Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in social scientific literature on the topic of “religious violence,” much of it arguing that there is a uniquely intense and disturbing connection between religion and political conflict and bloodshed. In this article, I challenge mainstream accounts of “religious violence” with an illustrative example from the 16th century of the theoretical and empirical problems with all such essentialist claims. The terms employed in the construction of “religious violence” might today just as easily be applied to the violence of the putatively “secular” nation-state. Furthermore, framing the debate in these sharp binary terms, as William Cavanaugh compellingly demonstrates, is itself part of a political project that had a very particular historical beginning and that conceals as much as it reveals about the nature of violence, both in the past and in the present.

The goal of this article is to examine the association between church attendance and the party identification of black Americans. Using ordinary least squares and logistic regression to analyze data taken from the 1996 National Black Election Study, I find that church attendance has dual effects for determining the party identification of blacks. On one hand, church attendance encourages blacks to be Republican. On the other hand, attending voting churches does not foster Republicanism. Attendance at voting churches influences blacks to be Democrats. Also, blacks who attend voting churches with increasing frequency are likely to identify themselves with the Democratic Party.

Are centralized leaders of religious organizations responsive to their followers' political preferences over time even when formal accountability mechanisms, such as elections, are weak or absent? I argue that such leaders have incentives to be responsive because they rely on dedicated members for legitimacy and support. I test this theory by examining the Catholic Church and its centralized leader, the Pope. First, I analyze over 10,000 papal statements to confirm that the papacy is responsive to Catholics' overall political concerns. Second, I conduct survey experiments in Brazil and Mexico to investigate how Catholics react to responsiveness. Catholics increase their organizational trust and participation when they receive papal messages that reflect their concerns, conditional on their existing commitment to the Church and their agreement with the Church on political issues. The evidence suggests that in centralized religious organizations, the leader reaffirms members' political interests because followers support religious organizations that are politically responsive.

As more debates in American politics become constitutional questions, effective citizens must engage in constitutional interpretation. While most Americans venerate the Constitution as a part of a national, civil religion, levels of constitutional knowledge are also very low. In this paper, we analyze how ordinary Americans approach the task of constitutional interpretation. An analysis of two cross-sectional surveys indicates constitutional hermeneutics are a product of political factors, religious affiliation, and biblical interpretive preferences. We also present the results of a survey experiment where the manipulation of a clergy's interpretation of a biblical passage affects how respondents interpret both scripture and the Constitution, providing a potential causal mechanism for learning how to engage in hermeneutics.

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.

Abraham Kuyper, Dutch Prime Minister (1901–1905) and modern Calvinist, was a controversial figure, not least in his foreign affairs. Yet while Kuyper's legacy has been felt in the world of religious, especially Christian, political, and social theory, very little has been made of Kuyper's actual record as a foreign policy maker and a Prime Minister. So, what was Kuyper's “Christian” perspective and policy on foreign affairs? Using newly available English translations, this article outlines Kuyper's “overseas manifesto” made most plain in Our Program, and compares it against Kuyper's commentary and policy in three major foreign crises: the Boer Cause, in South Africa; the “pacification” of Aceh, in modern-day Indonesia; and finally, the calamity of the Great War in Europe. From these I will paint an introductory, if general, picture of a serious, religious foreign policy maker, and a commentator on world affairs; a complex picture of religiously inflected policy in the early 20th century, with lessons and warnings for scholars of religion and foreign policy today.

A growing non-legal scholarship explores the domestic implementation of international court judgments in national law and policy. Yet little attention has been paid to the indirect effects of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law: namely, the ways in which its judgments may raise public consciousness, change how social actors articulate their claims, and/or prompt mobilization among civil society actors. This paper conceptualizes the significance of the indirect effects of ECtHR judgments in the domain of religion and education. Drawing on a constitutive approach to the law it explains the potential impact of such indirect effects. Second, it presents analytical concepts such as legal mobilization, which underpin the country-based case studies included in this symposium. Third, it provides an overview of the ECtHR religion and education-related case law which sets the stage for examining the nature and effects of the shadow of that case law in different country contexts.

“Sectarianization”—the political instrumentalization of sectarian identities—is a profitable strategy for many state and non-state actors. This paper presents a theory of sectarianization, as well as an accompanying typology. The paper does not seek to explain the causes of sectarian conflict; rather, the paper examines how third parties respond to exogenous instances of such conflict. The paper argues that third parties face incentives to cultivate strategic ambiguity about their own stances, especially amid significant religious and political competition. In such competitive environments, third parties appear to take stances based on the interaction among three factors: first, a short-term cost-benefit analysis of whether to take sides and if so, how far to align with either of the main two sectarian actors; second, pre-existing relationships between the third party and the two main sectarian actors; and third, a desire to maintain long-term credibility with the broadest audience possible.

Two aspects of democratic self-governance are analyzed: Collective self-governance, or the authority of citizens over one another, and individual self-governance, referring to the ability of each citizen to govern her/his own beliefs and actions. Individual self-governance is thought to require some level of autonomy on the part of individual citizens, and authenticity of personal preferences and desires. Beliefs about autonomy and authenticity in Roman Catholic and Islamic theology are considered, and these perspectives are applied to the problem of restricting certain types of discourse, based on the content of that discourse. While censorship if usually considered to be incompatible with democratic governance, Catholic and Islamic perspectives on individual self-governance suggest the possibility that some forms of censorship may enhance, rather than detract from citizen autonomy and authenticity, and enhance the possibility of positive collective self-governance.

The 19th century was a time of rapid population growth in the United States, and much of it was due to immigration from Europe. In the 1840s and 1850s, the largest proportion of immigrants came from Ireland and Germany, and most were Catholic. The Germans spread across small communities as far west as Wisconsin and Texas, but the Irish concentrated in the larger cities on the eastern seaboard, especially Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Local third- and fourth-generation Protestant immigrants from England resented the new arrivals and organized “Nativist” associations. Among these was the anti-Catholic American Party, better known as the Know Nothing Party, which enjoyed spectacular success in Massachusetts and other states during 1854–1855. But, by 1862, the party was dead. This article examines how moral panic theory, the theory of persistent cultural patterns and cycles, and revitalization theory may offer insights into the Know Nothing Party. Each of these theories explains both the emergence of the party and its rapid demise, and suggest that each can make a contribution to understanding anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century America, and the Know Nothing Party in particular.

Americans are reluctant to support foreign military intervention. However, if victims of violence are identified as Christians, support for intervention is higher. We term this a “Brother's Keeper” effect as Americans, especially more religious Americans, will support intervention that aids co-religionists. To test our argument, we use a survey experiment that randomly assigns respondents to varying accounts of violence in the Central African Republic. Respondents who read Christians are the victims of violence are more supportive of military intervention compared to respondents who read vignettes that do not identify the religious identities of victims. Moreover, these Brother's Keeper effects are stronger among more religious respondents. We also find even stronger effects when extrapolating results as a population effect with survey weights. Our findings reveal that labeling otherwise unknown foreign actors as Christian have significant effects on support for foreign military intervention.

This article discusses Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na‘im's Islam and the Secular State from the perspective of Marsilius of Padua's political theory. Both authors share similar concepts of the relationship between religion, state policy, and the state, and allow for the integration of religious doctrines into state law. Nonetheless, the Marsilian conception provides stronger protection of unbelievers' and religious dissenters' civic rights. In the broader discourse on political theory of rights, Marsilius argues in favors of individual rights and a protection of minority rights, while an-Na‘im's theory of Shari‘a reform suggests a preference for a people's self-determination.

Does the ethnic dimension of violence—religious versus tribal—shape whether individuals perceive national versus local issues as central? Based on survey data collected in Jos, Nigeria—a site of recurring ethnic violence since 2001—this paper argues that attribution to local versus national causes varies depending on whether individuals perceive the violence as religious or tribal. We also show that this has implications for peacebuilding, as views of the ethnic dimensions of violence also distinctly shape attitudes regarding national- versus local-level solutions. Broadly, this paper demonstrates the importance of a more nuanced approach to the study of ethnic conflict—specifically, the need to interrogate how perceptions of identity, conflict, and the locus of conflict interrelate.

In this article I explore the political aspects of contemporary Paganism. Based on my own fieldwork, I analyze the changes in views and attitudes in relation to nationalism among Polish followers of Rodzimowierstwo, which is a modern religious movement referring to the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs. I put forward the thesis that the attitude toward nationalism is an important element in shaping the dynamics of divisions within believers and at the same time radical nationalist views and attitudes present among them are marginalized. The gradual weakening of nationalist tendencies does not mean, however, the dissemination of liberal and universalist attitudes and views. Nationalism is being replaced by a specific type of conservatism, which consists in creating a clear opposition between “foreign” and “native” cultural patterns, and the postulate of preserving and defending the latter.

Despite frequent claims that religion serves as a motivator of political behavior in Muslim-majority contexts, empirical evidence of political messaging in sacred spaces is scant. Building on earlier studies on political messaging in both churches and mosques, we examine the presence and nature of political messages across Muslim and Christian religious contexts in a typical Indonesian city, Yogyakarta. Through an analysis of 71 sermons that took place in mosques and churches prior to elections in 2017 and 2019, we analyze the frequency, style, tone, and consistency of political content. We find that political messages within individual houses of worship were often inconsistent from week to week, reducing their potential as a mobilizing force for political action. We also find that houses of worship frequently sought to present themselves as politically neutral spaces in an electoral context in which religious themes are politicized.

Establishment of churches is a central feature of the church-state regime in most European countries, and understanding the nature of such privileges is of key importance for both theoretical and political reasons. Yet, there is little empirical research on how establishment influences the organizational behavior of congregations. This article looks at this question by focusing on one relationship in one geographical context: we investigate whether establishment suppresses the political activities of congregations in Switzerland or not. We identify mechanisms that might lead establishment to suppress the political activities of congregations, and other mechanisms that might enhance such activities. We use representative National Congregation Study Data from Switzerland. Our results are unequivocal: establishment does not suppress the political activities of congregations. The level of establishment of the canton has no significant impact either on established congregations or on the religious field as a whole. Rather than establishment, important determinants of the political activities of congregations are religious tradition and income.