Modern democracies guarantee both the freedom of religion and equality before law. This creates a paradox since most of the religions have their own laws, thus creating a system of different laws for different religious communities. For example, India is having a hard time implementing an Uniform Civil Code in place of the existing personal laws for different religions.
How have other democracies(preferably with considerable religious diversity) dealt with this problem?
I don’t know how successfully secular democracies (plural) deal with this, but the secular democracy with which I AM familiar deals with it as follows:
Separation of church and state. The laws of the country are written by the state, and are based on logic rather than on religious tenets.
People are free to practice any religion they choose so long as they do not engage in religious practices that violate the law. For example, it would never be permitted to practice ritual human sacrifice, no matter what the religious justification for it might be.
In most cases this is fairly straightforward - when religion and the law come into conflict, the law wins. Since the laws created by the state are mostly of a kind to keep people and their property safe from harm by other people, there isn’t actually conflict that frequently. One notable exception in recent years has been with regard to freedom of association. People of some religions find certain other people to be immoral, and therefore would like to be able to choose not to interact with them (to decline to sell them wedding cakes, for example). The US Supreme Court heard a case like this only a month ago, and I believe they are still deliberating as to how to resolve it.
Again, though, the question is NOT whether the religious freedom of the individuals in question trumps the law, but rather whether the law is unjust if it requires people to produce goods of a kind that they do not wish to produce, and for people whom they would rather not have as customers. So: it is a case where it is unclear whether harm is being done, and to whom by whom. The resolution all takes place within the realm of law, and not of religion.
Most Western European states have a state religion which enjoys certain privileges over other religions. For certain issues, such as giving a name, marriage and divorce people are allowed to use their own religious laws in coordination with the civil laws. The US is not the only democracy in the world.
Further to what Philipp says, you can review a list of nation states in reference to separation of church and state on Wikipedia.
However, in your question you mention "freedom of religion and equality before law" and ask how other democracies have "dealt" with the problem? At what point do you consider it dealt with, or successful?
If we were being precise, wouldn't you agree that in practice, modern democracies do not successfully deliver, certainly, the "equality before the law" part?
One can simply observe current affairs in "democratic" nation states and/or take a relatively shallow look through the modern history of various "democratic" nation states for empirical evidence to support the argument that there is manifestly not equality before the law.
I would also argue that they fail on the "freedom of religion" part too. You may think this pedantic, but democracy, being a form of statism, is itself a religion, where the concept known as government is the subject of belief. In other words, the "freedom of religion" is not precisely freedom, rather it is a greater degree of choice.
One might argue that modern democracies have been more successful in attempting it, and provide greater degrees of those freedoms and equalities than theocracies, but can never actually achieve them, because whether it's a sky-ghost or a democracy, if different moral or legal rules apply to different groups, and any of them is obliged to obey any other, we have a contradiction there.
