Policing Religion

Case: Singapore’s 1991 Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act

Case Synopsis: How are issues of law and religion framed and addressed in a common law jurisdiction conditioned by authoritarian politics? When public critique is treated as inherently threatening to the nation-state, but performing ‘rule of law’ is central to the state’s legitimacy, legislation can ensure that the adversarial contestation of a trial relating to religion rarely enters the public domain. Singapore’s Maintenance of Religious Harmony Actreflects the Singapore state’s understanding of ‘religion’ as always-already securitized. The silencing effects of legislation expand the sphere of secretive state power and diminish the role of courts and publics.

This case originates in the work of Jothie Rajah.

Art by Ethan Sim

Sources
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Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act

White Paper on the Maintenance of Religious Harmony

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Internal Security Act

Analyses
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Policing Religion

Rajah, Jothie. 2012. ‘Policing Religion’. In Authoritarian Rule of Law, 219–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Religious Activism

Barr, Michael D. 2010. ‘Marxists in Singapore? Lee Kuan Yew’s Campaign against Catholic Social Justice Activists in the 1980s’. Critical Asian Studies 42 (3): 335–62.

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Context
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Rule of Law, Race, and Political Economy in Singapore

Rajah, Jothie. 2017. ‘Rule of Law Lineages: Heroes, Coffins, and Custom’. Law, Culture and the Humanities 13 (3): 368–82.

Poetry and Prose on Imprisonment and Exile

Tan Jing Quee, Soh Lung Teo, and Kay Yew Koh, eds. 2009. Our Thoughts Are Free: Poems and Prose on Imprisonment and Exile. Singapore: Ethos Books.
A project of Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation