Efforts by anti-abortion advocates to introduce “personhood” initiatives, which state that human life begins at fertilization, have prompted concern among infertility specialists that these initiatives would hinder access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). Yet, our understanding of public opinion about IVF is limited. It remains unclear whether attitudes about this technology are consistent with opinions about other issues related to human embryos, particularly abortion and embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. Using data from a nationally representative survey, I fill this gap by exploring the role that religion plays in shaping attitudes about a range of embryonic politics issues. I find that religiosity, income, and ideology strongly influence whether individuals view these issues in moral terms. Respondents who are most devout and Evangelical Protestants are most likely to consistently oppose all three embryonic politics issues. Yet, the relationship between religion and attitudes about the morality of each procedure is also influenced by the procedure's outcome, with religion most influential with respect to abortion attitudes and least influential in the case of IVF. Additionally, women are less likely than men to describe IVF as morally wrong, while, in comparison to non-Hispanic whites, Latino respondents are more likely to do so.

Replication Data. Replication data is publicly available on the website of the Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life Project.

This study examines the religious-secular party cleavage in German morality politics from a new perspective by tracing politicization patterns at the individual level. It builds on the idea of issue competition and explores whether conflicts between Christian Democrats and secular parties align with the traditional denominational divide between Catholics and non-Catholics or with religiosity. By means of logistic regressions of Member of Parliaments’ politicization behavior in the German Bundestag (1998–2002) with regard to three morality policies, the study provides evidence that German politics is still structured by a conflict between Catholics and non-Catholics, whereas the influence of religiosity is secondary. If party competition is at work, non-Catholics draw attention to morality policies, while Catholics refrain from doing so. This finding contradicts research pointing to a decreasing significance of Catholicism for Christian Democracy. Moreover, the study proposes an innovative way to re-examine party cleavages at the individual level and in between elections.

Studies of religious regulation tend to examine how states manage the domestic religious market. This article extends this research program by analyzing a state that regulates the religious markets of foreign countries. The Moroccan case demonstrates the circumstances under which a religious bureaucracy designed to manage domestic religion can be turned outward, and employed to achieve foreign policy goals. Unlike other cases of foreign religious regulation, however, Morocco's efforts have been welcomed at the same time that the policy advanced Morocco's interests. What explains the success of Morocco's religious foreign policy? Building on interviews with religious elites from a recipient country, this article argues that Moroccan religious foreign policy has been successful because it was perceived as having historical and cultural legitimacy, it built on pre-existing institutions, and it was paired with renewed economic collaboration, three factors that have broader theoretical relevance to the study of religious foreign policies.

The role of religion in politics is problematic for liberal legitimacy. Religion is often restrained by a public reason requirement, but this creates cognitive burdens that asymmetrically impact religious citizens creating unequal barriers to accessing the political system, which is itself problematic for liberal legitimacy. Habermas’ institutional translation proviso balances the competing concerns of liberal legitimacy, which aims to offset the asymmetry disadvantaging religious citizens. This paper analyzes the problem and Habermas’ solution. It concludes that Habermas does not alleviate the asymmetry created by the public reason requirement to the greatest extent possible and so does not equalize the barriers to accessing the political system as much as he might. The reciprocal translation proviso provides an alternative that balances the competing components of liberal legitimacy more fully and alleviates the asymmetry and inequality of barriers to political access to the greatest extent possible while preserving the public reason requirement.

This article contributes to the debate over the appropriate place of religion in public reason by showing the limits of this framework for understanding and evaluating the real-world religious political activism of social movements. Using the 1980s Sanctuary Movement as a central case study, I show how public reason fails to appreciate the complex religious dynamics of this movement, the reasons actors employ religious reasoning, and, as a result, the very meaning of these acts. In response, I argue that a Deweyan perspective on the tasks and challenges of the democratic public offers a richer, more contextualized approach to evaluating the status of religion in the public sphere as well as other emerging publics whose modes of engagement defy prevailing notions of reasonableness and civility.

Why do religious organizations facilitate secular political activism in some settings but not others? I contend that where religious institutions are characterized by decentralized local governance, they are more likely to facilitate political activism. Drawing on nine months of field research and 60 interviews, I conduct a qualitative comparison between the Mexican states of Chiapas and Yucatán. I argue Chiapas exhibits highly decentralized governance by the Catholic Church whereas Yucatán exhibits centralized clerical management. This difference accounts for why Chiapas experiences high levels of indigenous political activism while Yucatán experiences very little political activism.

