More than half of all constitutions in South and Southeast Asia give special privileges and/or status to a single religion. Despite this fact, most scholars still treat these types of laws as though they were anomalous. Aside from transgressing the presumed neutrality of contemporary public law, religiously preferential constitutions are also assumed to give clear political or economic advantages to members of the preferred religious groups.

Yet, are these worries valid? Are religious supremacy clauses always an unequivocal boon for the majority religious groups? Moreover, when it comes to the functioning of constitutional law in society, how different are mechanism and effects of religiously preferential constitutions compared with secular ones?

Drawing on my recent book, and ongoing research, I explore these questions in the context of Sri Lanka—a country that, for the last four decades, has given Buddhism special constitutional status. Through an analysis of Buddhist doctrine, monastic practices and legal theory I hope to complicate existing wisdom about the effects of religious supremacy clauses and to challenge the assumed binary opposition between secular constitutions and religious preferential ones.

Benjamin Schonthal is Associate Professor of Buddhism and Asian Religions at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. His research examines the intersections of religion, law and politics in late-colonial and contemporary Southern Asia, with a particular focus on Buddhism and law in Sri Lanka. His work appears in The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, the International Journal of Constitutional Law and other places. Ben's first book, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2016. His current project, supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, examines the lived practices of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka and their links with state-legal structures.