John T. S. Madeley

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Government

Cambridge Core - Sociology of Religion - A Secular Age beyond the West - edited by Mirjam Künkler

What role do and should constitutions play in mitigating intense disagreements over the religious character of a state? And what kind of constitutional solutions might reconcile democracy with the type of religious demands raised in contemporary democratising or democratic states? Tensions over religion-state relations are gaining increasing salien...

This article compares the constitutional protection of religious education in Egypt, Ireland, and Norway. It shows that such protection has, in each case, path-dependent qualities that suggest religious education is relatively immune to constitutional attack. This immunity has been marked both at the point of independence and in the more secularizi...

The article addresses the relevance of Charles Taylor’s analysis in his influential magnum opus A Secular Age (2007) to those parts of the world which are not included in the North-Atlantic world on which he concentrates. It does so by discussing issues arising from case studies of Asian, African and Middle Eastern contexts where the impact of diff...

This chapter addresses the seeming paradox that as established religious bodies have progressively lost their privileged status in state and society, religious or religion-related issues have become more, rather than less, sources of general controversy. It is argued that the ambivalent role of religion in public affairs in different parts of Europ...

Stein Rokkan's sequential model of state-, nation-, and cleavage-formation in Western Europe provides a useful starting-point for developing a framework for the comparative analysis of church-state relations in Europe as a whole. Such an exercise necessitates extending his conceptual map spatially so as to include Eastern Europe and temporally so a...

The ongoing secularisation debate(s) rarely focus on state secularisation, seemingly because of the assumption that the state is definitionally secular and so logically not subject to secularisation. From a less compromised perspective, the secular state appears as an American late-eighteenth century invention while the present day states of Europe...

There are two ways of reading the January 2007 controversy in the United Kingdom about whether Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from antidiscrimination legislation that requires them to treat applications for adoption from same-sex partners no less favorably than those from heterosexual married couples.1 One way is to take it as an ind...

State and religion have historically had an uneasy relationship, at times being close allies, at others harsh adversaries, and at still others largely independent. This paper develops an economic model of this relationship, where the state's objective is to maximize net tax revenue. Religious goods benefit the state in two ways: first, they provide...

The field of religion does not constitute a single public policy area in Britain, France or Germany, and none of these countries — unlike some others, particularly in Northern and Eastern Europe — have central government ministries or departments covering church or religious affairs. All three states, however, have historically been, and continue i...

Over the last 30 years political philosophers of a liberal persuasion have developed a doctrine which mandates the neutrality of the state in matters of religion, yet nowhere in Europe have its requirements been fully realised in practice. In a majority of the approximately 50 cases, the state is committed either de jure or de facto to the support...

This volume represents an attempt in integrating a wide range of theoretically relevant issues into the identification and analysis of church-state patterns. Each chapter focuses on the analysis of a particular theme and its role in shaping, and/or being shaped by, church-state relations.

LSE) & Nick Sitter (Norwegian School of Management BI) Leicester PSA April 2003 Scandinavian Politics Specialist Group Work in progress: not for citation. The four Christian parties of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden represent the full range of stances on European integration from solid principled opposition through soft contingent opposition a...