Democracy and secularism: beyond state neutrality

What does the shift in perspective from the abstractions of liberal theory toward the social relations that make up the state as an effect tell us about democracy and secularism? And what analytical framework would enable us to investigate the nexus between state, religion, and democracy on the ground while being attentive to its systematic implications? In the following, I will briefly sketch how, despite the vast amount of scholarship on secularism and state-religion interactions, the socio-cultural embeddedness of the state and its effects often escape political theorists’ attention. Rather than reiterating the monism and idealism of liberal state theory that the program of “bringing the state back in” has often entailed (see Evans et al. Reference Evans, Rueschmeyer and Skocpol1985), following Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1991, 94), I suggest that we need to study the state as a “structural effect,” which becomes particularly visible on its margins.

Both the problem of the state and that of religion have been foundational to the development of democratic theory and praxis. Liberalism in Europe emerged as a response to both the restriction of personal freedom through religious doctrines and the power exercised by governments (Fischer Reference Fischer2009; Laborde Reference Laborde2017). Secularism and liberalism, therefore, are frequently taken to be preconditions for democracy, as one frees the people from oppression by clergy and dogma, the other from oppression by autocratic rulers and their legal regimes. That is why many democratic theories accept what Schirin Amir-Moazami (Reference Amir-Moazami2022) calls the “liberal-secular matrix” as the default scaffold that enables the construction of democratic polities. In this perspective, democracy unfolds in a plane of coordinates defined by their distance to more or less fixed principles of secularity and liberality and their respective opposites. In many liberal philosophical and legal perspectives, however, the central entity through which almost all institutional proposals for democratization are to be advanced—the state—often avoids scrutiny (see Povinelli Reference Povinelli2021). Liberalism’s conception of the state as a neutral arbiter of religious worldviews, as “weltanschaulich neutral,” is often taken as the baseline institutional framework through which to democratize religious politics (Bader Reference Bader2003; Laborde Reference Laborde2017, 69).

This line of reasoning tends to reduce the understanding of democracy to decision-making on religious matters, neglecting the social relations that constitute the institutions, actors, and citizenry in the first place. This vision of democratic theory mirrors the decision-based logic of the legal system, where problems between religious claims and state interference require a settlement that will be brought about through juridical decisions on concrete cases. As a result, court cases have provided ample empirical material for liberal and critical theorizing of religion and democracy alike (see Agrama Reference Agrama2012; Hurd Reference Hurd2015; Laborde Reference Laborde2017; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2016; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2005). However, many people encounter state institutions not primarily through legislative or juridical decision-making. Rather, the state as an effect materializes through a complex ensemble of social relations that opens up possibilities, restricts horizons, and governs people’s lives. Only a fracture of those effects surfaces as issues discussed in court rooms and parliamentary chambers. This suggests that idealist and abstract legalist accounts of the relationship between religion and the state need to be complemented by a different heuristic perspective (see Appadurai Reference Appadurai2002, 45).

As a counterweight to the liberal-secular narrative of the state, critical genealogies of religion and the state have followed Foucault in scrutinizing the productive aspect of state power (Agrama Reference Agrama2012; Asad Reference Asad2003; Fernando Reference Fernando2014). As Talal Asad puts it, “a secular state does not guarantee toleration, it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear” (2003, 8). A central mechanism contributing to this goal is the constant reproduction and policing of the boundaries between state/society, private/public, and religious/secular (see Dhawan Reference Dhawan2020; Mitchell Reference Mitchell1991). As Bourdieu argues, these conceptual demarcations are some of the state apparatus’ most influential tools: “one of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose … categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world—including the state itself” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1994, 1). As many critical scholars of religion have demonstrated, it is not least through the definition of the category of religion itself that the state delimits the very possibilities of democratic deliberation and decision-making on religion in the public sphere (Asad Reference Asad2003; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr Reference Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr2013; Griera et al. Reference Griera, Müller and Martínez-Ariño2023). This not only means that the state itself needs to be critically interrogated by those seeking to democratize the politics of religion; we also need to avoid reifying its character as an entity with clearly defined borders.

In their seminal volume The Many Hands of the State (2017), Kimberly Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff introduce a framework to scrutinize the state through its multidimensional effects. Rather than focusing on a perceived center, they suggest to interrogate the state from its purported margins. Black feminist theorists like bell hooks (Reference hooks1988) have long highlighted the significance of the margins as site of theorizing. According to Trouillot, the anthropology of the state follows a similar intuition: “1) state power has no institutional fixity on theoretical or historical grounds; 2) thus, state effects never obtain solely through national institutions or in governmental sites” (Trouillot Reference Trouillot2003, 80). Based on this insight, Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Reference Das and Poole2004) advocate for studying the “margins of the state,” a programme that resonates with the scholarship on how government interventions shape everyday life, especially in anthropological and sociological studies of the state, citizenship, and borders (see Bassel Reference Bassel2012; Bassel and Emejulu Reference Bassel and Emejulu2017; Lewicki Reference Lewicki2014; Meer Reference Meer2010; Sharma and Gupta Reference Sharma and Gupta2006). Similarly, state interventions in Muslim life through the regulation of hijabs, mosque constructions, and other spaces provide key insights into the micro-physics of state power in the life of Muslim denizens (Fernando Reference Fernando2014; Müller et al. Reference Müller, Taleb and Moses2021; Selby Reference Selby2014). This suggests that rather than trying to understand the state only through the rationales of the legal, geographic, and symbolic center of power prevalent in liberal state theory, we need to pay attention to the ways in which physical and social distance creates different forms of social (dis)order.

