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God and the Secular Legal System Rafael Domingo Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, Law and Christianity, xii + 180 pp (hardback £76.99) ISBN: 978-1-107-14731-7, (paperback £20.99) ISBN: 978-1-316-60127-3

This book is a much-welcomed addition to the pioneering Cambridge series on ‘Law and Christianity’. Its distinguished author, Rafael Domingo, is a professor of law at the University of Navarra in Spain who has written more than ten books on legal history, comparative law and legal theory. In the book, Domingo seeks to contribute to the emerging international debate on religion in an era of secularisation, in which belief in God has changed from a social assumption or norm to a respected option. He addresses three large topics – God, religion and conscience – from a normative, legal perspective. The study offers a legal paradigm to reset the relationship between these transcultural aspects of human experience and the secular legal systems of democratic societies. The argument is not tied to any particular legal system of Western culture (though several legal systems are discussed) but aims to provide the best justification for principles that inform and justify secular legal systems. The core argument is that secular legal systems should treat God, religion and conscience with respect – namely, not only through positive feelings or deference towards them, but also specific actions to express that appreciation. In the case of God, respect requires recognition; in the case of religion, toleration; and in the case of conscience, accommodation. In this grand enterprise, Domingo also evaluates critically both traditional religious and current liberal approaches to religion. For Domingo, the religious approach legalises God as the ultimate source of religion, morality and legality – without God, the secular legal system is not well founded – and nonbeliever citizens should assume this religious premise as a fact. The liberal approach focuses exclusively on morality: it sees religion as a product, even a positive one, of individual morality. For this approach the existence of God has no legal relevance – and to take God into legal account discriminates against nontheistic religions. Domingo argues that the religious approach fails because it requires God to justify the secular legal system in a globalised and plural society in which God is no longer axiomatic. And the liberal approach fails because it closes the door to Abrahamic religions, and specifically to God, by reducing God and religion to a matter of private conscience/morality. He sees the religious approach as inevitably exclusivist and the liberal approach as (2020) 22 Ecc LJ 100–115 # Ecclesiastical Law Society