This article addresses Pakistani Islamists' street power — their ability to organize rallies, protests, and demonstrations. Building on research on religion and collective action, I first demonstrate how Friday prayers aid Islamist mobilization. Mosques on Friday serve as a filtering and coordination tool, as tactical “choke” points in urban neighborhoods, and as incitement through the imam's sermon. I then show how Islamist street power affects Islamization in Pakistan. I argue that Pakistan's foundational religious nationalism acts as an “opportunity structure,” and affords Islamists agenda-setting and veto power. The success of Islamist agitation depends on the issue contested, the type of regime targeted, and the era in which it is practiced. I use interviews, participant observation at Islamist rallies, an original dataset of all rallies and protests in Pakistan from 2005 to 2010 (n = 4123); and government and local newspaper reports from the 1940s onward to buttress my claims.

Gender-based inequality is often regarded as a salient characteristic of Muslim societies, yet few works have systematically compared the status of women in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Fish (2011) finds a gender gap in structural indicators of inequality in Muslim-majority countries that cannot be explained by levels of economic development, raising questions about whether attitudes favoring inequality are more prominent among Muslims. We investigate the impact of structural-situational factors and religious identification on attitudes toward gender-based inequality using hierarchical-level models. We find that: (1) Muslim self-identification and the size of a country's Muslim population predict attitudes supportive of inequality; (2) an individual's gender has a stronger effect on attitudes than does religious identification; and (3) measures of structural inequality also shape attitudes. The effects of these variables remain strong when we consider other contextual elements, such as gross domestic product per capita, education, age, location in the Middle East, and fuels dependence.

According to recent research, oil abundance is the principal explanation for women's poor human rights record in many Muslim societies. However, this study argues that resistance to gender equality in the Muslim world originates in its specific historical trajectory and that the critical juncture precedes the extraction of oil by a thousand years. The study assesses data on women's economic, social, and political rights in 166 countries from 1999–2008 and shows that whereas the negative effect of oil is driven by the 11 members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, Muslim countries consistently underperform even when oil and gas rents and other relevant factors such as income and democracy are accounted for. The study concludes that persisting orthodox tendencies in Islamic culture provide the best explanation for Muslim women's limited empowerment.

It is often assumed that Latinos in the United States are deeply religious, and that this religious identity plays an important role in shaping their political beliefs and behaviors. A more controversial though unexplored proposition is that Latinos may not be as religious as is commonly believed and that forces beyond their religiosity play more prominent roles in shaping their political engagement. Relying on data from the 2006 Latino National Survey, we examine secularism — measured by church attendance — and civic engagement among Latinos. Our efforts are to analyze the social forces that shape levels of religiosity and find that generational status plays a significant role. Additionally, we further find that while church attendance declines among later generations, second and third generation Latinos have higher levels of civic engagement than their first generation peers, indicating that a decline in church participation does not depress political participation among later generations of Latinos.

The exact relationship between religiosity and moral values is understudied, and it is unclear what the process of secularization means for the morality of Europeans. Previous research shows that religion is associated with low levels of political and economic development. A potential explanation is that religion provides an alternative moral authority to the authority of the state. Using data from four waves of the European Values Study 1981–2008, I analyze attitudes to personal autonomy (vs tradition) and self-interest (vs social norms) in a multilevel model of 48 European countries. The results show that religious decline has been accompanied by an increase in autonomy values, but not self-interest, that the relationship between religion and morality is stronger in more religious countries, and that it has declined since the 1980s. We also show that religiosity is more negatively associated with self-interest among people with low confidence in state authorities.

The source of Hobbes's liberal view of toleration is a recognized paradox within his absolutist political sovereign. This article argues that Hobbes's view of toleration is consistent with his overall political theory based upon his broader religious teaching, which leads to an epistemological skepticism on the veracity of religion, and as such among rulers toleration is not only allowed, but necessary. Further, this article argues that the inability of the sovereign to punish the private conscience of the citizen derives from natural right and the inherent limitation of law. Finally, this article examines Hobbes's use of religious argumentation to support the inability of a believer to challenge or deviate from the religious commands of the sovereign.

In 1953, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly elected a low-key and relatively unknown personality as the second Secretary General of the UN. Dag Hammarskjöld, nonetheless, turned out to be one of the most entrepreneurial and innovative Secretary Generals that the UN has ever had. He invented peacekeeping, radically reformed the administrative structure of the UN, and promoted a crucial multi-lateral diplomatic role for the UN Secretariat. Behind this innovative approach to the politics of the UN, there was a personality with a deep and complex religious discernment that emerged occasionally in public speeches, as well as in private writing. This article interprets Hammarskjöld's norms entrepreneurship through the lens of post-secular theory and the concept of Habermasian institutional translation. It shows how — in contrast with merely secularist assumptions — Hammarskjöld's religiosity shaped and advanced international political processes consistently with the principles of the UN Charter.

While there have been many approaches to classifying religious traditions in the social sciences (see Hackett and Lindsay 2008), the most popular approach is the religious tradition classification scheme, which was most carefully systematized by Steensland et al. (2000). Their widely-embraced article argued that the most accurate typology of religiosity was to sort individuals into seven distinct groups: evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, other religious groups, and no religion. This approach has become popularly known as “reltrad” and its usage in academic writing is voluminous. A brief search of Google Scholar indicates that over 900 published articles and books utilized the reltrad framework. However, the implementation of this typology has never been fully and accurately operationalized.