01353nas a2200109 4500000000100000008004100001100001600042245003500058856014900093300001200242520098900254 d1 aL. Lixinski00aReligious heritage and the law uhttps://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85191468274&doi=10.4324%2f9781003149392-36&partnerID=40&md5=94c842a99d21fa404c5cb7716907ac6a a473-4883 aThis chapter focuses on religious heritage, broadly understood as the sites, buildings, artifacts, and practices that form part of living religions. I exclude specifically those artifacts associated with “dead” religions because I am more interested in the ways that religious and heritage narratives around sites overlap and are sometimes in tension with one another. I am also more interested in general in heritage that is “living” (particularly intangible cultural heritage). As such, while I am wary of drawing binaries that put believers and “society at large” as monoliths operating in opposition to one another, this juxtaposition helps enlighten many of the tensions about how identity and power are created and negotiated through the languages of heritage and religion. These narratives, to restate the matter, sometimes align, but sometimes create an “either/or” effect that can allow for the weaponization of discourse and identity around one or the other.