Political debates over religious freedom in Australia became prominent in the context of marriage equality, achieved in 2017. The Australian Christian Right (ACR) has driven these debates, but there is little research focusing on its discourse of religious freedom. This article examines a range of texts from ACR actors. Using discourse and theoretical analyses, we identify three key turns in the religious freedom rhetoric of the ACR: “ontological security,” “existential stress,” and “meaning vertigo.” We also explore how mimetic ACR discourse is compared to the United States' Christian Right (USCR). As with the USCR, this research demonstrates how the ACR—suffering meaning vertigo and aiming to re-secure its previously taken-for-granted worldview—has successfully reframed the discourse of religious freedom by positioning itself as a besieged minority.

We use Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs filed by seven religious groups—four liberal and three conservative—to understand the changing nature of political conflict between American religious groups in the predominantly White Protestant tradition from 1969 to 2020. Religious groups on both sides of the ideological divide have increased the frequency of their amicus filings, and increasingly become involved in issue areas which were once primarily the concern of groups on the other side. These findings suggest that the culture war that redefined party politics in America has also shaped religious activism, including legal activism. We argue that these groups have increased their involvement in a wider range of issues for two reasons: their rivalry for influence over the nation's moral center has become more encompassing and overtly political, and their appreciation for and consciously developed ability to tap into the courts' influence on American politics has grown.

Political theorists argue that justice requires treating people's time as having equal worth. In this article, I contend that justice sometimes requires making exceptions to uniform time rules. The article focuses on New York State's regulations for nonpublic schools and how they affect Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish day schools, or yeshivas. Dissatisfied yeshiva graduates, the state education department, and several liberal political theorists assert that the state should pressure yeshivas to dedicate more time to secular studies. Reconstructing Horace Kallen's argument against the melting pot conception of citizenship and for cultural pluralism, I maintain that liberal states should be generous toward non-liberal ways of life on condition that they do not systematically abuse children or pose a danger to public safety. A liberal education landscape may sustain many kinds of schooling, including ones that outsiders think waste time.

We study the extent and nature of Christian engagement in morality policy implementation by means of a comparative case study in Germany. In particular, we observe that the nature of engagement varies between unconnected and corresponding types of activities, and we explain this variation with the policy-specific goal congruence between religious organizations (ROs) and the state. Goal congruence, in turn, can be linked to Catholic and Protestant moral doctrines that tell us about ROs' position on morality issues. The study contributes to the literature on faith-based welfare by highlighting the role of moral doctrines as drivers of ROs' social engagement.

Civil religion has been described as the “common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share”. In an age of partisan division, there have been calls for a revitalized civil religion, but the idea that civil religion can be unifying has been debated. In this paper, we investigate whether civil religion can be unifying, or is it fractured by partisanship? To address this, we use two strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate that there are two dimensions to civil religion. These dimensions are distinct from Christian nationalism and structured along partisan lines. Second, we developed two survey experiments to understand the dimensions of civil religion and improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. Results indicate that, rather than promoting unity, civil religion is interpreted through partisan lenses.

Over the last decade, and throughout the Americas, evangelicals have strongly mobilized in defense of socially conservative agendas or against so-called “gender ideology,” sparking general and academic interest. Much less is known about progressive evangelicals. Using the unique juncture presented by the constitutional process in Chile, we study the politicization of a progressive evangelical identity and ask when these religious groups mobilize. We argue that intra-denominational competition for evangelical identity has played an important role in progressive evangelical mobilization, and more specifically the wish to differentiate themselves from conservative evangelicals, introduce a distance from the political right, and show the internal diversity of the community. This process occurs in response to an initial (conservative) politicization of religion. Drawing on campaign materials, surveys, and interviews, we provide evidence for this argument highlighting that policy preferences and theological interpretations are core differences among both groups, sparking countermobilization.

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism–progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the “cultural turn” literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance—due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for 20 West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe.

In Indonesia's political strategic environment, Islamic narratives have been among the main narratives, but have not always been dominant. The 2014 presidential election displayed the beginning of a rising trend of Islamic narratives within the political context in Indonesia. Since then Islamic narratives influenced the strategy of Indonesia's populist leaders, as particularly seen during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and 2019 presidential election. This paper analyzes how populism as a strategy was used in recent Indonesian elections. For this purpose, it uses the conception of populism as a political strategy proposed by Weyland. Building on this approach, the paper explains the strategic adjustments made in the use of populism from 2014, 2017, and 2019 in Indonesian political events. It argues that the strategic environment faced by populist actors in Indonesia's 2019 election affected their decision to choose Islamic narratives as an instrument for mass mobilization.

Applying a qualitative framing analysis, this paper examines narratives of the right-wing populist parties Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands on religion. The paper argues that references of these populist parties to religion can be interpreted against the background of specific national context factors such as the respective history of nation building, the traditional role of religion in society and secularization processes. A rigorous examination of parliamentary documents published between 2017 and 2019 shows that whereas the PVV clearly defines Christianity in civilizational and not religious terms, the AfD takes a less clear-cut stance toward the religion framing it both as culture and faith. We contend that this difference can be explained by the lower degree of secularization and the greater role of Christianity as a collective identity marker in post-war Germany.

The subfield of religion and politics, just like other subfields, was founded on the shoulders of giants who came before us. These seminal thinkers sometimes disagreed with each other, but their quarrels also opened new avenues for further discussion. Max Weber argued, for instance, that Protestant dominant countries develop faster and more effectively than Catholic ones because of their dynamic work ethic. The spirit of Protestantism, Weber believed, promoted values such as entrepreneurism and creativity, which facilitated the rise of democracy, all while the ethos of Catholicism lagged behind. Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, had a different opinion about the compatibility of democracy and Catholicism. Traveling throughout the United States, he observed that Catholics—with their emphasis on hierarchy, obedience, and top-down dissemination of teaching—were well predisposed to internalize American laws and regulations. Such predispositions, in turn, helped stabilize the still nascent American democracy. While both thinkers were concerned with the compatibility of Catholicism and democracy, they ended up reaching different conclusions about the matter. In many ways, their disagreement is still not resolved, but two recent books made important contributions to these ongoing debates.