Separation of Religion and State in Stable Christian Democracies: Fact or Myth (original) (raw)
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Separation of Religion and State and Secularism in Theory and in Practice
This study examines whether states follow the religion policies they declare in their constitutions. It identifies four types of policies which officially seek to limit religion’s role in government: absolute separation of religion and state (SRAS); neutral political concern; exclusion of ideals; and secularism–laicism. I determine whether states follow these policies using the religion and state (RAS) dataset and compare this to constitutional declarations that the state is secular and declarations of separation of religion and state. The results show that a majority of states which make both types of declaration do not follow these policies based on any of the four standards used in this study. However, the presence and wording of these clauses are correlated with state religion policy.
Religion, State, and Democracy: Analyzing Two Dimensions of Church-State Arrangements
Politics and Religion, 2010
One of the essential characteristics of a democratic regime is the separation of church and state. The elected governors of a democratic regime's institutions require sufficient autonomy in order to make policy that is within the bounds of the constitution and which cannot be contested or overruled by non-elected religious leaders or institutions. However, this requirement is often confused by scholars and politicians to mean that a democracy must also be secular. Therefore, the idea of an "Islamic democracy", for example, is often derided as a contradiction in terms. Using quantitative data from and Fox (2006) on cross-national church and state relationships, this paper argues that once the core autonomy prerequisite has been fulfilled, further separation of church and state is not necessarily associated with higher levels of democracy. In fact, the data indicates that there is a wide range of church-state arrangements which gives religion the possibility of a central role in political life while maintaining a high quality of democratic rights and freedoms. Drawing on the statistical results of this analysis, the paper concludes by rethinking about the possibilities and limits for "public" religion to strengthen democratization processes.
Quantifying Religion and State: Round Two of the Religion and State Project
The religion and state project is intended to develop and create a set of measures that systematically gauge government religion policy. Round 2 of the religion and state dataset will include 147 variables for 176 states. This update (1) describes the methodology and reasoning behind the new coding, (2) describes the changes between Round 1 and Round 2, (3) compares the religion and state variables to other religion data collections, and (4) discusses the potential significance of this data collection
A major argument for the separation of religion and state is that of equality: if a given state chooses one religion to support, members of minority religions will expectedly feel alienated, and grow resentful of the state itself and its organs. This argument was utilized by major legal and political philosophers (Nussbaum, Dworkin) and major courts (U.S. Supreme Court, ECHR). As a part of an empirical turn in legal and political theory ('realistic', 'contextual', 'experimental'), we examine whether the analyses of cross-country empirical data from numerous democratic and nondemocratic states support the 'equality' argument. We found no cross-country evidence to support the equality argument. We locate these findings within the context of recent debates regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the separation model.
World Separation of Religion and State Into the 21st Century
This study examines the extent of separation of religion and state (SRAS) between 1990 and 2002 in 152 states using the Religion and State database. The results show that when using a strict interpretation of SRAS—no state support for religion and no state restrictions on religion–no state has full SRAS except the United States. Even when discounting moderate amounts of government involvement in religion (GIR), greater than three quarters of states do not have SRAS. The findings also show that GIR has increased slightly between 1990 and 2002, economic development is associated with higher levels of GIR, states with Muslim majorities have higher levels of government support for religion, and democracies have higher levels of SRAS than do autocratic states but rarely have full SRAS. This contradicts the idea that SRAS is an essential element of democracy and predictions that religion will cease to be an important political and social factor in modern times.
ICL Journal, 2020
This article deals with one of the perennial questions of legal and political philosophy, i. e., how the state should relate to religion? It makes a distinction between five models: (i) the atheist state, (ii) the theocratic state, (iii) the model of an official state church, (iv) the multiculturalist state, and (v) the agnostic state (or secular state). The authors reflect on the legitimacy of each of these models. Some states reclaim their right to adopt an official religion as their state religion or as the religious Leitkultur of their country (model iii). Others favor the support of religion as long as this is premised on the equal rights of all religions (model iv). And others think that the state can only support equal citizenship if the state does not support any religion whatsoever (model v).
Do Democracies Have Separation of Religion and State?
This study asks a seemingly simple question: Do democracies have separation of religion and state (SRAS)? However, answering this question is not a simple endeavour, for three reasons. First, there is no agreement on the meaning of SRAS. Second, however it is defined, SRAS is difficult to measure. Third, the same can be said of democracy. One of the main foci of this study is to provide a set of usable operational definitions of the concept of SRAS and to examine how many democracies (as measured by existing datasets), as well as how many other states, have SRAS. To accomplish this goal, this study develops seven separate oper-ationalizations of SRAS based on four different definitions of SRAS. Despite this objective focus, it is important to remember that the appropriate role of religion in liberal democracies, and for that matter government in general, is a hotly contested political issue in many states, involving a number of normative issues that are anything but objective. This study addresses the role of religion in democracies using data from the Religion and State (RAS) dataset, which was developed by the author and includes 62 variables in six broader categories measuring different aspects of SRAS for all 152 states with populations of one million or more. The democracy data is taken from the Polity and Freedom House datasets. All analyses are performed for the years 1990 and 2002 in order to test whether the relationships found in this study hold true over time. This analysis is novel because the RAS data contains more information Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Patrick James, Shmuel Sandler and Baruch Susser, as well as the Canadian Journal ofPolitica1 Science's anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain mine alone. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 896/00) and the Sara and Simha Lainer Chair in Democracy and Civility. A copy of the RAS dataset can be obtained from Jonathan Fox at foxjon@mail.biu.ac.il.
VARIETIES OF STATE–CHURCH RELATIONS AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM THROUGH THREE CASE STUDIES
This Article attempts to answer the questions: Is secularism a nonnegotiable aspect of liberal constitutionalism? And can nonsecular state–church relationship models guarantee freedom of religion as an indispensable condition of liberal constitutionalism? Hence this Article deals with the practice of religious freedom in countries representing distinct models of state–church relations from both a normative/theoretical and an empirical perspective. The normative part of the Article examines the different models of state– religion relationships, while the empirical part will compare different national constitutional regulations on religious rights in three countries: Hungary (which became a liberal democracy after 1989-90 but has been backsliding into an illiberal constitutional system since 2010); Israel (a liberal democracy with a very special accommodationist model); and Egypt (a country that between 2011 and 2013 started to build up a democratic system with an illiberal theocratic constitutionalism). The hypothesis for my project is that the model of state–religion relations determines the state of religious freedom of a given country: The secular separationist model is by definition tolerant towards all religions, while the theocratic model is necessarily intolerant towards minority religions. But the three case studies should give an answer to the question raised in the title of this panel: at least from the perspective of freedom of religion, whether secularism is a nonnegotiable aspect of liberal constitutionalism.
Religious diversity and democratic institutional pluralism
Political Theory, 2003
Debat es on the relationships between religion and society, politics and the state in recent political philosophy in the United States show two characteristics. First, there is a focus on limitations of religious arguments in public debate and political decision making. The more or less radical exclusion of religious reasons and arguments from public debate and politics in political liberalism has been extensively criticized as morally arbitrary, unfair, and