Citizenship & Diversity: Bottom Up challenges to secular & religious collectives

In this paper we joined lenses in analyzing the roles of religion and secularism in a specific city area of Copenhagen, focusing on how individuals adapt to requirements from religious, political and state or municipality groups, and how they activate space and place to advocate their political claims. The presentation ends up in a discussion about the possibility to keep space for individual citizens to establish overlapping norms and ideas, combining religious norms and secularity standards into soft secularism, not only at state- and municipality level, but also at individual and maybe even group level. The main argument is, that strong requirements of group rights establish conflicts between state and religious groups over individual rights and plights, whereas soft, inclusive secularism in the Danish case at least has opened the spaces to individual decision making.