Under what conditions can faith leaders influence peace in civil wars? The ongoing conflict in Congo, Syria, and Yemen indicate that faith leaders can fuel sectarian divide, but also intervene on the side of peace. Drawing on experiences in Sierra Leone's civil war, this paper highlights the role of faith leaders as moral guarantors of peace processes, with respondent former rebels indicating that without interfaith delegations personally bringing the peace accord to their remote jungle camps, they would not have trusted the UN-led process. Ethnographic analysis and over 60 field interviews with former combatants and religious leaders, presents a model for answering why faith leaders were central in terminating this conflict. Combatant's personal experience with a diverse mixture of Christian, Traditional, and Islamic leaders contributed to high confidence in peace accords, due to interfaith practices deeply embedded within the culture and shows the dispositions, rituals, and interfaith practices that provided the cultural foundations for successful interfaith intervention. The paper ends with generalizations for other interfaith groups seeking to intervene in conflict.

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.

Low political support for religious minority groups in the United States is often explained as a matter of social distance or unfamiliarity between religious traditions. Observable differences between beliefs and behaviors of religious minority groups and the cultural mainstream are thought to demarcate group boundaries. However, little scholarship has examined why some practices become symbolic boundaries that reduce support for religious accommodation in public policy, while nearly identical practices are tolerated. We hypothesize that politics is an important component of the process by which some religious practices are transformed into demarcations between “us” and “them.” We conduct an original survey experiment in which people are exposed to an identical policy demand—women-only swim times at a local public pool—attributed to three different religious denominations (Muslim, Jewish, and Pentecostal). We find that people are less supportive of women-only swim times when the requesting religion is not a part of their partisan coalition.

Conventional wisdom describes Locke as an “optimist” about human nature; some scholars go further and say that he denied the Christian view that human beings are naturally sinful. But Locke's works, including the Two Treatises, clearly and firmly hold that human nature has a consistent tendency to desire selfishness and evil. Locke's view of the origin of human sinfulness is unorthodox – he dissents from the traditional doctrine of “original sin” – but on the question of whether human nature is in fact sinful his views are perfectly orthodox, and are in harmony with the Calvinism of the Church of England in his time. Understanding this is crucial to grasping the fundamental problem of the Two Treaties, which is the need to cope with humanity's selfishness. Locke argues that the persistent moral corruption of human nature is the primary reason government exists.

Why are religious riots between Hindus and Muslims endemic in some states of India and not in others? Scholarship on the topic is divided between those arguing that electoral competition increases the occurrence of such riots and those arguing that electoral competition decreases the occurrence of such riots. Both types of explanations assume a relationship between political parties and religious violence, but they ignore voting behavior. This paper accounts for party system instability or change, measured in terms of electoral volatility, to argue that electoral volatility in the Indian party system is a key overlooked determinant of religious violence. Specifically, higher levels of electoral volatility, implying high switching of party allegiances by voters, may indicate the process of ethnic outbidding that causes violence.

What explains the adoption of the regime of cooperation between church and the state in the democratic constitutions of Spain and Poland, while Portugal maintained a regime of strict separation in the United States and French tradition? The explanation could be that a consensual constitution-making process resulted in a constitutional formula accommodating religion and guaranteeing religious freedoms. Alternatively, the constitutional regime of cooperation could result from the diffusion of international norms to national constitutions, in this case, the cosmopolitan law of the church. The article process-traces the constitution drafting processes and finds that the emergence of a constitutional consensus among secularist and constitutional drafters in Spain and Poland was based on the Vatican Council II doctrine and facilitated by the intervention of the Catholic hierarchies. In Portugal, the violent context of the revolution excluded the church, and the constitutional regime of strict separation between church and state was adopted.

