This article highlights the methodological necessity of integrating concepts from the sociology of religion into political science research on religion and citizenship. Specifically, it demonstrates how political science can benefit from analytical tools developed in the sociology of religion to better capture the ways religious identities shape political behaviour and interactions with public institutions. Drawing on research on Orthodox Jews in France, I propose an approach that incorporates concepts such as integralism and enclave to systematically analyse the conditions under which religious affiliations influence voting behaviour. This methodological framework addresses existing gaps in political science by providing a more nuanced understanding of how religious commitments structure political engagement and institutional relationships, based on the case of Orthodox Jews in France. This article is grounded in my experience during a political science investigation (2017-2022) on the public regulation of religion in France. It strives to make a more general point: the sociology of religion helps to explain how religion may lead to completely opposite political behaviours or to similar political behaviours that are nevertheless grounded in different motives. In a nutshell, it helps us to understand how religion is constructed as a politically relevant factor.
This article introduces geopolitical symphonia to explain the Moscow Patriarchate's (MP) divergent responses to Russian military interventions in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2022). While both wars involved Orthodox-majority societies, the MP voiced pastoral restraint in Georgia but sacralised war in Ukraine. Drawing on systematic discourse analysis of ecclesiastical statements (2008-2024), the article identifies the mechanism underlying this variation: geopolitical symphonia arises when contested canonical territory activates civilisational narratives, enabling churches to shift from pastoral institutions to theological co-authors of territorial expansion. In Georgia, where the MP recognised Georgian Orthodox jurisdiction, discourse remained euphemistic with no civilisational frame. In Ukraine, the 2018-2019 autocephaly crisis ruptured Moscow's canonical claims, triggering escalatory rhetoric that reframed the 2022 invasion as sacred duty; the lexicon moved from pastoral grief to crusade grammar, culminating in the 2024 World Russian People's Council decree characterising the conflict as a 'Holy War'. Findings show that religious legitimation of violence is conditional, requiring the conjunction of canonical vulnerability and available civilisational repertoires. The framework moves beyond instrumentalist accounts of church-state relations to show how, when transnational jurisdictions are threatened, ecclesiastical institutions become co-producers of sacralised war narratives rather than mere legitimators.
Consumer law rests on the assumption that consumers are rational agents capable of comparing products and services, free of other obligations. This contribution argues that, in the Japanese context, this assumption has been quietly shaped by encounters and comparisons with religious ideologies and practices deemed problematic. Drawing on David Graeber's anthropological theory of value - which holds that the realisation of value always requires a social totality capable of giving meaning to an action - the contribution traces the legislative history of consumer protection in Japan since the 1970s to show that religion and consumer law have been mutually co-constituted. Through parliamentary debates, court judgements, and news reports, the contribution identifies two distinct but related modes of this co-making. In the first, visible in the pyramid scheme scandal of One Family Under the Heavens, religion is embedded in the scheme's cosmological warrant and its roots in a long history of local cooperatives that lawmakers acknowledge without referring to their shared values. In the second, visible in the subsequent history of spiritual sales legislation, religion enters consumer law explicitly, culminating in the 2018 Consumer Contract Law amendment that connects fraudulence to the exploitation of religious belief.
This contribution explores how Cambodian traditional healers (kruu) navigate ambiguous and unevenly enforced regulatory regimes through rumours about police corruption. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2019 and the analysis of two cases, I show how healers interpreted police visits not only as scrutiny of unlicensed herbal practice but also as morally charged encounters in a Theravada Buddhist polity, where authority is evaluated through idioms of merit, virtue, and karmic consequence. State recognition licenses 'traditional medicine' while casting wider magico-ritual healing as suspect. Because kruu practice does not neatly separate into these domains, practitioners remain vulnerable regardless of credentials. In response, kruu and their clients calibrate small tactics - offering food, invoking professional certificates or kin ties, and sometimes telling strategic half-truths - by comparing rumours with their own past experiences. I argue that rumours are not merely misinformation but interpretive tools that generate anticipatory fear and practical reasoning under discretionary enforcement. The contribution concludes that law and religion in Cambodia are co-constructed through these mundane interactions.
