The Trans-Universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing is a religion that emerged in the context of a period of political uprising in Slovenia in 2012–13 and later consolidated into a church that now claims 12,000 members. We use the lens of invented religion and interviews conducted with observers and participants in 2017 to demonstrate ways in which the Zombie Church has been an unusually effective actor in contemporary Slovenian political discourse and, indeed, has broken ground by spotlighting challenges in the young republic's negotiation of the legal and cultural relationships between church, state, and civil society. Part 1 explores the context that led to the mobilization of Zombie as a multivalent symbol for political critique. Part 2 looks at the church's tenets, its success in compelling changes in Slovenia's registration process, and the challenge is its advocates raise to Slovenian church-state structures and practices.

In recent years, the welfare state literature has been witnessing a “religious turn,” (re)reminding us the pivotal role of religion in shaping the modern welfare state. Notwithstanding its theoretical importance, this turn has been largely confined to European, North American, and antipodean settings. By drawing upon the historical case of Israeli burial services, this study seeks to make a modest step in closing this theoretical and empirical gap. Specifically, its findings point to the historical role of the Judaism in establishing universal burial services, funded by the state and operated almost exclusively by religious burial societies. Moreover, this policy legacy, which already had its roots in the British Mandate rule, is still at work, even in an era of “permanent austerity.” These findings problematize mainstream historical observations, which view the Israeli welfare state as a secular project, by suggesting a more nuanced and progressive role for Judaism in its history.

In the majority opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court over same-sex marriage, a claim by Confucius was quoted, which led to an uproar among Confucian scholars in mainland China. In this article, I will first explain the background of the debate over same-sex marriage in the United States, and why Confucius's claim was quoted. I will then show how a contemporary Confucian philosopher Zhang Xianglong addressed the issue of same-sex marriage from a Confucian perspective. In my view, compared with other mainland Confucians' responses, Zhang's are one of the most scholarly and moderate responses that nevertheless follow Confucian values. But he eventually rejected same-sex marriage on the Confucian ground. I will argue that, based on some Confucian values and principles which are shared by Zhang, we can answer Zhang's concerns with same-sex marriage, thus offering an even more moderate Confucian stance that accepts same-sex marriage. But this stance is still different from the typical liberal one. We will also see that, in order to accept same-sex marriage, it is the liberals, not the Confucians, who will have to deal with an issue—the acceptance of polygamy—that poses a serious challenge to the principle of equality, which is fundamental to some liberals.

Middle East scholars have traditionally attributed the survival of monarchs in the Gulf to the use of financial appeasements fueled by oil revenues. With rampant political insecurity in the region and the revolutionary fervor present after the Arab Spring, leaders have gone beyond the traditional rentier state system to ensure political survival by playing on the sentiments of sectarianism and identity politics. This paper argues that religious sectarianism is not only a question of attitudes and sentiments toward a religious minority but also a politically motivated state mechanism used to maintain the status quo and ensure an extended legitimation of power. We argue that the state often capitalizes on people's fear of economic adversities to incite sectarian exclusions of religious minorities, this is especially evident in times of economic hardships. With survey data from the Arab Barometer, we examined such political psychology in Saudi Arabia in 2011, at the onset of the Arab Spring. We found that Sunni Muslim sentiments of sectarian exclusion toward the Shi‘a minority could be attributed to not just religiosity but also state crafted incitement by the Saudi government. In particular, our results show that state-based sectarian intolerance was in part fueled by the government's scapegoating of the Shi‘a communities during times of economic downturns.

Why do clergy talk with congregants about elections to a greater extent in Mozambique than Indonesia, or in the United States than Taiwan? Arguing that context shapes religious actors' micro-level incentives to discuss or avoid electoral politics, we seek to explain variation in religious politicking—religious leaders' and organizations' engagement in electoral campaigns. Our framework integrates individual-level and country-level approaches, as well as theories of modernization, secularism, and religious competition. Drawing on survey data from 24 elections in 18 democracies in the Comparative National Elections Project, we find that human development depresses religious politicking, while secularism and religious pluralism boost it. However, “civilizational” differences in levels of religious politicking are muted and inconsistent. Finally, at the individual level, across the globe, citizens with higher levels of education are consistently more likely to receive political messages. Our results suggest the insights obtained from an approach emphasizing individuals embedded in contexts.

