The American founders frequently alluded to and quoted from the Bible in their political rhetoric. This fact alone reveals little about how and for what purposes the founding generation used the Bible and, more important, how the Bible influenced the political thought of the founding era. Drawing on some of the most familiar political rhetoric of the founding era, this article examines the founders' diverse uses of the Bible in political discourse, ranging from the strictly literary and cultural to the theological, from the stylistic to the substantive. Recognition of these distinct uses is important insofar as it is misleading to read spiritual meaning into purely political or rhetorical uses of the Bible or vice versa.

In this analysis, we expand the debate on the place of religion in political science by using the predictions of Wald and Wilcox as our starting point. Following in their footsteps, we ask how political scientists have studied Islam since 2002 and identify the studies on Islam and Muslims at the flagship conference of the discipline, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. We evaluate not only the quantity but also the approaches employed by these studies. In order to gauge the balancing of roles (or lack thereof) between the discipline and area studies, we also take a closer look at the Middle East Studies Association, the largest association focused on the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic world and its annual meetings during the same period. Our findings suggest that, unless carefully addressed, the prevailing patterns are likely to result in a crippling knowledge gap among political scientists.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of studies on the determinants of support for the European Union among national publics. Scholars have analyzed economic, political, informational, and identity factors as influences, but there has been less exploration of cultural factors, most notably religion. This article replicates our earlier studies exploring the impact of confessional culture and religious commitment on support for the European Union, expanding the purview from early member states to more recent accessions and candidates for membership. Using Eurobarometer 65.2 (Papacostas 2006), we demonstrate that religion still shapes attitudes toward European integration, but in varying ways and to different extents in several parts of the Union. In early member states, Catholics — especially committed ones — are more supportive of the European Union than Protestants, confirming earlier findings. In more recent accessions, however, religion's impact is weaker and assumes different configurations. Finally, we present evidence that even in the early member states religion is losing its influence over Europeanist sentiment and suggest that this development presents obstacles to further political integration.

This article argues that the relationship between democracy and the separation of religion and state needs to be reexamined. We argue that previous studies have misconceptualized the impact that a lack of church-state separation can have on democracy, or have taken a narrow focus by concentrating on specific cases. We use principal component analysis and a large-n data set covering 125 countries to show that the separation of religion and state should be conceptualized multi-dimensionally and that it should be considered a component of democracy. Our findings show that as separation of religion and state increases, the level of democracy also increases.

This article addresses an idea central to liberal debates on civic education: the spillover thesis. Both egalitarian liberals and their religious opponents in these debates claim that liberal civic education creates spillover effects into the way individuals assess the meaning of their own lives. Some religious citizens fear that their politically reasonable conceptions of the good life are being undermined by education that emphasizes the practice of autonomous reasoning. Egalitarian liberals usually acknowledge this risk or cost, but deny that religious citizens should be given special dispensation from the burdens of autonomous reasoning. Some may even hope that conservative religious beliefs will be eroded by the practice of liberal civic education. This article disputes the spillover thesis. Given the best evidence available from the field of cognitive psychology, we challenge the notion that critical personal reflection about public matters is bound to spillover into critical reflection about private moral matters. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that human beings are usually well equipped to compartmentalize and are capable of reasoning in different ways depending on the context. Thus, reasonable citizens of faith are not necessarily unduly burdened by programs of civic education; nor are liberal programs of civic education necessarily going to lead us to a more secular society of autonomous thinkers. The article also speaks to a broader civic humanist tradition in political philosophy that includes Plato, Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Marcus Aurelius. For these authors, the success of a political enterprise is seen to crucially depend on the inculcation of a robust and comprehensive system of private virtue. For without private virtue, there is no public virtue. If we are correctly interpreting the available psychological research, private virtue need not be as crucially relevant for the success of common political enterprises. The inculcation of private moral virtue does not so clearly translate into making good leaders, voters, and public servants.

Over the last decade the 80-million strong Anglican Communion has been increasingly divided, seemingly over the issue of sexuality. This article explores this conflict by focusing on the particular problems of resolving conflict when the divisions are a product of a growing ethical pluralism within the Church and the wider society. In particular, we locate the discussion within an emerging debate about the utility of “rules” in resolving conflict in an international community where cultural particularity challenges claims made for universal values. In the Anglican case, hope has been vested in a Covenant that is discussed in the second part of this article. The hope of Church leaders was that this particular set of rules would acquire not just formal consent but normative legitimacy, although by early 2010 it was far from clear that this had resolved the crisis.

