Proper Role Of Religion Research Articles

Influences of Social Class on the Negotiation of Authority and Community in Practice of Islam in America

Abstract This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of religious practice in a working-class and middle-class Muslim American community. Given the small sample size (N = 18), this study is exploratory and suggests avenues for future research on social class and religious practice among Muslim Americans. The results indicate that different social classes have different views regarding the proper role of religion in their lives. Moreover, social class provides people with unequal resources to meet certain demands placed on them by their religious community and society in general. Other aspects of community life (e.g., social networks) also intervene and mediate institutional relationships and affect religious practice. The social and cultural elements that facilitate perceived compliance with a particular interpretation of religious praxis can be analysed in terms of social and cultural capital. This study suggests that social and cultural capital can help scholars understand differences in religious practice among Muslims across different localities and classes.

Unpacking the Determinants of Outrage and Recognition in Public Discourse: Insights Across Socio-Cultural Divides, Political Systems, and Media Types

The degree to which civility norms are upheld or violated is an important criterion in evaluating the democratic quality of public debates. We investigate civility across media types, political systems, and levels of socio-cultural division, offering a comparative perspective on how these factors shape levels of civility in public debates around a key question for societies around the world: What is the proper role of religion in public life? Capturing both positive and negative forms of civility (i.e., recognition and outrage) on multiple levels of analysis, we compile and analyze an original large-scale dataset of news items published during August 2015 until July 2016 in six democracies (Australia, Germany, Lebanon, Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA) across three types of media (printed newspapers, news websites, and political blogs). We find that mediated discourse was heavier on outrage in mixed political systems (Germany and Turkey) than in ‘purely’ majoritarian and consensus systems. Public debate in deeply divided countries contained more outrage but also more recognition compared to less divided countries, with newspapers and news websites mitigating outrage discourse compared to political blogs. Blogs also emerged as less nurturing of recognition than newspapers and news websites.

Democracy and secularism: remarks on an ongoing dispute

This paper focus on the disputed issue concerning the proper role of religion in politics, confronting the contributions of three major contemporary political thinkers about democracy and secularism. I present, first, Charles Taylor’s characterization of secularist regimes as attempts to secure the basic principles of the modern moral order. Next, I argue that John Rawls’s growing interest in the relation between religion and democracy led him to an even more inclusive view of public reason. Thirdly, I show that Jurgen Habermas preserves a distinction between faith and knowledge that proves essential to grasping the debate over the place of religion in the public sphere. All three thinkers are concerned with the appropriate forum for the basic political language of the secular state. In a nutshell, my interpretation highlights a much greater proximity between Habermas and Rawls on political justification, on the one hand, and between the former and Taylor regarding the normative basis for the secular state, on the other hand, than their various interventions seem to indicate.

Religious politics and secular states: Egypt, India and the United States

This comparative analysis probes why conservative renderings of religious tradition in the United States, India, and Egypt remain so influential in the politics of these three ostensibly secular societies. The United States, Egypt, and India were quintessential models of secular modernity in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Islamists challenged the Egyptian government, India witnessed a surge in Hindu nationalism, and the Christian right in the United States rose to dominate the Republican Party and large swaths of the public discourse. Using a nuanced theoretical framework that emphasizes the interaction of religion and politics, Scott W. Hibbard argues that three interrelated issues led to this state of affairs. First, as an essential part of the construction of collective identities, religion serves as a basis for social solidarity and political mobilization. Second, in providing a moral framework, religion's traditional elements make it relevant to modern political life. Third, and most significant, in manipulating religion for political gain, political elites undermined the secular consensus of the modern state that had been in place since the end of World War II. Together, these factors sparked a new era of right-wing religious populism in the three nations. Although much has been written about the resurgence of religious politics, scholars have paid less attention to the role of state actors in promoting new visions of religion and society. Religious Politics and Secular States fills this gap by situating this trend within long-standing debates over the proper role of religion in public life.