The margins are not only the place where “things fall apart/the center cannot hold,” as Chinua Achebe (Reference Achebe1989)—quoting Yeats—observes regarding the devastations of imperial state power. Neither are margins only a place of insufficient penetration by the state. Rather, as Asad suggests, echoing Das and Poole, “state power … is always unstable, something best seen when one moves away from the ‘center’” (Asad Reference Asad, Das and Poole2004, 279). Building on this approach, Michal Kravel-Tovi (Reference Kravel-Tovi2024, 3) suggests that we need to “explore the particular ways in which states make themselves present along the margins, and the unique mechanisms of governance they adopt vis-à-vis the populations inhabiting these margins.” In this light, the tensions and contradictions encountered at the margins no longer appear as an aberration from the norm of the unified state, as most liberal state theory claims. Rather than a temporary modus vivendi, they are seen as the modus operandi that has characterized the reality of statehood below the fictitious veneer of its ubiquitous omnipotence. This means that “the state emerges as an inherently incomplete project, its legalistic formalism forever fated to contending with containers of disorderly people insufficiently socialized into the law” (Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2024, 4). However, anthropological approaches to the state often remain at the granular level of analysis and do not connect these perspectives to debates in political theory concerned with conceptualizing the state as an effect across multiple scales, as Mitchell suggests. The perspective of state projects offers a useful conceptual bridge between in-depth empirical analysis and abstract patterns of knowledge, or grids of legibility, that produce often conflicting state effects on the ground.

State projects and grids of legibility

A recent iteration of Bob Jessop’s (Reference Jessop2016) strategic-relational approach to studying the state combines Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives (see Biebricher Reference Biebricher2013; Jessen and Eggers Reference Jessen and Eggers2020), which I will draw on to develop the idea of state projects below. Jessop’s definition of the state provides us with a useful starting point:

In addition to the three traditional elements of territory, people, and domination (Herrschaft), this perspective adds the dimension of Staatsidee, the idea of the state, as constitutive dimension (Jessop Reference Jessop2016, 49). For Jessop, the state project is the ensemble of imaginaries and practices that bring this Staatsidee to matter. He defines state project (in the singular) as “the political imaginaries, projects, and practices that (1) define and regulate the boundaries of the state system vis-à-vis the wider society and (2) seek to provide the state apparatus thus demarcated with sufficient substantive internal operational unity for it to be able to perform its inherited or redefined ‘socially accepted’ tasks” (Jessop Reference Jessop2016, 84). In contrast to many liberal and legal perspectives, questions of the production of social acceptance, social practices, and political imaginaries are central to this analytic of the state, while avoiding to neglect the variety of state effects in people's lifeworlds.

The focus on a state project in the singular is a useful heuristic to grasp the macro-level process of “bringing under state control,” or what Foucault (Reference Foucault2008, 77) calls “étatisation” (statification). However, this singular perspective conceals the multiple fractures within this overall project, and the frequently conflicting discourses and practices it prescribes. Therefore, I suggest differentiating between different state projects, in the plural, which not only takes Foucault’s (Reference Foucault2008, 77) own resistance to state theory seriously—he called it an “indigestible meal”—but also opens the analytical horizon for understanding competing ensembles of power/knowledge and the practices through which they manifest. Drawing on Jessop and Foucault, I propose to understand state projects as strategic ensembles of knowledge formations, practices, and subjectivities (see Müller Reference Müller2020). State projects are the ensembles of boundary-defining imaginaries and actions that control and produce that which state actors conceive of as the population to be governed.

This conception of state projects allows us to investigate different types of discursive-material ensembles and their potentially competing or contradicting logics. It helps us to interrogate ruptures, conflicts, and ways of muddling through that become legible through the ways the state takes effect in people’s everyday lives. At the same time, the concept of state projects helps us to connect actions undertaken in the name of the state across multiple spatial dimensions, combining the overarching Staatsidee with the interpretations and social relations in which local municipal administrators, religious experts, and ordinary inhabitants are entangled. Analyzing emerging subjectivities alongside knowledge and practices is a helpful heuristic to interrogate the way in which state projects refashion the demos (see Mas Reference Mas2006). Who may belong, under which conditions, and with what degrees of autonomous decision-making are key questions to understand dynamics of subjectification, of how people are being fashioned into citizens and subjects (see Mamdani Reference Mamdani1996).

Processes of abstraction conducted in the name of the state through categories such as extremism, secularism, and the constitutional order are also processes of resignification. They reshape the symbolic boundaries of religion and the state and thereby the arenas in which political conflicts unfold. Central to this process of functional differentiation spelled out by Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann is the separation of religion from politics, which helps to turn a complex social assemblage into something the state is able to “see” (see Scott Reference Scott1998) and to rework through its “many hands.” Separating the social world into discrete fields of intervention is foundational to Foucault’s idea of étatisation, of bringing under state control. However, attempts at neatly separating politics from religion need to be recognized as a political intervention itself rather than following seamlessly from a stable metaphysical distinction between the two. State interventions targeting religion can therefore not be comprehended adequately by following definitions of religion as something different from politics. Rather, because the very terms employed by the state shape social reality, the border between religion and politics should be understood as a contested arena, a problem space (Agrama Reference Agrama2012), constituted by different tensions that constantly overflow its conceptual and material confines. This perspective allows us to critically assess the liberal imperative to isolate religion from politics or to sanitize politics from its contamination by the messy social fabric in which it unfolds. This narrow idealism not only obfuscates the idiosyncrasies at the heart of local democratic contestation but also sidelines the more far-reaching Christian, secular, patriarchal, and racist underpinnings of European nation-states’ political cultures that inform any boundary-making between religion and politics (see Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2022; Lypp Reference Lypp2025; Lypp and Özyürek Reference Lypp and Özyürek2025; Müller and Dokumacı Reference Müller and Pinar2024; Topolski Reference Topolski2018).