At least since the last decade of the 20th century, there has been strong scholarly interest in a perceived global wave of religious nationalism. Critical to that movement was the most important recent development in Indian politics, the rise of the Hindu right. Commentators lamented a fundamental change in the Indian body politic, the demise of India's celebrated secularism. However, others predicted that the Hindu nationalists would be forced to move to the center to gain votes, jettisoning much of their peculiar ideology in the process. The 2004 national parliamentary election was a crucial test of these contending interpretations. Would the Bharatiya Janata Party rely on its established arsenal of communally controversial issues? Would it emphasize themes designed to appeal to a broader audience? Analyzing reports published in national newspapers and news magazines, I will reach the surprising conclusion that the answer to both of these questions is yes.

John Rawls contended that an overlapping consensus for “political liberalism” could be found in different ways across the range of comprehensive systems of value in western societies. Three recent conflicts concerning the relationship of church and state in Canada involving the Catholic Bishop of Calgary, Frederick Henry, provide an opportunity to consider Rawls' ideas in a specific societal context. The first of these conflicts — Henry's call for the excommunication of Catholic Prime Minister Paul Martin for legalizing same-sex marriage — suggests that the resources for a Rawlsian overlapping consensus may be difficult to find in Catholicism. The refusal of the Calgary Catholic School Board to obey Henry's order to end the use of gambling related school fund-raising, the second of the Bishop's “travails,” undercuts that conclusion, but the moral emptiness of the vocabulary of cultural liberalism, which the Board deployed in its self-justifications, suggests that too much liberalism might be almost as regrettable as too little. Henry's third travail — a call before the Human Rights Commission to answer charges of “discriminatory public speech” for his public criticisms of homosexuality — suggests the merit of recognizing an alternative to overlapping consensus as the source of Catholic recognition of Rawlsian political liberalism: reciprocity.

After cultural and religious controversy in Modesto, California, community leaders attempted to increase tolerance and respect by requiring an unique world religions course for high school students. The first large-n empirical study of the effect of teaching about religion in public schools indicates that students taking the course showed statistically significant increases in passive tolerance, their willingness to refrain from discriminatory behavior, and active respect, the willingness to take action to counter discrimination. This research documents the circumstances that gave rise to the course and evaluates the course's effects using qualitative and quantitative evidence. It also connects the course to a larger research tradition in political science on the effects of civic education programs that promote liberal, democratic values.

In a post-September 11 world, no religious group in the United States has become more important yet remains more misunderstood than Muslim-Americans. This is particularly true with respect to the manner in which religious and political attitudes influence Muslim-Americans’ political behavior. This article addresses this issue by using data gathered from surveys taken in 70 mosques throughout the United States. With these data, this article maps the political and religious attitudes and behavior of mosque-attending Muslim-Americans and then analyzes the voting behavior of these respondents in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. It will show that the cultural and religious traditions of Islam have resulted in most mosque-attending Muslim-Americans being social conservatives and, as a result, report having voted for Bush in 2000. It will also show that increasingly negative perceptions of the manner in which the United States war in Iraq has affected Muslims living American led many to switch loyalties and cast their ballots for Kerry in 2004.

Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article assesses discrimination and anxiety among Muslims in the post-September 11, 2001 United States. Substantial portions of Muslim-Americans are indeed anxious and report personal and group discrimination. However, this is guided by many factors including religious salience, age, education, political attentiveness, native born status, and years lived in the United States. Respondents who are more anxious and know victims of religious discrimination are also more active in politics. However, personal experiences with discrimination are unrelated to political participation. Overall, in spite of or perhaps because of anxiety over their present status, Muslim-Americans are highly functional in the political sphere. Many are now more active in politics than prior to September 11, 2001.

Christianity and Danishness are mutually reinforcing phenomena in Denmark. Three factors applying specifically to Denmark explain this: first, the lack of national representative bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark; second, the journal Tidehverv (“New Era”) has nurtured a conservative and nationalistic Christian ethics among parts of the Danish clergy; and third, Danish politicians' abuse of the links between Christianity and Danishness as a tool in their anti-immigration strategies.

This article analyzes the emergence of female Islamist leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, and the glaring contradictions between their feminist views and their roles as political activists for the Islamic State. The two Islamist leaders who form the primary focus of this analysis are Zaynab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Nadia Yassine of Morocco's Justice and Charity Society. Our analysis reveals the existence of “Islamist feminism,” distinguished from broader secular-oriented Islamic feminism, as a logical, albeit unique, extension, and expression of Muslim anti-colonial discourse rooted in the intellectual currents of twentieth century independence movements that still resonate today.

