Countdown timer

Remember, it's never too late to register for a class, even after it's begun. You can always catch up with any sessions you may have missed by watching the video recordings of previous sessions. The time remaining to register before the first class session is below, so stop hesitating and get to it!

  • 00 Days
  • 00 Hours
  • 00 Minutes
  • 00 Seconds
Register now!

Offered:

as in-person, Zoom, or video recordings

  • • RD280 is offered in 2024 Term 3 (Jul-Sep) pending sufficient student enrolment.

  • • This course is offered as an in-person course at the EarthDiverse Centre in Hamilton, New Zealand, live-streamed via Zoom if you live elsewhere, and as video recordings of the live sessions if you cannot attend the regularly scheduled class.

Date & Time:

Begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 6:30-8:30pm

  • • Our RD280 course is offered on Mondays from 6:30-8:30pm (New Zealand time) beginning Monday 21 Oct 2024 and meets for 6 consecutive weekly sessions. The last class of the Term is on Mon 25 November 2024.

  • • If you live outside of New Zealand and wish to Zoom in to our live class sessions, check the nearest local Time Zone equivalent below:

Time Zone equivalents:

for live-streaming Zoom Sessions from New Zealand. If your Time Zone doesn't suit our live-streamed class, you can also access our courses by watching the live-recorded sessions that are posted to the course webpage each week, usually within 1-2 days.

  • Honolulu, Hawai’i: begins Sun 20 Oct 2024, 7:30-9:30pm

  • US Pacific: begins Sun 20 Oct 2024, 10:30pm-12:30am

  • US Eastern: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 1:30-3:30am

  • London, UK: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 6:30-8:30am

  • Paris, France: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 7:30-9:30am

  • New Delhi, India: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 11:00-1:00pm

  • Bangkok, Thailand: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 12:30-2:30pm

  • Singapore & Shanghai: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 1:30-3:30pm

  • Tokyo, Japan: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 2:30-4:30pm

  • Sydney, Australia: begins Mon 21 Oct 2024, 4:30-6:30pm

Description:

RD280: Religion and the Secular State: Justly governing religious diversity

  • • Almost every week, newspapers report a new controversy about religion. Are Gloriavale church members employees? Should the Seal of Confession prevent Catholic priests from reporting crimes? Is religious freedom a fair defense against hate speech? What gives, animal rights or halal slaughter? Should public schools still have bible classes? Is Christopher Luxon’s Christianity really off-limits? This course critically examines the history, politics and controversies of secularism.

  • • This course critically examines the history, politics and controversies of secularism. It asks how and why liberal democracies legislating religion differently.It analyses the sticky problems of ‘neutrality’ and ‘fairness’ that all jurisdictions face when governing religious diversity.

  • • And lastly, it considers what potential policy improvements there might be to secular liberal democracy’s ‘separation’ model.

Week 1: Whence separation?

Monday 21 October 2024

Why might we squirm when Evangelical pastors call on God to return Trump to the White House? Living in a liberal democracy, many of us have an in-grained secular sensibility. That is, something just feels intuitively wrong when religion, law and politics mix. Where does this sense of dangerous contamination come from? Why has separating these fields of human activity become so rooted in modern ideals of peace, tolerance and good governance? Beginning with the European Wars of Religion and the invention of the Westphalian nation state, we look at the founding histories and thinkers of ‘secularism’, and the multiple and often contradicting perspectives that now shelter under this term.
Whence separation

Week 2: Public or private. Religion in schools

Monday 28 October 2024

Secularism and separating ‘church and state’ seems at first glance self-explanatory. But when we dig a bit deeper, it is fraught with contingencies and divergent pathways. By comparing the exclusion of headscarves for schoolgirls in France, and the inclusion of bible classes in New Zealand state schools, we examine how and why the two modern ‘secular’ states regulate religion differently, and the thorny – if not impossible challenge – of keeping religion ‘private’ and away from the public sphere.
religion in school

Week 3: Law’s religion? From Dianetics to Sikh Daggers

Monday 4 November 2024

To protect religious freedom – a right most tend to think is integral to liberal fairness – nation-states have to decide what precisely religion is and is not. This means judges must legally classify what is properly religion and what is not: a judgement that in itself, trespasses on religious freedom! For example, how can we decide what is really a religion, and not a cult, a scam or a business? Using the origin story of the Church of Scientology and its decades long battle with the United States Inland Revenue Service over a religious exemption to tax, we discuss the objective and subjective criteria courts use to determine the presence or absence of religion – and the problems with both.
Week three

Week 4. Freedom from, freedom to. Blasphemy and Hate Speech

Monday 11 November 2024

A New Zealand Government 2021 consultation on bringing free speech legalisation in line with international covenants, included a list of new, potential, legally-protected characters: sex, sexual orientation, gender and… religion. Though religion—as we are finding out—is a slippery concept for lawmakers and it is not immediately clear what should be protected. Can one criticise beliefs harshly—which, say, ex-members may want to do, or is it perhaps necessary to change people’s beliefs—without vilifying the group that holds them? And likewise, what are the limits to religious free speech, such as when religious doctrine is used to vilify other minority groups, such as the LGBTQI community? By comparing two cases studies, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the surrounding fall-out to the Israel Folau controversy, we dig deeper into these questions.

