Drawing on recent debates on secularism, this article addresses the methodological problem of writing histories of secularism in context. It considers the experience of India. I argue that a study of the issues from which secularism emerged historically offers a way out of the secularism-religion binary which, in India, has obscured contemporary problems related to democracy. These issues had to do with ensuring the public representation of minorities, both religious and caste, regardless of their relative size or social power. Scholarship on the minority question has begun with the constituent assembly and that on secularism centered on the category of religion. In contrast, this article argues that caste was central to the formulation of Indian secularism and requires a longer historical perspective. It maintains that secularism reified the religious minority and, in so doing, denied both its potential to overcome marginality and the legitimacy of the community in the nation.

Many countries today face the challenges posed by their ethnic and religious diversity. This article comparatively analyzes how defining nation in Russia and Turkey affects what groups constitute religious minorities and what their prospects of integration into the Russian and Turkish societies are. It conceptualizes religious minorities as those religious groups that are excluded from the prevailing and institutionalized definitions of nation. This article studies what role religion, comprising Orthodox Christianity, and Sunni Islam, respectively, has played historically and until nowadays in Russia and Turkey in the definitions of their national identities and what kind of religious minorities each of these definitions created. It argues that a position of religious minorities depends not only on the informal association of national identity of the majority with certain religion, but also on the institutionalized support for the dominant religion by the ruling political forces.

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 aim of this article is to give a new reconstruction of the conception of human dignity as a pre-associative yet legal status. Such a legal conception of human dignity carries a universal legal obligation to respect the “innate” right to independence and enables us to move beyond the impasse between moral and political views of human rights. The argument has a normative and a genealogical component. The normative component shows why a legal conception of human rights is grounded on the Kantian idea of an innate legal right to independence, as well as showing that Kant adopted a legal status concept of human dignity. The genealogical component shows that the conception of human dignity as legal status undergoes a transvaluation from its ancient aristocratic to its modern democratic meaning in Dante's political thought, which is itself rooted in the western reception of Arabic philosophy, in particular political Averroism. By contrast to the Christian elaboration of dignity, the Averroist genealogy of dignity better describes the modern pursuit of an ideal of worldly happiness essentially linked with the collective attainment of public happiness through the unrestricted public use of reason facilitated by republican constitutions crowned by human rights.

The article addresses the relationship between religion and politics, and combines theories on religious change with theories on political cleavages. Empirical evidence is presented from a Norwegian survey of new forms of religiosity and political attitudes. Woodhead and Heelas (2004) have posited the hypothesis that a silent revolution is taking place where (traditional) religion is giving way to what they call “spirituality of life.” This article questioned the assumption that the individualistic and consumer-oriented New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s has developed into a new religious movement that is concerned with life quality and social questions. According to the literature on political cleavages, certain demands have to be fulfilled before a social divide or a conflict develops into a full political cleavage. With respect to alternative religion, the empirical analysis reveals that the main obstacle is related to the lack of a collective ideological platform.

This paper examines how Muslim American advocacy organizations have responded to recent spikes in anti-Muslim discrimination, particularly in the context of the 2016 elections. It asks how Muslim American interest groups have helped frame and communicate the policy interests of U.S. Muslims and, consequently, the collective claims of the group on whose behalf they claim to speak. Relying on political ethnography as the main method of inquiry, I conduct in-depth participant observation, qualitative interviews with Muslim American leaders, and an analysis of primary documents and social media communication produced by Muslim American organizations. This data was collected between June 2016 and July 2017, and transcribed and coded using Nvivo. Through this analysis, I find that being targeted as “other” has driven Muslim advocacy organizations to rely on constituent empowerment strategies, mobilize in demand of Muslim American group rights, defend their constitutional rights, and claim their place as an American minority.

