This article addresses Pakistani Islamists' street power — their ability to organize rallies, protests, and demonstrations. Building on research on religion and collective action, I first demonstrate how Friday prayers aid Islamist mobilization. Mosques on Friday serve as a filtering and coordination tool, as tactical “choke” points in urban neighborhoods, and as incitement through the imam's sermon. I then show how Islamist street power affects Islamization in Pakistan. I argue that Pakistan's foundational religious nationalism acts as an “opportunity structure,” and affords Islamists agenda-setting and veto power. The success of Islamist agitation depends on the issue contested, the type of regime targeted, and the era in which it is practiced. I use interviews, participant observation at Islamist rallies, an original dataset of all rallies and protests in Pakistan from 2005 to 2010 (n = 4123); and government and local newspaper reports from the 1940s onward to buttress my claims.

Conclusions from empirical analyses on how Islam influences democratic attitudes in Arab countries differ widely, and the field suffers from conceptual ambiguity and largely focuses on “superficial” democratic support. Based on the non-Middle Eastern literature, this study provides a more systematic theoretical and empirical assessment of the linkages between Islamic attitudes and the popular support for democracy. I link belonging (affiliation), commitment (religiosity), orthodoxy, Muslim political attitudes, and individual-level political Islamism to the support for democracy and politico-religious tolerance. Statistical analyses on seven WVS surveys for Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia show that tolerance levels are remarkably lower than “democratic support”; the influence of being (committed or orthodox) Muslim and Muslim political attitudes are negligible however. Political Islamist views strongly affect tolerance negatively. They also influence “support for democracy,” but if the opposition in an authoritarian country is Islamic, these attitudes actually strengthen this support.

If many consider the United States to be a Christian nation, how does this affect individuals who are American citizens but not Christian? We test two major hypotheses: (1) Americans consider Christians to be more fully American than non-Christians. We examine whether Americans explicitly and implicitly connect being Christian with being a true American; and (2) Christian Americans are more likely to be patriotic and set exclusive boundaries on the national group than non-Christian Americans. Among non-Christians, however, those who want to be fully accepted as American will be more patriotic and set more exclusive boundaries to emulate prototypical Americans than non-Christians who place less emphasis on national group membership. We test these hypotheses using data from a survey and from an Implicit Association Test. We find that Americans in general associate being Christian with being a true American. For Christians, this is true both explicitly and implicitly. For non-Christians, only the implicit measure uncovers an association. We also found that non-Christians exhibit significantly more pro-national group behaviors when they desire being prototypical than when they do not.

In this study, we contend that distinguishing individuals who support bans on minority religious symbols from those who want to ban all religious symbols improves our understanding of the roots of opposition to minority religious symbols in the public sphere. We hypothesize that both groups are likely driven by markedly different motivations and that opposition to the presence of minority religious symbols in the public sphere may be the result of an alliance between “strange bedfellows,” clusters of individuals whose political outlooks usually bring them to opposite sides of political debates. Drawing on a survey conducted in the province of Quebec (Canada), we find that while holding liberal values and low religiosity are key characteristics of those who would ban all religious symbols, feelings of cultural threat and generalized prejudice are central characteristics of those who would only restrict minority religious symbols. Negative attitudes specifically toward Muslims, however, also appear to motivate both groups.

Americans’ perceptions of science are structured by overlapping cultural fields of politics and religion, and those cultural fields vary over time in how they influence opinion about science. This paper provides a historical narrative for understanding how religious and political factors influence public perceptions of science over the last four decades. Using data from the 1974–2012 General Social Survey, the impact of religious and political factors are examined and compared across decades using heterogeneous ordinal logistic regression models and ordinal structural equation models. Estimates show that the impact of sectarian Protestant identification and fundamentalist beliefs in the Bible are increasingly linked to lower levels of confidence in science, and that these religious factors also influence the impact of political conservatism and Republican Party identification. Political conservatism has become more oppositional towards science, and Republicans have become less enthusiastic compared to periods when science was primarily linked to militaristic endeavors.

We examine the changing nature of an authoritarian regime, which is emerging from the social and political conditions shaped by the unconsolidated democracy in Bangladesh. Drawing on desk-based research combined with interviews from the field, we argue that the current form of the authoritarian regime in Bangladesh represents the characteristics of competitive authoritarianism. We find that authoritarianism in Bangladesh combines “election manipulation” with three additional social and political mechanisms: “marginalization of political oppositions” leading to the oppositional void, “institutionalization of authoritarian policies,” and “co-option of religious leaders.” By adding these new mechanisms of authoritarian politics and tracing the links between politics and religion, we aim to expand the theory of competitive authoritarianism and unpack the puzzle of democratic consolidation in Bangladesh.

