Before the Glorious Revolution attitudes towards religion’s position in the state had already helped to define the groupings coming to be known as Tories and Whigs that emerged from pro- and anti-court positions during the 1679–1681 exclusion crisis. Both groups had, however, felt threatened by James VII and II’s circumvention of Parliament and the apparent threat to the Anglican monopoly on power represented by his attempts at religious toleration. The overthrow of the monarch in 1688 made plain the power these elites now wielded through the instrument of Parliament.

Examines how the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, have generated social capital through their founding and funding of the Museum of the Bible and also how they have expended this capital through book publications, political speeches, and business opportunities. Argues that the Museum of the Bible functions to authorize the Green family as Bible interpreters and demonstrates through close readings of available material that the bible they commend is entangled with capitalism, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

The chapter explores the relationship between religion and nationalism in Iranian politics in two periods. In the first period (1925–79), under the autocratic rule of Pahlavi monarchs, a state-centered, secular nationalism served as the dominant ideology in promoting Iran’s national sovereignty, political integration, modernization, and socioeconomic development. These secularization policies limited the influence of the clergy in Iranian politics and society. In the second period (1979–present), a theocratic political Islam has served as the hegemonic ideology of the clerically dominated state. The postrevolutionary leaders’ stance toward nationalism, however, has not been entirely consistent or coherent. At first, they tended to condemn nationalism as contrary to the Islamic ideal of unity among believers. But, when faced with resistance against abandoning popular national symbols and rituals or supporting war with Iraq in the 1980s, they adopted a religious-nationalist ideology that combined a theocratic and supremacist vision of Islam with an emphasis on Iranian cultural identity. The chapter shows how the prevailing domestic and international circumstances, as well as ideas, selective historical narratives, and traditional cultural symbols and rituals, have been used to foster nationalism, political Islam, or an amalgam of the two as hegemonic state ideologies.

Chapter 4 shows how Peter Benenson’s initial idea for a one-year campaign on behalf of ‘prisoners of conscience‘ in May 1961 swiftly turned into a permanent organisation with the title Amnesty International. The chapter begins with a detailed account of how Benenson, in association with Eric Baker, launched the ‘Appeal for Amnesty‘, and explores the reasons for its remarkable success. There is then a discussion of the consolidation, in the period 1961-1964, of key elements of Amnesty’s practice – such as the archive of political prisoners, and the formation of local campaigning in ‘Groups of Three‘. A separate section analyses the role of religion in the early phase of Amnesty. The concluding part of the chapter shows how Amnesty also, from the very beginning, developed as an international campaigning organisation, even though the initial national sections were often extremely fragile.

The chapter provides the historical and historiographical context for the themes studied in the book. It begins with a discussion of the emerging concept of a ‘human rights movement‘ in the postwar decades. This is followed by an analysis of the different types of activists involved: inspirational leaders, managerial leaders, wealthy supporters, employees and grass-roots activists. The social and religious environments that encouraged and nurtured activism are then analysed, including the role of the Quakers, the United Nations Association and the Jewish community. The four principal antecedents of human rights activism are identified as the tradition of ‘English‘ rights and freedoms, anti-slavery, humanitarianism and internationalism. The chapter concludes by elaborating the book’s chronological and conceptual parameters.

Chapter 8 looks at the putative ‘breakthrough‘ of human rights in the 1970s, both in terms of the proliferation of activist organisations and their greater impact on governments. Beginning with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the chapter then looks more widely at the events of the 1970s and Amnesty’s growth. Although the membership of the British Section did not expand as rapidly as that of some other national sections, Amnesty represented a model of activism that many other organisations sought to emulate. These included Index on Censorship and the Minority Rights Group. By the later 1970s attempts were being made to organise the ‘field of human rights‘ into loose organisational networks.

This chapter summarizes the major theoretical contributions and empirical findings of the book. It restates the causal mechanisms through which Turkish and French states changed their policies toward Christian and Muslim minorities, respectively. Finally, it discusses how the analysis of the interaction between international context and domestic actors can contribute to scholarship on the study of religion and politics in general, and religious freedoms in particular.

This book is a study of the political ideology of Christian Democracy, a set of principles and values that has, on the one hand, been extremely influential in the history of Western democratic regimes, but, on the other hand, remains severely understudied, especially when compared with its main ideological rivals: socialism, liberalism and conservatism. I begin by substantiating these two claims.