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AbstractWhy do some ethno-political organizations resort to violence while others abstain? Are ethno-political organizations with a religious/Islamist ideology more violence-prone compared to non-religious ones? In addition to commonly cited factors such as grievances, political opportunities/constraints, resources, and organizational characteristics, I argue that the existence of youth bulges in a society also increases the probability of adopting violent strategies by ethno-political organizations. Frustrated young males under repressive and authoritarian regimes tend to be likely recruits for violent organizations. I use the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset, which includes 118 organizations in 16 countries of the Middle East and North Africa to test my hypotheses. The findings suggest that youth bulges, economic grievances, group fractionalization, external support, and state repression increase the probability of use of violent strategies by ethno-political organizations whereas religious ideology is insignificant. Youth bulges foster violence especially in autocratic countries.

AbstractThis article offers a normative evaluation of the Christian Right's impact on American democracy. It argues that our response to the question of whether this movement enhances or diminishes democracy turns on our understanding of the ideal of democracy. When viewed as a participatory ideal, the Christian Right's mobilizing practices enhance democracy. When viewed as a deliberative ideal, the Christian Right's practices diminish the deliberative virtues of toleration and free and open debate. These conflicting assessments point to an important democratic paradox. They show that the very same practices that inspire the participatory virtues of active political engagement also incite the deliberative vices of intolerance and polarization. To address this paradox, I argue that we ought to strive for a balance between pure participation and pure deliberation. The primary problem with Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family, I will argue, is that they tend to disrupt this balance. They inspire active participation at the expense of deliberation.

AbstractThe article examines the economic vision of the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda focusing on its supposed transformation from a party with socialist rhetoric to one embracing fully the tenets of neo-liberalism. The article argues that such a transformation has been quite easy to achieve because the party and its leaders were always more pragmatic than ideological when it comes to economic policy-making. In fact, the party is more at ease with neo-liberal economics because of the electoral constituency it serves and because of its internal structure and ways of operating, which reward those members who display the virtues that the neo-liberal economy also values.

AbstractScholars have long recognized the impact of Hebrew prophecy on the rhetoric of the American Founding era, but they have assumed it is all of one type, the American Jeremiad, a clarion call for political action. In fact, biblical rhetoric during this era mirrors three types of Old Testament prophecy formulated at three distinct moments in ancient Biblical history: before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE. I refer to these as repentance, Jeremiad, and disappointment. I interpret sermons by three leading Protestant ministers in order to demonstrate that all three types of Hebraic prophecy were prevalent during this era, but only one of them, the Jeremiad, seeks to inspire political action; second, the Jeremiad was prominent only during the Revolutionary War. Before the war, and after the ratification of the Constitution, the two quietistic modes of prophecy, repentance, and disappointment, are more prevalent. I conclude by speculating about what the American founders might think of the contemporary rhetorical landscape, where the Jeremiad has become dominant, drowning out more moderate forms of biblical discourse.

AbstractPolitical debates over religious freedom in Australia became prominent in the context of marriage equality, achieved in 2017. The Australian Christian Right (ACR) has driven these debates, but there is little research focusing on its discourse of religious freedom. This article examines a range of texts from ACR actors. Using discourse and theoretical analyses, we identify three key turns in the religious freedom rhetoric of the ACR: "ontological security," "existential stress," and "meaning vertigo." We also explore how mimetic ACR discourse is compared to the United States' Christian Right (USCR). As with the USCR, this research demonstrates how the ACR—suffering meaning vertigo and aiming to re-secure its previously taken-for-granted worldview—has successfully reframed the discourse of religious freedom by positioning itself as a besieged minority.

AbstractSeizing upon the opportunity afforded by a Republican primary contest in which a candidate backed by the Christian Right took on a candidate with connections to the party establishment, we examine the strength of the Christian right at the grassroots in Ohio. Using individual-level data compiled from an original survey instrument administered to over 1,000 Republican primary voters just after the May, 2006 primary, we present a more comprehensive model of both Christian Right support and the effect of Christian Right support on the vote choice. Instead of assuming a grassroots presence underpinning the movement, we assert and test the argument that natural elements of the social structure inhibit effective group access to collections of supporters. In doing so, we provide an explanation for the often observed gulf between movement identifiers and opinion-based supporters.

AbstractScholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in commerce, public administration, and the professions were more likely to sign the movement's petitions. The movement's supporters were also overwhelmingly literate. Contrary to expectations, the early Brotherhood also attracted support from Egyptians employed in agriculture, albeit less than we would expect given the prevalence of agrarian workers in the population. A case study tracing Muslim Brotherhood branch formation and petition activism in a Nile Delta village illustrates how literate, socially mobile agrarian families were key to the propagation of the movement in rural areas.

AbstractIn 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.

Abstract
Charles Taylor's "radical redefinition of secularism" has a significant place in the post-9/11 research on secularism. He replaces secularism's "old" paradigm, separation between state and religious institutions, with a "new" one, responding to diversity. Taylor appeals to French laïcité in-itself as the old paradigm. With an analysis of the parliamentary debates at the institutional origins of the old paradigm in the Third French Republic, this article questions whether Taylor's redefinition of secularism is truly radical. This historical intervention in Taylor's "radical redefinition" reformulates his novelty as the reconfiguration of the relation between generality of laws and meaning worlds in the institutional response to diversity. The Third Republic pushed generality in laws against diverse meaning worlds. Taylor (with Jocelyn Maclure) demands that general laws reasonably accommodate "meaning-giving convictions." I explore this reversal and argue that it's questionable Taylor offers a radical redefinition of secularism—or even that we need one.

AbstractInternational discussions regarding the environment have too narrowly focused on contributions by secular actors. The Catholic Church, recognized for its influential role in the democratization processes of the 1990s, also has a long-standing position regarding climate change, yet remains understudied. How can the Church contribute to the international community's debates regarding the environment and climate change? Using the framework of constructivism and Jurgen Habermas' concept of institutional translation, I argue that the Church is a norm entrepreneur that promotes a foreign policy of human/integral ecology. The most recent articulation of this foreign policy is Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si', which was referenced by the Holy See at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021. The Church's participation at COP26 was the latest animation and application of the Church's foreign policy; I examine the Church's efforts to change the narrative on the environment toward a shared, global responsibility.

AbstractThe cultural prerequisites of democracy have been receiving considerable attention over the past decades. Confucian values are regarded as incompatible with liberal democracy and are considered to impede democratization. This article explores the effect of Confucian values on the commitment of ordinary Chinese people to democracy. Support for democracy is divided into attachment to democracy and adherence to liberal democratic values. Attachment to democracy indicates explicit support for democracy, while adherence to liberal democratic values reflects implicit support for democracy. This study examines the impacts of Confucian values on each of these areas. The results show that there was no evidence that Confucian values inhibit the Chinese public's support for democracy in a democratic transition, but they are negatively connected to liberal democratic values, which are fundamental to the resilience and consolidation of a fledgling democracy. However, liberal democratic values are prone to increase with the generational shift.

AbstractConservative Christian groups in Britain have been involved in a number of high profile and controversial policy issues. Scholarly research into the political activities of such groups, however, remains limited. This article addresses this lacuna by exploring the collective action frames deployed by conservative Christian groups in their attempts to influence national level policies and debates. Drawing on elite interviews with group representatives, it argues that these frames have been constructed largely in response to the pressures of secularization, but have, in many respects, become secularized themselves.

AbstractThis article is an historical study of the Nicaraguan revolution that makes a case in favor of interpreting revolutionary stances/action as driven by religious dialogue. To this end, seminary dialogues that assumed revolutionary significance during the 1970s in Solentiname, Nicaragua, are studied. Institutional shifts in religious meaning, both in the region and Nicaragua, are historically detailed. Three dialogues fromThe Gospel in Solentiname, a four-volume collection of Bible-centered dialogues, are analyzed. These are evaluated in terms of their role for revolutionary outlooks. Innovative and developmental features of dialogue are identified in order to underscore the revolutionary potential of dialogue.

An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the Church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care, and political practice amounted not to a culturally backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalisation. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice