Confronted by a number of home-grown Islamic terrorist attacks, many Americans incorrectly assume that Muslim religiosity correlates with anti-American values and that the American mosque is the center of radical socialization efforts. This paper examines the nature of the relationship between mosque involvement and political engagement. It finds that mosque attendance is positively associated with political engagement only when the attendance engages congregants in ways beyond religious ritual. Attending mosque to pray does not significantly impact political identities or engagement like following politics, registering to vote, voting, or party membership, while participation in other social or religious activities at a mosque is associated with an increased probability of engagement. These results suggest that not all mosque involvement is equally beneficial for promoting political engagement and that religious participation must proactively engage with the social lives of the congregants to have a substantive political effect.

In this article, we discuss the relation between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and its jurisprudence and social mobilizations around the place of religion in the society. We focus on the struggles to define the intersection of religion and public education in Romania after the fall of communism. We show that secularist and counter-secularist civil society activists contending for the place of religion in public education in this country have made strategic use of the ECtHR and its case law, both in legal battles and in debates within the national public sphere. We argue that, since references to the ECtHR and its jurisprudence can be used in discursive battles as a form of symbolic “capital”, the strategies of mobilizing actors are at times more important than the strict doctrinal content of the ECtHR's judgments for understanding if and how the ECtHR's “shadow” is cast over religion-related mobilizations.

How are the characteristics of state–religion relations defined? The following paper provides a critical response to the competition perspective in studies on secularization, secularism, and mobilized religion. It argues that actors differ in how religion and state should relate to public life, not the extent that they should be integral or separate from each other. This paper substantiates its argument by exploring how in Tunisia––in a context of revolutionary, social and political instability––a variety of positions were articulated regarding the preferred position of Islam in relation to, first, national identity and, second, state authority. This is done in direct reference to one particular contentious issue: State control over mosques in name of ensuring the partisan neutrality of religious spaces in the country. This paper builds on multiple fieldwork visits to Tunisia and specifically Sfax, during which 32 individuals were interviewed. In addition, this paper builds on hundreds of primary and secondary sources.

The countries of the former Soviet Union witnessed a religious revivalism in the final years of the regime, although following the collapse, the revivals of the different faith communities have had different characteristics. This article discusses the nature of the desecularization and deprivatization processes of both the Orthodox Christian Georgians and the Muslim minorities in Georgia. Based on field researches and indepth interviews conducted with elites and experts, it is argued that the revival of Orthodox Christianity in Georgia differs from the revival of Islam. While the Islamic revival has taken the form of a deculturation, very much in line with global processes, the Orthodox Christian revival is taking the form of a reculturation.

It has become an article of faith that congregations in America play an important role in the political mobilization of the faithful, but the reasons why congregations themselves provide political opportunities are not well understood. We unite various strands of work about congregational political engagement under the canopy of the religious economies model. Using the 2001 U.S. Congregational Life Study and 1998 National Congregations Study datasets, we show that market forces shape churches’ provision of political goods, suggesting that the congregational embrace of political activities should be understood not as a politically strategic exercise, but as another way to reach out to new members and retain current ones.

Scholars have shown that religious activity can prepare individuals for civic activity by endowing them with the skills and motivation to engage in politics. Others, however, assert that religious dogmatism may lead to disengagement with the secular world and politics more generally. These two perspectives have resulted in contradictory findings on a key aspect of civic ability: political knowledge. I argue that while religiosity may indeed increase individuals’ engagement in a wide array of political activities, including some aspects of political knowledge, religious commitment decreases the ability to acquire accurate information about certain types of political facts. This argument is tested with a number of national surveys, and I find that while religion has a mixed effect on knowledge of general political structures and actors, it increases the perception of media hostility, which leads to lower levels of political knowledge about policy-specific surveillance information.

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.

