This symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these articles instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do — and do not — form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multi-denominational coalitions among party activists, litigants, and religious leaders. These varied articles arose from a workshop at Oxford University in March 2015, an event hosted and funded by the Rothermere American Institute. The collection explores the impact of religious coalitional activity upon political attitudes, decision-making, and public policy development. It is wide-ranging, extending our understanding of religious coalitional activity beyond the United States and dealing with topics of vital current significance, including the swiftly changing landscape of school voucher and tax credit expansion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, and abortion advocacy.

This article addresses Pakistani Islamists' street power — their ability to organize rallies, protests, and demonstrations. Building on research on religion and collective action, I first demonstrate how Friday prayers aid Islamist mobilization. Mosques on Friday serve as a filtering and coordination tool, as tactical “choke” points in urban neighborhoods, and as incitement through the imam's sermon. I then show how Islamist street power affects Islamization in Pakistan. I argue that Pakistan's foundational religious nationalism acts as an “opportunity structure,” and affords Islamists agenda-setting and veto power. The success of Islamist agitation depends on the issue contested, the type of regime targeted, and the era in which it is practiced. I use interviews, participant observation at Islamist rallies, an original dataset of all rallies and protests in Pakistan from 2005 to 2010 (n = 4123); and government and local newspaper reports from the 1940s onward to buttress my claims.

Although there has been considerable descriptive writing about religious coalitions, more work is needed in specifying when these coalitions form and when they are successful. This article offers some sketches toward a more general theory of religious coalitions.

In the past three decades, observers have noted a steady rise in religious leaders’ engagement in Brazilian politics. What motivates this new activism? One prominent theory focuses on threat from religious competitors; other scholars point to church-state relations or theologically-driven political grievances. I argue that because of institutional and theological differences, Catholic and Protestant clergy are motivated into political action by different kinds of threat. I draw on two question order experiments embedded in a face-to-face survey of clergy prior to Brazil's 2014 election to examine how clergy react to threats from religious competition and from elected politicians. Threat from religious competition is associated with changes in topics of preaching among Catholics, who substitute social justice for personal morality messages. Protestant clergy instead react to ideological, policy-based threats, and secularization; these latter threats explain the much higher political engagement among Pentecostal and evangelical than Catholic clergy in 2014.

Gender-based inequality is often regarded as a salient characteristic of Muslim societies, yet few works have systematically compared the status of women in Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Fish (2011) finds a gender gap in structural indicators of inequality in Muslim-majority countries that cannot be explained by levels of economic development, raising questions about whether attitudes favoring inequality are more prominent among Muslims. We investigate the impact of structural-situational factors and religious identification on attitudes toward gender-based inequality using hierarchical-level models. We find that: (1) Muslim self-identification and the size of a country's Muslim population predict attitudes supportive of inequality; (2) an individual's gender has a stronger effect on attitudes than does religious identification; and (3) measures of structural inequality also shape attitudes. The effects of these variables remain strong when we consider other contextual elements, such as gross domestic product per capita, education, age, location in the Middle East, and fuels dependence.

Religion is often seen as important to voting behavior, particularly in the Islamic world, where personal piety may serve as an informational shortcut to voters otherwise unclear about candidate quality. But how do voters react when nominally pious candidates are alleged to be corrupt? Are pious candidates evaluated differently according to their sectarian affiliations? To investigate the impact of candidate piety and sectarian identity on voter choice, we conducted a survey experiment in Quetta, Balochistan, a region of Pakistan, which has experienced high levels of Sunni-Shia violence. Our results suggest that voters are significantly more punitive of corrupt behavior committed by candidates from sectarian out-groups than those belonging to their religious in-group. Further, we demonstrate that respondents react negatively to information about candidate religiosity, and uncover the existence of a “hypocrisy effect” whereby voters disproportionately punish corrupt candidates purporting to be pious compared to candidates who make no such claims.

According to recent research, oil abundance is the principal explanation for women's poor human rights record in many Muslim societies. However, this study argues that resistance to gender equality in the Muslim world originates in its specific historical trajectory and that the critical juncture precedes the extraction of oil by a thousand years. The study assesses data on women's economic, social, and political rights in 166 countries from 1999–2008 and shows that whereas the negative effect of oil is driven by the 11 members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, Muslim countries consistently underperform even when oil and gas rents and other relevant factors such as income and democracy are accounted for. The study concludes that persisting orthodox tendencies in Islamic culture provide the best explanation for Muslim women's limited empowerment.

In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by statistical analysis, that Catholics who desire a religious education for their children have historically tended to exit for the parochial sector while Evangelicals having similar desires lobbied for reform of the public school system. These differential group responses stem from differing conceptions of identity and belonging, theological understanding, and institutional structure. In American education policy, differences between religious groups are surprisingly tenacious.

Many scholars have argued that orthodox Muslims harbor attitudes that are more economically communitarian and politically illiberal, since individuals are seen as embedded within a larger community that places a premium on social order. Yet most studies have ignored the potential of Islam as an ideological platform for political reformers. Religion in general and Islam in particular has mostly been treated as a predictor rather than a derivative of political-economic preferences. This article suggests that, in the absence of credible secular political ideologies and representative political mechanisms, reformist-minded individuals are likely to use religion as a political platform for change. When Muslims are a minority in a repressive non-Muslim society, Islamic orthodoxy can serve as a political platform for politically and economically liberal forces. We test these conjectures with original micro-level data from the Russian North Caucasus and find strong support for them.

