This article compares the difficulty in achieving a public stance of neutrality toward sexual orientation with the difficulty in achieving neutrality toward religious belief. Strict separation treats religion as a private commitment, with firm limits on government cooperation with religion and strong protection for free exercise. Formal neutrality discounts religion as a basis either for conferring special benefits or for withholding generally available benefits. Positive neutrality attends to the practical effects of public policy, sometimes requiring an abandonment of nonestablishment in favor of policies that allow for greater protection for free exercise of religion. I argue that none of these forms of neutrality establishes impartiality regarding either religious belief or same-sex marriage. First, Michael McConnell's “disestablishment” approach to sexual orientation and same-sex marriage instantiates are neither neutrality nor civic equality. Second, while formal neutrality may render an establishment more inclusive, it may exclude those whose beliefs and practices are not deemed in accordance with public purposes. Third, although positive neutrality may remove burdens from same-sex couples whose conscientious convictions may impel them to marry, it may still favor some kinds of practices over others.

The article addresses the relationship between religion and politics, and combines theories on religious change with theories on political cleavages. Empirical evidence is presented from a Norwegian survey of new forms of religiosity and political attitudes. Woodhead and Heelas (2004) have posited the hypothesis that a silent revolution is taking place where (traditional) religion is giving way to what they call “spirituality of life.” This article questioned the assumption that the individualistic and consumer-oriented New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s has developed into a new religious movement that is concerned with life quality and social questions. According to the literature on political cleavages, certain demands have to be fulfilled before a social divide or a conflict develops into a full political cleavage. With respect to alternative religion, the empirical analysis reveals that the main obstacle is related to the lack of a collective ideological platform.

Republicans made major efforts to win a larger share of the Jewish vote in 2004 by emphasizing their strong support for Israel. They partially succeeded, but did not make a dent in the overall loyalty of American Jews to the Democratic party, since they lost approximately as many votes because of Jews' negative reactions to the party's evangelical base. We argue that both Israel and worries over evangelical influence in the country reflect concerns about Jewish identity, above and beyond disagreements on specific social issues. We compare American Jewish voting behavior and liberalism to the voting behavior of non-Jews in 2004 using a survey of Jews from the National Jewish Democratic Coalition and the American National Election Study. For non-Jews, attitudes toward evangelicals are closely linked to social issues, but for Jews this correlation is small. The Jewish reaction to evangelicals is more of an issue of identity and the close ties of evangelicals to the Republican Party keep many Jews Democratic. Attitudes toward evangelicals are far more important for Jewish voting behavior than for non-Jewish voters.

Debates over the involvement of religion in the public sphere look set to be one of the defining themes of the 21st century. But while religious issues have attracted a large degree of scholarly attention, the public discourse of religion itself, in terms of the effort to assert and legitimize a role for faith in the public realm, has remained notably under-researched. This article marks an initial step to address this deficiency by deconstructing the public discourse of Christianity in the United Kingdom. It argues that, while appealing for representation on the grounds of liberal equality, the overall goal of this discourse is to establish a role for itself as a principal source of moral authority, and to exempt itself from the evidentially-based standards and criteria that govern public life.

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