This study asks how religious change at the social level (as expressed in increased religiosity) influences the religious behavior of public organizations. The study's empirical foundation is three Israeli case studies that focus on the impact of growing religiosity in Israeli Jewish society on three large public institutions: the military, healthcare, and schools. Based on comparative analysis of the three case studies, it is shown that variation in the extent of religionization in public organizations is influenced primarily by the religious composition of workers and consumers of a specific public organization. The influence of political pressure from above, however, is marginal. In addition, this study demonstrates how organizational religionization is differentially mediated by institutional mechanisms/structures: institutional layering or conversion.

The psychological security index is an important predictor of democratic norm support. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the separate but independent contributions of dogmatism, self-esteem, and trust, the three components typically combined to create that index. Thus, we do not know the unique influence of these components on democratic norm commitment. We also do not know the exact nature of the influence of the multiple dimensions of religion (belief, belonging, behavior) on the separate psychological security components. Using structural equation modeling and two national surveys, we examine the religion-psychological security-democratic norm support relationship. Our findings do not fully support a negative association between religion and democratic values. In fact, no matter the influence of religious belief, belonging, or behavior on psychological security, the mediating link of psychological security to democratic norm support is what is most important. Indeed, any differences that manifest as a consequence of the various dimensions of religion disappear in the religion-psychological security-democratic norm support linkage. As such, anti-democratic values are a product of one's psychological attributes and are almost entirely unrelated to one's religion. Further, our findings challenge the theoretical underpinnings of the psychological security index, as we find little evidence that the separate components used to construct the composite measure, particularly trust, are an appropriate proxy for authoritarianism.

Over one million people work for a faith-based welfare provider in Germany. Caritas and Diakonie, the largest faith-based providers in Germany enjoy prerogatives that do not exist in other countries. This particular group of faith-based organizations is exempt from federal labor law and discrimination clauses, which results in arbitrary, and in other cases, institutional, forms of discrimination against particular social groups in society. Research has focused on the institutional regulation of faith-based practice in Germany. Much less attention has been devoted to the faith component within faith-based welfare provision. This study traces the evolution of church doctrine and its impact on the care and employment practices of faith-based welfare providers in Germany from the 1950s to the present. It argues that the conservative ideology of these welfare providers amplifies the negative effects of gendered occupational regimes.

This article explores the relationship between headcovering and women's political participation through an original online survey of 1,917 Muslim-American women. As a visible marker of religious group identity, wearing the headscarf can orient the integration of Muslim women into the American political system via its impact on the openness of their associational life. Our survey respondents who cover are more likely to form insular, strong ties with predominantly Muslim friend networks, which decreased their likelihood of voting and affiliating with a political party. Interestingly, frequency of mosque attendance across both covered and uncovered respondents is associated with a higher probability of political participation, an effect noted in other religious institutions in the United States. Yet, mosque attendance can simultaneously decrease the political engagement of congregants if they are steered into exclusively religious friend groups. This discovery reveals a tension within American Muslim religious life and elaborates on the role of religious institutions vs. social networks in politically mobilizing Muslim-Americans.

Although violence over Northern Ireland's constitutional position has largely subsided, the problem of sectarian animosity between sections of the Protestant Unionist British and Catholic Irish Nationalist population remains. One such area of communal contestation is attitudes to Protestant parades, organized mainly by the Orange Order. For many Protestants, Orange Order marches are legitimate cultural, religious, and political expressions of Protestant culture, loyalty to the British Crown and a pro-United Kingdom position. For many Catholics, the Orange Order is seen as a sectarian and anti-Catholic organization, which prohibits its members marrying Catholics or attending Catholic Church services. The Parades Commission was established two decades ago to adjudicate on Orange Order parading routes. Its decisions have sometimes involved re-routing marches away from Catholic areas and the inability to satisfy both sides has been followed by riots on several occasions at the annual height of the Protestant “marching season.” This article examines levels of support or antipathy toward Orange Order marching rights among Protestants and Catholics. Drawing upon evidence from the most extensive recent study of public opinion in Northern Ireland, the 2015 Economic and Social Research Council general election study, the piece tests the importance of demographic, religious, political, and geographical variables in conditioning attitudes towards Orange parades.

