Thursday, April 14, 2016
Maestro B (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
The paper addresses the question of religious impact on the development of modern democracies in the West and resulting regimes of accommodation of religious minorities. This impact is conceptualized as stemming from particular actors, most notably churches and religious parties, and from structural factors such as confessional patterns and degrees of secularization. For this, the paper configures the legacies of the confessional state and the church-state regimes as well as levels of secularization and religious diversity by analyzing 19 European and non-European democracies with a Christian background and their current policies of integration and accommodation. The paper wants to show, first, that regardless the “multi-vocality” of religious traditions (A. Stepan), not all voices are equal and a historical mapping can demonstrate that democratic development occurs in distinct patterns rooted in the Catholic-Protestant divide. The paper then attempts to show that despite the universal acceptance of democracy among the major churches, there is no uniform model of church-state relations in an institutional sense. From these two observations follows the argument of distinct structural, i.e. path-dependent, effects. After, thirdly, highlighting current processes of religious pluralization in Western democracies, which put similar pressures on the institutional arrangements in these countries, the paper investigates, fourthly, how religious actors (parties, churches) react and to what extent historical legacies constrain a convergence of these responses. It is hypothesized that Catholic countries and actors seem more resisting to opening up to these pressures than are Protestant ones.
