Modernising the Monarchy: The Oaths of Office

According to laws deriving from the constitutional developments of the seventeenth century and earlier, a new monarch of the UK has to swear oaths that renounce Roman Catholicism and uphold protestantism in the UK, presbyterianism in Scotland and the privileged established status of the Church of England. If the next monarchical succession is to be as smooth as the governmental succession of 2010 these anachronistic oaths should be considered for abolition and the whole procedure should be reviewed. There remains then only one oath requiring to be administered at the coronation to which all can agree—to govern according to the law.     

Scottish Independence,State Religion and the Monarchy

The plans of the Scottish Executive/Government for the independence of Scotland, which are very sketchy, are explored in relation to desire to retain the monarchy. The Scottish Parliament has expressed support for the removal of religious discrimination from succession to the throne and instituted an alternative state religion—measures which suggest an alternative relationship between religion and the monarchy will be required in an independent Scotland. Repealing the Act of Union will require decisions as to whether the monarchy remains as Christian, Protestant and Presbyterian in Scotland or whether some alternative religious or secular arrangements will be developed. Accepting the existing religious settlement of the monarchy, or varying it, will generate challenging issues for a Scottish administration that is seeking to be more religiously inclusive.     

Besting Monarchy: The Anti-Classism Argument

Following the death of a monarch and the crowning of another, this article considers monarchy as a topic in political theory. It seeks to revitalise the topic, which has been given limited attention by political theorists in recent years. It identifies traditional objections to monarchy, alongside newer objections that attack it (particularly the British institution) for being racist and imperialist. However, those objections—though increasingly common—are not fatal to monarchy as an idea. This article develops an argument against monarchy based on the concept of classism: discrimination based on a person's class. Reframing familiar criticisms of monarchy for being elitist and snobbish, the anti-classism argument draws on discrimination theory to outline the best objection to monarchy at the conceptual level.     

Monarchy and Democracy: A Progressive Agenda

The Blair governments since 1997 have seen the single most significant period of constitutional reform in Britain for over a century. However, they leave the monarchy, the institution at the apex of the unwritten constitution, untouched. It is argued that neither inaction nor abolition is advisable, but that reform should be undertaken, with particular attention to the rules of succession and to the royal prerogative powers, notable examples being the powers to declare war, to dismiss parliament, to assent to legislation and to appoint the Prime Minister. Those powers now exercised by the executive should be formally and linguistically separated from the office of head of state, and put on a statutory basis. The achievement of these reforms depends, however, on political will and cannot be initiated by the monarchy itself.     

Moderate Secularism, Religion as Identity and Respect for Religion

Political secularism takes many forms but a fundamental distinction is between radical and moderate kinds. The latter is a genuine secularism and not just a failure to take secularism to its logical conclusion. The failure to appreciate this obscures the secularism that exists in western Europe. Namely, an accommodation of organised religion which sees it as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances assist to realise—even through an 'established' church. I adumbrate five types of reasons the state might be interested in religion: truth, danger, utility, identity and respect. The challenge facing such secularism today is whether it can be pluralised or multiculturalised, in particular whether it can accommodate Muslims. A ground for optimism is the respect that some people, especially some Muslims, have for religions other than their own.     

Religion and discrimination: extending the ‘disaggregative approach’

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s disaggregation strategy, which is convincingly applied to religion, liberal neutrality, and freedom of association, should be extended to discrimination, in order to more systematically determine whether, when, and why indirect religious discrimination is unfair. Moreover, while Laborde’s distinction between the ‘Disproportionate Burden scenario’ and the ‘Majority Bias scenario’ is a powerful alternative to the discrimination-focused account of the justifiability of religious exemptions, the epistemic status of that distinction is not immediately clear. A case can be made that Disproportionate Burden and Majority Bias do not map onto different types of minority exemption claims. They are perspectives or analytical frames that may jointly and usefully be applied to most instances of such claims.     

The secular contract: sovereignty,secularism and law in Australia

What does it mean to say that a nation-state is secular? Secular law typically begins when a state has no religious competitor for authority. For this reason, it can be said that the Australian state is secular because its authority is derived from its own laws. What makes Australian law sovereign, the highest authority within the state, is its secularity. However, given Australia's colonial heritage, it is not just the absence of religious authority, such as a state religion, that gives the state its secularity. The law's foundations in colonial violence and the extinguishment of Indigenous sovereignty as a competing authority are also a crucial way in which secular Australian law can continue to operate as the sovereign authority within the state. Using the work of Charles W. Mills, I will critically interrogate how legal and political characterisations of the law as secular work to disavow the state's racialised foundations in colonial violence in the form of a “secular contract”. In developing this notion of a “secular contract” I hope to show that secularism be must re-thought of as not simply the operation of law without religion, but also, as complicit with the ways indigenous sovereignties in (post)colonial states are negated.     

