Despite the growing flight of Americans from religious institutions, these are still the largest voluntary organizations in the United States and they remain significant forces in American politics. As leaders of these organizations, clergy are often visible and influential political figures. In just the past few years, conservative Protestant pastors were frequent visitors to the Trump White House and played a crucial role in mobilizing a large Republican religious constituency. Black Protestant ministers have long been a vital force in Democratic circles and are joined at times by white liberal colleagues, as evidenced by the recent mobilization to preserve abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

Existing research proves the connection between religion and social attitudes toward biopolitical topics. The purpose of our analyses was to deepen reflection on these connections. We explored the internal pluralization of religiosity and ideological self-placement and their significance for orientations toward abortion, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality, subjects of intensive political debate engaging the Catholic Church. Our analysis, based on a nationally representative sample of Catholics in Poland, leads to the conclusion that, despite high indicators of religiosity, the capacity of the Roman Catholic Church to form a consistent cognitive perspective among its followers is limited. Even among Catholics who present fully institutionalized religiosity (~25%), only half agree with the Church's teaching on biopolitical themes. These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of intra-religious pluralism for understanding the ideological role of religion in countries with high levels of belonging to one, dominant form of it.

The states of the Arabian Gulf present a novel case for the examination of relations between authoritarian governance and Christian organizations. The economic clout of the Gulf states has been central to political stability and legitimacy but they are increasingly seeking to expand and consolidate the soft power and resilience through political and diplomatic initiatives. This article examines how the Christian organizations established in recent decades by large migrant communities are incorporated into this strategy and how they are responding. It argues that religious tolerance has formed a central discourse in governmental policies and narratives that construct the Gulf states as modern progressive nations, despite their unique political systems based mainly on constitutional monarchies with limited political participation. This constructs local Christian communities as a source of soft power, despite their position as a religious minority.

The subfield of religion and politics, just like other subfields, was founded on the shoulders of giants who came before us. These seminal thinkers sometimes disagreed with each other, but their quarrels also opened new avenues for further discussion. Max Weber argued, for instance, that Protestant dominant countries develop faster and more effectively than Catholic ones because of their dynamic work ethic. The spirit of Protestantism, Weber believed, promoted values such as entrepreneurism and creativity, which facilitated the rise of democracy, all while the ethos of Catholicism lagged behind. Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, had a different opinion about the compatibility of democracy and Catholicism. Traveling throughout the United States, he observed that Catholics—with their emphasis on hierarchy, obedience, and top-down dissemination of teaching—were well predisposed to internalize American laws and regulations. Such predispositions, in turn, helped stabilize the still nascent American democracy. While both thinkers were concerned with the compatibility of Catholicism and democracy, they ended up reaching different conclusions about the matter. In many ways, their disagreement is still not resolved, but two recent books made important contributions to these ongoing debates.

The article investigates the transformation within a specific branch of German Salafism from a publicly-assertive da'wa (proselytizing) to a politically accommodating and legal advocacy movement. In doing so, a process analysis that focuses on internal and reflexive narrations among Salafi leaders and lay members, through a three year-long mosque-based ethnography (2018–2021) and textual analysis (2008–2022), is employed. Previous studies focused predominately on the “Salafi growth phase” (2005–2015) in Germany that is associated with the attraction of exclusive group boundaries, flat hierarchies and informal networks. Less research exists on the current “decline phase”, which has commenced a re-orientation and critical reflection on past strategies and new ways of civic engagement and legal pragmatism. By exploring this new phase, the article integrates a longitudinal dimension into conventional research protocols on contemporary Salafism. The paper concludes with a discussion on the converging struggles for recognition among Muslim and other religious minorities in Europe, while linking these transformations to domestic opportunity structures rather than transnational reconfigurations of so-called “global Salafism”.

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism–progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the “cultural turn” literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance—due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for 20 West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe.

This paper explores German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen's challenge to materialist theories that anticipate capitalism's collapse and assert socialism's dependence upon self-interest. It places Cohen's religious socialism in conversation with a cohort of Jews who led and sacrificed their lives for the German revolution of 1918–1919. I argue that although self-interest and an insistence upon socialism's inevitability may motivate revolutionary action, it can also result in quietism. Through Cohen's Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, I show how Jewish prayer functions as a ritual practice of ethical recommitment to a cause that appears unrealizable. Cohen's notion of prayer as dialogical monologue—wherein the petitioner addresses a unique and, according to Cohen, silent God—allowed him to overcome doubt and self-interest. Beyond what Kant understood as prayer's socializing power, this paper uncovers the capacity of dialogical monologue to re-tether individuals to movements that cannot guarantee victory, yet which make ethical demands of us anyway.

