{"title":"Improving the measurement of biblical interpretation in social science research","authors":"Stephen T. Mockabee, A. R. Lewis","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000160","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Asking about people's views of the Bible in a single survey question has become the prevailing way to understand the mass public's religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the standard survey items raise questions about what is being measured. The questions used to measure one's views of the Bible are often double-barreled and leave considerable room for interpretation. In this paper, we assess the measurement error in the standard three-category question from the American National Election Study (ANES) by developing new items to gauge what it might mean to a respondent to select one of the three options in the standard Bible question. Using original data from two online surveys, we demonstrate that there is substantial measurement error in the standard ANES item. Analyses also show that our new items predict responses to the standard ANES item and are potent predictors of political attitudes—often performing better than the widely used three-category question.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79793864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yannick Dufresne, J. Levin, J. Paquin, Marc-Antoine Rancourt
{"title":"Israel: a novel wedge issue in Canadian electoral politics","authors":"Yannick Dufresne, J. Levin, J. Paquin, Marc-Antoine Rancourt","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000147","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates the relationship between partisan foreign policy positions on Israel and the voting behavior of religious minorities in Canada. It discusses Stephen Harper's strong pro-Israeli stance in foreign policy when the Conservatives were in power and focuses on two main explanations accounting for such politicization of Israel, namely moral obligations and political clientelism. These hypotheses are tested using the 1968–2015 Canadian Election Study (CES) surveys and the 2011–2015 Vox Pop Labs election data. The results suggest that the Israeli issue had an impact on the support for the Conservatives among voters from religious minorities. Considering the effect of this foreign policy positions, Jewish Canadians are shown to be more supportive of the Conservatives, while the opposite pattern is observed among Muslim Canadians. The implications of these findings are then discussed.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79965942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Early stirrings of modern liberty in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas","authors":"Matthew P. Cavedon","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000159","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In a 2021 contribution to Politics and Religion , Jesse Russell wrote that St. Thomas Aquinas “had a decidedly illiberal view of a government.” He says Aquinas “advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty” and did not “prepare the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution.” But Aquinas places the rule of moral law above politics, endorses participatory government, prioritizes reciprocal duties rather than coerced conformity, favors a mixed regime with democratic representation, and sanctions resistance to tyrants. Each idea is an important component of modern understandings of freedom. Liberal democracy as a constitutional arrangement, and its various philosophical defenses, postdate Aquinas by centuries. It would be anachronistic to cast him as their partisan. But neither was he a proto-reactionary: his political philosophy is congenial to free, limited government that belongs to the people.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Views on political Islam among Australian converts to Islam: findings of a national survey","authors":"P. Mitchell, Halim Rane, Adis Duderija","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000135","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Over the past few decades, interest in and conversion to Islam among non-Muslims in the West has been on the rise. There is a view in the scholarly literature that Western converts to Islam are overrepresented in regard to politicized interpretations of the religion, commonly referred to as political Islam or Islamism, and even militancy or jihadism. This article presents the findings of a national survey of Muslim Australians. It focuses on views amongst Australian converts to Islam concerning political Islam, including views and understandings of such concepts as the caliphate, shariah, and jihad, and the relationship between Islam and politics, democracy, and conflict. The findings suggest that in the Australian context, converts to Islam are not more likely, and in some cases less likely, than the broader born-Muslim population, to understand and interpret Islam in accordance with political Islamist ideology.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77681332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do discriminatory laws have societal origins? The diffusion of anti-Ahmadiyah regulations in Indonesia","authors":"Michael Buehler","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000081","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Government laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities are on the rise worldwide. Scholars have debated whether or not society-based discrimination is a pre-condition for government-based discrimination. Examining an original dataset of regulations discriminating against the Ahmadiyah community in Indonesia, this article argues that calls from within society to restrict the freedom of religious minorities are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the rise of discriminatory government regulations. Instead, governments may emulate other governments and adopt laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities without any immediate societal pressure preceding it. Hence, future research needs to consider the interdependence between jurisdictions as an important driver of laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90892839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher Beuter, Matthias Kortmann, Laura Karoline Nette, Kathrin Rucktäschel
{"title":"Populism and religion: an intricate and varying relationship","authors":"Christopher Beuter, Matthias Kortmann, Laura Karoline Nette, Kathrin Rucktäschel","doi":"10.1017/S175504832300010X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S175504832300010X","url":null,"abstract":"About a decade ago, the relationship between populism and religion was still an under-researched area (Mudde, 2015). Since then, pioneering studies have started to assess this complex relationship, mostly concentrating on Western countries with a Christian imprint. Marzouki et al. (2016) focus on the role of religion in right-wing populist movements, arguing that these movements instrumentalize religious narratives. In the volume, Roy (2016, 79–80) reasons that religion takes more the role of an identity marker than an actual belief. Similarly, Brubaker (2017, 1193) has coined the term “identitarian Christianism,” which is, first and foremost, characterized by “a secularist posture” as a means of taking up battle lines against Islam. The edited volume by DeHanas and Shterin (2018) on “Religion and the rise of populism” widens the Western-oriented focus by bringing together case studies of populist parties not only from Europe and the United States but also from predominantly Muslim societies in Central Asia as well as from Turkey. While the broadening of case studies is innovative, the volume ultimately refrains from drawing conclusions that go beyond the observations of Roy (2016) and Brubaker (2017). Hence, populists perceive religion in an identitarian way, framing a specific religion (i.e., Islam) as a threat to their own culture (i.e., the [Christian] secular civilization) (DeHanas and Shterin, 2018, 178). This is where our symposium wants to tie in. By building on previous research, its objective is threefold. First, we attempt to show that populist actors refer to religion in various ways, with religion as a boundary marker, differentiating the in-group from the outgroup. In some instances, populists refer to religion to identify the out-group, often Islam, that is deemed incompatible with their own culture. Religion in this scenario is seen as a threat to the domestic society, and populists then primarily focus on the “evil other.” The religious threat to these secular societies can be both internal, harming one’s norms and values from within, as well as external, looming at the country’s border and waiting to take","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87927704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics</i>. By R. Khari Brown, Ronald E. Brown, and James S. Jackson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2021. xii+167 pp. $70.00 cloth.; <i>Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump</i>. By Stephanie A. Martin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2021. xi.+266 pp. $49.95 cloth.","authors":"James L. Guth","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000123","url":null,"abstract":"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 .","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religious tolerance in the Arab Gulf states: Christian organizations, soft power, and the politics of sustaining the “family–state” beyond the rentier model","authors":"Elizabeth Monier","doi":"10.1017/s175504832300007x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s175504832300007x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80191801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Differentiation of religiosity and its effects on biopolitical orientations among Catholics: evidence from Poland","authors":"I. Borowik, P. Grygiel","doi":"10.1017/s1755048323000093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048323000093","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79161512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Catholicism, Pluralism and American Democracy","authors":"Dawid Tatarczyk","doi":"10.1017/S1755048323000019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048323000019","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":45674,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Religion","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82292316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}