While the study of religion in political science has reemerged as a growing field of inquiry in the last few decades, most research still focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What religion is and how it is measured has largely been conceptualized through the lens of these Abrahamic faiths. This article, by contrast, examines Hinduism, the world's oldest and third most populous religion. I randomly assigned closed-ended or open-ended surveys about Hindu religiosity across and within two demographically similar villages in the north Indian state of Bihar. A comparison of survey responses from a sample of 100 respondents suggests that many Hindus: (a) do not recognize basic analytical categories scholars use in the social scientific study of religion; (b) do not differentiate between ostensibly religious and secular categories; and (c) recognize features of everyday life, such as attire or obedience to rules about purity and auspiciousness, as religious in ways that may be different from most Western religious communities. This article productively challenges how political scientists think about what religion is and how to measure it, tasks that must precede explaining how it affects political behavior.

This article studies the influence of religion on political attitudes in Israel by testing two propositions: “religion-friendly” democratization and “greedy” socialization. The former implies that accommodation of religious demands stimulates democratization, the latter argues that domineering religious socialization does not motivate democratic attitudes. Analysis of data from representative surveys conducted in 2006–2013, supports “greedy” socialization over the “religion friendly” hypothesis. I show that in most instances, socialization in religion-friendly environments does not moderate the political attitudes of religiously conservative groups. The results suggest that unbounded accommodation of religious needs in non-religious institutions may strengthen undemocratic political attitudes.

When contentious blasphemy laws are pressed into service in fledgling democracies with illiberal tendencies such as Indonesia, critical questions arise about judicial integrity and the political nature of blasphemy trials. Judicial legitimacy in Indonesia is defined according to international standards and conventions. The focus is on judicial propriety rather than the popularity or majoritarian appeal of court decisions. In May 2017 a watershed moment occurred in Indonesia as the former governor of Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (popularly known as Ahok) was found guilty of desecrating religion and sentenced to 2 years in prison. Judgments rendered in politicized blasphemy trials such as these fail to meet standards of impartiality, and when discursive transgressions of a blasphemous nature occur there are deep ambiguities of meaning and intent. This paper contends that the revival of blasphemy as a punishable crime relates to political power calculations and electoral opportunities, and offers an analysis of blasphemy in Indonesia through the quasi-historical lens of a discursive crime premised on the fallacy that religious offence threatens public order. Blasphemy trials are further complicated by the fact that religious authorities and Islamic mass organizations in Indonesia have significant influence over judicial processes.

This article is an historical study of the Nicaraguan revolution that makes a case in favor of interpreting revolutionary stances/action as driven by religious dialogue. To this end, seminary dialogues that assumed revolutionary significance during the 1970s in Solentiname, Nicaragua, are studied. Institutional shifts in religious meaning, both in the region and Nicaragua, are historically detailed. Three dialogues from The Gospel in Solentiname, a four-volume collection of Bible-centered dialogues, are analyzed. These are evaluated in terms of their role for revolutionary outlooks. Innovative and developmental features of dialogue are identified in order to underscore the revolutionary potential of dialogue.

Islamist parties' electoral performance is a hotly debated question. Two arguments dominate the literature in terms of Islamist parties' performance in democratic elections. The conventional argument has been the “one man, one vote, one time” hypothesis. More recently, Kurzman and Naqvi challenge this argument and show that Islamists tend to lose in free elections rather than win them. We argue that existing arguments fall short. Specifically, we theorize that moderateness of Islamist platform plays a key role in increasing the popularity of these parties and leads to higher levels of electoral support. Using data collected by Kurzman and Naqvi, we test our hypothesis, controlling for political platform and political economic factors in a quantitative analysis. We find that there is empirical support for our theory. Islamist parties' support level is positively associated with moderateness; however, this positive effect of moderation is also conditioned by economic openness.

Studies of interest groups typically sample from organizations or lobbyists registered with a government – those already engaged in political action. Because of this design choice, the questions asked of organizational systems are constrained. We take a different tack, pursuing investigation of one organizational form, ministerial organizations (MOs), in a wide variety of systems to ask about whether and how they engage in public affairs across ecologies. Specifically, we ask: What pressures affect whether MOs engage a public versus private purpose? How do MOs forage in public affairs, with what size and diversity of coalition? The data result from a hyper-network survey of MO contacts, identified by a national sample of United Methodist Church clergy. We find, contrary to assertions in previous work that religious interest groups respond to ecological pressures in a similar manner as other interest groups.