Some scholars of religious interest groups argue that one challenge facing religious groups in their pursuit of political goals is that they are unwilling or unable to compromise, which makes it difficult for them to operate strategically within the secular political environment. An alternate explanation is that the types of arguments religious groups use are multifaceted but do not filter into the public discourse. In this article, I examine the concept of constraint in the context of mediated debates of contentious political issues by looking at the extent to which religious and nonreligious groups differ in their development of argument frames. Compared with nonreligious groups, religious groups do display more evidence of constraint in mediated debates over public policies. Patterns of constraint relate to visibility, framing, group resources, and group purpose. More importantly, however, I find that the patterns of constraint have more to do with journalistic decisions to filter arguments made by religious groups than with the actual rhetorical strategies of religious groups.

The article argues that the secular Indian state and the Hindu nationalist movement are invested in restricting changes in religious membership in ways that intensify religious and caste-based inequalities. The secular state and the Hindu nationalist movement attempt to enforce a shared model of religion that takes the form of a fixed territory. In this model, changes in religious membership through conversion are restricted. An analysis of state-civil society interactions in India must therefore move away from a presumed opposition between state secularism on the one hand and religious nationalism and conflict within civil society on the other. The article draws on three cases: (1) nationalist debates over caste and religious conversion, (2) Hindu nationalist mobilization against religious conversion, and (3) state caste-based affirmative action policies that restrict benefits based on religious conversion.

Political realism is often seen as vulnerable to the “Machiavellian temptation,” that is, to the bracketing out of moral principles in the conduct of statecraft. In this article, I explore the use of Thomist themes in the writings of Martin Wight (1913–1972), a seminal figure of the so-called English School of international relations theory. Scholars have commented on the Christian realist roots of the English School, but it is little noted that Wight's most famous essay, “Western Values in International Relations,” uses the language of Thomism. By exploring the use of Thomist concepts in Wight's thought and the parallels to be found in the thought of his contemporary, Thomist political philosopher Jacques Maritain, I show how he seeks to escape the realist temptation to Machiavellianism. I then go on to sketch out the possible shortcomings of this approach.

Political development literature held that the process of secularization is conflict-ridden between the state and religious institutions. Later state building literature left state-religion relations outside its theoretical scope and left a puzzle in our understanding of state building. How did state-religion relations really change in the course of modern state formation? This article argues that the relationship between state builders and religious institutions was not necessarily conflictual. Rather, there were potential areas of cooperation between the two. However, whether any cooperation was realized was historically contingent. Depending on the type of relationship established, state-religion relations took different institutional shapes. This article makes two observations. First, if the religious institutions have a fairly hierarchical internal organization, then the state and religious institutions part their ways. This is the picture classical political development literature paints. Second, in cases where the state faces a disunited body of religious institutions, the state incorporates religious institutions into its apparatus, its extent depending on the institutional capacity of the state. As the institutional capacity of the state increased, its control over religious institutions also increased. The article then illustrates these observations through major cases from the Middle East.

Religious appeals have been part and parcel of campaign strategy for decades. Most often, however, these appeals to have come from men, but little is known about how women would fare using religious appeals on the campaign trail. To remedy this, we used an experimental design to examine voter reaction to religious appeals from a female and a male candidate competing for an open United States Senate seat. We find that women's use of religious appeals is governed by the dynamics of tokenism — reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes and serving to reduce voter support of the female candidate. This suggests that women must be careful in using a key campaign tool traditionally employed by men, and that this may affect the extent to which female candidates can effectively shape voter perceptions on the campaign trail.

In this article, we add to the evolving literature examining the importance of religious orientation and political elite behavior. We use data on the religious affiliations of United States House of Representative members to test the influence of religion on military funding for the “War on Terror.” Our findings indicate that, even after controlling for traditional political factors, such as ideology and partisanship, representatives' religious backgrounds often played a role in support for this bill. Roman Catholics, African-American Protestants, and those of other religions and the non-religious were more strongly opposed to funding for military intervention than mainline Protestants, even after controlling for other factors. This article provides a further look at the influence of religion and suggests that factors outside the traditional political dynamics may also be important in examining elite behaviors.

We validate the classification of 16 “mainline” and 97 “evangelical” Protestant denominations in Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000 based on Mark Chaves' five-point Biblical “inerrancy” scale. Using Glenmary county data, nearly perfect correlations were derived between the percentage of adherents in “evangelical” denominations and levels three-four on the Chaves scale and between the percentage of adherents in “mainline” denominations and level 1 on the Chaves scale. The distinguishing characteristic of Evangelical or Mainline Protestant denominations, therefore, is Biblical inerrancy or its absence. As a guide for future empirical research, this comprehensive listing of Evangelical and Mainline Protestant denominations should be employed in aggregate studies, especially where county-level analysis is applied to one state or a subset of states.