Recent years have seen a proliferation of studies on the determinants of support for the European Union among national publics. Scholars have analyzed economic, political, informational, and identity factors as influences, but there has been less exploration of cultural factors, most notably religion. This article replicates our earlier studies exploring the impact of confessional culture and religious commitment on support for the European Union, expanding the purview from early member states to more recent accessions and candidates for membership. Using Eurobarometer 65.2 (Papacostas 2006), we demonstrate that religion still shapes attitudes toward European integration, but in varying ways and to different extents in several parts of the Union. In early member states, Catholics — especially committed ones — are more supportive of the European Union than Protestants, confirming earlier findings. In more recent accessions, however, religion's impact is weaker and assumes different configurations. Finally, we present evidence that even in the early member states religion is losing its influence over Europeanist sentiment and suggest that this development presents obstacles to further political integration.

This article addresses an idea central to liberal debates on civic education: the spillover thesis. Both egalitarian liberals and their religious opponents in these debates claim that liberal civic education creates spillover effects into the way individuals assess the meaning of their own lives. Some religious citizens fear that their politically reasonable conceptions of the good life are being undermined by education that emphasizes the practice of autonomous reasoning. Egalitarian liberals usually acknowledge this risk or cost, but deny that religious citizens should be given special dispensation from the burdens of autonomous reasoning. Some may even hope that conservative religious beliefs will be eroded by the practice of liberal civic education. This article disputes the spillover thesis. Given the best evidence available from the field of cognitive psychology, we challenge the notion that critical personal reflection about public matters is bound to spillover into critical reflection about private moral matters. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that human beings are usually well equipped to compartmentalize and are capable of reasoning in different ways depending on the context. Thus, reasonable citizens of faith are not necessarily unduly burdened by programs of civic education; nor are liberal programs of civic education necessarily going to lead us to a more secular society of autonomous thinkers. The article also speaks to a broader civic humanist tradition in political philosophy that includes Plato, Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Marcus Aurelius. For these authors, the success of a political enterprise is seen to crucially depend on the inculcation of a robust and comprehensive system of private virtue. For without private virtue, there is no public virtue. If we are correctly interpreting the available psychological research, private virtue need not be as crucially relevant for the success of common political enterprises. The inculcation of private moral virtue does not so clearly translate into making good leaders, voters, and public servants.

At least since the last decade of the 20th century, there has been strong scholarly interest in a perceived global wave of religious nationalism. Critical to that movement was the most important recent development in Indian politics, the rise of the Hindu right. Commentators lamented a fundamental change in the Indian body politic, the demise of India's celebrated secularism. However, others predicted that the Hindu nationalists would be forced to move to the center to gain votes, jettisoning much of their peculiar ideology in the process. The 2004 national parliamentary election was a crucial test of these contending interpretations. Would the Bharatiya Janata Party rely on its established arsenal of communally controversial issues? Would it emphasize themes designed to appeal to a broader audience? Analyzing reports published in national newspapers and news magazines, I will reach the surprising conclusion that the answer to both of these questions is yes.

Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article assesses discrimination and anxiety among Muslims in the post-September 11, 2001 United States. Substantial portions of Muslim-Americans are indeed anxious and report personal and group discrimination. However, this is guided by many factors including religious salience, age, education, political attentiveness, native born status, and years lived in the United States. Respondents who are more anxious and know victims of religious discrimination are also more active in politics. However, personal experiences with discrimination are unrelated to political participation. Overall, in spite of or perhaps because of anxiety over their present status, Muslim-Americans are highly functional in the political sphere. Many are now more active in politics than prior to September 11, 2001.

The article argues that the secular Indian state and the Hindu nationalist movement are invested in restricting changes in religious membership in ways that intensify religious and caste-based inequalities. The secular state and the Hindu nationalist movement attempt to enforce a shared model of religion that takes the form of a fixed territory. In this model, changes in religious membership through conversion are restricted. An analysis of state-civil society interactions in India must therefore move away from a presumed opposition between state secularism on the one hand and religious nationalism and conflict within civil society on the other. The article draws on three cases: (1) nationalist debates over caste and religious conversion, (2) Hindu nationalist mobilization against religious conversion, and (3) state caste-based affirmative action policies that restrict benefits based on religious conversion.

Political development literature held that the process of secularization is conflict-ridden between the state and religious institutions. Later state building literature left state-religion relations outside its theoretical scope and left a puzzle in our understanding of state building. How did state-religion relations really change in the course of modern state formation? This article argues that the relationship between state builders and religious institutions was not necessarily conflictual. Rather, there were potential areas of cooperation between the two. However, whether any cooperation was realized was historically contingent. Depending on the type of relationship established, state-religion relations took different institutional shapes. This article makes two observations. First, if the religious institutions have a fairly hierarchical internal organization, then the state and religious institutions part their ways. This is the picture classical political development literature paints. Second, in cases where the state faces a disunited body of religious institutions, the state incorporates religious institutions into its apparatus, its extent depending on the institutional capacity of the state. As the institutional capacity of the state increased, its control over religious institutions also increased. The article then illustrates these observations through major cases from the Middle East.

The study of Muslims in the West is a burgeoning field, in which scholars are examining the religious, social and political lives of Muslims as minorities. This article continues in that vein, and utilizes the Muslim American Political Opinion Survey (MAPOS) to compare Shi‘a and Sunni responses in a few areas of interest: religious identity, views of being a Muslim in the United States, and political participation in the American system. Using a comparison of mean responses and the t-test to analyze 13 variables, it demonstrates that Sunnis felt more strongly that the teachings of Islam were compatible with political participation in the United States, and that a statistically significantly higher percentage of Shi‘a respondents participated in a rally or protest. The study goes further to suggest that perhaps congregants of Shi‘a mosques view Islamic teachings as being more compatible with participation in American politics, and opens the door for further consideration and research involving a more in-depth study of the Shi‘as in the American political context, one that examines how the narratives that drive Shi‘ism affect individual Shi‘a social and political participation in a country where they are a real “minority within a minority”.