European political parties, particularly radical right parties (RRPs), increasingly use religious symbols during elections. Despite the prevalence of these symbols, evidence on the association between religion and far-right vote share is mixed. We compare two leading arguments explaining the relationship between religion and RRPs. We hypothesize that the number of religious buildings, identifiable as Islamic or Catholic, will be associated with higher RRP support. We test this as a most likely crucial case using results from the French 2017 presidential election. Controlling for other demographic factors, more Catholic buildings in a commune are associated with a decrease in votes for the Front Nationale (FN). An increase in the number of mosques in non-urban communes is associated with increased support for FN. We argue these findings are evidence that RRPs use religious symbolism to draw on nativist or anti-Islamic support rather than traditional religious support.

We use data from the new and nationally representative National Survey of Religious Leaders, supplemented with the 2018 General Social Survey, to examine the extent to which clergy are politically aligned with people in their congregations. Two assessments of alignment—clergy reports of how their political views compare to the political views held by most people in their congregations, and comparisons between clergy and lay voting preferences in the 2016 election—yield the same findings. Clergy in Black Protestant and predominantly white evangelical churches are much more likely to be politically aligned with their people than are Catholic or, especially, white mainline Protestant clergy, who often are more liberal than their people. Contrary to media reports suggesting that evangelical clergy are now likely to be less conservative than their people, the vast majority are either politically aligned with, or more conservative than, their members.

Asking about people's views of the Bible in a single survey question has become the prevailing way to understand the mass public's religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the standard survey items raise questions about what is being measured. The questions used to measure one's views of the Bible are often double-barreled and leave considerable room for interpretation. In this paper, we assess the measurement error in the standard three-category question from the American National Election Study (ANES) by developing new items to gauge what it might mean to a respondent to select one of the three options in the standard Bible question. Using original data from two online surveys, we demonstrate that there is substantial measurement error in the standard ANES item. Analyses also show that our new items predict responses to the standard ANES item and are potent predictors of political attitudes—often performing better than the widely used three-category question.

This article investigates the relationship between partisan foreign policy positions on Israel and the voting behavior of religious minorities in Canada. It discusses Stephen Harper's strong pro-Israeli stance in foreign policy when the Conservatives were in power and focuses on two main explanations accounting for such politicization of Israel, namely moral obligations and political clientelism. These hypotheses are tested using the 1968–2015 Canadian Election Study (CES) surveys and the 2011–2015 Vox Pop Labs election data. The results suggest that the Israeli issue had an impact on the support for the Conservatives among voters from religious minorities. Considering the effect of this foreign policy positions, Jewish Canadians are shown to be more supportive of the Conservatives, while the opposite pattern is observed among Muslim Canadians. The implications of these findings are then discussed.

In a 2021 contribution to Politics and Religion, Jesse Russell wrote that St. Thomas Aquinas “had a decidedly illiberal view of a government.” He says Aquinas “advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty” and did not “prepare the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution.” But Aquinas places the rule of moral law above politics, endorses participatory government, prioritizes reciprocal duties rather than coerced conformity, favors a mixed regime with democratic representation, and sanctions resistance to tyrants. Each idea is an important component of modern understandings of freedom. Liberal democracy as a constitutional arrangement, and its various philosophical defenses, postdate Aquinas by centuries. It would be anachronistic to cast him as their partisan. But neither was he a proto-reactionary: his political philosophy is congenial to free, limited government that belongs to the people.

Over the past few decades, interest in and conversion to Islam among non-Muslims in the West has been on the rise. There is a view in the scholarly literature that Western converts to Islam are overrepresented in regard to politicized interpretations of the religion, commonly referred to as political Islam or Islamism, and even militancy or jihadism. This article presents the findings of a national survey of Muslim Australians. It focuses on views amongst Australian converts to Islam concerning political Islam, including views and understandings of such concepts as the caliphate, shariah, and jihad, and the relationship between Islam and politics, democracy, and conflict. The findings suggest that in the Australian context, converts to Islam are not more likely, and in some cases less likely, than the broader born-Muslim population, to understand and interpret Islam in accordance with political Islamist ideology.