Atheists can expect discrimination when running for office. We know less about political appraisal of other types of nonreligious candidates or how the influence of nonreligion compares to other factors. Using a conjoint experiment, I examine how the impact of nonreligion on vote choice depends on (1) the label describing nonreligion; (2) the electoral scenario in which voters face the candidate; and (3) voters' partisanship and religiosity. I find that atheists and nonbelievers are at a substantial disadvantage but secular candidates suffer a smaller penalty. While nonreligion reduces political support, it is not the most important influence, plays a smaller role in lower than in higher level elections, and is generally not a factor for Democratic and nonreligious voters. In contrast, it is a major liability for Republican, Independent, and religious voters, especially when Republicans vote in nominating contests and when they face atheists or nonbelievers as opposed to secular candidates.

When do religious organizations develop human rights platforms during violent internal conflicts? This article offers the first comparative study to address this question and focuses on religious organizations in El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, and Indonesia. It identifies two causal factors to explain variation in religious human rights activism in these four countries: (1) transnational religious ideas and linkages, and (2) the nature of the state-religion relationship. First, Vatican II and Liberation theology significantly contributed to the rise of religious human rights activism in El Salvador and Peru. Similar transitional linkages were absent in Turkey and Indonesia. Next, the more conflictual nature of the state-religion relationship in El Salvador explains why the Salvadorian Church pursued a more determined human rights agenda than its Peruvian counterpart. A similarly conflictual state-religion relationship contributed to the presence of Islamic human rights activism in Turkey, and a less conflictual relationship prevented its emergence in Indonesia.

Risk aversion dampens political participation and heightens religiosity, with concentrated effects among women. Yet, little is known about how intersecting identities moderate these psychological correlates of religiosity and political engagement. In this paper, we theorize that the risk-religion-politics relationship is gendered and racialized. Using a nationally representative survey, we show that political participation is more strongly correlated with risk for Black women than for any other race-gender group. For religiosity, however, we find little evidence that risk is related to religiosity among Black women, while highly correlated with white women's religious engagement. For men—whether Black or white—risk exhibits a modest, positive relationship with their religiosity. Our results speak to the importance of considering intersectionality and race-gender identities in evaluations of religious and political activities in the United States.

Although there has been considerable descriptive writing about religious coalitions, more work is needed in specifying when these coalitions form and when they are successful. This article offers some sketches toward a more general theory of religious coalitions.

Examination of the First Amendment's establishment clause in the post World War II period is unique in American constitutional interpretation because virtually all voices had agreed on one point, originalism. Few if any significant writers on the establishment clause had doubted the centrality of the founders' original intent for interpreting the clause's meaning. Yet this now has changed. Unlike their predecessors, leading advocates of church-state separation have now moved away from an original meaning interpretation of the establishment clause. Yet these separationists continue to try to ground their normative policy prescriptions in establishment clause mandates. They attempt this balancing act by employing narrative strategies of evolutionary processes in history. They do not simply track changes in constitutional doctrine, but characterize changes yielding greater separation between church and state through the nation's history as incipient in the Republic's founding, an originally inchoate church-state principle only fully formed through historical evolution. In the process, they sweep myriad separationist ideas into their progressively evolving narratives which have never been enunciated as law. Their accounts thus often reflect less an attempt to track historical developments in fundamental law than an attempt to construct fundamental law narratives. These attempts highlight persistent historical problems in the separationist endeavor that require attention if the evolutionary narratives of leading separationist are to shape the field of establishment clause history.

This study analyzes a potential source of immigration policy by comparing attitudes toward Syrian refugees across different religious traditions in the United States. The analysis focuses on the puzzling case of evangelical public opinion, where the views of lay evangelicals showed a contrast with the pro-refugee stance of the church leadership. The current analysis examines the sources of evangelical public opinion by scrutinizing the mediating effects of Muslim stereotypes. The findings from a series of regression analyses using the ANES dataset (2016) suggest that while evangelicals are not distinctive in their opposition to Syrian refugees, they are unique in holding significantly high levels of Muslim stereotypes, which makes them more opposed to allowing refugees from Syria. Additionally, interesting differences in attitudes emerge within the evangelical community, thereby cautioning against generalizing the divide between church leadership and laity. Finally, measures of religiosity demonstrate significant effects on attitudes across religious traditions.

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.