Political philosophers widely assume that public reason liberalism is hostile to religious contributions to liberal politics. My dissertation argues that this assumption is a mistake. Properly understood, public reason liberalism does not privilege religious or secular reasoning; a compelling conception of public reason liberalism can balance the claims of secular citizens and citizens of faith. I develop a framework that can resolve the tensions between liberalism and faith not only at a theoretical level but in the practical matters of dialogue, public policy, institutional design and constitutional law.

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Public opinion regarding crime-related issues is a challenging matter for researchers and politicians alike. An ill-informed public with regards to crime, punishment and other aspects of the criminal justice system leads to discontent and demands for harsher policies to strengthen public safety. Politicians harness public opinion to secure votes, and this can result in punitive policies that are founded on erroneous beliefs. The objective of this study is to look more deeply into people’s attitudes towards crime and punishment, and to consider why Greek people hold the views that they do and how these views are constructed. A multi-method approach was adopted for the implementation of this study. Quantitative methods were used to map the scope of attitudes towards crime and punishment in Greece. Qualitative methods were then appropriate to analyse and explore how attitudes are constructed and investigate specific factors in more depth. Greek culture was found to be one of the core issues, and in this context the Greek Orthodox faith and the traditional tight Greek family unit indicate that the stronger are the Greek people’s adherence to their traditional religious and family values, the less punitive are their attitudes towards crime and punishment. However, factors such as the media, attitudes towards immigrants and the contemporary political scene were found to cause distorted perceptions, leading to lack of confidence in the Greek criminal justice system.

This thesis examines American perceptions of William Ewart Gladstone in the religious and secular press from 1868 to 1900. The scope of the study encompasses his role as a Christian apologist and his engagement in public affairs where religion and politics converged. The opinions of Americans are examined in the general categories of evangelicals, Roman Catholics, secular news organs and to a lesser extent Unitarians and agnostics. Gladstone’s reputation in the United States is followed through much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, beginning shortly after the close of the Civil War when Americans in the North held him in disrepute for his impolitic acknowledgement of Southern nationhood. This thesis demonstrates that American opinions of Gladstone were transformed as they increasingly perceived him to be a champion of Liberal reform and religious liberty and, especially for conservative evangelicals, a stalwart defender of Christian truth and civilisation against the rising tide of modern secularism. It also suggests that a pervasive anti-Catholicism inspired many in the United States to support Gladstone’s political causes. Finally, this study demonstrates that Americans projected their own values and myths on to the statesman. For many, he came to embody their progressive worldview with respect to the spread of religious and political liberty.

This study expands the literature on clergy as political actors by shedding light on the relative electoral performance of clergy who hold office in state legislatures. Kinney’s 2008 study on the occurrence of clergy in local office, as well as other works showing the divergence in attitudes towards church-state separation among racial groups and religious traditions, illustrate potential factors affecting the performance of clergy in elections. The analyses examine the factors related to differences in vote percentages, margins of victory, and campaign funding between clergy and non-clergy. These factors include racial and religious traditions and how their effects interact. The analyses find that clergy-legislators receive larger vote percentages, larger margins of victory, but less campaign funding. These effects, with the exception of campaign funding, tend to be the strongest when looking at black Protestant clergy compared to mainline Protestant clergy and non-clergy legislators.

In its Constitution, postcolonial India acknowledges the caste-based practice of "untouchability" as a social and historical wrong, and seeks to redress the effects of this wrong through compensatory discrimination. Dalits are recognized by the state as having suffered the effects of untouchability, and thus as eligible for statutory protections and remedial measures, on the condition that they profess no religion "different from the Hindu religion" (a condition later expanded to include Sikhism and Buddhism as well). The present work charts the career of the idea underlying this condition of recognition - the idea that the "untouchable," insofar as she has not converted to Islam, Christianity, or another "world religion," must be Hindu - and its consequences, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Historically and ethnographically grounded in the community life of the sanitation labor castes - those Dalits castes that perform the vast majority of South Asia's sanitation work - in the north Indian city of Lucknow, the study tracks the idea from its ruptive colonial beginnings to its propagation by Hindu nationalists, induction into mainstream nationalism and installation in the edifice of postcolonial law. This is also an account of the everyday effects of postcolonial India's regime of recognition in the present: what it confers, what it transforms, what hides in its shadows.

This dissertation analyzes how government agencies influenced the religious expression of Mormons of the Territory of Utah in the 1870s and 1880s, Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and Muslims of Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 2013. I argue that nineteenth-century federal marshals and judges in the Territory of Utah, mid-twentieth century FBI agents throughout the United States, and New York Police Department officers in post-September 11 New York were prompted to monitor each religious community by their concerns about polygamy, communism, and terrorism, respectively. The government agencies did not just observe the communities, but they probed precisely what constituted religion itself.