Religious liberty in America: the First Amendment in historical and contemporary perspective

In recent years a series of highly publicized controversies has focused attention on what are arguably the sixteen most important words in the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The ongoing court battles over the inclusion of the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, the now annual cultural quarrel over Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays, and the political promotion of faith-based initiatives to address social problems - all reflect competing views of the meaning of the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment.Such disputes, as Bruce T. Murray shows, are nothing new. For more than two hundred years Americans have disagreed about the proper role of religion in public life and where to draw the line between church and state. In this book, he re-examines these debates and distills the volumes of commentary and case law they have generated. He analyzed not only the changing contours of religious freedom but also the phenomenon of American civil religion, grounded in the notion that the nation's purpose is sanctified by a higher authority - an idea that can be traced back to the earliest New England colonists and remains deeply ingrained in the American psyche.Throughout the book, Murray connects past and present, tracing the historical roots of contemporary controversies. He considers why it is that a country founded on the separation of church and state remains singularly religious among nations, and concludes by showing how the Supreme Court's thinking about the religious liberty clauses has evolved since the late eighteenth century.

Pulpits Versus Ivory Towers: Socializing Agents and Evolution Attitudes*

Objective. Although debate concerning the theory of evolution is part of an ongoing U.S. dialogue over the proper role of religion in society, academics have provided little in the way of systematic understanding of public opinion on this issue. Important questions, such as the relative influence of socializing agents—religion and education—in shaping attitudes on evolution remain unanswered. Building on socialization and cognitive accessibility theories, we offer a framework for predicting public opinion on human origins and the teaching of evolution in public schools.Methods. We model attitudes on evolution and related policy through analysis of data from a 2005 national survey of U.S. adults.Results. Our analysis suggests that religion and education are key predictors of opinion, but that gender, partisanship, and ideology also play an important role.Conclusion. The socializing agent of religion outweighs the effect of education on attitudes related to evolution.

Is Public Reason Counterproductive?

The debate over the proper role of religion in public life has raged on for decades and shows little signs of slowing down. Proponents of restrictive accounts of public reason have proceeded under the assumption that religious and deep moral disagreement constitutes a threat to social stability that must be tamed. In contrast to this linking pluralism with the threat of instability, there exists within political theory a competing, according to which pluralism affirmatively contributes to stability by creating incentives for groups to moderate their demands. Whether the scary story or happy story is a more accurate reflection of our reality is a difficult empirical question, but one that ought to matter a great deal to discussions of public reason. Acting as if the scary story were true when the happy story is in fact operating will lead proponents of public reason to stifle the healthful effects of robust pluralism, degrading the quality of public deliberation and ultimately undermining stability. In other words, if the happy story turns out to be the right one, restrictive accounts of public reason may turn out to be counterproductive, hastening the very deliberative and social harms they aim to forestall.

The Political Marketplace of Religion

The law of the religion clauses is primarily a judicial exercise in mediating the inherent conflict between the clauses, for some accommodations of religion are required by the free exercise clause and other accommodations of religion are prohibited by the establishment clause. Judicial mediation of this tension will produce one of four distinctive patterns, each characterized by the relative degree of deference the judiciary displays toward legislative judgments of appropriate accommodation that are claimed to offend the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, or both. Judicial primacy is the pattern in which the Court displays the least deference toward legislative judgments of religious accommodation, by means of robust enforcement of both clauses. Legislative primacy is the polar opposite of judicial primacy. Under legislative primacy the Court defers to legislative judgments of religious accommodation by lax enforcement of both clauses. Judicial secularism is a pattern by which the Court vigorously enforces the establishment clause and loosely enforces the free exercise clause, thus restricting the ability of legislatures to decide when to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but leaving them with relatively greater freedom to decide whether or not to accommodate religious conduct. Judicial accommodation is a pattern by which the Court energetically enforces the free exercise clause to require many accommodations of religious conduct, but is less willing to strike down other types of accommodations that allegedly violate the establishment clause. The result of judicial accommodation is that legislatures are given considerable freedom to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but are required to accommodate religious conduct. When the law of the religion clauses began to develop in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century it developed toward the judicial primacy pattern, but as the century, waned and turned the millenial milepost the law of the religion clauses has begun to assume the shape of legislative primacy. This change has been influenced by political and cultural changes. The de facto Protestant establishment that persisted from the nation's beginning to the twentieth century collapsed by mid-century and in its wake a new coalition of religious and secular allies began to press for broader governmental assistance to religion. At the same time the age of modernity - the Enlightenment commitment to rationalism as the avenue to truth, which had replaced the medieval commitment to religious faith - began to be undermined by post-modernism, the belief that there are no universal truths. Modernity had posed a conflict between two competing explanations of truth; post-modernism accepts that no account can be known to be true. The paradoxical result is that religion has been freed from the margins to which modernity had consigned it. Moreover, much of traditional religion has been replaced by a distinctively post-modern spirituality, a preoccupation with self-understanding that borrows eclectically from many ways of apprehending transcendent reality, both religious and secular. The resulting religious pluralism has increased the pressure upon political actors to accommodate a variety of religions and, simultaneously, made imperative the need to avoid compelling governments to accommodate the limitless variety of conduct that may be the product of religious belief. Legislative primacy produces both behavioral and doctrinal effects. The principal behavioral effect is to encourage a political marketplace of religion, in which religious and secular actors engage in rent seeking in the form of government benefits to religion. Benefits, however, can come in the form of favors bestowed on any given rent seeker or burdens placed on rival rent seekers. By-products of religious rent seeking include increased proselytizing, because successful proselytizers will secure an advantage in religious rent seeking, and increased contentiousness concerning the proper role of religion in public life. The likely doctrinal effects of legislative primacy include the terminal irrelevance of Lemon, increased emphasis on non-discrimination between religious groups, a sharper conflict between the competing endorsement and coercion tests for detecting establishment clause violations, and a heightened judicial focus upon the legislative purpose underlying ostensibly neutral measures that deliver religious effects. While it is too soon to know whether legislative primacy will ameliorate or exacerbate religious conflict; it is not too soon to declare that we are entering a new era of the law of the religion clauses. Perhaps the metaphysics of post-modernism will produce sufficient religious toleration that the political dynamic of religious rent seeking will moderate, and the result will be an increase in aggregate preference satisfaction without destabilizing side effects. But it is also possible that the mixture of extreme religious pluralism, post-modern uncertainty, and religious rent seeking will prove to be a volatile mixture.

