Symposium Introduction The Politics of Religious Alliances Ursula Hackett

Symposium Introduction The Politics of Religious Alliances Ursula Hackett内容摘要：

Symposium Introduction The Politics of Religious Alliances Ursula Hackett David E. Campbell This Politics & Religion symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these papers instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do—and do not—form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multidenominational coalitions amongst party activists, litigants and religious leaders. These varied papers arose from a workshop at Oxford University in March 2015, an event hosted and funded by the Rothermere American Institute. The collection explores the impact of religious coalitional activity upon political attitudes, decisionmaking, and public policy development. It is wide-ranging, extending our understanding of religious coalitional activity beyond the United States and dealing with topics of vital current significance, including the swiftly changing landscape of school voucher and tax credit expansion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, and abortion advocacy. Literature On many public policy questions – not just hot-button ‘culture war’ issues such as gay rights and abortion –religious organizations ally with one another despite sharp historical disagreements and differences in theology, church structure and membership. Scholars have examined the way churches interact within America’s peaceful and plural religious ‘free market’ (Wuthnow 1988; Stark and McCann 1993; Chen 2014), the role of religious ‘switching’ in encouraging individuals’ tolerance of other religions (Putnam and Campbell 2011), and the causes and consequences of religious group position-taking on church-state separationism and related policy issues (Detwiler 1999; Lewis 2014; Adkins et al. 2013), but there has been limited scholarship on the elite politics of alliances between religious organizations on matters of public policy (Bendyna et al. 2001). Why do some policy issues attract multi-faith coalitions – even amongst churches with historical and continuing political and theological disagreements – and others do not? How do leaders of religious alliances manage the demands of their followers and intra-denominational disagreements while lobbying, advocating, and litigating on behalf of policies? This collection speaks not only to the literature on religion and politics but to American and comparative politics more broadly. Sitting at the intersection of political science, public policy and law, it identifies causal antecedents of partisan polarization and the ‘rights revolution’ (Pacelle 1991). It traces policymaking processes at the state and federal level, the relationship between interest group leaders and the rank-and-file, and the trajectory of the culture wars. Battles over particular political issues are manifestations of a broader struggle to shape America’s political, religious and cultural landscape (Layman 2001). Such efforts are influenced by historical animosities and their constitutional manifestations, America’s political institutions, and the rise of globalization and partisan polarization. These symposium papers set the politics of religious alliances in the broader temporal context. They explore rights claims, federalism, establishment and free exercise – united around an emerging understanding of the coalitional activity of religious groups. Definition As Clyde Wilcox’s contribution indicates, there are many ways to define religious alliances and understand their origins and impact. This collection takes a broad definition that incorporates both ad hoc and permanent coalitions and religious and secular participants. Some coalitions, such as official alliances of religious bodies, are united explicitly around theological precepts. Others, such as coalitions active on school vouchers, early Christian Right public protest advocacy, and the ‘actively secular’, tend to be organized along ideological or partisan lines. The presence of strange bedfellows encourages us to reconsider definitional boundaries. In cases such as religious school aid, the relative scarcity of liberal and Democratic coalition participants underscores the conservative nature of the dominant pro-voucher coalition. But in campaign finance reform and abortion politics, strange bedfellows of traditionalists and progressives p