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Believer beware: The Challenges of Commercial Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Abstract
In a wide range of circumstances religious activity and commercial activity may overlap, leading to what may fairly, albeit novelly, be categorised as commercial religion. This overlap is potentially problematic to law, raising as it does the possibility of inappropriate over-regulation of religious activity and religious claims and the possibility of inappropriate under-regulation of commercial activity and claims. One way to solve this problem is to create a binary divide between the commercial and the religious, so that any situation might be categorised as one or the other, and the appropriate legal framework and philosophies applied. This is the preferred route under the European Convention on Human Rights. Such a separation does not, however, address the complexity of regulating commercial religion in practice, as demonstrated by considering the regulation of commercial religion in UK consumer law. There are, however, strategies which may serve to reblend the commercial and religious elements.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 2013
Footnotes
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Many thanks for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper to Professor Ilona Cheyne and Dr Dominic Corrywright of Oxford Brookes University, and Peter Cumper of Leicester University.
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