Religion

Any investigation into the interdependencies between religion and politics first of all calls for a definition of the subject matter and hence for a definition of religion. However, such a definition faces considerable difficulties because religion historically is a universal phenomenon and encompasses today an enormous variety of experiences, convictions, and practices the religious character of which is far from being unequivocal. The distinction between religious phenomena and other social phenomena is found in religious sociology and anthropology, mostly with regard to specific contents or functions. As to content, the experience of or interaction with superhuman, preternatural, or transcendental creatures, powers, forces, or orders often is defined as a universal characteristic of religion. Functionalist approaches use functions such as the individual coping with contingency or a collective foundation of identity. Content criteria, however, often prove to be too exclusive and functionalist definitions, too inclusive. The attempt to determine criteria for the identification of religion as a unique area of activity clearly to be differentiated from other societal or cultural spheres of action is also highly selective from an intercultural point of view, because it refers to a large extent to Western Christianity, with its characteristic notion of a differentiation between the worldly and spiritual spheres. Nevertheless, the category “religion” has established itself as a global concept of reference even for non-Western religious traditions, and it has admittedly been rephrased and revised in the course of its global reception. Because of this global, pluralistic, and contextualized debate about the term religion, James A. Beckford recommends a constructivist approach to its definition. Constructivist approaches assume that the concept of religion, like other concepts, is the result of conflictual definition processes and advocate following this everyday practice when defining social science terms. This entry sketches the role of contemporary religion in politics and discusses some issues of current research and their different perspectives.

Religious traditions and religious actors have been highly relevant in politics and hence also in political science. After all, religious traditions have at their disposal specific notions about the constitution of the self and the world as well as about proper conduct in one's individual and collective life. These concepts and moral guidelines have also left their mark on the political orientations of individual and collective religious actors. However, not only do religious politics exercise an influence on the constitution of the political community, but religious actors and traditions, symbols, and practices in nearly all historical and contemporary societies have also been instruments and objects of political action and control. Often, the specific dynamics of the religious–political complex result from the interaction of religious politics and the politics of religion. The interactions between religion and politics are currently of particular interest because since the end of the 1970s, a (re)vitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious actors can be observed in many parts of the world.

The current practice of researching the interactive relationship between politics and religion is also due to its rediscovery by political science. At least since the 1960s, religion was regarded in large parts of the discipline as a social complex whose historical destiny had been settled. The reason for this was the underlying conviction of secularization theory that, in the course of processes of modernization and functional differentiation, religious traditions had lost many of their former societal and political functions as well as their attractiveness and persuasiveness. They would, therefore, be relinquished to the private sphere if not disappear altogether. Even the normative issues about the relationship between politics and religion seemed to be settled. Many traditions of political theory, such as liberalism and republicanism, agreed on the basic tenet that religion had to be limited to the private sphere because neither was it suitable for forming a universally acceptable normative basis for democratic political communities nor was it able to supply arguments or justifications for political decisions that could be universally agreed on. Moreover, large parts of the social sciences were shaped by a “methodological atheism,” according to which experiences with or interactions with supernatural powers are illusionary. This methodological atheism led to reductionist patterns of explanation that regarded and reconstructed religion as a mere epiphenomenon of social or political processes. Based on these underlying convictions, religion was found interesting at best in the sense of a relic of religious influence on politics, which could be found in political cleavages, voting behavior, party systems, or types of welfare states.

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