Political debates over religious freedom in Australia became prominent in the context of marriage equality, achieved in 2017. The Australian Christian Right (ACR) has driven these debates, but there is little research focusing on its discourse of religious freedom. This article examines a range of texts from ACR actors. Using discourse and theoretical analyses, we identify three key turns in the religious freedom rhetoric of the ACR: “ontological security,” “existential stress,” and “meaning vertigo.” We also explore how mimetic ACR discourse is compared to the United States' Christian Right (USCR). As with the USCR, this research demonstrates how the ACR—suffering meaning vertigo and aiming to re-secure its previously taken-for-granted worldview—has successfully reframed the discourse of religious freedom by positioning itself as a besieged minority.

Over the last decade, and throughout the Americas, evangelicals have strongly mobilized in defense of socially conservative agendas or against so-called “gender ideology,” sparking general and academic interest. Much less is known about progressive evangelicals. Using the unique juncture presented by the constitutional process in Chile, we study the politicization of a progressive evangelical identity and ask when these religious groups mobilize. We argue that intra-denominational competition for evangelical identity has played an important role in progressive evangelical mobilization, and more specifically the wish to differentiate themselves from conservative evangelicals, introduce a distance from the political right, and show the internal diversity of the community. This process occurs in response to an initial (conservative) politicization of religion. Drawing on campaign materials, surveys, and interviews, we provide evidence for this argument highlighting that policy preferences and theological interpretations are core differences among both groups, sparking countermobilization.

Civil religion has been described as the “common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share”. In an age of partisan division, there have been calls for a revitalized civil religion, but the idea that civil religion can be unifying has been debated. In this paper, we investigate whether civil religion can be unifying, or is it fractured by partisanship? To address this, we use two strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate that there are two dimensions to civil religion. These dimensions are distinct from Christian nationalism and structured along partisan lines. Second, we developed two survey experiments to understand the dimensions of civil religion and improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. Results indicate that, rather than promoting unity, civil religion is interpreted through partisan lenses.

We study the extent and nature of Christian engagement in morality policy implementation by means of a comparative case study in Germany. In particular, we observe that the nature of engagement varies between unconnected and corresponding types of activities, and we explain this variation with the policy-specific goal congruence between religious organizations (ROs) and the state. Goal congruence, in turn, can be linked to Catholic and Protestant moral doctrines that tell us about ROs' position on morality issues. The study contributes to the literature on faith-based welfare by highlighting the role of moral doctrines as drivers of ROs' social engagement.

Political theorists argue that justice requires treating people's time as having equal worth. In this article, I contend that justice sometimes requires making exceptions to uniform time rules. The article focuses on New York State's regulations for nonpublic schools and how they affect Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish day schools, or yeshivas. Dissatisfied yeshiva graduates, the state education department, and several liberal political theorists assert that the state should pressure yeshivas to dedicate more time to secular studies. Reconstructing Horace Kallen's argument against the melting pot conception of citizenship and for cultural pluralism, I maintain that liberal states should be generous toward non-liberal ways of life on condition that they do not systematically abuse children or pose a danger to public safety. A liberal education landscape may sustain many kinds of schooling, including ones that outsiders think waste time.

We use Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs filed by seven religious groups—four liberal and three conservative—to understand the changing nature of political conflict between American religious groups in the predominantly White Protestant tradition from 1969 to 2020. Religious groups on both sides of the ideological divide have increased the frequency of their amicus filings, and increasingly become involved in issue areas which were once primarily the concern of groups on the other side. These findings suggest that the culture war that redefined party politics in America has also shaped religious activism, including legal activism. We argue that these groups have increased their involvement in a wider range of issues for two reasons: their rivalry for influence over the nation's moral center has become more encompassing and overtly political, and their appreciation for and consciously developed ability to tap into the courts' influence on American politics has grown.

Applying a qualitative framing analysis, this paper examines narratives of the right-wing populist parties Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands on religion. The paper argues that references of these populist parties to religion can be interpreted against the background of specific national context factors such as the respective history of nation building, the traditional role of religion in society and secularization processes. A rigorous examination of parliamentary documents published between 2017 and 2019 shows that whereas the PVV clearly defines Christianity in civilizational and not religious terms, the AfD takes a less clear-cut stance toward the religion framing it both as culture and faith. We contend that this difference can be explained by the lower degree of secularization and the greater role of Christianity as a collective identity marker in post-war Germany.

In Indonesia's political strategic environment, Islamic narratives have been among the main narratives, but have not always been dominant. The 2014 presidential election displayed the beginning of a rising trend of Islamic narratives within the political context in Indonesia. Since then Islamic narratives influenced the strategy of Indonesia's populist leaders, as particularly seen during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and 2019 presidential election. This paper analyzes how populism as a strategy was used in recent Indonesian elections. For this purpose, it uses the conception of populism as a political strategy proposed by Weyland. Building on this approach, the paper explains the strategic adjustments made in the use of populism from 2014, 2017, and 2019 in Indonesian political events. It argues that the strategic environment faced by populist actors in Indonesia's 2019 election affected their decision to choose Islamic narratives as an instrument for mass mobilization.