Scholars contend that correctly applying religious cues is crucial to winning political elections. This article examines the effect of general religious cues by conducting an experiment on a national sample (N = 520). Through the use of a fictitious congressional candidate's webpage, we examine how subtle and overt religious cues interact with citizen religiosity to affect political evaluations. The findings demonstrate that politicians who use overt religious cues run the risk of alienating a large portion of potential voters. Religious cues do, however, appear to become more effective as citizens become more religious. We also find some evidence that overt religious cues are more polarizing than subtle religious cues. This article provides a foundation from which to more thoroughly consider how general religious cues can affect political outcomes and how these cues may interact with other factors.

This article argues that high levels of government regulation of religion help to explain the “democracy gap” in majority Muslim countries. Controlling for previously hypothesized determinants of democracy, it finds that as levels of regulation increase, levels of democracy decline. Examination of specific types of religious regulation in Muslim-majority countries uncovers a pattern of repression of religious expression that may be used to mobilize citizens politically. These regulations are targeted more often at Muslims who seek independence from state-controlled religion or who wish to challenge authoritarian governments, rather than at non-Muslim minorities or at religious worship more generally. Thus, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Muslim-majority states successfully use policies toward religion to restrict political competition and inhibit democratic transition.

This article aims to move beyond media discourse about “new atheism” by mapping and explaining anti-religious zeal among the public at large in 14 Western European countries. We analyze data from the International Social Survey Program, Religion III, 2008, to test two theories about how country-level religiousness affects anti-religiosity and its social bases: a theory of rationalization and a theory of deprivatization of disbelief. Hypotheses derived from the former are contradicted, whereas those derived from the latter are largely confirmed. Anti-religiosity is strongest among disbelievers and among the higher educated in the most religious countries and among the older generations in today's most secularized countries.

Past research shows that religious beliefs can shape political activity. Yet current literature leaves open many questions about the mechanisms at work. I point to the key role of a particular religious belief found across denominations: providentiality, or the belief that God has a plan that humans can further. When these beliefs are connected to politics, providential believers are likely to be active and dedicated participators. I test this notion using survey data collected during the 2012 election campaign from congregants in Little Rock, Arkansas. In general, providential believers are less likely than their non-providential counterparts to participate in politics. However, when providential believers report hearing political sermons from their clergy, they are significantly more likely to participate. These findings illustrate one pathway by which religious beliefs can influence politics: through a cue that links providentiality and politics.

The effect of religion on political behavior and attachment has been a topic of intense interest in the United States and elsewhere. Less attention has been paid to the issue of secularism. Some analysts have viewed secularism as an absence of religious attachment, and a number of studies have utilized indices of secularization to analyze such topics as economic development or modernization. In this article, we show that secularism, like religion, is in fact a multifaceted category, and should not be viewed as the antithesis of religiosity. Utilizing a very large sample of United States adults, we apply factor analysis to demonstrate that secularism is composed of two logically separate components, and we use these results to examine the role of secularism in political attachments. We suggest that Religious Secularism and Social Secularism are different motivations and have different effects on political behavior and that, politically, the marginal effects of Social Secularism are larger than Religious Secularism in all cases.

Foreign aid allocations represent one of several important economic policy tools used by governments to realize their foreign policy objectives. Using a conjoint survey of respondents in the United States, this paper shows that recipient country religion is a significant determinant of individual-level foreign aid preferences. In particular, respondents express a preference for giving to Christian-majority countries in contrast to Muslim- or Buddhist-majority countries. This effect is comparable with that of other important determinants of support for foreign aid, such as a country's status as a U.S. ally or trade partner. Importantly, the preference for Christian recipient countries is especially pronounced among Christian, and most notably Evangelical Christian, respondents. This paper explores two potential mechanisms for the effect of religion: country religion as a heuristic and an individual-level preference for giving to co-religionists.

We assess how likely Americans are to support political candidates who are Muslim, and the extent to which support for Muslim candidates is structured by “cultural outgroup antipathy”—generalized antipathy targeting cultural outgroups. We employ two survey experiments included in the 2007 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies that juxtapose a hypothetical state legislative candidate's Muslim faith with Arab ethnicity, African American race, and both Democratic and Republican party affiliation. Identifying a candidate as Muslim significantly reduces voter support and that reduction is largest among people with higher levels of cultural outgroup antipathy. The effect is consistent regardless of whether the candidate is also identified as being Arab or African American or is just presented as a Muslim. We also find that cultural outgroup antipathy diminished electoral support for same-party Muslim candidates among Democrats but not among Republicans.