Evangelicals garner much attention in polling and public opinion research, yet measuring white evangelicals remains elusive, even opaque. This paper provides practical guidance to researchers who want to measure or analyze evangelicals. In the social sciences, many have adopted a detailed religious affiliation approach that categorizes evangelicals based on the religious tradition of the denominations to which they belong. Others have used a simpler self-identification scheme, which asks respondents if they consider themselves “born-again or evangelical”. While the affiliation and self-identification schemes are predominant, a practical examination of these approaches has been absent. Using several waves of the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we compare them. We find almost no statistical differences between the two measurements in prominent demographic, political, or religious factors. Thus, we suggest that for most a simple question about broad religious affiliation followed by a born-again or evangelical self-identification question will suffice.

There is a lively debate on the relative impacts of Islam, oil wealth, and Middle Eastern institutional legacies regarding democratization and the spread of liberal values. We examine this issue using religious repression. We argue that oil-wealthy rulers use religious monopoly to control dissent. Our results show that oil wealth increases religious repression above the effects of Muslim dominance and a host of sundry controls. The Middle East and North Africa region seems to matter more than Islam. Interestingly, the conditional effect of oil and the Middle East and North Africa region is positive on religious freedom. The data suggest that several Gulf monarchies have more religious freedoms than other Muslim dominant states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, or even Israel and Jordan. The worst religious repression is among oil producers in Central Asia. The results are robust to a host of intervening factors, different measures of oil wealth, alternative data on religious freedom, and estimating method.

What explains the adoption of the regime of cooperation between church and the state in the democratic constitutions of Spain and Poland, while Portugal maintained a regime of strict separation in the United States and French tradition? The explanation could be that a consensual constitution-making process resulted in a constitutional formula accommodating religion and guaranteeing religious freedoms. Alternatively, the constitutional regime of cooperation could result from the diffusion of international norms to national constitutions, in this case, the cosmopolitan law of the church. The article process-traces the constitution drafting processes and finds that the emergence of a constitutional consensus among secularist and constitutional drafters in Spain and Poland was based on the Vatican Council II doctrine and facilitated by the intervention of the Catholic hierarchies. In Portugal, the violent context of the revolution excluded the church, and the constitutional regime of strict separation between church and state was adopted.

Clergy members are often important political actors. Yet, scholars rarely distinguish among different types of clergy political activities. Here, I argue for three disaggregated categories of clergy political activity: personal, general congregation level, and election-specific congregation level. Data from two sources—the Cooperative Clergy Study and the Little Rock Congregations Study—demonstrate that important differences exist across these categories, with the majority of model variables significantly influencing different clergy political activities in different directions. For instance, a conservative ideology and affiliation with a Black Protestant church both negatively influence personal political activities, like donating to a campaign, while also positively influencing election-related political activities in the congregation, like distributing voter guides. Similarly, providential religious beliefs increase general congregation-level political activities, while decreasing personal and electoral activities. These relationships are obscured when political activity is considered in the aggregate, suggesting that clergy political activities are nuanced; different activities are driven by different motivations.

Four decades after the Court's landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion persists as a point of contention for elected officials. The Catholic Church has taken a leading role in the pro-life movement, putting many Catholic representatives in a difficult position as they can be cross-pressured by their party, their constituents, and their own beliefs. Given these pressures, how do Catholic legislators explain their positions on abortion? We address this question via an analysis of public statements about abortion made by Catholic representatives and senators in the 108th Congress. We examine which members comment on abortion and use automated text analysis to measure legislators' certainty and use of moral and religious terms when discussing abortion. Multivariate analysis shows that gender, ethnicity, and an interaction between a member's position on abortion and the number of Catholics in their constituency shape how Catholic legislators discuss abortion.

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.