Government laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities are on the rise worldwide. Scholars have debated whether or not society-based discrimination is a pre-condition for government-based discrimination. Examining an original dataset of regulations discriminating against the Ahmadiyah community in Indonesia, this article argues that calls from within society to restrict the freedom of religious minorities are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the rise of discriminatory government regulations. Instead, governments may emulate other governments and adopt laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities without any immediate societal pressure preceding it. Hence, future research needs to consider the interdependence between jurisdictions as an important driver of laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities.

Existing research proves the connection between religion and social attitudes toward biopolitical topics. The purpose of our analyses was to deepen reflection on these connections. We explored the internal pluralization of religiosity and ideological self-placement and their significance for orientations toward abortion, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality, subjects of intensive political debate engaging the Catholic Church. Our analysis, based on a nationally representative sample of Catholics in Poland, leads to the conclusion that, despite high indicators of religiosity, the capacity of the Roman Catholic Church to form a consistent cognitive perspective among its followers is limited. Even among Catholics who present fully institutionalized religiosity (~25%), only half agree with the Church's teaching on biopolitical themes. These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of intra-religious pluralism for understanding the ideological role of religion in countries with high levels of belonging to one, dominant form of it.

The states of the Arabian Gulf present a novel case for the examination of relations between authoritarian governance and Christian organizations. The economic clout of the Gulf states has been central to political stability and legitimacy but they are increasingly seeking to expand and consolidate the soft power and resilience through political and diplomatic initiatives. This article examines how the Christian organizations established in recent decades by large migrant communities are incorporated into this strategy and how they are responding. It argues that religious tolerance has formed a central discourse in governmental policies and narratives that construct the Gulf states as modern progressive nations, despite their unique political systems based mainly on constitutional monarchies with limited political participation. This constructs local Christian communities as a source of soft power, despite their position as a religious minority.

The article investigates the transformation within a specific branch of German Salafism from a publicly-assertive da'wa (proselytizing) to a politically accommodating and legal advocacy movement. In doing so, a process analysis that focuses on internal and reflexive narrations among Salafi leaders and lay members, through a three year-long mosque-based ethnography (2018–2021) and textual analysis (2008–2022), is employed. Previous studies focused predominately on the “Salafi growth phase” (2005–2015) in Germany that is associated with the attraction of exclusive group boundaries, flat hierarchies and informal networks. Less research exists on the current “decline phase”, which has commenced a re-orientation and critical reflection on past strategies and new ways of civic engagement and legal pragmatism. By exploring this new phase, the article integrates a longitudinal dimension into conventional research protocols on contemporary Salafism. The paper concludes with a discussion on the converging struggles for recognition among Muslim and other religious minorities in Europe, while linking these transformations to domestic opportunity structures rather than transnational reconfigurations of so-called “global Salafism”.

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism–progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the “cultural turn” literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance—due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for 20 West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe.

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.

We study the extent and nature of Christian engagement in morality policy implementation by means of a comparative case study in Germany. In particular, we observe that the nature of engagement varies between unconnected and corresponding types of activities, and we explain this variation with the policy-specific goal congruence between religious organizations (ROs) and the state. Goal congruence, in turn, can be linked to Catholic and Protestant moral doctrines that tell us about ROs' position on morality issues. The study contributes to the literature on faith-based welfare by highlighting the role of moral doctrines as drivers of ROs' social engagement.

A number of controversial aspects of the relationship between religion and the state are located in public space. Although burqa bans, the Swiss minaret ban, and duties to display crucifixes on public buildings are different in various ways, it is significant that they all take place in this particular type of location. However, when normative political theorists have addressed these issues, they have rarely paid sufficient attention to their spatial location, and, as a result, their analyses are lacking a vital dimension. This article shows what can go wrong when these normative analyses do not refer to an account of public space. It then indicates what part of a suitable account would look like by sketching four of its essential elements, referred to as the definition, distinctiveness, differentiation, and dynamism of public space. It is argued that normative political theorists should draw on aspects of such an account in order to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of issues concerning religion in public spaces, as well as to reach more securely grounded normative conclusions about them.

