The crisis as a constrained opportunity? Catholic organisations and territorial welfare in the Basque Country and Emilia-Romagna

Interactions between politics and religion are frequently reduced to ethical and civilisational issues which are politicised and given prominence in the media. Focusing instead on the role of religious – here Catholic – actors in the local experience of social economy and welfare provision in times of economic crisis helps instead to highlight the discrete interactions between politics and religion. In particular, the strong involvement of religious actors, beyond their traditional charity-oriented activity, also concerns more solidarity-oriented socioeconomic experiences as well as political advocacy. These articulations generate new forms of politicisation with respect to both social movements and policymakers. In this article I address these issues comparatively in a Spanish region (the Basque Autonomous Community) and an Italian region (Emilia-Romagna).     

Religion at the European Parliament: the Italian case

Italy is a predominantly Catholic country that developed historically on the basis of a strong, dominant religion and weak state institutions. Yet, openly clerical parties, direct advocates of the interests of the Catholic Church, have nowadays virtually disappeared and the relevance of the religious cleavage is decreasing, in favour of a more indirect support for these interests, mainly among moderate and conservative forces. Although the overall level of secularisation in Italy has increased, the degree of religiosity of Italian society remains one of the highest of the 27 member-states of the European Union (EU) and polarisation over religious issues in domestic politics remains high, particularly regarding moral values and family matters. In our study we explore the role of religion within the Italian political sphere with regard to the functioning of political representation, by taking into account the sub-national, national and European levels of government. We focus on the attitudes and behaviours of Italian political elites at the EU level. We hypothesise a strong influence of religion on the articulation between national and European politics. Our findings consistently show that the degree of religiosity of the Italian delegation to the European Parliament (EP) is high. However, the impact of such a high degree of religiosity among the members of the EP (MEPs) on their political activities appears less direct than one might predict, while the degree of political secularism is higher among Italian MEPs than among their national or regional counterparts. When we discuss a case study, namely the accession of Turkey to the EU, our data show that the religious attitudes of Italian MEPs play a crucial role in their stance on Turkish accession. The picture that emerges is thus nuanced. Religion significantly impacts on Italian MEPs’ ideological, political and moral attitudes, but plays a smaller role in their activities; while their left-right collocation emerges as the most relevant predictor, despite a number of exceptions.     

Trust,organisational boundaries and gender: Mothers Prayers in Ukraine

This article is focused on the Ukrainian branch of an international prayer network Mothers Prayers and its relations with the hierarchy of the Greek Catholic Church. The argument made here can be located within investigations on the transformations of religion and gender relations under Soviet socialism and the post-Soviet conditions (Buckley 1997; Kormina et al. 2015; Luehrmann 2011; Ngo and Quijada 2015; Wanner 2012). While a gender-focused analysis can undoubtedly help us understand some crucial aspects of this movement’s development, here I put forward a complementary interpretation which stresses the need to understand religious vitality and the role of religion, including religious organisations such as churches, in social and political struggles as an outcome of the Soviet secularisation project. The secularisation politics in the Soviet Union resulted both in the appearance of an ‘ambient faith’ (Engelke 2012; Wanner 2014) in unexpected areas of life and in changes of how people perceive the role of religious organisations in religious and political life. I argue that the praying mothers mobilise their motherhood to challenge the male-dominated hierarchical religious organisation in ways that are implicit and indirect, but nevertheless significant.     

The Influence of Priests on the Political Attitudes of Roman Catholics

For years, scholars in religion and politics have worked under the assumption that clergy wield significant political influence with their congregations. Until recently, however, this assumption had gone largely uninvestigated and undemonstrated. This article helps correct this shortcoming by analyzing the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life for evidence of priestly influence on the political attitudes of Catholic parishioners. Though the data indicate that Catholic priests do, indeed, appear to influence the political attitudes of their parishioners, the nature of this influence is more complex than previously demonstrated. Specifically, pastor ideology is the key predictor of both parishioners' issue positions and political ideology, and influence appears to be restricted to politically liberal pastors.     

