Putting Politics First: The Impact of Politics on American Religious and Secular Orientations

Nearly all research on the political impact of Americans’ religious and secular orientations assumes that such orientations are exogenous to politics. Using multiwave panel and experimental data, we find that religious and secular orientations are endogenous to political orientations. In other words, religion and secularism are a consequence as well as a cause of politics. In showing this, we make three major contributions. First, we conceptualize and measure secular orientations in a new way—not just as the absence of religion, but also as an affirmative secular identity and positive commitment to secular principles. Second, our panel and experimental data allow for the most definitive test to date of whether political orientations exert a causal effect on religious and secular orientations. Third, we isolate the conditions under which politics affects religious–secular perspectives, thus identifying the mechanism that underlies political orientations.     

纳粹大屠杀对犹太民族和犹太文明的影响

从1933年到1945年的十几年里,纳粹对犹太民族的迫害、驱赶和“最后解决”,约使600万犹太人死于纳粹的魔爪中,是全部犹太人的1/3,这不仅让犹太民族遭遇灭顶之灾,而且也是人类历史上罕见的大悲剧。但大屠杀并未能摧毁犹太民族的奋斗精神,反而使犹太民族得到世人广泛的同情和援助,使犹太文明得到进一步发展。     

马克思主义者的犹太观

犹太人问题是人类历史进程中的一个既古老而又现代的问题。诞生于西方、着眼于解决现实问题的马克思主义理论在其发展的各个阶段都没有回避犹太人问题,各个国家、各个历史时期的马克思主义者都对这一问题有着自己的看法和主张,其共同点是都不公开支持反犹主义。     

Michael Howard: The First Jewish Prime Minister?

Initially, Michael Howard seemed the saviour of the divided and disheartened Conservative party, reuniting it in the hope of victory at the next general election. Initially, also, he seemed a match for his fellow barrister, Tony Blair. Though successful at winning over Tory MPs, he was much less effective in relation to all those ex-Tory voters who deserted the party in 1997 and 2001. This failure was confirmed after less than nine months of his leadership, when his party polled poorly at the European elections of June 2004 (where a large slice of the anti-European vote went to UKIP) and came an ignominious third in the Parliamentary by-elections of July 2004. These results, combined with Howard's lacklustre response to the Butler Report, sapped Howard's personal ratings and reopened civil war within the Conservative party.     

A Two-edged Sword: The Differential Effect of Religious Belief and Religious Social Context on Attitudes towards Democracy

Different components of the religious experience have differing effects on attitudes towards democracy. Using heteroskedastic maximum likelihood models and data from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey for 45 democratic countries, we show that as a personal belief system, religiosity contrasts with democratic principles, generating opposition to democracy while increasing ambivalence towards democratic principles among religious people. Nevertheless, at the group level, religion also serves as a social institution which increases the homogeneity of one??s social network, leading to lower ambivalence, and makes for an active minority group which benefits from the democratic framework, consequently increasing support overall for a democratic regime. This double-edged sword effect explains the mixed results currently found in the literature on religiosity and democracy, and clearly illustrates the multidimensionality of religiosity.     

The Black body and the Jewish body: a comparison of medical images

Hödl attempts to show how deeply the medical views of Blacks and Jews were embedded in racial theories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concepts of racial distinctiveness formed the framework that purportedly explained a specific liability of African Americans and Jews to various ailments. In particular, he compares the prevailing perception of the susceptibility of Jews and Blacks to tuberculosis in the United States from the 1840s to the early twentieth century, and shows that physicians advanced widely differing explanations for the proclivity to this disease, explanations that fall into three distinct periods. Within the same time span, however, there is continuity in the concepts of the 'sick Negro' and the 'healthy Jew'. The aetiologies were largely dependent on stereotypes of the bodily constructs of Jews and Blacks. Hödl thereby demonstrates the interdependence of racism and medicine.     

The Catholic Lobby: Structures,Policy Styles and Religious Networks

This article is about the place of lobbying by the Catholic Church in contemporary Australian federal politics. It builds on some previous attention by political scientists to Catholic political campaigning (eg, Hogan 1978, 1993 ; see also Byrnes 1993 ), but it is more comprehensive. Discussion of such lobbying uses various terminology and, like much lobbying, it can be viewed in a normative sense either favourably or unfavourably, as democratic or undemocratic. During the parliamentary debate in December 1996 on the anti‐euthanasia private members bill introduced by Kevin Andrews, for instance, Nick Dondas (Country Liberal, Northern Territory) alleged that ‘the debate has been driven by the Catholic community of this country’. To which his Catholic colleague Tony Abbott (Liberal, New South Wales), alleging that Dondas had blamed the bill on the ‘Catholic lobby’, responded that ‘those comments were beneath him’. ¹     

Religious Pluralism and Democratic Inclusion: The American Recipe for Peace

There is no simple formula for religious peace in the United States, such as “separation of church andstate.” Instead, the US Constitution establishes two opposing principles -- religious freedom and civicinclusion -- that must be continually rebalanced. The legal result is a “serpentine wall” between church andstate that creates zones of cooperation as well as separation. Moreover, the relatively peaceful coexistence ofdiverse religious communities within the United States is due, not simply to the principles of the FirstAmendment, but also to the de-spatialized and de-ritualized character of American religion, and to the absence of explicitly confessional parties in the American polity.