The cultural prerequisites of democracy have been receiving considerable attention over the past decades. Confucian values are regarded as incompatible with liberal democracy and are considered to impede democratization. This article explores the effect of Confucian values on the commitment of ordinary Chinese people to democracy. Support for democracy is divided into attachment to democracy and adherence to liberal democratic values. Attachment to democracy indicates explicit support for democracy, while adherence to liberal democratic values reflects implicit support for democracy. This study examines the impacts of Confucian values on each of these areas. The results show that there was no evidence that Confucian values inhibit the Chinese public's support for democracy in a democratic transition, but they are negatively connected to liberal democratic values, which are fundamental to the resilience and consolidation of a fledgling democracy. However, liberal democratic values are prone to increase with the generational shift.

The interactions between religious and secular elites differ across societies, and those interactions may evolve differently even in the face of similarly controversial issues. What explains variation in relations between religious and secular elites in comparative settings? We highlight the links between religious change, political incentives, and the level of conflict or cooperation between religious and secular actors in public life. We illustrate distinct patterns of religious-secular relations with a paired comparison of two democracies with an intertwined history: the United States and the Philippines. In the United States, religious-secular relations have becoming increasingly conflictual as political incentives have changed in response to religious change. In the Philippines, in contrast, religious and secular actors maintain cooperative ties in part because relative religious stability has diminished political incentives to stoke religious-secular tensions.

Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the spatial interaction between religion and politics. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected. Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mount al-Haram al-Sharif, this article demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places can illuminate unique intra-communal processes that aim to make a contested sacred site increasingly indivisible for parties to the conflict.

Religious identity serves as a central cleavage in American politics. However, little attention has been granted to how gendered views of authority conveyed in religious doctrine shape political identities and attitudes. Using a nation-wide sample of adult Americans, we demonstrate that gendered notions of divine and human authority exert considerable influence on political thinking. In particular, belief in a masculine God and preferences for traditional gender roles strongly relate to political conservatism. Adherence to gendered notions of authority influences political identity and policy preferences, even when controlling for more conventional indicators of religiosity. Accounting for gendered beliefs about authority also partially explains well-documented gender gaps in American politics, providing insight into women's apparently contradictory tendencies toward both political liberalism and religiosity. The relationships uncovered here, coupled with the continued salience of both gender and religion in contemporary political campaigns, underscore the importance of attending to the gendered dimensions of authority.

Conservative Christian groups in Britain have been involved in a number of high profile and controversial policy issues. Scholarly research into the political activities of such groups, however, remains limited. This article addresses this lacuna by exploring the collective action frames deployed by conservative Christian groups in their attempts to influence national level policies and debates. Drawing on elite interviews with group representatives, it argues that these frames have been constructed largely in response to the pressures of secularization, but have, in many respects, become secularized themselves.

Despite the continued debate over the relationship between church and state in American politics, our understanding of the sources of attitudes on controversies over religious establishment and religious free exercise is limited. I argue that authoritarianism is an unrecognized but important predictor of mass-level attitudes on church and state. I argue that individuals with higher levels of authoritarianism are more likely to support religious establishment as a means of maintaining social conformity and reinforcing the existing social order. Likewise, those with higher levels of authoritarianism should exhibit reduced support for religious free exercise when minority groups are in question as a means of imposing greater costs on social out-groups. Using data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, I find strong support for my theory. Even after controlling for a variety of alternative explanations, authoritarianism remains an important factor in attitudes toward both religious establishment and religious free exercise.

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.

