Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates legal processes to mitigate social conflicts unfolded in 2008 and to balance religious accommodation in the South Korean society, to understand how those religious identity-based claims refined state's secular identity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates legal processes to mitigate social conflicts which unfolded in 2008 and led to the emergence of the notion "religious discrimination" in the South Korean society.

Some religious groups denounced the civil servants behaviors, including the president Lee Myungbak, which raised doubts on their distinctive connections with certain Protestant churches. They organized protests of historical scale accusing "religious discrimination”. These religious identity-based claims engendered a sensitisation of social awareness regarding religious freedom and equality. In order to mitigate those groundbreaking social tension, the state initiate the changes. In 2008, Religious neutrality is inserted in the norms of government officials. In 2009, the National Assembly explicitly incorporated the prohibition of religious discrimination into the laws of national and regional civil servants, as well as the Constitution.

This research attempts to align with many other researchers taking into account the point that a decline of religion does not occur in the world (Casanova 1994). Without abandoning the theory of secularization itself, it will take a distance from the European-western model of the social sciences and reinforce the validity of social science itself ((Chakrabarty 2000; Kuhn 2013).

Exploring social and political dynamics to balance religious accommodation in South Korea will enhance our understanding of how the secular and the religious are deeply entangled and how legal and constitutional reforms can solidify the human rights framework and promote conflict mitigation (Bâli & Lerner 2017).