Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2017
The interactions between religious and secular elites differ across societies, and those interactions may evolve differently even in the face of similarly controversial issues. What explains variation in relations between religious and secular elites in comparative settings? We highlight the links between religious change, political incentives, and the level of conflict or cooperation between religious and secular actors in public life. We illustrate distinct patterns of religious-secular relations with a paired comparison of two democracies with an intertwined history: the United States and the Philippines. In the United States, religious-secular relations have becoming increasingly conflictual as political incentives have changed in response to religious change. In the Philippines, in contrast, religious and secular actors maintain cooperative ties in part because relative religious stability has diminished political incentives to stoke religious-secular tensions.
The authors thank participants at the Democracy, Religion, and Governance Symposium at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University for their organization and constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this project, and to the editors and anonymous reviews at Politics and Religion for helpful feedback on the initial submission. David Buckley thanks the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville for financial support for research related to this project.