This article examines one aspect of current disagreements over immigration reform — Anglo-Saxon nativist rhetoric — through the lens of civil religion. It argues that the idea of America as a “New Jerusalem” can sometimes take on a nativist and even ethno-centric cast. The analysis uses two case studies to articulate the ways in which this nativism can play out in terms of civil religion: Patrick J. Buchanan's folding of immigration concerns into his culture wars rhetoric and some of the far-right rhetoric coming out of the 2016 presidential race in America. This sort of rhetoric can also be found surrounding President Obama's executive action on immigration. The analysis shows that these fears combine a view of American “chosenness” with a sense of existential threat generated by rapid demographic changes. However, while this rhetoric is grounded in civil religion, it is also a symptom of the corruption of the prophetic core of American civil religion.

The source of Hobbes's liberal view of toleration is a recognized paradox within his absolutist political sovereign. This article argues that Hobbes's view of toleration is consistent with his overall political theory based upon his broader religious teaching, which leads to an epistemological skepticism on the veracity of religion, and as such among rulers toleration is not only allowed, but necessary. Further, this article argues that the inability of the sovereign to punish the private conscience of the citizen derives from natural right and the inherent limitation of law. Finally, this article examines Hobbes's use of religious argumentation to support the inability of a believer to challenge or deviate from the religious commands of the sovereign.

For the past century, the expansion of free speech rights has been the domain of liberals. Recently, however, conservatives have become advocates for expanded free speech rights. For Evangelicals Protestants, this advocacy would have been highly controversial only a generation ago, offending the base's ordered liberty sentiments. I suggest that abortion politics is a primary contributor to the evangelical free speech advocacy shift. Using a variety of data, I detail the evangelical shift toward expanded free speech by exploring the topics of radical protest, campaign finance, and obscenity. While rank-and-file evangelicals are less supportive of free speech than the general-public, elites have routinely used abortion politics to frame the shift toward individual free speech rights. Elites have diverged from their constituents to support a higher-priority issue (abortion), and the constituents have been supportive. Abortion politics has come to dominate evangelical advocacy decisions and has cultivated an evangelical rights culture.

Americans are reluctant to support foreign military intervention. However, if victims of violence are identified as Christians, support for intervention is higher. We term this a “Brother's Keeper” effect as Americans, especially more religious Americans, will support intervention that aids co-religionists. To test our argument, we use a survey experiment that randomly assigns respondents to varying accounts of violence in the Central African Republic. Respondents who read Christians are the victims of violence are more supportive of military intervention compared to respondents who read vignettes that do not identify the religious identities of victims. Moreover, these Brother's Keeper effects are stronger among more religious respondents. We also find even stronger effects when extrapolating results as a population effect with survey weights. Our findings reveal that labeling otherwise unknown foreign actors as Christian have significant effects on support for foreign military intervention.

In 1953, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly elected a low-key and relatively unknown personality as the second Secretary General of the UN. Dag Hammarskjöld, nonetheless, turned out to be one of the most entrepreneurial and innovative Secretary Generals that the UN has ever had. He invented peacekeeping, radically reformed the administrative structure of the UN, and promoted a crucial multi-lateral diplomatic role for the UN Secretariat. Behind this innovative approach to the politics of the UN, there was a personality with a deep and complex religious discernment that emerged occasionally in public speeches, as well as in private writing. This article interprets Hammarskjöld's norms entrepreneurship through the lens of post-secular theory and the concept of Habermasian institutional translation. It shows how — in contrast with merely secularist assumptions — Hammarskjöld's religiosity shaped and advanced international political processes consistently with the principles of the UN Charter.

Why do some ethno-political organizations resort to violence while others abstain? Are ethno-political organizations with a religious/Islamist ideology more violence-prone compared to non-religious ones? In addition to commonly cited factors such as grievances, political opportunities/constraints, resources, and organizational characteristics, I argue that the existence of youth bulges in a society also increases the probability of adopting violent strategies by ethno-political organizations. Frustrated young males under repressive and authoritarian regimes tend to be likely recruits for violent organizations. I use the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset, which includes 118 organizations in 16 countries of the Middle East and North Africa to test my hypotheses. The findings suggest that youth bulges, economic grievances, group fractionalization, external support, and state repression increase the probability of use of violent strategies by ethno-political organizations whereas religious ideology is insignificant. Youth bulges foster violence especially in autocratic countries.

Recently, a number of influential clergy leaders have declared their support for liberal immigration reforms. Do the pronouncements of religious leaders influence public opinion on immigration? Using data from a survey experiment embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that exposure to the arguments from high profile religious leaders can compel some individuals to reconsider their views on the immigration. To be more precise, we find that Methodists, Southern Baptists, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America leaders successfully persuaded respondents who identify with these religious denominations to think differently about a path to citizenship and about the plight of undocumented immigrants. Interestingly, we also uncovered that religiosity matters in different ways for how parishioners from different religious faiths react to messages from their leaders. These findings force us to reconsider the impact that an increasingly strident clergy may be having on public opinion in general and on support for immigration reform in particular.

