Research Associate, University of Lancashire

Brandon Reece Taylorian is a research associate at the University of Lancashire in Preston, UK. He specializes in the legal personality of religious organizations, in particular the registration issues that religious communities face. Dr. Taylorian’s systematic approach to the subject of registration has led to his development of a Spectrum of Religious Registration to contextualize and scale the different restrictions states impose on unregistered religious communities or those communities excluded from registration. An alumnus of the 2024 Young Scholars Fellowship on Religion and the Rule of Law at Oxford, Dr. Taylorian’s scholarly work on religious freedom synthesizes normative legal studies with historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives. His interest in law and religion stemmed not only from his founding of a new religion called Astronism, which he aims to register as a religious organization, but also from his family history research on his Latter-day Saint, Quaker, and Lefebvrist ancestors in England who, across different centuries, were persecuted or ridiculed for their dissenting beliefs.