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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abraham Kuyper, Dutch Prime Minister (1901–1905) and modern Calvinist, was a controversial figure, not least in his foreign affairs. Yet while Kuyper's legacy has been felt in the world of religious, especially Christian, political, and social theory, very little has been made of Kuyper's actual record as a foreign policy maker and a Prime Minister. So, what was Kuyper's “Christian” perspective and policy on foreign affairs? Using newly available English translations, this article outlines Kuyper's “overseas manifesto” made most plain in Our Program, and compares it against Kuyper's commentary and policy in three major foreign crises: the Boer Cause, in South Africa; the “pacification” of Aceh, in modern-day Indonesia; and finally, the calamity of the Great War in Europe. From these I will paint an introductory, if general, picture of a serious, religious foreign policy maker, and a commentator on world affairs; a complex picture of religiously inflected policy in the early 20th century, with lessons and warnings for scholars of religion and foreign policy today.

Researchers have posited a bifurcated discursive field with regard to United States politics, with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other. This division is typically understood to be both ideological and stylistic, with secular liberals possessing a robust language for speaking about structural inequality but lacking transcendent rhetoric about morality, and conservatives having the opposite discourses available to them. Yet this view steers us away from groups that complicate this picture, such as progressive religious communities. This article uses qualitative data collected among progressive religious groups to demonstrate that, through their ability to integrate discussions of structural inequality and personal morality, these communities create a rhetorical style that blends critical discourses with calls for righteousness. To understand different rhetorical positions, we have to examine the on-the-ground meaning making represented by politicized talk within communities that provide actors with the categories of identification which make social action possible.