Religion and Politics

A range of arrangements

Societies arrange the relationship between religion and political power in different ways, and a single country can combine them. Separation of religion and state (often called separation of church and state) is the arrangement in which the state does not establish or endorse a religion and religious bodies do not hold governmental authority. Britannica describes the underlying concept — that the religious and political powers in society are clearly distinct — and notes its legal expression in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The boundary is constantly tested: courts and publics have disagreed about religious displays in public buildings, prayer in public schools, and state support for religious organizations, and the same kind of expression can be judged acceptable or not depending on who organized it and how official it was.

At the other end of the range, an established religion is a tradition a state formally recognizes or supports: historically, several Lutheran churches in Europe became, in effect, arms of the state, and Henry VIII made the Church of England the state church of England. A theocracy goes further: government by divine guidance or by officials regarded as divinely guided, often with clergy in office and religious law as state law; examples commonly cited include Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Vatican. Civil religion is neither establishment nor theocracy: it is the public use of religious language, symbols, and rituals in national life, which Robert Bellah in 1967 described as visible in presidential inaugurations, flag rituals, and national cemeteries.

Religious freedom and the law

Religious freedom is not only a philosophical idea; it is a legal right. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a United Nations treaty, guarantees everyone freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including the freedom to adopt a religion or belief of one’s choice and to manifest it in worship, observance, practice, and teaching, alone or in community. The same article states the accepted limits: states may restrict the manifestation of religion only when the restriction is prescribed by law and necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. This two-sided structure — a broad right plus a narrow, law-based limit — is typical of how modern states protect religious freedom while also regulating it. National constitutions and courts add their own rules: some states register religious organizations, some fund religious schools, some restrict practices they judge harmful — each measure raising the same question of where protection ends and limitation begins.

Religious actors in public life

Religious communities do not appear in politics only inside constitutions; they act. Religious organizations, leaders, and movements engage in public life through social movements, advocacy, lobbying, education, and social services. OpenStax describes liberation theology, a movement that began within Latin American Catholicism in the 1950s and 1960s, as combining Christian principles with political activism aimed at reducing injustice and poverty. In the United States, religious groups have long been active in policy controversies, and courts have repeatedly ruled on how far that activity may go inside public institutions. In some democracies, parties form in association with religious communities: Christian democratic parties emerged across Europe after World War II — the German Christian Democratic Union and the Italian Christian Democratic Party among them — associated with Catholic social thought yet autonomous from church organizations, and they became major governing forces. Religious participation in politics takes many organizational forms, and none of them by itself reveals a country’s constitutional arrangement.

Religion and national identity

Religion can also be woven into a people’s sense of nationhood. In pre-Christian civilizations, Britannica notes, people typically worshipped the gods of the state, religion being in such cases a department of the state; among the ancient Israelites, revealed law constituted the law of the people. Later, established churches tied one tradition to a country’s public identity, as with the Church of England. Modern national life continues the pattern in softer forms: civil religion research shows nations drawing on religious language and ritual in ceremonies that mark the state — inaugurations, holidays, memorials. None of this means that every member of a nation shares one religion; it means that national identity and religious identity are frequently intertwined, with the strength of the tie varying by country and over time.

The secularization debate

One of the most contested questions in the study of religion and politics is whether modernization reduces religion’s public role. The secularization thesis holds that it does: as societies industrialize, rationalize, and diversify, religion loses social and political influence. The claim has a long pedigree — OpenStax notes that Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Freud anticipated this decline, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy attributes predictions of religion’s disappearance or privatization to Marx, Weber, and, at one time, Peter Berger. The evidence cuts both ways. Religion remains publicly influential, shaping political culture in liberal democracies; the United States is comparatively religious among wealthy democracies; and yet the share of American adults with no religious affiliation has grown — 26 percent in a 2019 Pew survey, up from 17 percent in 2009 — while several European countries report lower observance. Scholars disagree about how to weigh these trends, and the debate remains open.

Contested cases, studied neutrally

Several live disputes belong to this topic, and the academic task is to describe them accurately rather than to take sides. Political theorists, for example, disagree about what role religious reasons may play in justifying coercive law in pluralistic democracies: some hold that citizens should be able to offer a plausible secular rationale for the laws they support, others deny that such restraint is justified, and still others argue that religious orthodoxy and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. The boundaries of separation in the United States are similarly contested, with courts and legislatures resolving particular cases. And scholars disagree about how to interpret data on religious decline and persistence. A neutral study names the positions, attributes them, and examines the evidence; it does not adjudicate which side is correct.