Like the state itself, state projects should not be misconceived as monolithic entities. As Bourdieu cautions about considering the state as the subject of an action, these projects do not actually do things. However, as epistemic, social, and material ensembles they are “relays” of power/knowledge, to use Foucault’s metaphor (Reference Foucault2003, 29). They transmit certain ways of knowing and doing, including modes of inquiry, patterns of suspicion, and identification of targets for policies on religion, migrants, or radicalization (Mcdonald Reference Mcdonald2011). In this way, putting Asad’s perspective presented above to work, state projects can be seen as the vehicles through which the state distributes and elicits patterns of ambition and fear.

The perspective advanced here builds on and expands Scott’s (Reference Scott1998, 9) argument that “legibility and simplifications” are “state projects” central to the functioning of the modern state. The selective interpretation of “certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality” produces “schematic knowledge, control and manipulation” which are key dimensions of “statecraft” (Scott Reference Scott1998, 11). Such knowledge was historically produced by officials who circumscribed “exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices … and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored,” which renders populations and territories governable (Scott Reference Scott1998, 2, emphasis added). Scott shows how this grid, variously identified as “the administrative grid,” “a total classificatory grid,” “static grid,” “planning grid,” “hierarchical grid,” and “legible grid,” served states in pursuing their high modernist projects of classifying land, people, and practices, and to build geometric and neatly taxonomized cities, legal structures, and bureaucratic apparatuses (Reference Scott1998, 80, 82, 88, 108, 139, 204). This grid of legibility is an epistemic and practical device pivotal for state agencies trying to advance their projects of socio-political change, even though their impact on everyday practices are often different from or even contradicting their original intention. While Scott argues that this is caused by the mismatch between the abstract schemas giving rise to state simplifications and the unwieldy social reality on the ground, he still seems to treat this grid of legibility as a singular (high modernist) vision of reality. While it is useful to consider legibility and simplification as state projects at the most abstract level, I suggest that concrete analyses of such processes reveal that state actors do not only employ one singular but multiple grids of legibility. In other words, it is not only local recalcitrance that causes state intervention to fail but also that the state—as decentralized ensemble of force relations—operates through conflicting interpretive lenses itself.Footnote ¹

This perspective allows us to make two distinct contributions. First, while the critical secularism literature is highly sensitive to the contextual parameters constructing the problem space of state and religion, it sometimes defaults to a vision of the modern state as a relatively unitary actor drawing this boundary (see, e.g., Asad Reference Asad2003, 5, 253). This article demonstrates that there is no single way in which “the state” draws that line, since various actors and institutions do so differently depending on the context, synchronously and diachronically. The many hands of the state mobilize multiple grids of legibility in order to measure reality and design interventions. Second, this perspective allows us to interrogate how state officials employing different grids of legibility to delineate legitimate forms of religious practice create a highly complex, opaque, and often confusing political, legal, and moral landscape. As a result, incommensurable forms of legibility create their own unwieldy and dynamic reality of frequently conflicting laws, regulations, and expectations. This leaves intersectionally marginalized people in a space of fractured subjectivity where it becomes increasingly impossible to be on the “right” side of the line that would enable them to act as fully enfranchised and recognized parts of the demos. The lines that define the possibilities of legitimate participation, enjoyment of rights, and temporary protection from violence get constantly redrawn, over and across one another, through various dynamically interacting grids of legibility, which obstructs a cohesive democratic existence. The result is a distinctive democratic challenge emanating from state projects as overlapping and contradicting processes of rendering social reality legible and subject to state intervention.Footnote ²

The state project framework offers political theorists a tool to locate the state between its granular manifestations and its cumulative effect, between the discretion exercised by street-level bureaucrats and the constitutional logics of national security, social cohesion, and individual rights. The fine-grained lens provided through an anthropology of the state offers an apt methodological tool to scrutinize state projects in action. In previous work based on extensive empirical research in two highly diverse neighborhoods in Hasenbergl/Milbertshofen, Munich and Brent, London, I identified key imperatives that serve as a heuristic to investigate three conflicting state projects: security, identity, and diversity (Müller Reference Müller2020). Based on this and the empirical analysis below, the final section of the paper will outline how these imperatives manifest in the practices and knowledge formations of connected yet distinct state projects.

Sanitizing politics

Local state actors trying to adjudicate the legitimate delineation between religion and politics have to negotiate a dilemma for which abstract calls for state neutrality do not offer clear-cut solutions. The first empirical case on a controversy around local funding for religious festivals in the west London Borough of Brent demonstrates the conflicting imperatives politicians are faced with, and how despite their attempts to act as neutral arbiters they cannot avoid intervening in religious life. The effect of the imperative to remain neutral materializes as a process of sanitizing politics, where considerations of local context, culture, and politics are rendered illegible or irrelevant within the secular-liberal grid employed by state actors.

In contrast to the ethnic-religious imaginaries such as white nationalism and white Christian nationalism that shape national discourse in the UK and Germany (Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2022; Bhambra Reference Bhambra2017; Lypp Reference Lypp2025; Müller Reference Müller2022; see Gorski and Perry Reference Gorski and Perry2022), Brent is one of London’s radically multicultural or “superdiverse” boroughs (Bowen Reference Bowen2014; Degli Esposti Reference Degli Esposti2019; Vertovec Reference Vertovec2007). While many different religious groups thrive in Brent, the question of how to identify parameters under which decisions on religious matters should be taken also haunts elected officials running the local authority. In Brent this question came to a head in 2011, when, faced with severe budgetary pressures imposed by the government’s austerity measures, the council had to make drastic cuts across all its activities. This included scrutinizing the funds allocated for religious festivals. Challenged about the fact that activities organized by some religious groups were supported while others were not, Brent Council officials came to the realization that they lacked any criteria to guide these decisions. This conundrum was aptly summarized by Rashid, an influential councilor with a South Asian Muslim background:

Rashid’s reflections show how a democratically elected representative tasked with decision-making on religious matters struggles to establish the norms and categories that are legitimate in justifying the local authority’s interaction with religious groups. The funding of religious festivals was fiercely debated in many council meetings and vigorously defended by groups that had previously received generous funding. This included large-scale functions such as the Hindu Navratri Festival, which was seen by many as a flagship event for the municipality and London as a whole. Despite this resistance, in the end, the council cut all funding for religious activities. The deliberations leading to this highly controversial decision merit close attention as they reveal the difficulty of democratic decision-making on religion when allocating local state resources. Such issues usually fall outside of liberal theory’s core concerns with rights, exemptions, or symbolic establishment. Rather, they touch on the types of support a local authority can provide to foster the public participation of its diverse constituencies. Enabling different groups to contribute to public life is not only a key imperative of the diversity state project; it also forms the precondition of democratic participation in a liberal state.

Reflecting on the funding cuts, Rashid told me that explaining this decision to the affected religious groups proved politically difficult and personally challenging:

Four possible logics for allocating state funding to religious communities can be discerned in Rashid’s statement. To achieve fairness and equity, a first criterion could be proportionality, which entails allocating funds to religious communities based on their relative size. Secondly, one could provide support in an equalizing way, in which each community would be seen as an equally worthy recipient of state funds, irrespective of size and membership. Thirdly, funds could be allocated according to efficacy, focusing on the tangible, ideally quantifiable, output that is achieved with a certain budget. Finally, a needs-based assessment would weigh up the socio-economic positions of different religious groups. In Brent, Indian Hindu and Iraqi Shia Muslim communities were historically more middle class and affluent whereas Sunni Muslim groups tended to attract more working-class believers; and as a result, had fewer resources at their disposal. However, these disparities were difficult to translate into a language that was legible for the state apparatus. While there existed disaggregated data on religious affiliation and socio-economic status, allocating less well-to-do communities more money would risk stigmatization and putting them in the position of welfare recipients, which is why this rationale was rejected by both the council and the respective communities. Since official statistics are not broken down by denomination, using population size as grounds for decision-making on fund allocation would be perilous, not least because it would be very unclear which organization was the adequate recipient representing this specific part of the population. In addition, such statistics say little about the realities of religious life. For example, the Brent Council-funded Navratri Festival drew at one point a crowd of 250,000 attendees, whereas the Christmas celebration it supported had merely 95–450 participants (Brent Council 2011b, 90–91).

This demonstrates how the different logics of legibility and legitimacy employed at the margins of the state struggle to adequately account for the messy reality of superdiversity on the ground. The desire for quantification underlying the grids of legibility enabling Seeing Like the State, as James Scott’s (Reference Scott1998) famous book title puts it, troubles democratic decision-makers trying to reconcile what they consider the wishes of their constituents and the conflicting logics of different state projects. Prior to the controversy around the funding for religious festivals, financial support was granted without any overarching, categorical rationale. Instead, funding decisions were influenced by factors such as historical emergence, bargaining power, democratic representation, and a local cultural strategy aimed at supporting public expressions of community life. However, the financial pressures introduced by austerity and the administrative logics requiring the council to trace, justify, and account for financial flows contributed to elected representatives opting for a radically different approach.

Trying to weigh up the proportional, equalizing, efficacy, and need-based logics of allocating the funds was further complicated by another legal framework that was used as an argument against state financing of religious festivals: the Equality Act of 2010. While it was widely considered a landmark legislation that introduced far-reaching requirements of equal treatment, it left open the question whether state funding could be allocated to religious groups at all. In the meeting where the festival funding strategy was discussed, the former leader of Brent Council, Ann John, used this argument to support radical cuts: She “reminded the Executive of the … concern that faith and cultural events were not seen to be inclusive … for the council to meet its obligation under the Equality Act 2010” (Brent Council 2011a). Speaking against this, “Councillor HB Patel reminded the Executive that religious and cultural events had been celebrated for many years, that this was a diverse borough and that there was no clear evidence that they were not valued” (Brent Council 2011a).

The elected representatives’ interventions point not only to the tensions between different understandings of equality but more broadly to the question on what basis decisions about local state funding should be made. Mobilizing the abstract, national level legislation, Councilor John argued for a vision of democratic equality where inclusivity meant that the state would not grant financial support to any religious group. On the other hand, Councilor Patel drew on cultural customs and the preferences of local communities as the sources for legitimate decision-making, citing the events’ popularity and Brent's historic tradition of celebrating religious festivals. This can be interpreted as a conflict between a vision of “diversity-as-difference” and one of “diversity-as-inclusion”. The diversity state project is marked by the tension between these different visions of diversity. Diversity becomes the “problem space” where the question of what kind of differences matter and whether they are legitimate grounds for democratic decision-making is constantly renegotiated (see Agrama Reference Agrama2012). Like diversity, as the statement by Councilor John indicates, reference to inclusivity can become a vehicle through which state support for certain cultural and religious expressions are delegitimized.

The democratic salience and legitimacy of these arguments, however, cannot be determined by abstract theorizing alone. Rather, they require careful attention to the complex empirical realities in which democratic decision-makers and bureaucrats find themselves. They produce new forms of religious politics on the ground, a democratic experiment that resulted in the following decision by Brent Council: The final report on the religious funding strategy outlined as number one priority “1) an all encompassing approach that promotes festivals and events which are inclusive of all of Brent’s communities” (Brent Council 2011b, 10), which implied they would no longer fund the borough’s major community festivals and leave fundraising up to the religious groups themselves.