After five decades of research, there is still little consensus about the relation of religious variables to environmental attitudes. Even putting aside variations in sampling and measurement, we still have doubts about where modest consensus exists—the role of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs, such as mastery over nature, are more unstable than previously considered. Moreover, more importantly, these studies have generally failed to consider the role of secular beliefs about environmental problems and the interaction they may have with religion. Using data from a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, we find religious variables have effects conditional on secular beliefs. Moreover, we draw upon an embedded experiment that shows instability in religious dominionism—the dominant religious effect in previous work. The results suggest previous reports of religious effects are not wrong, but overstated, and eliding secular beliefs is a serious sin of omission.

This article examines the relationship between senators' personal religious affiliations and their roll-call voting record on organized labor's policy agenda. While an impressive body of literature now demonstrates clear connections between religion and representation in the U.S. Congress, fewer studies have linked religion to issues outside of the realm of cultural and moral policy. Based on a data set spanning 1980 through 2020, our findings show that evangelical Protestants are significantly the most opposed to organized labor's legislative agenda, while Jewish senators are the most supportive. Other religions fall in between, depending on the decade. The findings imply that the reach of religion in Congress may run even deeper than is commonly understood. It extends beyond the culture wars to one of the most salient issue cleavages in the modern history of the American politics.

Since the 2005 Jyllands-Posten controversy, both far right and Islamist actors have employed Muhammed cartoons to construct a radical frontier between Muslims and non-Muslims. This article aims to provide a better understanding of the linkages between two opposing forms of popular identification by looking at the utilization of the Muhammed cartoons to crystallize a multitude of (conflicting) subjects, affects, and demands. Following a vantage point of mutual relations, the article investigates the discursive performances of the Dutch branch of the transnational Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir and the far right Party for Freedom with respect to the Jyllands-Posten affair, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the 2020 killing of a French schoolteacher. Considering its cultural and political foundations of mutual respect and tolerance, the Dutch case is pertinent for examining the tension between the right to free speech and support for extremist and popular forms of (far right and Islamist) identification.

International discussions regarding the environment have too narrowly focused on contributions by secular actors. The Catholic Church, recognized for its influential role in the democratization processes of the 1990s, also has a long-standing position regarding climate change, yet remains understudied. How can the Church contribute to the international community's debates regarding the environment and climate change? Using the framework of constructivism and Jurgen Habermas' concept of institutional translation, I argue that the Church is a norm entrepreneur that promotes a foreign policy of human/integral ecology. The most recent articulation of this foreign policy is Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si’, which was referenced by the Holy See at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021. The Church's participation at COP26 was the latest animation and application of the Church's foreign policy; I examine the Church's efforts to change the narrative on the environment toward a shared, global responsibility.

Understanding the social dynamics of public opposition to religious symbols is a pressing issue. This research finds that stereotypes of how committed group members are to the national community shape support for the right to wear religious symbols in various settings. These social perceptions are particularly influential in determining support for the rights of Muslims to wear religious symbols. Drawing on data from a national survey experiment (N = 974) conducted in Canada, the results show Christians benefit from a particularly strong perceived commitment to the nation, while religious minorities are stereotyped as less committed and identified to the country than the average Canadian. As the perceived national commitment of religious minorities increases, however, the gap in support shown for the rights of Christians over religious minorities disappears and may lead to particularly strong support for the rights of Muslims to wear religious symbols in public when perceptions of national commitment are high.

How do racial group attitudes shape the political preferences of Black and white evangelicals? Scholarship has documented the relationship between religion and race in shaping political behavior and attitudes. However, less is known about how in-group and out-group racial attitudes operate within religious populations. Using samples of Black and white evangelicals from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, we explore the role of racial identity centrality and racial resentment in determining evangelicals' political preferences. While the role of Black and white identity among evangelicals is minimal, we find strong and consistent conservatizing effects for racial resentment. Together these findings suggest that the evangelical racial divide is not driven by Black evangelicals' attachment to their racial identity, but that racial resentment may drive white evangelicals to more conservative political preferences.