We argue that personal religiosity and political religiosity are distinct attributes of a political candidate. Personal religiosity reflects a candidate's level of personal religious commitment and political religiosity reflects the candidate's policy regarding separating versus blending religion and politics. The paradoxical religiosity hypothesis predicts that, within a democracy, personal religiosity will increase voters' endorsement of a candidate whereas political religiosity will decrease voters' endorsement. We test this hypothesis comparatively in two experiments, one performed within a long-standing democracy containing predominantly Christian voters (the United States), and the other within a more recent democracy containing predominantly Muslim voters (Indonesia). We demonstrate the robustness of the paradoxical religiosity effect and its persistence across the two countries, suggesting that Muslim Indonesians are no less capable than Christian Americans in separating the sacred and the secular.

It is often assumed that Latinos in the United States are deeply religious, and that this religious identity plays an important role in shaping their political beliefs and behaviors. A more controversial though unexplored proposition is that Latinos may not be as religious as is commonly believed and that forces beyond their religiosity play more prominent roles in shaping their political engagement. Relying on data from the 2006 Latino National Survey, we examine secularism — measured by church attendance — and civic engagement among Latinos. Our efforts are to analyze the social forces that shape levels of religiosity and find that generational status plays a significant role. Additionally, we further find that while church attendance declines among later generations, second and third generation Latinos have higher levels of civic engagement than their first generation peers, indicating that a decline in church participation does not depress political participation among later generations of Latinos.

Prior work has shown party activists and religious divisions to be two of the leading causes of party polarization in American politics. Using the Convention Delegate Studies, we examine the interaction between these two culprits and their impact on party polarization. We leverage a novel measure of secularism in the latest wave of the Convention Delegate Studies to demonstrate that active secularism is distinct both conceptually and statistically from low religiosity. Furthermore, we show that both religiosity and secularism drive party activists to take more extreme policy positions, to identify themselves as more ideologically extreme, and to exhibit less support for compromise. As the Democratic and Republican Parties have become more secular and religious, respectively, these results suggest religious polarization may compound existing divisions between the two parties and exacerbate the partisan divide in American politics.

In recent years, measures have been taken to ban the use of international legal principles in state courts. While these international laws vary in terms of the specific restrictions they place on state legal practices, many of these laws have been aimed implicitly or explicitly at banning Sharia law practices. While dozens of states have attempted to pass anti-Sharia policies, thus far, only eight have been successful. In this article, we apply a policy diffusion framework to help explain the agenda placement and adoption of these measures. We find that both internal state determinants and external regional diffusion factors influence the interstate agenda placement and adoption of anti-Sharia practices. However, the regional effect is negative, meaning that these policies follow an atypical diffusion pattern. This study adds to the growing body of literature that examines the diffusion of controversial morality policies.

The existing studies on the determinants of the regulation of religion are based on the theories of modernization, clash of civilizations, and economics of religion, which do not properly take into account the potential impact of the political environment. The current study aims to address this gap in the research. It discusses some of the ways in which the differences in the political environment in autocratic and democratic countries might influence the regulation of religion. The results of the descriptive analysis for ca. 150 countries show that there is more variation in regulation of religion among the autocratic countries than among the democratic ones, and that in the autocratic countries there is a clear association between patterns of legitimation and regulation. The results on the association between the constitutional structure of the democratic countries and regulation of religion are ambiguous.

In this article, I compare progressive and conservative religio-political activists' commitment to their movements (the religious left and right, respectively). I rely on data from the Public Religion Research Institute's 2009 surveys of individuals they identified as religious left activists and religious right activists. Do these activists actually say they identify with the movement with which pollsters assume them to affiliate? How potentially influential do they perceive their movements to be? Third, to what extent do activists support their movement's core social movement organizations? I conclude by arguing that the evidence is mixed that the American religious left lacks influence because its activists tend not to be unified.

What are the boundaries for discussing a candidate's religion? In the 2008 and the 2012 presidential campaigns, the religious beliefs and practices of at least one of the candidates became a subject of intense scrutiny from the media and the public. To ascertain the limits of social discourse for religious out-group, we conducted a survey experiment on the 2012 CCES survey. We find strong evidence that norms of social discourse do not apply to all religions equally. Furthermore, the application of norms differs by political party because Democrats and Republicans express concerns about different religious groups. Overall, there is a large difference for Muslims when it comes to social discourse. Finally, individuals have internalized the norms because most of them are willing to sanction those who violate them, even if the norms on social discourse are not applied equally among American voters.

The exact relationship between religiosity and moral values is understudied, and it is unclear what the process of secularization means for the morality of Europeans. Previous research shows that religion is associated with low levels of political and economic development. A potential explanation is that religion provides an alternative moral authority to the authority of the state. Using data from four waves of the European Values Study 1981–2008, I analyze attitudes to personal autonomy (vs tradition) and self-interest (vs social norms) in a multilevel model of 48 European countries. The results show that religious decline has been accompanied by an increase in autonomy values, but not self-interest, that the relationship between religion and morality is stronger in more religious countries, and that it has declined since the 1980s. We also show that religiosity is more negatively associated with self-interest among people with low confidence in state authorities.