Essay. The Supreme Court and the pedagogy of religious studies: constitutional parameters for the teaching of religion in public schools

The United-States' Supreme Court uses the idea of objective pedagogy to define the proper role of religion in public school classrooms. The justices tend to leave this idea undefined, except to oppose objectivity to advocacy. Current pedagogical theory challenges this opposition. Moreover, educators often translate the Court's idea of objectivity into an exclusion of some methodologies in religious studies, like theology. A reformulation of religious studies pedagogy could not only meet the Court's standards on neutrality but also lead to a more engaging and open pedagogical response to the religious pluralism represented in public classrooms.

Religion, Politics, and Abortion

This essay - which was the basis of my Philip J.McElroy Lecture at the University of Detroit Mercy in April 2001 - is the final installment in a series of five essays on the proper role of religiously grounded morality in the politics and law of the United States. The contemporary American debate about religion in politics is partly animated and shaped by two large controversies that are at once both moral and in character: the controversies over same-sex unions and abortion. Addressing the issue of religion in politics without addressing those two controversies would be like staging Hamlet without the prince. In two other essays in the series of which this essay is a part, I focus on the controversy over same-sex unions. In this essay, speaking in particular to religious believers who hold (as I do) that reliance on religiously grounded morality is neither illegitimate in a liberal democracy nor unconstitutional in the United States, I turn to the moral/political controversy that, in the last generation, has been the most difficult and divisive of all: abortion. To an even greater extent than the controversy over same-sex unions, the abortion controversy looms large in the background of the debate about the proper role of religion in the politics of the United States. More than any other American controversy in the second half of the twentieth century, the abortion controversy has been a principal, if sometimes unspoken, occasion of the debate about religion in politics. My overarching aim, in this essay, is to address the abortion controversy in a way that is true to each of two propositions. I defend the first proposition in two other essays in the series of which this essay is a part: A citizen's religious faith has a legitimate, important role to play in her politics. The second proposition is at least as well illustrated by the moral/political controversy over abortion as by any other: In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, political issues deal with complex problems of justice, every solution for which contains morally ambiguous elements.

Jewish Perspectives on the Role of Religion in the Political Process

The American people are relative newcomers to the question: What is the proper role of religion in the political process? For we have been wrestling with this issue for only a little over two hundred years. On the other hand, the Jewish community has had some 2500 years to balance our Jewish identity with our citizenship in the Diaspora. The insights we have gained in this process provide some understanding of the confusion which buffets America today. I wish to begin with the basic question: According to Jewish law ( Halakhah ), how should Jews interact with the legal and political process of a non-Jewish country? Halakhah is the legal system of Judaism, by which the traditional Jew regulates public and private life. Since it arose in a culture which recognized no distinction between “religious” and “secular” law, it was, throughout most of Jewish history, the ultimate, binding source of order in Jewish society. The Halakhah includes rules regarding civil and criminal jurisprudence, ceremonial observances, and day-to-day activities.