Recent political science literature notes that the relationship between religion and politics is not a one-way interaction: religion influences political beliefs and political beliefs influence religious practices. Most of these studies, however, have relied on aggregate or indirect methods of assessing individual-level religious decisions of where to attend worship services. This paper utilizes an original, nationally representative survey conducted through YouGov to directly ask about respondents' views on politics in church and how it influences their religious behaviors. We find that many respondents admit church shopping, both inside and outside of their denomination, and that politics influences their choice of congregation to attend. After examining the demographics of those who church shops for political reasons, we conclude by discussing the implications of religiopolitical sorting for tolerance and partisan reinforcement.

This paper highlights the impact of religious oppositions in Muslim-majority states towards security cooperation with the U.S. Such cooperation provides security but is risky as the U.S. can coerce its weaker allies and push for regime change. To protect against this possibility, this paper suggests that incumbents in recipient states strategically extend or limit cooperation based on the strength of Islamist opposition parties. Weaker Islamist oppositions pose a threat to incumbents in recipient states as the U.S. can coerce and replace them without fear of bringing anti-U.S. elements to power, which results in lower cooperation. In case of a stronger Islamist opposition, the regime's replacement cannot offer better policy concessions to the U.S.; hence, a strong Islamist opposition leads to more extensive cooperation. This mechanism is demonstrated through U.S. military aid acceptance in 40 Muslim-majority states during 2002–2015, and a comparison of U.S. security relations with Algeria and Tunisia.

This article examines interethnic tensions in Russia within the framework of the “post-Soviet religious model.” This term is understood as a set of mechanisms of cooperation between the state and representatives of “traditional” religious organizations. The article includes an analytical overview of the state of interethnic relations in Russia and how this issue is approached by the state and “traditional” religions. Based on this analysis, the author tries to expose weaknesses of the model and point out possible future problems.

How far can monotheism be reconciled with the pluralism characteristic of modern societies? In this article, I focus on the “value pluralism” of Isaiah Berlin, which I suggest captures a deeper level of plurality than Rawls's more familiar version of pluralism. However, some critics have objected that Berlinian pluralism is too controversial an idea in which to ground liberalism because it is profoundly at odds with the monotheism professed by so many citizens of a modern society. I argue that monotheists can be value pluralists as long as they do not insist that their faith is superior to all others. This pluralist position is exemplified by elements of the interfaith movement, according to which many religions are recognized as having roughly equal value. I also argue that a value-pluralist approach to religious accommodation, if it can be achieved, may be more stable than the uneasy combination of disapproval and restraint involved in the more orthodox solution to conflict among religions, toleration.

The role of religion in politics is problematic for liberal legitimacy. Religion is often restrained by a public reason requirement, but this creates cognitive burdens that asymmetrically impact religious citizens creating unequal barriers to accessing the political system, which is itself problematic for liberal legitimacy. Habermas’ institutional translation proviso balances the competing concerns of liberal legitimacy, which aims to offset the asymmetry disadvantaging religious citizens. This paper analyzes the problem and Habermas’ solution. It concludes that Habermas does not alleviate the asymmetry created by the public reason requirement to the greatest extent possible and so does not equalize the barriers to accessing the political system as much as he might. The reciprocal translation proviso provides an alternative that balances the competing components of liberal legitimacy more fully and alleviates the asymmetry and inequality of barriers to political access to the greatest extent possible while preserving the public reason requirement.

How do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.

When the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) again took control after the 2012 general election, Japan's ruling party politicians increasingly associated themselves with Shinto Seiji Renmei, a political organization that is affiliated with Shinto, the country's native religion. What are the motivations for joining such a group, considering Japan has institutional regulations regarding the separation of politics and religion, in addition to there being no sign of rising religiosity among the Japanese population? I explain this puzzle by focusing on politicians' electoral incentives in a changing environment of Japan's party politics. As the opposition became fragmented after 2012, the ruling party's candidates found it electorally advantageous to appeal to the core supporters rather than the centrist floating voters. An empirical analysis of an original dataset supports my argument. The findings suggest the changes in Japan's political landscape might affect the future strategies of LDP politicians, particularly regarding the coalition with Komeito. Overall, this study proposes that there is a need to pay closer attention to politicians' strategic use of religion in politics.

The communal elements of Christianity are of increasing concern to religious thinkers. Indeed, for some religious thinkers, the importance of community is paramount in Christian belief and practice, especially as these communitarian views interact and enhance Christian pacifism. The community of Christians as the “peaceable kingdom” becomes the core element of Christian life. But is this pacifist communitarian Christianity tenable? In this article, I will argue that pacifist communitarianism leads to unexpected and objectionable consequences. Specifically, I will consider the views of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. By explicating the weaknesses of their pacifist views, most especially on the issue of coercion and the notion of “Constantinianism,” I will show that both thinkers tend toward a view of Christian separatism vis-à-vis the secular world. Both thinkers' systems present problems in communicating truth to those not already in the community. Finally, their communitarian views conflict with their pacifism, in the end requiring those not within the community to act as if they were members.

