Recent years have witnessed the rise of a multiracial church (MRC) movement in American evangelicalism. Leaders of this movement articulate a “biblical mandate”-based mission for breaking patterns of racial homogeneity in pursuit of more diverse, egalitarian, and vibrant churches. While participants are passionate about what they see as a powerful racial change effort in their religious communities, they express a variety of orientations about the potential political implications of faith-based MRC-building. Drawing from interview-based research inside MRC settings, I find that most participants are nervously interested in applying their framework to political contexts, while a minority articulates a more politicized justice orientation, and others are confused or actively resistant. The movement's political reluctance is instructive of the understudied dynamics between race and religion, especially in theologically conservative churches. In social capital terms, the “bonding” incentives of MRC settings by definition require difficult kinds of “bridging,” or reaching across deep historical and identity-based differences, in order to create trust-based networks where they have not existed. When successful, however, such networks can open new paths to race-related political engagement.

The political practice of consociational democracies to take religion off the political agenda has led to the idea that religious issues only play a marginal role in the left-right ideological framework. This study demonstrates that religion has more than a marginal effect on the left-right placement of parties and thus on the space of competition. The analysis shows that voters for secular parties and voters for religious parties have different motives and beliefs on which they base the orderings of parties on the left-right scale. In other words, each group of voters defines its own left-right scale. These different left-right scales are individually single-peaked but there is no collective transitivity of orderings of parties. The intransitivity is a clear violation of Downs' condition for placing all parties on a single line in a manner agreed upon by all voters. Instead of having one left-right dimension as some sort of “super issue,” there are at least two left-right scales, one for voters for secular parties and one for voters for religious parties.

It is widely recognized that religious institutions and values play a prominent political role in various countries around the world. What is less clear is the degree to which other prominent ideologies perform an analogous role in regions where they predominate. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between Confucianism and liberal democracy in Taiwan. As the most important belief system in Taiwan and, indeed, in much of East Asia, Confucianism has provided a model of civic behavior for centuries, performing a largely priestly role. What is less apparent is whether Confucianism inhibited or promoted the development of liberal democracies in the region. While an extensive theoretical debate exists on this question, virtually no work analyzes how Confucianism has been understood by political actors on the ground. The data for this study consist of interviews with 27 politicians, democracy activists, Confucianism scholars, and journalists in Taiwan. The article tests whether or not, in the minds of these key political and cultural leaders, Confucian values are an aid or a hindrance to their efforts to promote liberal democracy. The concluding section discusses the implications of the empirical results for East Asian countries and addresses the parallels between Confucianism as an ideology in East Asia and the religious institutions and values in Western countries.

Positing a “clash of cultures,” many European politicians oppose Muslim headscarves as well as Islamic instruction in public schools; the real source of “failed integration” lies not with the religiosity of young Muslims but rather with an arcane definition of “state neutrality” that sustains the dominance of some religions at the expense of others. Focusing on Germany, this study reviews educational statistics pertaining to youth of migrant origin, showing that conflicts over Islamic instruction mirror deeper patterns of minority discrimination. It outlines the legal hurdles new faith communities must overcome to secure recognition as “corporate entities under public law” (Körperschaftsstatus), entitling them to accredited teacher training, tax-funded salaries, construction subsidies, and other institutional privileges. It describes divergent curricular models utilized by the Länder, followed by a closer look at Islamic instruction in Berlin, where a court ruling compelled authorities to take a pro-active approach. It concludes with a review of dilemmas inherent in Germany's approach to “value education” against the backdrop of the new European Union anti-discrimination directives.

This article explores the conditions under which religious organizations push for democratization by addressing variation in support for democracy among Catholic Church authorities in South America. It argues that this can be best explained by leveraging key concepts used in the study of social movements: cultural frames, mobilizing resources, and political opportunity structures. This approach yields counter-intuitive insights about the role played by the Second Vatican Council, the size of national churches, and the crucial role of political parties. The empirical argument is formulated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and tested using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.

Liberalism, as a political paradigm, is committed to maintaining a stance of neutrality toward religion(s), along with other comprehensive systems of belief. Multiculturalism is premised on the view that the political policies of internally diverse nations should respect the beliefs and practices of the various cultural, ethnic, and religious groups of which those nations are composed. Sometimes synthesized, sometimes standing in tension, these two political frameworks share a common goal of minimizing conflict while respecting diversity. Although this goal is, in principle, laudable, I argue in this article that the operation of liberal and multiculturalist forms of public reasoning inadvertently diminishes critical reflection and revision in the area of religion, with potentially dangerous consequences both for the health of religion and for social stability. Measures to counter these dangers, I propose, include a relaxation of the restrictive rules that define liberal public reason, and education about religion in schools.

The past four decades have witnessed profound transformations in the Egyptian legal system and in the Egyptian legal profession. Article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution now enshrines Islamic jurisprudence as the principle source of law, thus establishing an important symbolic marker at the heart of the state and opening avenues for Islamist activists to press litigation campaigns in the courts. Additionally, the Islamist trend gained prominence within the legal profession, a development that is particularly striking given the long and illustrious history of the Lawyer's Syndicate as a bastion of liberalism. Despite these significant shifts, however, Islamist litigation has achieved only limited legal victories. This article traces the political and socio-economic variables that underlie the Islamist trend in Egyptian law, and examines the impact of Islamist litigation in the Egyptian courts.