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.     

Religions in Europe

The breakdown of European society is changing rapidly, particularly in the field of religion. Culture is of vital importance to the presence of religion in all nations. Religions also have exerted a certain degree of political power, thus influencing the economy and other related spheres of life.The different religions in Europe exhibit a variety of attitudes towards religious pluralism. The religious differences between Western and Eastern Europe depend mainly on issues of national identity related to religious adherence.This essay provides an overview of religion and politics, or Church and state, in Europe. It will conclude with some reflections about possible future developments within religious traditions in Europe. New religious communities and religious organisations are reaching different parts of Europe, sometimes very far from their place of origin. Christianity (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism) is the most widespread religion in contemporary Europe. Catholic religion is well diffused in Europe, but there are substantial differences in belief, behaviour and practice within different Catholic communities. There are various branches of Orthodoxy in Europe, such as the distinct autocephalous churches. In general Orthodox religion is closely aligned with national culture. Islam is also present in Western countries, and its impact is evident.     

Christian protesters for democracy in Taiwan: a study of two American missionaries under Taiwanese martial law

Christians played a significant role in the course of Taiwan’s self-determination movements and the pro-democratic Tangwai movement during the 1960s and 1970s. While most researchers laid their focus on the Presbyterian Church ministers, the stories of Methodist pastor Milo Thornberry and Catholic priest Ronald Boccieri have rarely been mentioned. Thornberry helped Peng Ming-min to escape the country and Boccieri sheltered Chen Chu in his parish church. Consequently, the two American missionaries were listed as personae non gratae and expelled from the island by the Kuomintang (nationalist) regime. Although they were involved in the respective political incidents to different degrees, they had some things in common: compassion for native Taiwanese, concern for social justice and human rights, and conviction in witnessing to the gospel by non-violent action and fighting against injustice. This article uses interviews, autobiographies, memoirs, Foreign Ministry archives and newspapers to recount their stories that have not appeared in the historiography of their churches. It discusses how the Catholic and Methodist Churches maintained harmonious relations with the government for the benefit of their evangelistic work during the period of martial law. Finally it looks into the reasons why the two missionaries dared to disobey their churches’ official positions and the Washington government’s instruction that expatriates in Taiwan should not interfere in local politics.     

Taking liberties and making liberty: religious bounding and political violence in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that the relationship between religion and violent politics is best understood through a focus on religious practice. The case study of the Tamil Catholic Church within Sri Lanka's civil war is presented against a backdrop of Buddhist monk participation in violent insurgency decades earlier. The discrete cases evidence a common preoccupation with management of physical borders and discursive boundaries as actors seek to reproduce themselves and their work as legitimately ‘religious’. Despite relying on remaining ‘pure’ from the dirty political realm, in practice religion is bound to social action and reproduced through the violent circumstances it engages.     

An activist religiosity? Exploring Christian support for the Occupy movement

While Christian involvement in progressive social movements and activism is increasingly recognized, this literature has rarely gone beyond conceptualising religion as a resource to consider instead the ways in which individual activists may articulate their religious identity and how this intersects with the political. Based on ten in-depth interviews with Christian supporters of the London Occupy movement, this study offers an opportunity to respond to this gap by exploring the rich meaning-making processes of these activists. The article suggests that the location of the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral was of central importance in bringing the Christian Occupiers’ religio-political identities to the foreground, their Christianity being defined in opposition to that represented by St Paul’s. The article then explores the religio-political meaning-making of the Christian Occupiers and introduces the term ‘activist religiosity’ as a way of understanding how religion and politics were articulated, and enacted, in similar ways. Indeed, religion and politics became considerably entangled and intertwined, rendering theoretical frameworks that conceptualise religion as a resource increasingly inappropriate. The features of this activist religiosity include post-institutional identities, a dislike of categorisation, and, centrally, the notion of ‘doings’—a predominant focus on engaged, active involvement.     