There is a paradox: why are there so many political and economic Islamic actors in the Middle East but not a large willingness on their part to adopt and promote Islamic banking and finance methodologies? This paper argues that the more vague and ambivalent these actors are on economic policy, the wider their appeal; and, by extension, the more compatible Islamic ideas and ideologies are with neoliberalism. The case of the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan is given as it has adopted an emphasis on Islamic middle-class values and ethical concerns of neoliberalism in order to gain political support. The case of the IAF demonstrates that there are points of compatibility between the neoliberal economy and Islamist politics. In the calibrations of the relationship between the state and Islamist party politics in line with Islamic neoliberal tenets, this approach ensures enhanced appeal for neoliberal Islamism into the future.

Critical Islam is an intellectual orientation that prizes timeliness and broad-mindedness and a political sensibility that tends to honor majority rule, minority rights, and the good of pluralism. This essay considers how an important European Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, promotes critical Islam in his call for a moratorium on stoning, his argument for the reformation of fatwa committees, and his analysis of the Arab Awakening. The essay argues that the art of controversy and the building of civil society—more so than political revolution—can cultivate a critical sensibility among Muslim scholars and publics.

In 1967 the Church of Scientology's tax-exempt status was revoked on the basis that it failed to meet the criteria outlined in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service. Between its loss, and eventual reacquisition in 1993, the Church of Scientology employed a number of political based tactics in an attempt to legitimize itself to the public sector. This article explores these tactics in relation to the religion's use of perception management. The article argues that the processes of both legal recognition and legitimization draw upon each other in a new faith's transition to mainstream theology. In this, the Church employed perception management in attempt to influence both processes. In exploring this, the paper contributes to our understanding of role that public legitimacy plays in a new faith's development.

The subfield of religion and politics, just like other subfields, was founded on the shoulders of giants who came before us. These seminal thinkers sometimes disagreed with each other, but their quarrels also opened new avenues for further discussion. Max Weber argued, for instance, that Protestant dominant countries develop faster and more effectively than Catholic ones because of their dynamic work ethic. The spirit of Protestantism, Weber believed, promoted values such as entrepreneurism and creativity, which facilitated the rise of democracy, all while the ethos of Catholicism lagged behind. Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, had a different opinion about the compatibility of democracy and Catholicism. Traveling throughout the United States, he observed that Catholics—with their emphasis on hierarchy, obedience, and top-down dissemination of teaching—were well predisposed to internalize American laws and regulations. Such predispositions, in turn, helped stabilize the still nascent American democracy. While both thinkers were concerned with the compatibility of Catholicism and democracy, they ended up reaching different conclusions about the matter. In many ways, their disagreement is still not resolved, but two recent books made important contributions to these ongoing debates.

How, and in what contexts, do U.S. senators publicly invoke religious rhetoric when engaging with their constituents? Do periods of heightened public anxiety make senators more likely to use religious rhetoric? We use the Internet Archive's 90-terabyte collection of material from the U.S. government's Internet domain (.gov) to evaluate the relationships between insecurity, anxiety, and religious rhetoric on senators' official websites. We estimate the association between a senator's use of anxiety-related terms on her official website in a given year (as a proportion of overall yearly words) and that senator's use of religious rhetoric (public-facing religiosity). We find a strong, positive association between senators' public display of anxious sentiments and public-facing religiosity in a given year. This research advances scholarly understanding of how U.S. legislators invoke religion in public spaces. It also models the use of “big data” sources and scalable, time-variant text-data approaches for measuring and analyzing religion and elite political behavior.

While the role of theology in Jefferson's political thought and its implications for how we should understand the role of “Nature's God” in grounding natural-rights republicanism are topics of ongoing scholarly interest, scholars have missed important continuities between Jefferson's natural-law theory and that of classical, theistic natural-law. Many scholars who have considered Jefferson in this light have emphasized Jefferson's discontinuity and even subversion of that tradition. In critical dialogue with this vein of scholarship, we argue that Jefferson espouses a creational metaphysics and a natural-law theory of morality that has surprising continuities with classical natural-law. We seek to shed new light on Jefferson's theory of the moral sense and his the earth belongs to the living principle, which we contend encapsulates his theistic understanding of equality and property.

Pakistan has strived though unsuccessfully to introduce reforms into thousands of religious seminaries. Among the different sects of seminaries, Deobandi madaris which are mostly led by Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F) have posed the greatest challenge. This paper seeks to analyze why and how JUI-F obstructs the state's attempts of convincing madaris for reforms. Based on the findings of elite group interviews and constructs of “elite instrumentalism” and “political survival theory,” this study argues that JUI-F has political interests, both strategic-cum-existential and tactical, at stake in resisting these reforms. This study of Fazlur Rehman's behavior vis-à-vis state's madrassah reform initiatives allows one to bring home the theoretical premises set by “political survival theory” and “elite instrumentalism.” Accordingly, JUI-F opposes madrassah reforms because the instrumental use of religion (madaris) has long been vital for retaining its political power which in turn has ensured party's political survival.