A World Survey of Religion and the State

Abstract

This book delves into the extent of government involvement in religion between 1990 and 2002 using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The study is based on the Religion and State dataset, which includes 175 governments across the globe, all of which are addressed individually in this book. The forms of involvement examined in this study include whether the government has an official religion, whether some religions are given preferential treatment, religious discrimination against minority religion, government regulation of the majority religion, and religious legislation. The study shows that government involvement in religion is ubiquitous, that it increased significantly during this period, and that only a minority of states, including a minority of democracies, have separation of religion and state. These findings contradict the predictions of religion's reduced public significance found in modernization and secularization theory. The findings also demonstrate that state religious monopolies are linked to reduced religious participation.

A New Agenda for Immigration and Citizenship Policy Research

“…Yet as already mentioned above, over the last 10 years researchers have started to build policy databases that allow large-N and across time comparisons (for an overview, see Helbling, 2016). The citizenship and migration field has thus followed other fields in political science such as those studying democracy (Coppedge et al, 2011;Munck & Verkuilen, 2002), the state-church relationship (Chaves & Cann, 1992;Fox, 2008;Grim & Finke, 2006), rule of law regulations (Skaaning, 2010), and electoral systems (Teorell & Lindstedt, 2010), where similar developments toward index-building have taken place. Helbling (2016, p. 29) counts four databases that focus exclusively on citizenship regulations, five that combine citizenship and integration, and 14 that measure immigration policies.…”

Leo Tolstoy’s Anticlericalism in Its Context and Beyond: A Case against Churches and Clerics, Religious and Secular

“…Despite this, however, in some European countries, the subsistence of the clergy is funded by the state; in others, Christian "heritage" forms an integral part of national identity (church property might be maintained and preserved by state funds, for instance); in many, the symbols and iconography of one are present in the other; and so on. In short, religion still influences politics and vice versa, even in much of Western Europe (see for instance: [78][79][80]). The pact between church and state which Tolstoy criticised so vehemently still persists to a non-negligible degree.…”

Towards New Maps of Global Human Values, Based on World Values Survey (6) Data

“…For that reason, it's a welcome development that nowadays empirically oriented political scientists and sociologists have begun to publish comparative studies on their own on comparing religions (Juergensmeyer et al, 2013;Röhrich, 2004Röhrich, , 2010. This research effort, just to mention a few, produced already important comparative studies on the relationship of the globalized denominations to the state apparatus in 175 countries (Fox, 2000), or on the relationship of religions to violence and terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000(Juergensmeyer, , 2011. Even more, the use of massive comparative evidence based on global opinion surveys to compare the actual different cultural systems of the world "on the ground", is relatively new, and outstanding attempts to arrive at such empirically well-founded comparisons already include Barro, 2004;Guio et al, 2003;and Inglehart and Norris, 2003. In the following, we apply the logic of our new "Overall Value Development Index" to the data contained in the World Values Survey about the major global religious denominations.…”