Religious Engagement,Civic Skills,and Political Participation in Latin America

To what extent has the growth of Evangelicalism in Latin America contributed to political participation across the region? A number of scholars of religion and politics in the United States have suggested that Evangelicalism promotes the development of civic skills necessary for political engagement, while the Catholic Church, due to its hierarchical structure, provides fewer opportunities for skill acquisition. In this paper, we apply this debate to Latin America to test whether civic skills developed in Catholic and Protestant church activities lead to differential participation rates in 18 countries. We utilize the 2014 Pew Religion in Latin America survey to test these effects, and find that Protestant churches do indeed promote skill-developing activities at higher rates, but that Catholics, when involved, are more likely to translate this religious participation into political action. We conclude that political scientists must better understand the organizational role of religion in promoting political engagement worldwide.     

The labor of Job: The biblical text as a parable of human labor

This paper addresses how religion is playing an increasingly important role in empowering anti-nuclear protests at Gongliao in Taiwan. It begins by describing how the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan was originally dependant on the opposition political party, and then examines how growing disaffection with party politics at Gongliao has resulted in a local temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu coming to the forefront of the struggle. This paper frames the dispute as a struggle between three different ways of generating power (and implicitly, of losing power): first, the generation of nuclear power by bureaucrats and scientists working through the industrial sector; second, the generation of political power by opposition politicians and elite campaigners; and third, the generation of religious power by people rooted in local communities, creating an alliance between religious power and secular protest.     

Prayer,Hij # b and the Intif # da : The influence of the Islamic movement on Palestinian women

As Islamic movements are often perceived as only political movements, their effects on society are often overlooked. Based on empirical evidence, this article attempts to show the nature of the influence the Islamist movement in Palestine had on Palestinian women in particular. It formulates such questions as how do the Islamists view the role of women in society according to their political programs and how did Palestinian women respond to these demands in the decade between 1986 and 1996. In personal interviews conducted 1995/96 in the West Bank and Gaza the author asked women from different areas and social backgrounds about their religious attitudes, the importance of religion and their views of the Islamic movement especially during the Intif # da .     

Populism and religion: On the politics of fear

Our societies of fear go along with an increase of populist movements in politics. This article explains the basics of populism and shows how easily it joins highly likely political friend‐enemy patterns. Anthropologically, we have to deal with parochial altruism undergirded by a static type of religion. A further step deals with the relationship between politics and fear by referring to terror management theory and its insight into the relationship between mortality and fear. The concluding part addresses ways out of fear and in what way a dynamic type of religion helps to avoid scapegoating and political enmity.     

Feed the Church,starve the party? Church-state relations and religious political mobilisation in 21 Catholic-majority countries

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines the effects of state religion policy on religious political mobilisation, focusing on the case of the Catholic Church in the post-Cold War era. Catholicism remains politically salient in most Catholic-majority societies, but the presence and success of parties that explicitly mobilise Catholicism in the electoral arena varies enormously. In addition, Catholic-majority countries display a wide variety of institutional arrangements governing the relationship between religion and state. This contribution presents a theoretical framework for analysing the effect of these institutions on the performance of political parties that seek to mobilise religion. Relying on a dataset that covers 137 elections in 21 Catholic-majority countries as well as key measures from the Religion and State (RAS) dataset, this contribution shows that countries with higher levels of state regulation of religion and friendlier religion-state relations are more likely to host parties that mobilise religion; it also suggests that funding for the Catholic Church may constrain such parties.     

The Essentiality of “Culture” in the Study of Religion and Politics

This article reviews various theoretical approaches political scientists employ in the analysis of religion and politics and posits culture as a conceptual bridge between competing approaches. After coming to the study of religion slowly in comparison with other social science disciplines, political science finally has a theoretically diverse and thriving religion and politics subfield. However, political scientists’ contributions to the social scientific study of religion are hampered by a lack of agreement about whether endogenous or exogenous theoretical approaches ought to dominate our scholarship. I assert that the concept of culture—and more specifically, subculture—might help create more connections across theoretical research traditions. I emphasize how the concept of religion‐based subculture is inherent in psychological, social psychological, social movement, and contextual approaches to religion and politics scholarship, and I explore these theoretical connections using the example of religion‐based “us versus them” discourses in contemporary American politics.     