The effect of this process can be described as sanitizing politics from the blemish inflicted by a set of social relations identified as religious in the context of superdiversity. As a possibly unintended consequence, this grid of legibility renders the cultural, local, community, relational, and institutional scaffold on which religious practices unfold outside of the realm of legitimate democratic praxis. The sole focus on religion and its rendering as non-inclusive meant that the funding question was decided largely in isolation from other considerations that democratic representatives might have deemed more important. The case also shows how the diversity project’s imperative of equality conflicts with the identity state project’s practices of fostering a sense of community and belonging; the Navratri festival as flagship event of the post-imperial multicultural metropolis was no longer supported by the state. This state effect took the form of a liberal-secular constraint on democratically elected officials, which shows the significance of attending to local contexts at the margins of the state, and how conflicting grids of what is legible as diversity, inclusivity—and the demos itself—are remade in democratic praxis.

Fracturing the demos

The question of who counts as part of the demos is constitutive for political theory and continues to haunt the democratic experiment (see Brown Reference Brown2015). In addition to the formal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion through citizenship regimes, asylum policies, and hostile environments, participation in the demos in the political sense is often fractured not only along legal and geographic lines but also along the axes of temporality, race, gender, class, and religion (see Bassel and Emejulu Reference Bassel and Emejulu2017; Emejulu and Bassel Reference Emejulu and Bassel2025; White Reference White2024). Government officials not only intervene in religious life by redrawing the boundaries of legitimate relations between state and religion, they also have to navigate the sometimes contradicting imperatives of security, fostering a national identity, and enabling democratic participation in highly diverse societies. The controversy around the Munich Forum for Islam (MFI), at one point the largest new mosque building project in Southern Germany, illustrates how state interventions follow conflicting grids of legibility and hence can produce outcomes directly contradicting explicitly stated objectives. This results in a process of fracturing the demos: introducing overlapping and crisscrossing boundaries of racialized suspicion, legitimate religious expression, and possibilities of establishing civic associations conditions and restricts the possibilities of thus marginalized populations to participate in democratic life.

While MFI’s existing building is located in Munich’s city center, it serves as a vital institution for many people living in the neighborhoods I studied, and the projected site of the planned mosque would have brought it very close to the hubs of Muslim life in Milbertshofen/Hasenbergl. MFI had for a long time planned to build a major representative mosque in Munich. MFI stands out in the German Islamic landscape where most mosques are part of large associations with mainly Turkish and some Moroccan, Iranian, Bosnian, and other national affiliations. MFI successfully attracts multiethnic groups of attendees bridging many separations within local communities (see Müller Reference Müller2021). On its website, MFI describes itself as “enlightened,” “reformist,” and “detached from the countries of origin” (MFI 2014). MFI had been repeatedly supported and praised by Catholic, Lutheran-Protestant, and Jewish groups for their active engagement in interfaith dialogue, refugee support work, and educational activities against radicalization (Müller Reference Müller2019, Reference Müller2020). The new mosque was imagined by its supporters as an intellectual and community hub for training imams, school class visits, and interfaith activities in the planned library and cafe facilities.

To the great surprise of many observers, after years of preparation, fundraising, and planning, the mosque project was declared to have failed in 2016. The official statement suggested that this was due to the lack of funds to purchase the piece of land allocated by the city council. This narrative, however, hides a more complex and problematic backstory in which different hands of the state turned out to play a major role. Imam Benjamin Idriz and other leaders of MFI had worked for a long time in the Islamic Community Penzberg (Islamische Gemeinde Penzberg), which followed a model similar to MFI: actively creating a multiethnic and locally rooted Muslim community (see Becker Reference Becker2017). However, in 2007, the Penzberg mosque was suddenly classified as an object of surveillance by the secret service in charge of dealing with domestic extremism, the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution (see Müller Reference Müller2019). They accused MFI of maintaining working relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Community Millî Görüş (IGMG, Islamische Gemeinschaft Millî Görüş). The two main charges later upheld in two court decisions claimed that Bayram Yerli, then the Penzberg mosque chairman, had not effectively renounced his membership of Millî Görüş at least until 2005, even though he provided the court with various emails asking Millî Görüş to send him a confirmation that his membership had been terminated long ago (see Müller and Müller Reference Müller, Müller and Sinder2023).

The Penzberg mosque community filed a court case against being classified as an object of surveillance for suspected extremism by the secret services, to no avail. The evidence that upheld the secret service’s assessment in court was that during a raid in a Millî Görüş mosque, the police found an Excel spread sheet that still listed the Penzberg mosque as a member organization. The other pieces of evidence were several secretly recorded phone calls between Benjamin Idriz and other Muslim leaders in which they criticized him for being too forthcoming in his collaboration with the state agencies they saw as suppressing different Muslim groups. This call was interpreted by the court as ongoing “strategic collaboration” (BayVGH, 16.7.2010).Footnote ⁴ Finally, secret service operatives allegedly found a poster in the Penzberg mosque that advertised a Qur’an citation competition organized by Millî Görüş. This led the Bavarian administrative court to claim that the Penzberg mosque was “an exemplary case for the formal and only external efforts at distancing oneself [from Millî Görüş],” while it claimed there were still an “inner proximity and connection to these extremist organizations” (BayVGH, 16.7.2010).

Three years after being first charged with extremism and after two unsuccessful court cases, the Penzberg mosque was suddenly dropped from the Annual Report for the Protection of the Constitution in 2011 and was no longer classified as object of surveillance suspected of extremism. The reputational, financial, and personal damage experienced by the Penzberg and MFI personnel during this episode were immense. One of the fallouts of MFI’s attempts at fending off the charges of extremism, which included them agreeing with the Bavarian Interior Ministry’s assessment that other groups including Millî Görüş were extremist, resulted in a significant deterioration in the relations among Muslim communities in Munich. This was likely one of the reasons that broad-based ideational and material support for the new mosque project failed to materialize (Müller Reference Müller2019).

