J. Christopher Soper

Religious Institutions, Church–State History and Muslim Mobilisation in Britain, France and Germany

With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church–State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims’ religious needs in each country.

The Effect of Confucian Values on Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Taiwan

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in the extent to which ”Asian values,” or Confucian ideology, inhibit a countrys acceptance of liberal-democratic values. Much of that research, however, focused on the experience of nondemocratic states, concentrated on theory rather than empirical analysis, was written before the complete democratization of Taiwan, and/or created a pan-Confucian-values index instead of estimating the effects of the main components of Confucianism (family loyalty, social hierarchies, and social harmony) individually. In this article, we review theoretical arguments for why Confucian values would decrease public support for democratization, women’s rights, and freedom of speech. We then use OLS and Logit to estimate models of data from the Taiwan subsamples of the 1995 World Values Study and the 2001 East Asia Barometer. Our results indicate that adherence to Confucian values did not consistently undermine public support for liberal democracy in 1995 and even increased support for some liberal-democratic values in 2001. Our findings thus disconfirm previous empirical research on this question. The article concludes by discussing how Confucian and liberal-democratic values might reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Equal treatment of religion in a pluralistic society

Few areas of public policy in the United States are as politically contentious and legally confusing as church-state relations. And today the traditional view of a strict separation of church and state is being further confused by increasing levels of religious pluralism. This timely book provides the first analysis of a new paradigm for discussing church-state relations -- equal treatment, also sometimes referred to as neutrality -- that has growing popularity in Congress and has recently been used in several Supreme Court rulings. Ten leading scholars of constitutional law and political science trace the development of equal treatment theory, consider its implications for public policy and church-state relations, and evaluate it from a number of ideological perspectives.

Evangelical Christianity in the United States and Great Britain

List of Figures - Preface - Introduction - Theories of Social Movement Formation - Evangelical Ideology and Group Formation - Temperance Politics in Britain and America - The Political Mobilization of Evangelicals: 1960-Present - Political Structures and Evangelical Activism - Conclusion

Political structures and interest group activism: A comparison of the British and American pro-life movements

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the structure of state power and interest group activism in Great Britain and the United States using as a model a comparison of the pro-life movement in both countries. The article proposes that different types of political structures create different sets of opportunities for interest group activism. A review of abortion politics in Britain shows how a unitary political system, lack of elite support, and strong party structures, frustrated the political efforts of pro-life organizations. In contrast, American pro-life interest groups took advantage of opportunities created by a federal political system, weak political parties, and elite support to become a significant social force in state and national politics.

J ØRGEN S. N IELSEN , Towards a European Islam (London: Macmillan Press, 1999). Pp. 163.

Jorgen Nielsens Towards a European Islam provides a very good introduction to the role that Islam plays in the experience of most non-European immigrants to Western Europe. As Nielsen correctly notes, there is an overwhelmingly Muslim character to immigration in the region, but few of the recent studies on immigration have looked systematically at the issue of the role religion plays in the lives of these newly arrived migrants. This relative silence is surprising given that there are an estimated 9 million Muslims in Western Europe, which makes them the largest religious minority in the region. Nielsens book, therefore, is a healthy corrective for a literature that too often ignores this important question. The books greatest strength is its description of the complex process by which Muslims seek to integrate their religious values and practices into social and political cultures that are not well suited to accommodating those views.

59.95 cloth.

Over the past two hundred years, American and British evangelical Christians have been politically active in social movements. In the nineteenth century, evangelicals became convinced that drinking was the root of the religious and social problems in their respective nations and they formed a movement to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. In the past several decades, evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic have organized a social movement to impose restrictions on abortion services and the publication of pornographic material. Evangelical activism leads to important questions about the study of social movements, particularly about what the cause of social belief and action might be.

Theories of Social Movement Mobilization

In a 1905 speech before the Baptist World Congress, George White, a Liberal member of the British Parliament, expressed an opinion about alcohol which was widely shared by evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘The centre of operation against this monster evil should undoubtedly be the Christian churches. We exist to fight the devil in all his works, and this drink evil is undoubtedly his greatest masterpiece.’1 By 1905, most evangelicals had become convinced that the only solution to the ‘alcohol evil’ was the total prohibition of its sale and consumption. How was it that these transatlantic Christians came to share a religious condemnation of drinking and why did they conclude that they had a religious obligation to impose their temperance ethic on an entire nation?

Temperance Politics in Britain and America

Evangelicals have generated significant social movement development in Britain and America during the past two hundred years. Abolition, Prohibition and numerous broad-based movements designed to promote public education, health and ‘morals’ developed with the intellectual, political and financial support of evangelical organizations. More recently, abortion, pornography and related ‘family’ issues have mobilized evangelicals into political organizations. In each instance, an evangelical religious ideology structured believers’ views on a specific issue, encouraged their involvement in a social and political campaign, and defined group goals.

Evangelical Ideology and Group Formation

Evangelical Christians in Britain and America mobilized political protest groups in the 1970s and 1980s around the issues of abortion, pornography, and religion in state-supported schools. In contrast to the evangelical mobilization against alcohol discussed in the previous chapter, evangelical activism of the past few decades has not focused on a single social issue. Instead, believers in each nation organized groups in response to a series of social and political changes. The reason for evangelical involvement now and a century ago, however, is essentially the same: social change conflicted with evangelical religious and cultural values. This chapter demonstrates how an evangelical ideology led believers to form social and political groups against abortion and pornography and in favour of religion in state-supported schools.