Week 5. Religious and secular harm: Children’s Bodies and Animals

Monday 18 November 2024

In multicultural societies, secular and religious groups weigh harm—to animals, to our bodies, to children’s minds—differently. When courts make decisions that, for example, prevent Jehovah Witness children from ‘knocking’ (proselytising) or force them to receive blood transfusions, or lawmakers prohibit infant circumcision or ban kosher slaughter, they all impose an understanding of harm that those religious groups subject to these judgements do not share. Moreover, as nation-states become increasingly invested in promoting happy and healthy (and therefore more productive) populations, interventions into the lives of ‘deviant’ religious groups are only likely to increase. Using real life court cases, we discuss how judges, lawyers and religious groups negotiate this play-off between citizens’ welfare and minority religious freedom.

Week 6. Legal uniformity, accommodation or pluralism? Secularism and Indigenous Religion

Monday 25 November 2024

Secular laws on religion recognise a set of beliefs and behaviours that are often culturally alien to Indigenous ways of life. As these more holistic traditions do not clearly separate religion from secular activities, legal templates of religion often fail to recognise or protect their sacred places or beliefs. In this final week we look at why Indigenous religions often fall through the gaps of liberal secular law, and consider what alternatives to legislating Indigenous ‘religion’ there are? In this regard, we look at two different systems to managing religion: reasonable accommodation and legal pluralism.

Meet our Instructor

Teaching Fellow Dr Tom White, PhD

Tom White is from the UK, and studies the histories, politics and effects of secularisation and religious change in the Pacific Islands. He was awarded his PhD in 2020 from the University of Otago, with his thesis, The Constitutional Politics of Religion in Fiji, passing with distinction. He is currently a Teaching Fellow in the History Department at The University of Waikato and a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Leipzig University. He has held research fellowships at the University of Otago and the University of the South Pacific, and before coming to Aotearoa New Zealand led the School of Social Sciences at the Fiji National University. Tom has undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Politics (MA with honours) from the University of Edinburgh (2006), and in Religion and Society (MA) from Durham University (2011). He cycles an old, rickety road bike around the Ngāruawāhia hills, coaches kiddies’ soccer and drinks too much Good George cider, though not all at the same time. You can find out more about his research at tomwhite-research.com

Location:

This class is a hybrid class with both in-person sessions in our classrooms and streamed live via Zoom.

All in-person classes are held at the EarthDiverse offices and classrooms located at 401 Anglesea Street, Hamilton Central, Hamilton (located just north of the Hamilton Central Bus Station) (entrance is located on the side of the building, see map below). Those looking for parking for our evening classes can park just in front of the building in any of the available car parks. Daytime parking can be found in our dedicated car parks, or free 2-hour on-street daytime parking can be found just in front on Anglesea Street.
Location

Course curriculum:

Week by week new material will be posted throughout the duration of the course. Video recordings of each weekly session will be posted here after 1-2 days after each class.

    1. EarthDiverse Course information

    2. EarthDiverse Zoom Instructions

    1. Week 1. Whence separation?

    1. Week 2. Public or private. Religion in schools

    1. Week 3. Law’s religion? From Dianetics to Sikh Daggers

    1. Week 4. Freedom from, freedom to. Blasphemy and Hate Speech

    1. Week 5. Religious and secular harm: Children’s Bodies and Animals

Additional course info:

  • Video and PDF content of class presentations or whiteboard notes are uploaded weekly after each live session
  • Begins Mon 21 Oct 2024
  • NZ time: Fridays 6:30-8:30pm

Pricing options:

• All prices are in New Zealand dollars and include GST.

• Unwaged includes students, seniors, retirees and unemployed.

• Prices remain the same regardless of your chosen method for accessing this course.

Distance Learning:

This course has distance-learning options for those unable to attend the live class sessions in Hamilton, New Zealand. Students have three options for attending our courses once they have registered:

  • Attend in-person classes in our Hamilton classrooms at the regularly scheduled day and time.

  • Attend our live on-line classroom sessions via Zoom at the regular scheduled day and time.

  • Watch the live-recorded class sessions at your leisure, at a time, day and place more suited to your schedule.

Distance-Learning options:

Live Zoom sessions or Video-Recordings

  • • In addition to our in-person classes in Hamilton, our courses offer distance learning options for those unable to attend classes in-person. Live-streamed Hamilton classes are available via free Zoom software for those living outside the Waikato. Live-streaming allows you to participate fully in your own learning, ask questions of the instructor and participate fully in the same way as if you were in the physical classroom.

  • • Those unable to attend the scheduled date and time of the actual class sessions, or those who need to miss a class or two due to previous engagements or unexpected illness, can watch any or all of the live-recorded video sessions on their computers, laptops, tablets or mobile devices and study at their own pace and in their own time.

  • • Detailed instructions on how to access our distance learning components will be sent after completing your registration. There are no additional fees for this service. However, distance learners will need access to a desktop or laptop computer with a good quality web-camera (tablet devices and mobile phones can also access our live-streamed classes), a built-in microphone (most modern laptops have built-in microphones) or a headset with a microphone. You will also need to download and install the free Zoom software on your computer or device. Those accessing the video recordings will be able to do so with a simple web browser on any device.

Prerequisites:

a keen desire to learn more about religious diversity and governance

• There are no prerequisites for this course.

• Open to adults and children aged 14 and above.