This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the religious economy approach by applying it to the religious revival across contemporary Russia and China. This comparison shows that the religious economy framework is beneficial in explaining some aspects of the communist and post-communist religious change, including macroeconomic market trends and why some faiths thrive while others fail. However, it has less explanatory power in explaining religious-state relations under market constraints — that is, how religious groups interact with state regulators to survive and grow; the range of options available to religious actors and their payoffs; and the political consequence of this interaction. This article draws on fieldwork in both countries to illustrate the benefits of grounding the religious economy approach more deeply in politics. The political economy of the marketplace reveals how and why religious groups engage the state to survive, and that they are becoming influential political and economic actors.

The American religious landscape is transforming due to a sharp rise in the percentage of the population that is nonreligious. Political and demographic causes have been proffered but little attention has been paid to the current and potential political impact of these “nones,” especially given the established link between religion, participation, and party politics. I argue that the political impact of nonreligious Americans lies in an unexplored subset of the nonreligious population called committed seculars. Committed seculars de-identify with religion, they adopt secular beliefs, and join organizations structured on secular beliefs. Using a unique survey of a secular organization, the American Humanist Association, I demonstrate that committed seculars are extremely partisan and participatory, and are driven to participate by their ideological extremity in relation to the Democratic Party. These results point to a long-term mobilizing dimension for Democrats and indicate the potential polarizing influence of seculars in party 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.

This article aims at explaining religious actors' influence on democratic transition in Mali (1987–1992). It argues that it takes more than political theology to effectively influence democratization processes. Although Muslim actors used their political theology during democratization, they had neither the organizational means nor the legitimization to convince others of their preferences for a post-authoritarian institutional set-up. They had very limited influence on the institutions that today are supposed to regulate the relations between religion and the state under democratic rule. In fact, this high path-dependency of institutional factors since the colonial era led to an informalization of non-liberal Muslim politics in the 2000s. It is likely that accepting Muslim actors' demands for institutionalized cooperation between the state and religion during democratic transition would have caused fewer problems for democracy in the long run. The article concludes with general lessons for the study of religion in democratization.

Christianity and Danishness are mutually reinforcing phenomena in Denmark. Three factors applying specifically to Denmark explain this: first, the lack of national representative bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark; second, the journal Tidehverv (“New Era”) has nurtured a conservative and nationalistic Christian ethics among parts of the Danish clergy; and third, Danish politicians' abuse of the links between Christianity and Danishness as a tool in their anti-immigration strategies.

The Prosperity Gospel (PG) has gotten an increasing amount of attention recently as a major theological force driving Americans' political attitudes and identity. A number of studies have also examined how the PG affects racial minorities, especially Black Protestants, for whom it works counter to Social Gospel theology that is commonly associated with Black religious leaders and believers. This paper employs a unique data set that shows the prevalence of PG identity and beliefs across racial and religious categories, comparing the political outputs of the confluence of race, theology, and religious identity.

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.

Political debates over religious freedom in Australia became prominent in the context of marriage equality, achieved in 2017. The Australian Christian Right (ACR) has driven these debates, but there is little research focusing on its discourse of religious freedom. This article examines a range of texts from ACR actors. Using discourse and theoretical analyses, we identify three key turns in the religious freedom rhetoric of the ACR: “ontological security,” “existential stress,” and “meaning vertigo.” We also explore how mimetic ACR discourse is compared to the United States' Christian Right (USCR). As with the USCR, this research demonstrates how the ACR—suffering meaning vertigo and aiming to re-secure its previously taken-for-granted worldview—has successfully reframed the discourse of religious freedom by positioning itself as a besieged minority.