Recently, political scientists and economists have redoubled their attempts to understand the “Rise of Europe.” However, the role of the Catholic Church has been curiously ignored in most of this new research. The medieval West was shot through with Catholic values and institutions, and only by factoring in the Church can we understand the peculiar European development from the high Middle Ages onward. More particularly, the 11th century “crisis of church and state” set in train a series of developments that were crucial for the Rise of Europe. The Church was the main locale in which the development of representation, consent, and early bureaucratic institutions took place, and it contributed to creating, integrating, and maintaining the European multistate system. This note demonstrates that current scholarship has failed to factor in ecclesiastical influences and it shows how these gaps can be filled by a more careful reading of prior historical scholarship.

Are majority-Muslim countries laggards when it comes to developing liberal economic institutions? Using an Index of Economic Freedom and its component parts, this study finds that Muslim-dominant countries (>50% of the population) are positively associated with free-market capitalism. Protestant dominance is also positively correlated, but the association stems from just two components of the index, mainly “legal security and property rights protection.” Surprisingly, Protestant countries correlate negatively with “small government” and “freedom to trade,” two critical components of free-market capitalism. Muslim dominance shows positive correlations with all areas except for “legal security and property rights.” The results are consistent when assessing similar variables measuring property rights and government ownership of the economy collected by the Varieties of Democracy Project. Capitalistic policies and institutions, it seems, may travel across religions more easily than culturalists claim.

As of yet, Islamization by secular ruling parties has hardly been investigated in depth. To bridge this gap, the present article reviews the existing literature on Islamization, synthesizes the scattered existing theoretical insights on Islamization by secular actors and applies them to the case of Bangladesh. It argues that, especially when they act in conjunction, three main conditions can drive secular rulers to Islamize public policy: first, the rise of Islamist social movements; second, fierce political competition; and third, (semi-)authoritarian rule. Focusing on the current Awami League (AL) government, the article shows how these three factors have interacted to produce a top-down process of state-led Islamization in Bangladesh.

Many hypothesize that religious individualism is associated with progressive moral attitudes. Our analysis of data from US adults from the fourth wave of the Baylor Religion Survey finds that those who navigate moral conjunctures as religious individualists, knowing what God wants them to do “in their hearts” or through “human reason,” are more likely than those who draw on institutional religious sources of authority, like the Bible or religious teachings, to express progressive attitudes on issues of same-sex marriage, divorce, and premarital sex, but not abortion. Our findings indicate that perceived sources of moral authority further explain differences in moral attitudes within the population of religious decision-makers, specifically with regard to issues that are culturally in flux. This supports the idea that religious individualism, even among religious individuals and within religiously conservative traditions, makes people more accepting of contemporary cultural trends in morality.

The countries of the former Soviet Union witnessed a religious revivalism in the final years of the regime, although following the collapse, the revivals of the different faith communities have had different characteristics. This article discusses the nature of the desecularization and deprivatization processes of both the Orthodox Christian Georgians and the Muslim minorities in Georgia. Based on field researches and indepth interviews conducted with elites and experts, it is argued that the revival of Orthodox Christianity in Georgia differs from the revival of Islam. While the Islamic revival has taken the form of a deculturation, very much in line with global processes, the Orthodox Christian revival is taking the form of a reculturation.

Scholars have shown that religious activity can prepare individuals for civic activity by endowing them with the skills and motivation to engage in politics. Others, however, assert that religious dogmatism may lead to disengagement with the secular world and politics more generally. These two perspectives have resulted in contradictory findings on a key aspect of civic ability: political knowledge. I argue that while religiosity may indeed increase individuals’ engagement in a wide array of political activities, including some aspects of political knowledge, religious commitment decreases the ability to acquire accurate information about certain types of political facts. This argument is tested with a number of national surveys, and I find that while religion has a mixed effect on knowledge of general political structures and actors, it increases the perception of media hostility, which leads to lower levels of political knowledge about policy-specific surveillance information.

The public reason criterion is a prominent theme in contemporary political theory. Yet scholars have focused predominantly on conceptual and normative issues at the expense of empirical questions about the language used by actors engaged in political debate. This is a particular problem in the case of religious actors, whose underlying motives for taking part in such debates are frequently driven by theological concerns. This paper explores these issues by analyzing religious opposition to the legalization of assisted dying in Britain. It shows that religious actors have tended toward the use of secular rather than theological modes of argumentation, and that this is consistent with the idea of a strategic shift in response to the increasingly secularized nature of British society.