This symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these articles instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do — and do not — form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multi-denominational coalitions among party activists, litigants, and religious leaders. These varied articles arose from a workshop at Oxford University in March 2015, an event hosted and funded by the Rothermere American Institute. The collection explores the impact of religious coalitional activity upon political attitudes, decision-making, and public policy development. It is wide-ranging, extending our understanding of religious coalitional activity beyond the United States and dealing with topics of vital current significance, including the swiftly changing landscape of school voucher and tax credit expansion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, and abortion advocacy.

Although there has been considerable descriptive writing about religious coalitions, more work is needed in specifying when these coalitions form and when they are successful. This article offers some sketches toward a more general theory of religious coalitions.

In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by statistical analysis, that Catholics who desire a religious education for their children have historically tended to exit for the parochial sector while Evangelicals having similar desires lobbied for reform of the public school system. These differential group responses stem from differing conceptions of identity and belonging, theological understanding, and institutional structure. In American education policy, differences between religious groups are surprisingly tenacious.

Prior work has shown party activists and religious divisions to be two of the leading causes of party polarization in American politics. Using the Convention Delegate Studies, we examine the interaction between these two culprits and their impact on party polarization. We leverage a novel measure of secularism in the latest wave of the Convention Delegate Studies to demonstrate that active secularism is distinct both conceptually and statistically from low religiosity. Furthermore, we show that both religiosity and secularism drive party activists to take more extreme policy positions, to identify themselves as more ideologically extreme, and to exhibit less support for compromise. As the Democratic and Republican Parties have become more secular and religious, respectively, these results suggest religious polarization may compound existing divisions between the two parties and exacerbate the partisan divide in American politics.

In this article, I compare progressive and conservative religio-political activists' commitment to their movements (the religious left and right, respectively). I rely on data from the Public Religion Research Institute's 2009 surveys of individuals they identified as religious left activists and religious right activists. Do these activists actually say they identify with the movement with which pollsters assume them to affiliate? How potentially influential do they perceive their movements to be? Third, to what extent do activists support their movement's core social movement organizations? I conclude by arguing that the evidence is mixed that the American religious left lacks influence because its activists tend not to be unified.

For the past century, the expansion of free speech rights has been the domain of liberals. Recently, however, conservatives have become advocates for expanded free speech rights. For Evangelicals Protestants, this advocacy would have been highly controversial only a generation ago, offending the base's ordered liberty sentiments. I suggest that abortion politics is a primary contributor to the evangelical free speech advocacy shift. Using a variety of data, I detail the evangelical shift toward expanded free speech by exploring the topics of radical protest, campaign finance, and obscenity. While rank-and-file evangelicals are less supportive of free speech than the general-public, elites have routinely used abortion politics to frame the shift toward individual free speech rights. Elites have diverged from their constituents to support a higher-priority issue (abortion), and the constituents have been supportive. Abortion politics has come to dominate evangelical advocacy decisions and has cultivated an evangelical rights culture.

Why do some ethno-political organizations resort to violence while others abstain? Are ethno-political organizations with a religious/Islamist ideology more violence-prone compared to non-religious ones? In addition to commonly cited factors such as grievances, political opportunities/constraints, resources, and organizational characteristics, I argue that the existence of youth bulges in a society also increases the probability of adopting violent strategies by ethno-political organizations. Frustrated young males under repressive and authoritarian regimes tend to be likely recruits for violent organizations. I use the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset, which includes 118 organizations in 16 countries of the Middle East and North Africa to test my hypotheses. The findings suggest that youth bulges, economic grievances, group fractionalization, external support, and state repression increase the probability of use of violent strategies by ethno-political organizations whereas religious ideology is insignificant. Youth bulges foster violence especially in autocratic countries.

Most studies examining the relationship between social cleavages and party system fragmentation maintain that higher levels of social diversity lead to greater party system fragmentation. However, most aggregate-level studies focus on one type of social cleavage: ethnic diversity. In order to develop a better understanding of how different cleavages impact electoral competition, this article considers another type of social cleavage: religious diversity. Contrary to previous literature, higher levels of religious diversity provide incentives for cross-religious cooperation, which in turn reduces party system fragmentation. Using a cross-national data set of elections from 1946–2011, the results show that, in contrast to most studies examining the effects of social cleavage diversity on the number of parties, higher religious diversity is associated with lower levels of party system fragmentation.