The absence from Britain of anything like the United States New Christian Right of the 1980s could be explained by differences in the popularity of religion or in features of the respective party and political structures. Devolution and electoral reform have encouraged British Christians to form political parties and contest elections. Examination of their performance, agendas, and candidate profiles, coupled with survey data on British attitudes to mixing religion and politics, suggests that the major difference between the United States and Britain lies in the degree of secularization rather than in political opportunity structures.

Public opinion research has demonstrated that minority religious and ethnic groups hold distinctive preferences on foreign policy issues, including military interventions in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. There has been little scholarly research in Britain into the attitudes of minority groups on foreign policy issues. This article uses a nationally-representative survey of the ethnic minority population in Britain to examine the sources of public opinion towards the war in Afghanistan. Using multivariate analysis, it finds strong effects for religious affiliation, religiosity and political alienation. There is also evidence of a “gender gap” and age-related differences. The paper contributes to the literature on the impact of religion on public opinion and foreign policy and to analysis of the political attitudes of minority groups in Britain.

Recent research in the United States has found candidates for elected office are able to use a rhetorical form of closed-circuit communication with evangelical Protestants — “God Talk” — that communicates valuable political information without alerting other constituencies. Close observation of the 2010 parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom (U.K.) uncovered what appeared to be a form of God Talk in use by David Cameron and the Conservative Party, especially the use of “broken” to describe the state of Britain. Thus, we assess whether God Talk is an efficacious communication strategy in the U.K. using an experiment that selectively exposes participants to God Talk statements. The mixed results suggest that some forms of God Talk are better than others in conveying to U.K. evangelicals that a candidate is conservative and religious without triggering the same associations by non-evangelical voters. We close with a discussion of the normative impact of such communication strategies.

Does Christianity re-emerge in politics even in the most secularized part of the world, Western Europe? In this article, the exemplary case of the Netherlands provides empirical evidence for two mechanisms of resurgent Christianity in party politics. In this way, the article also offers a more precise understanding under what conditions various dimensions of religion become (again) or remain politically significant. The first mechanism has been the incentive of secularization and secularism for remaining Christians to regroup in a so-called creative minority to convey an explicitly faith-based message to a broader public. Modernization has therefore not automatically meant less religion in politics. However, creative minorities remained a relatively minor affair in Dutch party politics, despite the large number of Christian migrants and their descendants. Second, Christian and culturally rightwing, secular parties have increasingly referred to a Judeo-Christian culture to mark the political identities of the European Union and its nations in response to Islam's growing visibility. The concept of Judeo-Christian culture foremost functioned as a sacred word to denote the liberal and secular order of the West, reflecting the re-emergence of Christianity as cultural phenomenon rather than faith in West European politics.

This article aims to move beyond media discourse about “new atheism” by mapping and explaining anti-religious zeal among the public at large in 14 Western European countries. We analyze data from the International Social Survey Program, Religion III, 2008, to test two theories about how country-level religiousness affects anti-religiosity and its social bases: a theory of rationalization and a theory of deprivatization of disbelief. Hypotheses derived from the former are contradicted, whereas those derived from the latter are largely confirmed. Anti-religiosity is strongest among disbelievers and among the higher educated in the most religious countries and among the older generations in today's most secularized countries.

This article discusses Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na‘im's Islam and the Secular State from the perspective of Marsilius of Padua's political theory. Both authors share similar concepts of the relationship between religion, state policy, and the state, and allow for the integration of religious doctrines into state law. Nonetheless, the Marsilian conception provides stronger protection of unbelievers' and religious dissenters' civic rights. In the broader discourse on political theory of rights, Marsilius argues in favors of individual rights and a protection of minority rights, while an-Na‘im's theory of Shari‘a reform suggests a preference for a people's self-determination.

The ideal of public reason, made prominent by John Rawls, has become a mainstay of discussions about the proper role of religious arguments in a politically liberal society. In particular, Rawls's theory of public reason requires citizens and public officials to refrain from appealing to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines in public deliberation on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. In this essay, we review the ways in which the public life of Martin Luther King, Jr. — with its frequent appeals to a comprehensive doctrine to justify disobedience to the law — represents a challenge to the ideal of public reason, and we consider several Rawlsian rejoinders. What is missing from the existing body of scholarship on public reason is a thorough analysis of King's philosophical and theological arguments, including the examples of legal injustice he offered in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” As we note, King's specific examples of unjust laws rely on a theological framework that bedevils the attempt to reconcile his Letter with the constructivist underpinnings of Rawls's theory of public reason. Indeed, Rawls is in something of a bind: either King's argument is not acceptable under the terms of public reason or public reason simply cannot limit contemporary public discourse in the way Rawls has in mind. We consider several possible Rawlsian arguments for the accommodation of King's theological rhetoric, but conclude that the Rawlsian idea of public reason remains deeply problematic.

American Buddhism is a phenomenon that allows for the testing of a number of generally-held assumptions about how religion operates within the American context. Due to the fairly de-politicized character of the religion in the United States, Buddhism allows for the examination of religion-qua-religion insofar as its role in the political mobilization of believers. This study finds that Buddhist political engagement is driven in general by private religious practice rather than by communal or small-group religious participation, as social capital-oriented theories of religio-political engagement suggest. Furthermore, this appears likely to be due to the nature of Buddhist adherents in the United States (who are predominantly Caucasian converts to the faith and who enjoy a generally high socio-economic status.) Closer examination of the situation of Buddhists in the United States suggests that the resource-model of civic skill acquisition does hold among the most economically disadvantaged, but that other explanations help us better understand political engagement among more advantaged Buddhists.