The failure of the Munich mosque project connects various spatial dimensions in addition to fracturing inter-community relations in Munich, including criticism of donors from the Gulf countries and opposition from conservative politicians and local far-right groups (Müller Reference Müller2019). The project became highly politicized through far-right anti-mosque protests and interventions by politicians from the governing Christian Social Union party agitating against receiving money from international donors (Rieber Reference Rieber2015). While the full story of the city administration’s actions was never made public, municipal civil servants told me that while several donors had agreed to pay for the property, a clear sign that their donation was welcome by the mayor was lacking, so they withdrew their support. After the failure of the project, MFI was running one of the last mosques in the city center since increasing rents and gentrification had pushed out most other communities. This left Munich—which is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the country—without any centrally located purpose-built mosques.

The case of the MFI demonstrates that even citizens meeting the expectations articulated through the imperatives of security and national identity, including by affirming normative-legal constructs such as “moderate,” “enlightened,” and “reformist,” are only temporarily accepted as part of the demos. Both their belonging and “integration,” a key concern in the identity state project, and their freedoms, a baseline of the diversity state project, were fundamentally interrupted through direct and indirect state interventions. Like MFI regular Yesmine, whose experience will be discussed below, MFI was put on a pedestal as “exemplary” Muslim community. State actors chose MFI to represent the side of Islam that was legible as belonging to and “fitting” with their vision of national identity. This practice of elevation and becoming the representative and spokesperson for a community is key to the imperative of the state identity project to influence how religious minorities are supposed to interpret the rightful place of religion in the public sphere, how they are supposed to identify themselves vis-à-vis the Christianity-inflected national culture, and how they are expected to help enforcing boundaries to exclude unwanted parts of the body politic (see Amir-Moazami Reference Amir-Moazami2022).

At the same time, the imperative mobilized through the security state project, to produce knowledge about possible extremists, identify them, trace their connections, and render them “prosecutable” through the security apparatus has made MFI a target of suspicion and legally sanctioned restrictions. They were caught up in the conflicting demands of the security and the identity state project, one elevating them to the position of representing the “good Muslim” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2005), the other pushing them out of the realm of the respectable into the space of the suspicious and potentially dangerous to the constitutional order (Dazey Reference Dazey2024). The grids of legibility underlying the aims to achieve security and national identity can arguably be justified according to the internal logic of the constitutional order. However, their locally entangled manifestations produce effects that render Muslims as subjects whose belonging to the Bavarian and German national body politic is perpetually conditional and fragile. Membership, capacities, and existential security of being a citizen with equal abilities to shape religious and public life are therefore rendered tenuous and volatile, even for those who do everything in their power to prove their loyalty to the constitutional order.

This suggests that for the Muslim citizens running MFI, belonging to the demos is not only limited by the legal requirements of citizenship, which is in itself steeped in the racialized histories of exclusion and Islamophobia (Cakir Reference Cakir2014; Hafez Reference Hafez2026; Lewicki Reference Lewicki2018; Müller Reference Müller2022), but also by the knowledges and practices advanced through the many less visible hands of the bureaucratic machinery acting at the margins of the state—in the name of liberal democracy. The fracturing of the demos is therefore not only a legal and political phenomenon but also a process of contraction and expansion of possibilities for differently situated people’s democratic participation. This fracturing runs not only along a geographical axis, for example through families separated by border regimes, but also along a temporal one. Without a perceptible change in attitudes and practices, members of the MFI community were at one point elevated to the position of the posterchild Muslim subject imagined by state actors, only to be suddenly dropped, suspected of extremism and targeted by ruthless legal sanctions and public denouncement. The temporal oscillation between inclusion and denigration further unsettles the possibilities of democratic participation and contributes to the fragmentation of the demos in the name of the state.

How the fracturing of the demos restricts individuals’ participation in public life becomes even more vividly evident in the story of Yesmine, who used to be a regular attendee and collaborator of MFI. Yesmine is a teacher of Islamic studies employed by the Free State of Bavaria working in different state schools in Munich. The strongest demand for Islamic instruction in state schools occurs in neighborhoods with the highest linguistic and national diversity, and large proportions of people living in poverty such as Milbertshofen/Hasenbergl, where Yesmine works in a secondary school (see Müller Reference Müller2020). Yesmine walks a tight rope between the secular-legal demands of her employer, the Bavarian state, and the religious-communal demands of local Islamic associations. She is a devout Muslim not wearing a headscarf who advocates for the symbiosis of Islam and the German constitution. Her positionality and the way she is read as representing a “German Islam” has resulted in many state institutions relying on her as a dialogue partner on matters concerning Islam in Germany. For instance, she was invited to develop curricula for Islamic instruction in state schools, a reluctant concession wrested from the Bavarian state, given the significant privileges the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Protestant churches enjoy. At the same time, she told me that as an Islamic studies teacher she is frequently met with suspicion in the school’s staff room. Colleagues would often confront her out of the blue, urging her to explain her position on a wide range of political issues, from political movements in the Middle East to terrorist attacks in Europe.

