Religious Rules and Principles in Belgian Law
(2016) Religious Rules, State Law, and Normative Pluralism - A Comparative Overview — ISBN: [978-3-319-28333-3], 91-117, accepted/in-press
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- Belgian courts very often use the concept of “religious rules”, but its precise content remains undefined. Sometimes the concept of “religious rules” is very narrowly understood as an institutional and formal rule enacted by a religious authority. Sometimes the concept is largely open to include any individual feeling of religious duty. This paper chooses a generous understanding of the concept, while focusing it on traditional religions. Three main issues are addressed. First, Belgian courts do not seem to clearly distinguish ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ nor make a coherent distinction between cultural customs and religious traditions. On the other hand, “religious rules” are sometimes (and even wrongly) referred to as norms coming only from recognized religions. The judiciary seems to be reluctant to take into account religious “rules” affirmed by non-recognized churches or traditions. Third, a “deference principle” is classically adopted by Belgian courts in order not to attempt any interpretation of a general religious rule, but to only defer to a religious authority that has previously interpreted the controversial rule. Nevertheless, this “deference principle”, which mainly applies within the system of ‘recognised”’ religions, is sometimes extended to other fields of Belgian law which would have required a more individual and subjective approach, i.e. not to submit an individual religious freedom complaint to a collective or institutional church authority’s formal appraisal.
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Christians, L.-L., & Overbeeke, A. (2016). Religious Rules and Principles in Belgian Law. In Bottoni, Rossella, Cristofori, Rinaldo, Ferrari, Silvio (ed.), Religious Rules, State Law, and Normative Pluralism - A Comparative Overview (pp. 91-117). Springer. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/187508