The proliferation of school choice policies has expanded schooling options for parents. While this trend coincides with a decline in private school enrollment, it is unclear how these policies affect enrollment among various religious traditions and religiosity. We study the impact of religion and school choice initiatives on the decision to enroll in different types of private schools in this new era. We evaluate two concurrent theories on the role of religion in the enrollment trends of private schools. Religious school enrollment may be motivated by (1) the desire to transmit a religious social identity, or (2) the secular goods associated with religious-based education. Using state-level data, we test these two explanations by estimating fixed effects regression models predicting private school market shares between 1993–2011 among different religious groups. We find support for both theories, particularly for a robust private school market aided by school choice policies.

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.

Questioning the compatibility of Islam with liberal democratic principles has become a common argument in the public rhetoric across the socio-political spectrum. This article examines this claimed irreconcilability through the prism of a constitutive dimension of healthy democracies: active citizenship. Drawing on a systematic synthesis of recent studies, the article argues that, while it is impossible to ultimately decide whether Islam as a faith is compatible with liberal democratic norms, the lived religiosity of most Muslims is generally not an obstacle to civic engagement in non-Muslim majority countries; active involvement in mosques rather tends to enhance their active citizenship. Data from an explorative study on Muslims’ engagement in Australia and Germany allow new insights into the different ways civically active Muslims refer to their faith as a driver for their citizenship. Some describe it as a religious duty, while for others ‘serving humanity’ constitutes a fundamental aspect of lived religiosity.

Evangelicals are generally considered culturally conservative regarding issues like abortion or homosexuality and sometimes also economically conservative regarding issues like tax reduction. But does this image also apply to Dutch evangelicals who live in a secular environment in which they constitute only a tiny fraction of the number of church members? This article explores the political attitudes of Dutch evangelicals with the help of two research questions: (1) Do Dutch evangelicals hold more conservative political attitudes on economic and cultural issues than Catholics, mainline Protestants and non-church members? and (2) Which decisive factors determine the supposed conservatism among Dutch evangelicals as compared to Catholics, mainline Protestants and non-church members? Analyses of survey data show that Dutch evangelicals are indeed culturally conservative, but more liberal in economic matters. In addition, results also show that their cultural conservatism is related to their religious convictions, while their economic attitudes are unrelated to religion.

Since the 1980s, Pentecostal and other born again Christian movements have become increasingly prominent in the public spheres of many sub-Saharan African states. A dearth of reliable survey data has constrained investigation of the potential influence of these religious movements on political attitudes and participation. This article analyzes original survey data from Zambia, a majority-Christian nation. These data, from a stratified random sample of 1,500 Zambians, indicate that Pentecostals do in fact share partisan preferences and report higher levels of political interest and participation than other Christians. They are less likely, however, to contact elected officials—a finding that accords with ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal pastors as political interlocutors for their politically mobilized congregations. We further contextualize and explore the external validity of our findings using cross-national survey data collected by the Pew Forum (2010, N = 9,500). We conclude by underscoring the value of further survey research on religion and politics in the region.

The American religious landscape is transforming due to a sharp rise in the percentage of the population that is nonreligious. Political and demographic causes have been proffered but little attention has been paid to the current and potential political impact of these “nones,” especially given the established link between religion, participation, and party politics. I argue that the political impact of nonreligious Americans lies in an unexplored subset of the nonreligious population called committed seculars. Committed seculars de-identify with religion, they adopt secular beliefs, and join organizations structured on secular beliefs. Using a unique survey of a secular organization, the American Humanist Association, I demonstrate that committed seculars are extremely partisan and participatory, and are driven to participate by their ideological extremity in relation to the Democratic Party. These results point to a long-term mobilizing dimension for Democrats and indicate the potential polarizing influence of seculars in party politics.

Religious affiliation and participation are thought to work as mobilizing structures through which religious participants accrue organizational and psychological resources, which augment political participation. Given the rejection of homosexuality by many denominations, do religious LGBT people actually accrue more positive psychological resources, and are the positive effects of religiosity on political participation mitigated when belief conflicts with identity? Informed by resource mobilization theory, the identity-threat model of stigmatization, and an intersectional approach, I conduct secondary analyses of two survey data sets of LGBT people. The results suggest that religiosity is associated with increased political participation among LGBT people; however, religious LGBT people exhibit weaker psychological association with the LGBT community and are “out” to fewer people. Furthermore, political participation is less likely among those who experience conflict between their religion and sexuality and among Evangelical Christians.