This paper examines grassroots mobilizations in Turkey against the government's policies on religion and education (RE), and the potential effects of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) on their mobilization. Specifically, it follows the ways in which grassroots actors frame their discourses of secularism and freedom of religion in education during a period when the Turkish government is aiming to increase the role of Sunni-Islam in national education, while at the same time refusing to implement ECtHR decisions regarding RE. Drawing on empirical research, it analyzes the role the ECtHR and its case law play in the diverse rights claims and discourses of three different types of mobilizations that is going on in the field of RE: (i) legal mobilization, and right to exemption and freedom from religion, (ii) political mobilization, and new discourses of pluralism and secularism, (iii) monitoring and policy-based mobilization and national and international advocacy for pluralism and equality in education.

Political secularism is defined as “an ideology or set of beliefs advocating that religion ought to be separate from all or some aspects of politics or public life (or both).” In the secular–religious competition perspective, I argue that political secularists compete with religious political actors to influence government policy around the world. Yet this competition is complicated by many factors. The contributions to this symposium demonstrate that this is the case in their examination of secular–religious tensions and state–religion relations in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Tunisia. These cases show that government religion policy evolves over time and is deeply influenced by secular–religious competition but that this competition is a complex one involving many other factors and influences.

Survey estimates of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States—between 20% and 25%—make this group one of the largest “religious” categories in the country. Recent research argues that political polarization pushes political liberals and moderates to report no religious affiliation to distance themselves from religious conservatives. One key point of polarization behind this phenomenon is sexuality-focused politics, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) rights and discrimination. The current research uses a split-ballot survey experiment to investigate sexuality-focused political polarization as a cause of the reports of religious nonaffiliation. A sample of 2,238 respondents, stratified by sexual orientation (half LGBQ, half straight), completed a brief web survey starting with two randomly ordered series of questions on religion and sexuality. Findings suggest that sexuality-focused political polarization is not likely to be a primary cause of survey respondents’ claims of religious nonaffiliation.

The public reason criterion is a prominent theme in contemporary political theory. Yet scholars have focused predominantly on conceptual and normative issues at the expense of empirical questions about the language used by actors engaged in political debate. This is a particular problem in the case of religious actors, whose underlying motives for taking part in such debates are frequently driven by theological concerns. This paper explores these issues by analyzing religious opposition to the legalization of assisted dying in Britain. It shows that religious actors have tended toward the use of secular rather than theological modes of argumentation, and that this is consistent with the idea of a strategic shift in response to the increasingly secularized nature of British society.

This paper analyzes comparatively the indirect effects of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments related to religion and education in four countries: Greece, Italy, Romania, and Turkey. It examines whether and how ECtHR jurisprudence on religion and education influences the views and the strategies deployed by various categories of actors. Do religious, secularist, minority, and other actors invoke these judgments and their normative principles in their discourse and mobilization strategies to promote religious pluralism or conversely religious values, in education? How are the norms that are enunciated in these judgments perceived by a diverse array of nationally situated actors who mobilize in this domain?

American Muslims’ increased societal salience has led to greater scrutiny of their political and social attitudes. Yet, systematic analyses of this population remain rare and tend to aggregate findings at a level that masks the community's diverse backgrounds and experiences. As a partial corrective, our paper provides a comprehensive demographic analysis of American Muslim political participation. Our conclusions, first, complement previous efforts to elaborate the influence of minority status on the core determinants of political participation. Second, they highlight the differential impact of these determinants within key American Muslim demographic subgroups, revealing the moderating effects of denomination, racial or ethnic background, and gender. As scholars and practitioners seek to better understand Muslims in America, our research suggests that there are myriad circumstances when this community's presumed cohesion gives way to meaningfully diverse perspectives and behaviors.

Since Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), federal and state religious freedom restoration acts now extend the right to free exercise of religion to businesses. But what does it mean for businesses to have such a right? In this paper, I identify three implications of these new rights: they shift the burden for fulfilling the right to private citizens, and they conflict with businesses’ both commercial and democratic obligations. To illustrate how they become problematic, I draw on the case of In re Wathen (2015) where the owners of a bed and breakfast cited their business's religion as their reason for refusing to host a wedding reception for a same-sex couple, even though state law specifically prohibited commercial businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation.