The prominence of evangelical Christians in the electoral base of the Republican Party is a noted feature of recent American elections. This prominence is linked to a key stereotype that saturates public discourse: “born-again/evangelical Republicanism.” The stereotype fuses religious and partisan social group membership to create a composite social label. Using a social categorization approach, which challenges the assumptions and methods of existing research, the present analysis asks whether voters embrace this stereotype in their definitions of self. The article employs confirmatory factor analysis of religious and partisan identity constructs from a national internet survey, the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and finds evidence of the presence of this religious-partisan stereotype in individual self-views, and of the backlash that it has produced, particularly among citizens that are exposed to public discourse on American elections.

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.

Of the 45 Muslim majority countries in the world, 42 have signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. While this does indeed signal a motive to improve women's rights, there is wide disparity in terms of which countries expand rights and which do not. Social science literature suggests that in addition to economic factors like wealth and oil resources, or political factors like the quality of democracy in the country, Islamic culture may be at odds with the Western conception of women's rights. We posit that Muslim countries are unique in this regard due to religious pressures that often conflict with conventional measures of human rights. Using data from the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset and the Religion and State Project, we find that Muslim countries that restrict the influence of fundamentalist religion in the government and population improve women's economic and social rights.

Using data from the American National Election Studies, Poole-Rosenthal DW-Nominate scores, and data on the religious affiliations of members of the United States House of Representatives, I show that religion has important independent effects on the evaluation of candidates' ideologies. The results suggest that candidates affiliated with evangelical Christianity will tend to be seen as more conservative than ideologically similar candidates from mainline Protestant denominations. Jewish candidates, in contrast, will tend to be seen as more liberal than ideologically similar mainline Protestants. Additionally, the use of religion-based stereotypes varies with frequency of church attendance. These findings attest to the external validity of recent experiment-based research on religion-based political stereotypes. The approach employed here also allows for the estimation of the magnitude of the effects of such stereotypes. The results shed light on both the importance of religion in election campaigns and the factors that influence perceptions of candidates' ideologies more generally.

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.

Critical Islam is an intellectual orientation that prizes timeliness and broad-mindedness and a political sensibility that tends to honor majority rule, minority rights, and the good of pluralism. This essay considers how an important European Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, promotes critical Islam in his call for a moratorium on stoning, his argument for the reformation of fatwa committees, and his analysis of the Arab Awakening. The essay argues that the art of controversy and the building of civil society—more so than political revolution—can cultivate a critical sensibility among Muslim scholars and publics.

Analyzing a unique module of the General Social Survey, we test hypotheses that three religion dimensions — affiliation with specific religious traditions (belonging), service attendance (behaving), and religious orthodoxy (believing) are associated with compassionate feelings, and that these feelings carry over into support for government efforts to help the poor, blacks, and the sick. The religiously orthodox report more compassionate feelings toward others than do modernists and, partly because of this, are more supportive of government intervention to help the poor. Yet attending religious services frequently does not increase compassionate feelings and makes people less supportive of government efforts to help the poor. There are no differences among religious traditions in compassionate feelings, and the only difference on economic policy preferences is for Black Protestants to support government assistance to blacks. Compassionate feelings have comparable effects to political ideology and party identification on support for government assistance to the disadvantaged and misfortunate. We conclude that people of faith, variously defined, do not constitute a monolithic “Religious Right” and are potentially open to policy appeals from both political parties.

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.

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.

Allusions to holy scriptures and quotes from sacred texts appear in hundreds of political science articles. Yet while we treat other ancient texts with reverence and diligence, we have not extended a similar care to the holy scriptures of the world's religions. Political scientists often refer to biblical events, statements, and turns of phrase but rarely cite them, chapter and verse. They are careless about referencing the precise translation of the holy texts used, tend to cite religious passages out of context, and disregard the role of religious tradition, interpretation, and practice in shaping and reshaping the meaning of holy texts. I offer examples for these trends, provide evidence for their harmful implications and offer guidelines for the appropriate treatment of sacred texts as formal scholarly sources.

The ideal of public reason, made prominent by John Rawls, has become a mainstay of discussions about the proper role of religious arguments in a politically liberal society. In particular, Rawls's theory of public reason requires citizens and public officials to refrain from appealing to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines in public deliberation on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. In this essay, we review the ways in which the public life of Martin Luther King, Jr. — with its frequent appeals to a comprehensive doctrine to justify disobedience to the law — represents a challenge to the ideal of public reason, and we consider several Rawlsian rejoinders. What is missing from the existing body of scholarship on public reason is a thorough analysis of King's philosophical and theological arguments, including the examples of legal injustice he offered in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” As we note, King's specific examples of unjust laws rely on a theological framework that bedevils the attempt to reconcile his Letter with the constructivist underpinnings of Rawls's theory of public reason. Indeed, Rawls is in something of a bind: either King's argument is not acceptable under the terms of public reason or public reason simply cannot limit contemporary public discourse in the way Rawls has in mind. We consider several possible Rawlsian arguments for the accommodation of King's theological rhetoric, but conclude that the Rawlsian idea of public reason remains deeply problematic.

The literature on state accommodation of Muslim religious practices has focused on the regional context of Western Europe and North America. In this project, I identify and compare state policies toward Islamic religious practices using a sample of 22 former communist Muslim republics of Eurasia. For this purpose, I construct an original dataset collected from a variety of sources. Employing the number of mosques functioning in each post-communist Muslim republic as the measure of state accommodation of religious practices I find that among all factors the level of democracy is the single most important variable in explaining variation in accommodation of Islamic religious practices. To further demonstrate significance of these results I trace the process of democratic influence on state accommodation of religious policies examining in-depth the case of Tatars both in the pre-communist Imperial and revolutionary Russia and the contemporary republic of Tatarstan.

American Buddhism is a phenomenon that allows for the testing of a number of generally-held assumptions about how religion operates within the American context. Due to the fairly de-politicized character of the religion in the United States, Buddhism allows for the examination of religion-qua-religion insofar as its role in the political mobilization of believers. This study finds that Buddhist political engagement is driven in general by private religious practice rather than by communal or small-group religious participation, as social capital-oriented theories of religio-political engagement suggest. Furthermore, this appears likely to be due to the nature of Buddhist adherents in the United States (who are predominantly Caucasian converts to the faith and who enjoy a generally high socio-economic status.) Closer examination of the situation of Buddhists in the United States suggests that the resource-model of civic skill acquisition does hold among the most economically disadvantaged, but that other explanations help us better understand political engagement among more advantaged Buddhists.