This article illuminates the relationship between level of religious restriction and the onset of religious civil war in the context of autocracy. That is, we investigate how autocrats' religious restriction accounts for religious civil war. We hypothesize that in autocracies, moderate religious restriction is likely to engender religious civil war (Hypothesis 1), policy change from religious laissez-faire to moderate restriction raises the probability of religious civil war (Hypothesis 2), and the transition from tight restriction to moderate restriction is likely to trigger religious civil war (Hypothesis 3). To test our hypotheses, we conduct statistical analyses as well as case studies. The results confirm Hypotheses 1 and 2, but not Hypothesis 3. This suggests that (1) within autocracies, different levels of religious restriction exert different effects on religious civil war and (2) moderate religious restriction is dangerous enough to spark religious civil war and religious laissez-faire helps to generate religious peace.

The Catholic Church often plays a policy and mobilization role in American politics. We assess the degree to which the Catholic Church hierarchy — including national and state conferences of bishops — can provide uniform information to parishioners about political participation. Using a textual analysis of information distributed to parishioners in Florida in the 2012 election, we evaluate how much political information is conveyed to parishioners, the sources of this information, and the factors associated with higher or lower levels of information. While we find that most parishes provided information related to the election, there is wide diversity in the types and sources of information. And, while the Catholic hierarchy attempted to provide messaging about the importance of political participation, not all parishes complied with these efforts. Our findings are consistent with the ideas that the local community and hierarchical structure combine to shape the behavior of the parishes.

Decades of polling data and recent research have demonstrated the magnitude of anti-atheist prejudice in the United States and its relationship to perceptions of atheists as immoral and untrustworthy. Across three studies, I examine the malleability of bias against atheists in the context of election politics. Informational manipulations of an atheist candidate's stated values (Study 1) and popularity (Study 2) improve participants’ perceptions of the morality and trustworthiness of and likelihood of voting for that atheist candidate, but religiously affiliated participants still prefer a similarly situated Christian candidate. Study 3 shows that participants are more likely to vote for an atheist when the opposing candidate was described as a theocrat. Implications of this research for ameliorating the under-representation of non-religious individuals in government are discussed.

What role does religion play in preventing civil war from recurring? Politicians have proposed that when warring groups share the same religion, achieving a durable peace will be easier. We test this hypothesis empirically using a large-n sample of all ethnic civil wars that began and ended between 1950 and 2006, and a measure of co-religiosity between the ethnic group in power and the main opposition group. The analysis shows that there is no positive relationship between co-religiosity and the duration of post-civil war peace, showing that sharing the same religion may not help to bring about peace following an ethnic civil war. To the contrary, the closer religious ties, the less likely it is that peace will last after the end of the conflict, and the higher the risk that conflict will recur.

Following armed conflict, why do some members of ethno-religious groups vote for political parties that use religious appeals while others do not? I argue that internal displacement shapes the relationship between conflict and post-war political outcomes. Specifically, individuals who become internally displaced during armed conflict will use their religious faith to cope with the trauma of displacement, thereby strengthening their religiosity. This heightened religiosity then leads them to prefer religiously oriented parties after conflict. Analyzing survey data from Bosnian Muslims, I show that internally displaced respondents were more likely to vote for the religious nationalist Party of Democratic Action nearly a decade after conflict. Employing matching analysis, I then verify that these internally displaced persons became more religious than other respondents compared to before the war. My findings therefore provide evidence that trauma and religiosity combine to shape post-war voting behavior for members of ethno-religious groups.

We argue that concerted efforts by Tea Party leaders, Republican politicians, and leading Christian Right figures to establish and promote a connection between Christian faith and the free-market system has helped shift the economic attitudes of white evangelical Protestants in a more conservative direction. Our analysis of Public Religion Research Institute survey data finds that white evangelical Protestants express greater skepticism about an active role of government in society and believe economic growth is more likely to be spurred by a reduction in taxes rather than in public investments. Moreover, we find that identifying with the Tea Party has a conservatizing influence on their economic issue positions. While we find that partisanship, class, and in some cases, age, serve to modify the views of some evangelicals, by and large, evangelicals have come to embrace the conservative fiscal message promoted by both the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.