This contribution examines how opposition to death-related facilities in contemporary Japan crystallises anxieties about death through administrative and judicial processes, institutionalising them as officially cognisable interests. Through case studies of protests against Islamic cemeteries and Buddhist ossuaries, I analyse how different comparative frameworks - between cremation and ground burial, between residential areas and death-related facilities - transform vague anxieties into legally cognisable claims. In Muslim cemetery cases, opposition mobilised the cremation/burial dichotomy whilst concealing potential xenophobic undertones behind seemingly objective concerns about water contamination. These disputes primarily unfolded through administrative channels, with local councils serving as venues where comparative frameworks became politically mobilised. In contrast, ossuary opposition moved into judicial settings, where the 2004 Administrative Case Litigation Act reform enabled courts to recognise individual psychological interests as legitimate grounds for standing to sue. Both case types demonstrate how emotions surrounding death are not fixed cultural traits but are actively constructed through interactions with institutional processes. Without clear definition of 'religious sentiments' in the 1948 Graveyards and Burials Act, this ambiguous legal category has become a vessel for accommodating diverse individual anxieties about death.
Previous comparative Rights of Nature (RoN) research has predominantly focused on secular dimensions, examining the diversity of legal designs and frameworks across cases sharing the meta-norm of Earth Jurisprudence. While some studies acknowledge religion as a factor shaping diverse RoN forms, they tend to treat religious contexts as stable, essentialised 'legal cultures' that pre-exist the law-making process. This contribution proposes an alternative approach to comparison based on ethnographic fieldwork in India and Japan. Instead of analysing existing laws or judgments, I compare how the legal concept of RoN becomes entangled with religious matters in the process of a court of law reaching its decision. To achieve this, I focus on two cases: the 2017 public interest litigation in the Uttarakhand High Court, which granted the Ganges River 'the same legal rights as humans', and the Amami Oshima court case (1995-2000) against the construction of a golf course, in which the plaintiffs were the Amami rabbit and three other animal species. By comparing how lawyers compared the 'Rights of Nature' concept with people's religious interests, feelings, and natural entities, I elucidate the dynamic entanglement and co-making of legal and religious elements and the under-researched multiplicity of emergent RoN cases.
This contribution examines the French cult controversy in the late twentieth century through the theoretical framework of the 'risk society'. While the sociological concept of 'risk' has often been applied to issues such as nuclear energy and environmental degradation, it also offers a relevant framework for analysing the concept of religion. In the context of the 'second modernity', characterised by increased uncertainty, religion may be simultaneously reinterpreted as an axiological resource and an ontological risk. The case of the French cult controversy, culminating in 2001 with the About-Picard Law that strengthened the legal regulation of so-called 'sectes', reveals how fears surrounding 'religious risk' gained traction in public discourse. By tracing the processes through which this fear expanded, I argue that such risk-conscious interpretations of religion have contributed to a transformation of French secularism (la & iuml;cit & eacute;), shifting it from a liberal to a more authoritarian model. At the same time, the co-making processes of religion (as risk) and secularism (as control) illustrate the paradox inherent in risk management: efforts to control one form of risk ('cults') may generate new risks, such as the erosion of religious freedom, a core value of the secular state.
Strict religious regulations in Iran and Saudi Arabia restrict artistic expression, particularly for those who challenge the status quo, impacting metal musicians and fans in both countries. Despite this, metal music in these two contexts has often opposed the use of religion as a means of control. Metal is considered har & amacr;m (forbidden) by religious authorities in Iran, who associate it with criticism of organised religion. Recently, Saudi Arabia has loosened restrictions on metal music, but religious norms persist, and bands may face prosecution for blasphemy. While previous studies have explored metal music in the Middle East, there remains a significant gap in literature regarding how artists and fans discuss religion and governance, particularly in countries with strict religious authoritarian regimes. This study uses thematic analysis of interviews with Iranian and Saudi metal musicians and fans to explore the complex role of religion in their lives, especially in the context of major sociopolitical events. It shows that the legitimacy of religion diminishes in participants' perceptions when authorities exploit it as a tool of governance, and suggests participants view a 'good religion' as one that is personal and based on individual choice, rather than imposed by the state.
This contribution examines the legal treatment of religion-related disputes in Japan and Indonesia, highlighting how courts navigate legal gaps in secular governance. Drawing on Saba Mahmood's insight that political secularism regulates religion and promises religious freedom, it explores how courts exercise judicial imagination where the law is silent or open-textured. In Japan, the 1989 Supreme Court ruling on a temple leadership dispute exemplifies judicial restraint, while other cases, such as Honmonji and subsequent High Court decisions, demonstrate how j & omacr;ri is applied flexibly to extend oversight without undermining neutrality. In Indonesia, blasphemy and minority rights cases, including the Ahok and Meliana decisions, illustrate how rechtsvinding gives judges interpretive latitude to address legal gaps, while interventions remain largely case-specific rather than producing systematic doctrinal guidance. This contribution conducts a double comparison: first, between Japan's j & omacr;ri and Indonesia's rechtsvinding as doctrinal tools for addressing legal gaps; and second, between how these tools shape secular courts' engagement with religious matters. The comparison shows that judicial reasoning in both countries is contingent and informed by doctrinal, historical, and sociopolitical factors. The absence of explicit law does not suspend political secularism; rather, courts in Japan and Indonesia continue to exercise legal imagination in governing religious life.