In addition to being treated with suspicion by colleagues, she is regularly criticized by parents and religious associations who doubt her commitment to and interpretation of Islamic laws. This is not a unique case. Muslim teachers and professors frequently experience alienation or outright hostility from Islamic associations who often hold more institutionalized and conservative views on moral, legal, and religious questions (see Rosenow-Williams Reference Rosenow-Williams2012). Due to the corporatist structure of German constitutional law on religion, Islamic associations hold a considerable degree of influence in educational affairs. Religious associations have the constitutional right to offer subsidized religious instruction in schools. Islamic organizations have claimed for a long time that, like churches, it is their right to appoint appropriate teachers and design curricula according to their interpretation of Islam. In an interview, Eymen, a spokesperson for the Turkish government-funded organization Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), complained about the repeated rejections of their efforts to become recognized by the state as an institution allowed to deliver religious instruction in state schools: “Because we understand ourselves to be the guarantors of the constitutional order here in Bavaria, we Muslims, we uphold the constitution and we request the Bavarian state government, to uphold the constitution, please!”

This puts Yesmine in a difficult position. She struggles for the recognition to teach Islam in German state schools in a way that is relatively independent from Islamic associations while also trying to face off structural Islamophobia and racism she is subjected to when being interpellated as a “moderate” or “secular” Muslim (see Mas Reference Mas2006). Very well connected across the Bavarian and German landscape of Muslim organizations, she is one of the people trying to chart a path between instrumentalization by either the state or Islamic organizations. As a sought-after speaker and vocal public intellectual, she frequently gave talks about the democratic values of Islam and the Islamic values of democracy. Among others, she had been a supporter of MFI’s efforts to establish an Islamic Centre in Munich that was independent, academically oriented, multi-ethnic and locally rooted, and hence enjoyed broad political support across the city.

All this changed dramatically with a letter she received in 2009. The letter was from her employer, the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs. It contained a list of mosques that she was advised to no longer attend or else risk losing her job as Bavarian civil servant. Among the significant number of mosques on the list was also the MFI. Faced with the threat of losing her family’s livelihood, she cut links with MFI and drastically reduced her public engagement. She felt like she had been betrayed by the state whose liberal constitution she had so vehemently defended and who had put her in the uncomfortable position of the respectable Other, until even this precarious privilege had been revoked through the letter.

Yesmine experienced that her belonging to the citizenry of the German state had been conditional, and that these conditions had radically changed in unforeseeable ways. Like other people identified as so-called moderate and secular Muslims, she had also been seen as an instrument in the efforts organized through the security state project to push back against “Islamism,” which the security services define as a religiously inspired enmity to the German constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz Reference Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz2013; see Müller Reference Müller2017; Schiffauer Reference Schiffauer2010, Reference Schiffauer and Mecheril2014). The government’s instruction meant that Yesmine was no longer attending her religious community because it had been turned into an “object of surveillance,” suspected to have links to Islamism. The charges were later dropped and in 2019, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank Walter Steinmeier, helped clear their name by calling the activities of key MFI personnel a “model” to be emulated (Schröder Reference Schröder2019).

With the letter, the state was exercising its power as an employer to direct and limit the religious life of those acting on its behalf. Through this administrative act, a Muslim citizen was prevented from attending the mosque she used to frequent, which represents a very significant intervention regarding both freedom of religion and freedom of expression. By virtue of their non-public and idiosyncratic nature, such state interventions largely escape legal and scholarly scrutiny. They are part of the many ways in which the imperative of the state to fight “the enemy within” (Warsi Reference Warsi2018) is translated into an act of expanding sovereignty, pushing the boundary of the state’s ability to intervene into citizens’ religious life. Here, the social relation of a labor contract is used to press citizens into complying with a newly redrawn boundary of extremism, which is constantly in flux and as such creating a permanent state of instability. Yesmine’s case also illustrates how the redefinition of the boundary of what constitutes a security threat is not adequately captured by a narrow view of decision-making on religion through laws and court decisions. Rather, the securitizing lens expands into all sorts of social relations that make up the state and the competing projects therein, including through the actions of street-level bureaucrats. To understand these dynamics requires us to attend to the internal workings of the state apparatus beyond those institutions explicitly tasked with the policy field designated as religion.

The case of Yesmine also illustrates how the imperatives and grids of legibility mobilized across different state projects can contradict each other. For many local and federal state-level government officials acting to advance the identity state project, Yesmine was an ideal “representative.” She was legible as a staunch defender of liberal democracy, fluent in Arabic, highly educated in Islamic theology and secular social sciences, critical of the conservative Islamic associations, and practicing her religion in a way that was deemed legitimate and respectable: she regularly attended a mosque but was not suspected to be “too religious” since she did not wear a headscarf. From the perspective of the Christian nationalism underlying the identity state project in Bavaria and other parts of Germany (Müller Reference Müller2022; Pautz Reference Pautz2005), she was seen as a valuable resource in the fight for a largely assimilated Islam that would easily blend into a public sphere dominated by Christian culture, secular law, and a racialized imagination of who really belonged to the German Volk (see Özyürek Reference Özyürek2015). And yet, the security state project’s practices of suspicion moved the mosque she attended into the field of extremism, eroding her loyalty credentials in the eyes of the state. More importantly, this securitizing move had devastating consequences for her personal choices, religious life, and individual freedoms, which are core to the logic of the diversity state project, which aims to enable at least a modicum of liberal democratic rights to racialized and marginalized populations. In this way, the experiences of Yesmine and the MFI community reveal a frequently overlooked facet of the relation between religion and democracy. The empirically nuanced scrutiny of state effects resulting from competing grids of legibility points to the significance of more critical and realist appreciations of the contradictions and conflicts within the modern state, which often escape the attention of liberal legalist and idealist perspectives.

In lieu of a conclusion: conflicting state projects of security, identity, and diversity

The two case studies reveal how state actors have to navigate the political and legal imperatives advanced on the basis of different grids of legibility. While there are significant differences between the two case studies which I have discussed elsewhere (Müller Reference Müller2020), in the following I will focus on the heuristic benefit of investigating these competing ways in which the “many hands” of the state “see” the social world, and the knowledges, practices, and subjectivities they mobilize, as distinct state projects. The claim is not that these can be extrapolated to other state-religion constellations, but rather that they offer a lens through which to identify the frequently conflicting ways in which state agents understand the population and social relations they are tasked to govern. Rather than a unified grid of legibility, as Scott suggests, state projects allow us to study competing grids of legibility and the types of investigation, evaluation and intervention they enable.

