Comparative research on authoritarianism has largely neglected religion. Yet, in order to understand the logic of authoritarian control over the civil society, it is necessary to study how the authoritarian regimes deal with religious groups. In this paper, lessons from the two rapidly expanding fields on regulation of religion and comparative authoritarianism are combined. In particular, a conceptualization of regulation of religion in the authoritarian context is proposed, according to which positive endorsement of religion can be understood as co-optation, whereas negative restrictions can be seen as repression. By employing data on positive endorsement and negative restrictions on religion from 2014 for ca. 70 countries, three different clusters of authoritarian countries regarding the regulation of religion are identified. Finally, it is argued that capacity and ambition of both the religious groups and the authoritarian regimes are the main determinants of regulation.

Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, direct observations of political topics in a wide set of religious settings are rare. We examine the nature of political speech by clergy with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political content in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of 10 pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic data to link the sermons to demographic and political information around the church and to information about the church and pastor to evaluate the variation of political content in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—engage around political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.

The fight against terrorism prompts governments to differentiate between “good” religious practices and the “bad” ones. The simplistic dichotomy of “good” and “bad” Muslims has led to a cascade of criticism, but a fallacy underlying this dualism remains underexplored. This paper examines the “no true Scotsman” fallacy that is prevalent in the political discourse surrounding terrorism and religion. It argues that China's attempt to counteract the essentialist assumption about Uyghurs leads to a reinforced “good-versus-bad” dichotomous categorization of Muslims, reflected in the binary of “normal” and “illegal” in China's religious policy. This is a major contribution to the existing literature on politics and religion because, theoretically, this paper applies the “no true Scotsman” fallacy and “good” and “bad” Muslims dichotomy to explain the relationship between politics and religion; empirically, it provides a rich overview of the political nature of religious policy in China.

The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, although widely noted for their clarity, are also rich and capacious enough to merit differing interpretations among scholars of good will and good faith. However, despite the noble intentions and praiseworthy work of the late Michael Novak and other Catholic neoconservatives, their marketing of St. Thomas Aquinas as the “first Whig” appears to sever elements of the Angelic Doctor's philosophy from its essential principles. Although jealously guarding the nobility of conscience and the interior life, St. Thomas envisioned a political community that was decidedly hierarchical and in which the faith was to be shepherded by the state, which itself was charged with suppressing heresy and dissident thinking. These political ideas, moreover, are rooted in the very heart of St. Thomas Aquinas's deepest philosophical and theological principles.

This article analyzes the use of religious language on Twitter by members of the U.S. Congress (MOCs). Politicians use various media platforms to communicate about their political agendas and their personal lives. In the United States, religious language is often part of the messaging from politicians to their constituents. This is done carefully and often strategically and across media platforms. With members of Congress increasingly using Twitter to connect with constituents on a regular basis, we want to explain who uses religious language on Twitter, when, and how. Using 1.5 million tweets scraped from members of Congress in April of 2018, we find that MOCs from both major political parties make use of a “religious code” on Twitter in order to send messages about their own identities as well as to activate the religious identities of their constituents. However, Republicans use the code more extensively and with Judeo-Christian-specific terms. Additionally, we discuss gender effects for the ways MOCs use “religious code” on Twitter.

Middle East scholars have traditionally attributed the survival of monarchs in the Gulf to the use of financial appeasements fueled by oil revenues. With rampant political insecurity in the region and the revolutionary fervor present after the Arab Spring, leaders have gone beyond the traditional rentier state system to ensure political survival by playing on the sentiments of sectarianism and identity politics. This paper argues that religious sectarianism is not only a question of attitudes and sentiments toward a religious minority but also a politically motivated state mechanism used to maintain the status quo and ensure an extended legitimation of power. We argue that the state often capitalizes on people's fear of economic adversities to incite sectarian exclusions of religious minorities, this is especially evident in times of economic hardships. With survey data from the Arab Barometer, we examined such political psychology in Saudi Arabia in 2011, at the onset of the Arab Spring. We found that Sunni Muslim sentiments of sectarian exclusion toward the Shi‘a minority could be attributed to not just religiosity but also state crafted incitement by the Saudi government. In particular, our results show that state-based sectarian intolerance was in part fueled by the government's scapegoating of the Shi‘a communities during times of economic downturns.

Lengthy debates over the process of secularization in the West have concluded. In many ways, secularization theorists appear to have “won” the debate: traditional measures of religious vitality reveal a decline in religion. Yet, recent events, especially those involving politics and national identity, have encouraged scholars and members of the public to reconsider the ways in which something like religion might endure and influence public life in secularized Western nations. This paper uses the “exceptional-typical” case of Iceland—a modern, Western, secularized country of comparatively small population size—to observe and conceptualize a variety of processes which are here collectively named “post-secularization.” Its findings suggest that processes which may appear as unrelated or opposing forces—the emergence of new religious movements, the transformation of traditional religious symbols into profane branding, far right nationalist movements—may be part of a single, post-secularization process. Secularization, having fissured the sacred, leaves religion a pliable cultural tool.