Turkish Islamists have long attributed the root causes of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey to the anti-religious Turkish nationalism promulgated by the secular Kemalist republican elite in the 1920s. As a result, they lay emphasis on “Islamic brotherhood” as the glue that holds numerous ethnic nationalities together. This article examines this claim and argues that Islam's role as a peacemaker has been overstated. The data from in-depth interviews with dozens of Kurdish Islamists in Turkey conducted in the summer of 2013 indicate that Kurdish Islamists in principle agree with the peacemaking potential of Islam. Distrustful of the “Islamic brotherhood” discourse however, they describe this allegedly new policy as yet another tactic to undermine the Kurdish struggle for equal rights

This study tackles the place and role of the Orthodox Church in Serbian society, state, and political life after October 5, 2000. Owing to its present “symphony” with the state, the church now offers a new ideological framework and value-system for state institutions such as the armed forces and public education. This new role of the church is particularly emphasized in the current legislation. One could probably refer to the “etatization” of the Serbian Church, with some negative consequences for non-traditional religious communities. The relations with the Macedonian and Montenegrin Orthodox churches have also been discussed in this context. In post-Milošević Serbia, religious rights and freedoms have been considerably extended, but there is still a great deal of arbitrariness, even completely partial interpretations of the church-state relations. In the concluding section, this article deals with the church's traditionalist perception of society as narod (the people), with some recommendations as for the possible cooperation between the church and civil society in Serbia.

There is one European state leader from the moderate Christian-democrat center right who has developed a discourse and policies showing his progressive move toward the radical right: Viktor Orbán. Can Christianity be considered from a Laclauian perspective, as a “nodal point” of Orbán's radical right discourse; that is, a key element around which his antagonistic narratives are structured? Based on an analysis of segments of Orbán's speeches between 2014 and 2019 that mention Christianity, the research reveals that this religion is a nodal point for three main reasons: (1) the density of Christian references used to shape a negative and antagonistic discourse, strategically adjusted to his audience; (2) the use of Christianity to ground the three ideological pillars of the radical right (populism, nativism, and authoritarianism); and (3) the mobilization of Christianity to organize a hegemonic struggle against the dominant political force that has defined the meaning of this religion in the European public sphere—the moderate center right.

Gender-based inequality is often regarded as a salient characteristic of Muslim societies, yet few works have systematically compared the status of women in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Fish (2011) finds a gender gap in structural indicators of inequality in Muslim-majority countries that cannot be explained by levels of economic development, raising questions about whether attitudes favoring inequality are more prominent among Muslims. We investigate the impact of structural-situational factors and religious identification on attitudes toward gender-based inequality using hierarchical-level models. We find that: (1) Muslim self-identification and the size of a country's Muslim population predict attitudes supportive of inequality; (2) an individual's gender has a stronger effect on attitudes than does religious identification; and (3) measures of structural inequality also shape attitudes. The effects of these variables remain strong when we consider other contextual elements, such as gross domestic product per capita, education, age, location in the Middle East, and fuels dependence.

This article presents a cross-country empirical analysis of the relationship between religion and political attitudes among the Catholic and Muslim publics, using the most recent data from the World Values Survey. We find that public support for democracy is stronger among the better educated in both the Catholic and Muslim countries. Contrary to the conventional belief that pious believers are less receptive to democracy, individual religiosity, measured by belief in God, is found to have a significant positive impact on desire for democracy in both types of society. Our findings further indicate that at the societal level, overt support for democracy is consistently positively correlated to the attachment of a set of more implicit tolerant civil values in Catholic-majority countries, while exactly the opposite is observed in Muslim-majority countries.

Together, Asian American and Latino evangelicals constitute about 13% of all evangelicals in the United States. This proportion is surely going to increase as new immigrants enter the United States from Asia and Latin America and the number of White evangelicals remains steady or even falls. But the extent and nature of the effects of evangelical identity on the political attitudes of growing numbers of Latinos and Asian Americans have not been studied systematically. This article aims to fill that gap by comparing the effects of evangelical identity on political attitudes across a range of groups to better address the conditional effects of religious identity on political orientations in an increasingly diverse context. The primary research question driving the study is does born-again identity play a consistent role across racial groups in determining political attitudes?

As of yet, Islamization by secular ruling parties has hardly been investigated in depth. To bridge this gap, the present article reviews the existing literature on Islamization, synthesizes the scattered existing theoretical insights on Islamization by secular actors and applies them to the case of Bangladesh. It argues that, especially when they act in conjunction, three main conditions can drive secular rulers to Islamize public policy: first, the rise of Islamist social movements; second, fierce political competition; and third, (semi-)authoritarian rule. Focusing on the current Awami League (AL) government, the article shows how these three factors have interacted to produce a top-down process of state-led Islamization in Bangladesh.