks, and religious networks have collectively shaped Hong Kong’s distinctive form of religious plurality.
This paper presents findings from a multi-methodological study of atheism and agnosticism (which we collectively label as nontheism) in contemporary China, conducted as part of a broader international research program exploring nontheistic beliefs, identities, and moral perspectives. The results reveal that, unlike the naturalistic, anti-religious atheism common in the West, Chinese nontheism is characterized by high engagement with supernatural beliefs and low levels of anti-religious sentiment. While Chinese nontheists associate atheism with political orthodoxy, they do not favor particular nonreligious labels. In terms of moral outlooks, Chinese nontheists are not markedly different from the Chinese general population, exhibiting both relativist and conventionalist perspectives. These findings provide insight into the cross-cultural and pluralistic dimensions of atheism and agnosticism as well as the nature of meaning, value, and belief in twenty-first-century China.