Through the example of contemporary Buddhist nationalist groups in Myanmar, this article draws attention to the cultural authorization of religio-political discourse. The symbolic power of a monk's pronouncements is amplified because of the cultural reverence attached to his vocation as a Buddhist monk, even without doctrinal references or ritual practices. A monk's cultural position within Burmese Buddhism particularly strengthens his authority when he frames his preaching and actions as a defense of Buddhism. Without attention to these cultural institutions and the religious authority they confer, the resonance and influence of monks' words cannot be completely understood. Furthermore, without directly responding to the logic of these authorizing discourses, responses intended to counter the violence emerging from Buddhist nationalism and promote tolerance will be ineffective.

While it is becoming increasingly clear that religious cues influence voter evaluations in the United States, work examining religious cues has largely overlooked the conditioning role of race. We employed a 2 × 2 (White candidate vs. Black candidate) × (racial cues vs. no racial cues) online experiment with a national sample (N = 397; 56% white, 46% black) where participants were exposed to a fictitious congressional candidate's webpage. Results show that White participants expected the religious candidate to be more conservative, regardless of race, while Black participants did not perceive a difference in ideology between the religious and non-religious Black candidates. Additionally, when it comes to candidate favorability, religious cues matter more to White participants, while racial cues are most important to Black participants. These findings provide evidence that religious and racial cues activate different assumptions among White and Black citizens.

While there have been many approaches to classifying religious traditions in the social sciences (see Hackett and Lindsay 2008), the most popular approach is the religious tradition classification scheme, which was most carefully systematized by Steensland et al. (2000). Their widely-embraced article argued that the most accurate typology of religiosity was to sort individuals into seven distinct groups: evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, other religious groups, and no religion. This approach has become popularly known as “reltrad” and its usage in academic writing is voluminous. A brief search of Google Scholar indicates that over 900 published articles and books utilized the reltrad framework. However, the implementation of this typology has never been fully and accurately operationalized.

This article aims at explaining religious actors' influence on democratic transition in Mali (1987–1992). It argues that it takes more than political theology to effectively influence democratization processes. Although Muslim actors used their political theology during democratization, they had neither the organizational means nor the legitimization to convince others of their preferences for a post-authoritarian institutional set-up. They had very limited influence on the institutions that today are supposed to regulate the relations between religion and the state under democratic rule. In fact, this high path-dependency of institutional factors since the colonial era led to an informalization of non-liberal Muslim politics in the 2000s. It is likely that accepting Muslim actors' demands for institutionalized cooperation between the state and religion during democratic transition would have caused fewer problems for democracy in the long run. The article concludes with general lessons for the study of religion in democratization.

Most studies examining the relationship between social cleavages and party system fragmentation maintain that higher levels of social diversity lead to greater party system fragmentation. However, most aggregate-level studies focus on one type of social cleavage: ethnic diversity. In order to develop a better understanding of how different cleavages impact electoral competition, this article considers another type of social cleavage: religious diversity. Contrary to previous literature, higher levels of religious diversity provide incentives for cross-religious cooperation, which in turn reduces party system fragmentation. Using a cross-national data set of elections from 1946–2011, the results show that, in contrast to most studies examining the effects of social cleavage diversity on the number of parties, higher religious diversity is associated with lower levels of party system fragmentation.

Contentious battles over state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Acts suggest a fundamental refashioning of the “culture war” clashes in American politics. Conservatives — particularly religious conservatives — have come to champion a politics of rights, using “liberal weapons” (rights) to win battles or at least stave off loses. This raises important questions about the long-run effects of making rights claims. Does rights claiming lead to balkanization and reinforce group boundaries or is rights claiming an education in the democratic process that promotes tolerance? Drawing on evidence from an experimental design, we find that exposure to rights claims made by clergy regarding exemptions from participation in same-sex ceremonies acts as a prime to boost tolerance of selected least-liked groups, an effect particularly potent for evangelical Protestants.

Religious Zionists have been the driving force behind the settlement project in Israel for the past 40 years. They often see settling in the Greater Land of Israel as a messianic activity. It might be thought that when state policy clashes with radical messianic movements, the result would be violent, bloody confrontations. This study seeks to explain why this has not been the case in Israel despite the dismantling of settlements in the Sinai and Gaza and the controversial Oslo process. Although there has been turmoil and resistance, most religious Zionists have refrained from serious violence. We suggest that a “theological-normative balance” prevents all-out de-legitimation of the state and life-threatening violence against it.