The role of religion in politics is problematic for liberallegitimacy. Religion is often restrained by a public reasonrequirement, but this creates cognitive burdens that asymmetricallyimpact religious citizens creating unequal barriers to accessing thepolitical system, which is itself problematic for liberallegitimacy. Habermas’ institutional translation proviso balances thecompeting concerns of liberal legitimacy, which aims to offset theasymmetry disadvantaging religious citizens. This paper analyzes theproblem and Habermas’ solution. It concludes that Habermas does notalleviate the asymmetry created by the public reason requirement tothe greatest extent possible and so does not equalize the barriersto accessing the political system as much as he might. Thereciprocal translation proviso provides an alternative that balancesthe competing components of liberal legitimacy more fully andalleviates the asymmetry and inequality of barriers to politicalaccess to the greatest extent possible while preserving the publicreason requirement.

Evangelicals garner much attention in polling and public opinionresearch, yet measuring white evangelicals remains elusive, evenopaque. This paper provides practical guidance to researchers whowant to measure or analyze evangelicals. In the social sciences,many have adopted a detailed religious affiliation approach thatcategorizes evangelicals based on the religious tradition of thedenominations to which they belong. Others have used a simplerself-identification scheme, which asks respondents if they considerthemselves “born-again or evangelical”. While the affiliation andself-identification schemes are predominant, a practical examinationof these approaches has been absent. Using several waves of theGeneral Social Survey and the Cooperative Congressional ElectionStudy, we compare them. We find almost no statistical differencesbetween the two measurements in prominent demographic, political, orreligious factors. Thus, we suggest that for most a simple questionabout broad religious affiliation followed by a born-again orevangelical self-identification question will suffice.

Clergy members are often important political actors. Yet, scholarsrarely distinguish among different types of clergy politicalactivities. Here, I argue for three disaggregated categories ofclergy political activity: personal, general congregation level, andelection-specific congregation level. Data from two sources—theCooperative Clergy Study and the Little Rock CongregationsStudy—demonstrate that important differences exist across thesecategories, with the majority of model variables significantlyinfluencing different clergy political activities indifferent directions. For instance, a conservativeideology and affiliation with a Black Protestant church bothnegatively influence personal political activities, like donating toa campaign, while also positively influencing election-relatedpolitical activities in the congregation, like distributing voterguides. Similarly, providential religious beliefs increase generalcongregation-level political activities, while decreasing personaland electoral activities. These relationships are obscured whenpolitical activity is considered in the aggregate, suggesting thatclergy political activities are nuanced; different activities aredriven by different motivations.

We assess how likely Americans are to support political candidateswho are Muslim, and the extent to which support for Muslimcandidates is structured by “cultural outgroupantipathy”—generalized antipathy targeting cultural outgroups. Weemploy two survey experiments included in the 2007 and 2010Cooperative Congressional Election Studies that juxtapose ahypothetical state legislative candidate's Muslim faith with Arabethnicity, African American race, and both Democratic and Republicanparty affiliation. Identifying a candidate as Muslim significantlyreduces voter support and that reduction is largest among peoplewith higher levels of cultural outgroup antipathy. The effect isconsistent regardless of whether the candidate is also identified asbeing Arab or African American or is just presented as a Muslim. Wealso find that cultural outgroup antipathy diminished electoralsupport for same-party Muslim candidates among Democrats but notamong Republicans.

Since the 1980s, Pentecostal and other born again Christian movementshave become increasingly prominent in the public spheres of manysub-Saharan African states. A dearth of reliable survey data hasconstrained investigation of the potential influence of thesereligious movements on political attitudes and participation. Thisarticle analyzes original survey data from Zambia, amajority-Christian nation. These data, from a stratified randomsample of 1,500 Zambians, indicate that Pentecostals do in factshare partisan preferences and report higher levels of politicalinterest and participation than other Christians. They are lesslikely, however, to contact elected officials—a finding that accordswith ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal pastors as politicalinterlocutors for their politically mobilized congregations. Wefurther contextualize and explore the external validity of ourfindings using cross-national survey data collected by the Pew Forum(2010, N = 9,500). We conclude by underscoring thevalue of further survey research on religion and politics in theregion.

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.