The security state project is animated by a knowledge formation based on the distinction between who is and who is not considered extremist. The key set of practices through which this manifests is by categorizing and preempting risks of extremism, creating epistemic, legal, and practical tools to surveil, control, and punish. This results in the production of a risky subject, in the sense of a subject at risk of radicalization and thereby posing a risk to the body politic, as the case of MFI and Yesmine vividly demonstrate.

In the identity state project, the guiding question is who and what belongs, to country, culture, and constitution. Policing the reproduction of the national body politic is at the heart of the practices flowing from this question. These cannot be limited to the issue of citizenship, notwithstanding its centrality to this mode of scrutiny, which is frequently culturally and racially overdetermined. Rendering belonging permanently unstable for parts of the population, the identity state project mobilizes the interrogation of the subject regarding its loyalty to a constantly changing definition of what the proper place of religion in a racialized cultural-constitutional order should be, as the problem of establishing criteria for local government funding for religious festivals in Brent demonstrates.

The diversity state project entails a variety of knowledge formations concerning the meaning of equal treatment and the extent to which inequality in status, representation, and decision-making are justifiable. The practices enacting and producing this knowledge include the management of inclusion and exclusion, frequently through the metaphor of “community,” which becomes the relevant subject through which state engagement is organized, in addition to the individualized legal dynamics between human rights, surveillance, and persecution. In both cases presented above, the state objective to support the public participation of minority communities has been stymied; by a logic of suspicion of extremism in Munich, and a logic of secularism detached from the realities of minority communities in Brent.

The two case studies suggest that we need to pay closer attention to conflicting imperatives and grids of legibility shaping actions undertaken in the name of the state when thinking about the relation between democracy and religion. Liberal state theories’ abstract legal and philosophical accounts are insufficient to understand the way in which state projects aimed at security, identity, and diversity mobilize conflicting imperatives which elected representatives, bureaucrats, and ordinary people have to negotiate. Administrative decisions such as the one preventing Yesmine from attending her mosque can have effects that run against some of the purported objectives of the state, even within the boundaries of secularism. In order to foster social cohesion, a public commitment to religious freedom and ethnic diversity, the MFI mosque project was supported by the majority of elected representatives and civil society organizations. Its failure was less the result of a single decision by a court or a local parliament, but the coming together of a complex web of financial challenges, racialized suspicion, and interventions of the secret services. This shows how the limits to the exercise of religious freedom and civic participation in public life are not necessarily imposed by laws or court rulings, but by a multiscalar ensemble of interactions across state and society. Rather than representing an exception, this paper contends that these effects of obstruction and marginalization are central to how citizens—particularly racialized religious minorities in Europe—experience and are made legible by liberal democratic states (see Hafez Reference Hafez2026; Povinelli Reference Povinelli2021) and hence need to inform democratic theorizing about religion.

The analytical framework of state projects helps to bridge more abstract, national-level legal and discursive frameworks with the relational, material, and spatialized practices through which religious lifeworlds encounter the state. By combining the study of knowledge formations, practices, and subjectivities, a more critical, realistic, and more realist—in the theoretical sense—account of how the politics of religion and secularism play out on the ground emerges. The state project perspective enables conceptual coherence through its identification of key imperatives that are mobilized in the name of security, identity, and diversity, while being open enough to capture a wide variety of scales, temporalities, and grammars through which these projects are articulated and resisted in different contexts.

The state project framework also provides an analytical bridge between political theory and in-depth empirical studies. In terms of theory, its foundation in neo-Marxist, Foucauldian, and anthropological state theory makes it directly relevant for current debates about the transformations of the modern state, the changing nature of power, and processes of subject formation. Like the disciplinary, pastoral, and productive power that animates the clinic and the prison identified by Foucault, historical and empirical studies of “micro-physics of power” (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 28) at the nexus of state and religion can open new avenues in theorizing how power/knowledge shapes the conditions of democratic life. Regarding its empirical-heuristic value, the granular focus on relationality, social practices, and knowledge formations allows a much wider range of concerns to inform our thinking about the state, particularly the intimate and locally specific modalities of inequality, marginalization, and resistance. In addition, this perspective allows us to critically interrogate how concepts underlying the Staatsidee such as diversity, security, and national identity enable and constrain different forms democratic praxis. Based on this, future research should identify different types of state projects and the tensions they produce across time and space, which could be developed into an original research agenda for political theorists studying contemporary political contestations.

Underappreciated effects of the state like the ones discussed here often remain outside of democratic theory’s remit, mostly due to the lack of studies taking these effects at the margins of the state as the starting point for political theorizing. Drawing methodological insights from the anthropology of the state enables us to bridge local particularities with the conceptual concerns of political theory. The case studies above demonstrate the need for diversifying the empirical grounding of democratic theorizing of religion, taking seriously how local bureaucrats and municipal representatives interpret and challenge abstract accounts of secularism and religious politics at the national level. The different visions of diversity contested in Brent Council show how these local religion-state encounters can be productive sites of democratic theorizing. This demonstrates how fieldwork not only opens up new sources and questions for political theory; it also suggests that we would be well-advised to take more seriously religious experts and bureaucrats as political actors and theorists of their own practice. This will allow future research to complement centralized, legal and philosophical accounts of state-religion interactions with perspectives from the complex lifeworlds where secularism and the state take effects, which promises to open novel pathways for democratic theory.