The sweep of the coronavirus pandemic across the world and the United States offers an almost unparalleled opportunity to study how social systems cope with the threat and opportunities for collective action. In this paper, we draw on survey data collected as the United States flailed in response and before a general consensus among executive officeholders developed in the following weeks. In particular, we assess how holding prosperity gospel views strongly shaped perceptions of the virus and reactions to state responses to the virus. Research on the prosperity gospel is slowly expanding and this paper helps to highlight some missing dimensions. At a time when concerted action for the social good could be uniting the country, prosperity gospel beliefs systematically undermine that possibility by augmenting threat, raising outgroup barriers, and decreasing social trust.

Lengthy debates over the process of secularization in the West have concluded. In many ways, secularization theorists appear to have “won” the debate: traditional measures of religious vitality reveal a decline in religion. Yet, recent events, especially those involving politics and national identity, have encouraged scholars and members of the public to reconsider the ways in which something like religion might endure and influence public life in secularized Western nations. This paper uses the “exceptional-typical” case of Iceland—a modern, Western, secularized country of comparatively small population size—to observe and conceptualize a variety of processes which are here collectively named “post-secularization.” Its findings suggest that processes which may appear as unrelated or opposing forces—the emergence of new religious movements, the transformation of traditional religious symbols into profane branding, far right nationalist movements—may be part of a single, post-secularization process. Secularization, having fissured the sacred, leaves religion a pliable cultural tool.

While religion and democracy have been intertwined since World War II, scholars have made little of the connections between religion and populism, largely conceptualizing religion as a tool of populism. In this paper, however, I argue that Pope Francis' deployment of Catholicism resists such instrumentalization by populist politics, and offers resources for political ills underlying populism. I show that Francis' focus on the people allows him to capitalize on populist currents in global politics, while also reforming those currents into something more constructive than populism. I further explore how his political theology and institutional autonomy render his thought and example relatively impervious to appropriation by political actors.

Using two national general population and one clergy survey, we examined racial differences in the association between religious theology and health care policy attitudes. We find that controlling for religious faith, political partisanship, and social-demographic characteristics, religious theology more strongly associates with White health care policy attitudes than it is for Blacks and Hispanics. Whereas theologically liberal Whites are more likely than their conservative counterparts to support universal healthcare and/or Obamacare, we observed no such relationship among Blacks and Hispanics. This is true of both the general population and clergy.

When contentious blasphemy laws are pressed into service in fledgling democracies with illiberal tendencies such as Indonesia, critical questions arise about judicial integrity and the political nature of blasphemy trials. Judicial legitimacy in Indonesia is defined according to international standards and conventions. The focus is on judicial propriety rather than the popularity or majoritarian appeal of court decisions. In May 2017 a watershed moment occurred in Indonesia as the former governor of Jakarta Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (popularly known as Ahok) was found guilty of desecrating religion and sentenced to 2 years in prison. Judgments rendered in politicized blasphemy trials such as these fail to meet standards of impartiality, and when discursive transgressions of a blasphemous nature occur there are deep ambiguities of meaning and intent. This paper contends that the revival of blasphemy as a punishable crime relates to political power calculations and electoral opportunities, and offers an analysis of blasphemy in Indonesia through the quasi-historical lens of a discursive crime premised on the fallacy that religious offence threatens public order. Blasphemy trials are further complicated by the fact that religious authorities and Islamic mass organizations in Indonesia have significant influence over judicial processes.

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.

How does social identity shape Protestant attitudes about guns in the United States? Numerous studies show that religion shapes attitudes about guns, but the role of Protestantism in forming those attitudes is undertheorized and undertested. We draw from the extensive literature on religion-as-identity and the burgeoning literature of gun-ownership-as-identity to test the theory about the role of Protestant religion in cultivating a gun identity. We argue that for many Protestants, gun ownership has taken on the characteristics of a distinctive social identity, but that there are clear differences between different types of Protestants—notably, evangelicals and mainliners—that render the expansive category of “Protestant” largely irrelevant as an explanatory variable. While that finding might seem straightforward to scholars of religion and politics, the broad categorical approach—that is, treating “Protestant” as explanatory—has proven surprisingly durable in studies of gun ownership and attitudes about gun control. The analysis uses a recent Pew survey with batteries of questions about gun identity, gun policy, and religion. While this research note does not fully test why this relationship between Protestantism and gun identity exists, we do show that the relationship not only exists but also affects gun policy attitudes.