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Soft Separation Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Jeremy Menchik
Jeremy Menchik*
Affiliation:
Boston University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to:Jeremy Menchik, Frederick S. Pardee School of GlobalStudies, BostonUniversity, Boston,United States. E-mail: menchik@bu.edu
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Abstract

How do nonsecular democracies govern religion? Despite two decades ofresearch on the many ways that church and state overlap in moderndemocracies, scholars lack an adequate answer to this question. Manyconsolidated democracies have a soft separation between church andstate rather than a wall. These are not defective versions ofdemocracy, but rather poorly understood institutional arrangements.To remedy this lacuna, this paper investigates institutionalarrangements in six consolidated democracies with a soft separationbetween church and state: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, India,Indonesia, and Switzerland. After describing the institutionalworkings of these states, the paper develops hypotheses for theorigins of soft separation democracy as well as addressing thechallenges of this form of government. The paper concludes bysuggesting three other potentially fruitful lines of analysis aswell as elucidating the implications of soft separation democracyfor U.S. foreign policy.

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Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 863 - 883
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

Versions of this essay were presented at the 2015 Conference onLaw and Religious (un)freedom in the Global Era, and the 2016meeting of the American Political Science Association. I amgrateful for thoughtful feedback from David Buckley, PeterDanchin, Michael Driessen, Mayanthi Fernando, Diana Kim, TamirMoustafa, Oscar Salemink, Kaija Schilde, Erica Simmons, NicholasRush Smith, Kari Telle, and thankful to the editor and anonymousreviewers of Politics and Religion for theirassistance in improving the paper.

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