Strategically Prophetic Priests: An Analysis of Competing Principal Influence on Clergy Political Action

We assess clergy political activism dynamics using data from a national survey of Roman Catholic priests. Like their elite counterparts in interest groups and other secular political institutions, clergy encounter expectations and demands from competing principals when determining how to publicly act on key political issues. Building on insights from decades of clergy politics scholarship, we leverage new perspectives of principal-based influence by examining how Catholic priest perception of both local parish finances and diocesan bishop expectations affect their reported political actions. Our findings are consistent with the notion that parish and bishop principals condition priest political behavior, controlling for priest ideology. However, priest political action proves more sensitive to parish financial concerns than bishop encouragement.     

Religion in the Israeli Parliament: a typology

Because religion has been a constant source of social divisions and political conflicts, the role of Judaism in Israel is very often studied through the prism of a rigid religious–secular cleavage.Without denying the contentious character of religion in the political and social arenas, I suggest in this study that a closer look at the usages of religion in Israeli politics offers a more nuanced picture of the role of Judaism in Israel. In order to uphold this thesis, I identify the main usages of Judaism in the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) and scrutinise the extent to which these different mobilisations overlap or crosscut the secular–religious cleavage. This analysis leads to a typology of three usages of religion: religion as a source of authority, religion as a marker of identity and nation, and religion as a source of values. On this basis, I demonstrate that the role of religion in Israel and especially in the Israeli Parliament cannot be reduced to the divide between religious and secular groups. If in its first usage, the religious–secular cleavage indeed predominates, the use of religion as an identity marker does not necessarily lead to a conflict with secular members, while in its final form, religion is mobilised as a resource by members of both groups.     

Second special section on religion and territorial politics in southern Europe

The three articles included in this second special section devoted to the interactions between religion and territorial politics in southern Europe continue the underlying research questions about the multiscalar interactions between religious mobilisation and policymaking, focusing on different denominations and scales of observations. The three articles point out three relevant elements for the analysis of religion and local politics. First, they show how contextualised exogenous factors influence the structures of opportunities for religions in the public and the political spheres. Second, they inchoately reveal the weakness of simplistic readings of the secularisation thesis. Third, they evidence the importance of a local and localised approach in analysing the relationships between religion and politics.     

Are all Socialists Anti-religious? Anti-religiosity and the Socialist Left in 21 Western European Countries (1990–2008)

The political situation in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century has led some to suggest that socialism is some kind of secular religion as opposed to ‘normal’ religion. In modern Europe, however, there have been vibrant Christian socialist movements. This article looks into the different attitudes of socialists towards religion and answers the question whether it is pressure of religious activity or pressure of religious identity that makes socialists resist religion. The results from a multilevel analysis of three waves of the European Values Study (1990–2008) in 21 Western European countries specifically point to an increase in anti-religiosity by socialists in countries marked by Catholic and Orthodox religious identities.     

The Spanish Catholic Church,the public sphere,and the economic recession: rival legitimacies?

Spanish society was severely affected by the post-2008 economic recession. The country’s political institutions were faced with a major crisis of legitimacy that gave birth to new social and political movements. In this context, the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the recession was threefold. Firstly, the recession had an impact on the Church itself, as it reactivated the recurring public debate on Church–State relations and the institutional benefits enjoyed by the Church. Secondly, the recession also provided a limited opportunity for the Church. On a normative level, the Catholic hierarchy used the recession to give voice to its discourse on the moralization of the economy and politics, relating it to recurrent campaigns by the Church on family policies and the territorial unity of Spain. In addition, the social sector of the Church responded to the recession through a program of social work intended to offset the failures of both the market and the public authorities. Thirdly, the social work undertaken by specific sectors of the Church unexpectedly led to forms of political advocacy, independently or alongside anti-austerity or pro-migrant social movements. All these effects sharpened previously existing dividing lines within the Catholic landscape.