The emergence and regulation of minority religious groups in europe

This chapter examines the vexing issues of recognition and regulation of minority religious groups in Europe from the vantage point of social theory. We consider minority religious groups as social agents with properties that are not reducible to their individual members.1 This approach neither collapses human agency into group agency nor conflates the agency of individuals with the agency of a group (Tollefsen 2002; Pettit 2002). Individual and group agencies may be differentiated between one another but they are analytically meaningful if they are contemplated in the context of an ongoing interplay between one another (Lockwood 1964; Archer 1988, 1995; Bhaskar 1993; Manicas 2006). In this sense, minority religious groups are endowed with social agency, which is readily differentiable from the agency of their individual members, but at the same time these two agencies are at constant interplay with one another. The extent to which the group agency of a religious minority affects the agency of an individual member (and vice-versa) is a matter of empirical investigation.2.