Through a comparative reading of two court cases, one from Singapore and one from Japan, this contribution critically engages with the question of what religious freedom legislation can do and under what conditions. Both cases involve the refusal by members of Jehovah's Witnesses to bear arms, in the Singapore case in the context of National Service and in the Japanese case during Kendo practice in a publicly funded school. Although the stakes are different in the two cases, they both engage with the question of when members of minoritised communities are allowed to deviate from national norms. By juxtaposing the two cases, the contribution explores the question of under which conditions religious freedom can do what it is intended to do - i.e. to allow members of minority communities the freedom of belief and practice - and when it inevitably fails to do so. The contribution argues that while the dissimilarity in stakes between the two cases certainly contributed to the different outcomes, the question of to what extent a religious minority is perceived as a threat to the public good and survival of the state can also significantly impact the outcome of religious freedom cases.
In his article for this journal, 'How should states recognise religion? Strengthening multicultural secularism', Jonathan Chaplin presents a series of important challenges to our account of multicultural secularism, according to which the state can offer recognition to a range of religions while remaining sufficiently independent of them all. In this response to Chaplin's critique, we shall concentrate on what we regard as the most important charges that he levels at our theory. We begin by arguing that it is important to maintain a clear distinction between groups and associations. Both may be objects of recognition and neither should be reduced to the other. We then focus on what we see as a key theme running through Chaplin's critique: the claim that, by offering religious communities recognition, we threaten to undermine their freedom. By responding to this claim in three distinct ways, we hope to be able to further explicate and justify our account of multicultural secularism.
This article suggests improvements to a proposal for a 'multidimensional recognition of religion' by Simon Thompson and Tariq Modood. The proposal proceeds from a broader approach to public religion, 'multiculturalist moderate secularism', that has emerged from leading figures in the 'Bristol School of Multiculturalism' (notably Modood). The approach is critical of restrictive accounts of religion-state relationships and supportive of a capacious recognition of religion by the state. Thompson and Modood's notion of 'multidimensional recognition' lends valuable specificity to this broad approach. The first part expounds and clarifies central features of multidimensional recognition. The second proposes three broad 'categories of recognition' that can usefully frame and inform state policies towards religion. Two scholarly fields - religious freedom law and associational theory - are identified that can strengthen multidimensional recognition. The third part argues that, notwithstanding the aspiration to inclusion motivating multicultural moderate secularism, it is not yet sufficiently attentive to two kinds of risk arising in state-religion relationships, what I call recognitive bias and recognitive co-option. Paying greater attention to these risks will lend yet further specificity to religious recognition, improve democratic deliberation, and shore up the freedom of religions in order to retain their integrity within the public realm.
This article presents and theorises key findings from research examining how the increased use of digital technologies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has affected diverse religious communities in seven European countries. Interviews with 270 members of 27 selected communities suggest that digital technologies alone cannot sustain a thriving and vibrant religious community. Drawing on scholarship related to the corporeal and sensory turn, the authors argue that their study largely confirms conceptions of religion as not only doctrines and beliefs but also embodied participation that engages the physical senses. Because religion is always embodied in everyday life, it resists being fully transposed into the digital realm. While the acceleration of digitisation may foster new forms of religiosity and spirituality, fears that traditional religions will vanish in the new digital world seem unfounded. However, it is inevitable that they will transform in response to the widespread digital shift.
The Roman Catholic Church has historically played a significant role in Poland's democratisation, but the current stance of its leaders on the country's democratic backsliding remains uncertain. To explore this issue, we conducted a 2019 mail survey of Polish Catholic clergy (N = 83) to examine their political preferences. The findings reveal moderate support for democracy among the clergy alongside confidence about the state of Poland's democratic health. A notable finding is that Church leaders often allow partisanship, especially in favour of the Law and Justice party (PiS), to overshadow concerns about violations of democratic norms. The political engagement of priests, along with the social contexts they operate in, tends to shape their attitudes. This leads to a prioritisation of conservatism and social stability over core democratic principles, creating a complex relationship between the Church and democracy. This ambiguity in the Church's support for democratic values suggests its position could undermine Poland's democratic future. Moreover, the Church's mishandling of clerical abuse cases further damages its credibility, emphasising its complicated and sometimes contradictory role in Poland's evolving political landscape. These findings suggest that the Church's influence may be a double-edged sword in Poland's political development.