The majority of political science research on religion and politics examines how religious variables influence political outcomes. Either implicitly or explicitly, this literature posits a one-way causal arrow from religion to politics. This dissertation argues that in many developing countries, however, religious and political change have been endogenous (interrelated). This is particularly true in weak states, where established religious groups mobilized to promote third wave democratization. In such contexts, politicians simultaneously faced heightened political competition and established religious groups mobilized to demand accountable democratic governance after the Cold War. Under these conditions, I argue that politicians faced incentives to intervene in the religious sphere, and to actively propagate conversionary religious movements. In doing so, politicians sought to cultivate both moral authority and new constituencies that would compete with the established "watch dog" religious groups. I term this strategy "politicized propagation," and argue that it is an important mechanism undergirding the endogenous relationship between religious and political change in the region. Although the theoretical argument advanced in this dissertation is general, I assess the argument empirically by focusing on the explosive rise of pentecostal (born again) Christianity as a politically salient identity in some, but not all, sub-Saharan states in recent decades. I begin by evaluating the dissertation’s broadest claim — that religion and politics are endogenous — at the cross-national level. Specifically, I assess the degree to which a country’s pentecostal population share in 2010 is predicted by that country’s (i) level of political competition in the 1990s and 2000s, and (ii) prior mobilization by established religions for democratization. The evidence reveals a strong, and significant positive correlation between these political context variables and pentecostal population shares in the region. Moreover, through a controlled comparison of born again movements (i.e., charismatics and pentecostals), I am able to adjudicate between the appeal of born again doctrine, and the organizational features of pentecostal churches (such as decentralized network structures, and relative freedom from transnational oversight and rigid training requirements for leaders), which make pentecostal churches accessible and malleable political allies. The dissertation’s cross-national findings therefore refute alternative explanations for cross-national variation in the rise of pentecostalism, as well as the null hypothesis that political and religious change were not endogenous in sub-Saharan states. The latter half of the dissertation proceeds to evaluate causal process mechanisms by examining church-state relations in a single case over time. Specifically, I focus on Zambia, a predominantly Christian nation, where I collected quantitative and qualitative data in 2011 and 2013. My analyses of these data reveal that Zambia's ruling party systematically targeted local pentecostal churches with cash grants, media permits, urban land plots, and political appointments between 1991 and 2011. Moreover, I find that the government was significantly more likely to allocate perks, such as lucrative tax breaks or church business licenses, in the lead up to national elections. This evidence provides strong suggestive support for the theory of politicized propagation. Zambians' subjective perceptions of the relationship between different religious groups and the state are consistent with the theory of politicized propagation, but also belie the wide-ranging motivations of pentecostal converts. I conclude with reflections on the impact of politicized propagation, as well as the ability of this argument to illuminate political dynamics of born again Christian movements in Latin America, and Islamic movements in sub-Saharan Africa.

China’s dramatic religious revival over the last three decades has defied two dominant theories in the study of religion and politics: the secularization theory and the market theory of religion. Put simply, the former predicts declining religious significance along with economic modernization; and the latter holds that religious vitality is a function of state regulation. Not only is religious observance on the rise despite continued economic growth, but also the upsurge of religion has coincided with the atheist state’s unceasing effort to curb religious expansion. This dissertation focuses on the material dimension of religious revival. It investigates the mixed material and ideational incentives of both state and religious actors in the processes of temple restoration, their interactions, and the resulting variety of temple autonomy. One of the key findings is that mass temple restoration has been greatly driven by state agents acting on their own interests. The atheist state and its local agents encourage temple reconstruction and tolerate priestly autonomy when doing so is expedient to social stability and economic growth imperative to their political survival. This dissertation argues that temple restoration has become a repertoire in local economic development. Local state agents seek to restore temples and redirect their functions to mass tourist consumption. Due to the immobility of temple assets, aspiring religious leaders seek to demonstrate political conformity and the temple’s economic contribution in their struggle for religious autonomy. As a result, Buddhism and Taoism have been battling with constant pressure of local state-led religious commodification. The close tie between temples and the interests of various state agents has resulted in uncertain religious development and a state-religion relationship that is simultaneously cooperative and contentious. The research hence contributes to our understanding of the antinomies of authoritarian state legitimation wherein state-religion enmities are endogenous to the system of economic development and religious governance. More broadly, the research situates the upsurge of religion in the larger cultural and institutional contexts and explores less-studied top-down religious institutionalization and its sociopolitical consequences. It therefore enriches the study of religion and politics by bringing the modernizing state and its local representatives to the forefront as the agent of secularization as well as religious restoration.

Low public acceptance of evolution among Americans in general, and conservative Protestants specifically, has recently received increased attention among scholars of both religion and the public understanding of science. At the same time, members of another major religious tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), reject evolution at rates similar to evangelical Christians, yet there remains a dearth of studies examining the lack of acceptance of evolution among Mormons. Using a nationally representative survey of Americans that contains an adequate number of LDS respondents for advanced statistical analyses, this study examines patterns of evolution acceptance or rejection among Mormons. Findings reveal a moderating relationship between political identity and education, such that educational attainment has a positive relationship with evolution acceptance among political moderates and liberals, but a negative association among political conservatives. These findings highlight the central role played by the politicization of evolution in low rates of evolution acceptance among American Mormons and emphasize the need to—where possible—examine relations between ‘science and religion’ within and across specific religious traditions.