Vineeta Yadav provides an excellent commentary on many of the core arguments in my book. I am particularly grateful for her discussion of how my approach to the conceptualization of religious parties differs from that of much of the extant scholarship. She is correct in noting that, rather than ascribe an essential religious (or nonreligious) identity to parties and then observing how their behavior changes over time, I propose that parties can be considered religious if and when they “walk the religious walk,” as she neatly puts it, by mobilizing religion in electoral contests.
My comparative historical research on religion and parties has convinced me that treating “religious” as a fixed and essential attribute of political parties is problematic, not least because the process by which this label gets assigned is often opaque and inconsistent. For example, Kurzman and Naqvi, whose seminal work on Islamic parties arguably sets the gold standard for datasets on the topic, say that they include “all those parties that seek to increase the role of Islam in political life” (“Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” Journal of Democracy, 21 [2], 2010, 51). Yet there are many parties that could fall in this rather vague category that are not considered Islamic parties, such as Turkey’s MHP or Pakistan’s PML-N, probably because they compete locally with other, more explicitly religious organizations.
An exclusive reliance on founding ideology to establish a party’s status as religious, as proposed by Yadav, reflects the distinctive trajectory of scholarship on Islamic politics and does not always travel well to other traditions. As my book notes, studies of Catholic politics typically emphasize links to religious organizations, rather than ideology, as the sign of a religious party. Appeals to religious identity—which is conceptually different from having a doctrinally infused ideology—can also mark a party as religious, particularly in more denominationally pluralistic societies. In Muslim-majority contexts, these distinctions may be less critical because parties that mobilize religion along one dimension tend to do so along the other two as well— although, as noted earlier, there are some important exceptions. But they are fundamental if we want to examine religious parties across traditions.
Moreover, why should decades-old documents be determinant of essential religiousness? And what about parties that were founded on nonreligious principles but have become increasingly reliant on religion? These are conceptual issues, but they have practical consequences. My students and colleagues here in the United States often ask me whether the Republican Party is a religious party. If the question is one about the foundational or essential nature of the party, the conversation rapidly devolves into partisan posturing. In contrast, we can usefully discuss the extent to which the party has mobilized religion through appeals to identity, doctrinal references, and partnerships with religious organizations in civil society.
Finally, I agree with Yadav that in-depth case studies provide a particularly appropriate means for testing my arguments about how and why political parties mobilize religion. I disagree, however, with the notion that the goal of these case studies should be to determine “whether changes in policy platforms or alliance tactics accurately reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of a party.” I suspect that even the most rigorous experimental methods would have trouble deciphering the fundamental beliefs and commitments of politicians. But well-researched case studies can certainly tell us how and under what conditions political parties mobilize religion to compete in elections.