论言谏制度是君主专制的监控和纠错机制

言谏是中国古代规劝君主并促使其改正过失的一种制度 ,它与御史弹劾相互配合、互为表里 ,御史纠察百官之非法 ,谏官谏诤君主之违误 ,两者比翼共同构成了古代监察制度的有机整体 ,在一定程度上发挥了“彰善瘅恶 ,激浊扬清”的作用。言谏制度作为对君主的监督和制约机制 ,是君主专制的调节因素和有益补充 ,也是我国古代对政治运行体制的完善和制度创新     

Harry and Meghan Shine a Light on Monarchy,and its Demands

The Netflix documentary Harry and Meghan conveys the impression that they have been uniquely victimised. But the difficulties they have faced are shared by all the royal families of Europe. It is monarchy which is unique, in the extraordinary demands which it makes of close members of the royal family. They lack freedoms which ordinary citizens take for granted: privacy; free choice of career; freedom of speech; freedom to marry whom they like; freedom of religion; and freedom to travel. It is not surprising if individual royals wish to escape the gilded cage. But as Harry and Meghan have shown, opting out is easier said than done.     

Laborde,liberalism, and religion

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the debate on religion in political philosophy. We present the main arguments defended by Cécile Laborde in Liberalism’s Religion and explain how these arguments contribute to the debate.     

The Sacred Kingdom and the Royal Wedding of 2011

Despite secularisation and increased religious diversity the UK state and the monarchy are religiously legitimated institutions which have their origins in protestant/catholic divisions over three hundred years ago but which remain strong enough to survive in the current era. The Church of England acts not only as the established church of England but as a church for the UK with respect to events such as the coronation and the royal wedding of 2011. Ecumenical and interfaith initiatives have been attempted by the government and the monarchy and were evident in attendance at the wedding but it demonstrated the ritual supremacy of the state church and the inevitable difficulties of seeking to achieve formal representation for religious diversity in the state. Attempts at more formally inclusive religious involvement in state institutions conflict with other goals such as gender equity and suggest that secular state institutions might be fairer to all religions, denominations and those with no beliefs.     

Did Secularism Win Out? The Debate over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

The debate over the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill marks the latest in a series of conflicts between secularism and religion in the public sphere. The failure of religiously motivated campaigners to alter the Bill's most substantive and controversial provisions, however, should not be seen as a victory for a homogeneous secular camp. Although campaigners motivated by religious belief were almost universally opposed to the Bill, secular campaigners reflected a more varied mix of opinion. Moreover, the degree of organisation and mobilisation shown by the religious lobby during the course of the debate, are a sign that attempts to secure a greater role for religion in the public sphere are likely to remain a prominent feature of British political life.     

Religion,partisanship and preferences for redistribution

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro-redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre-right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter-war state-building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro-redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.     

哲学,宗教与中国文化精神:兼论中国人信仰的历史特点

中国化与世界其他主要化的重要不同在于,中国化的基本精神是人主义的,不是宗教神学的,在中国历史上,官方信仰了、学信仰也间信仰互相交错又彼此疏离,哲学和宗教的关系及其在整个民族化中的作用十分复杂,从全局上看,儒家哲学和道家哲学的互渗互补构成了中国传统褒庇的主干和基本线索,提供给中国人尤其是知识人以安身立命的依托。虽然道教、佛中国历史上也有长久的影响,但追求彼岸不是民族化的主要传统。了解中     

Religion and the State: The Case of Faith–based Schools

It is always misleading, and sometimes dangerous, to suppose that the current problems represent no more than a recapitulation of earlier and intractable difficulties. An inhibiting sense of déjà vu numbs the mind and distracts attention from the essential novelty of deceptively familiar issues. The contemporary interaction of religion and politics in Western societies is as different from nineteenth–century contests between traditional faiths and their critics as it is distant from medieval versions of the church and state question. These truisms are well illustrated by the attempt made in this article to apply some of the harder lessons of historical and of cross–national studies to current debates on changing relations between organised religion and public education.     

Tuvalu and You: The Monarch,the United Kingdom and the Realms

The government plans to amend the royal succession rules by making primogeniture gender blind and ending marriage to a Roman Catholic spouse as a disqualification for succession. Achieving these goals means that the UK is dependent on the agreement of the fifteen Commonwealth countries—the ‘realms’—that also have the Queen as head of state. The article questions whether these proposals go far enough when leaving intact other religious discriminatory rules hostile to Catholics and all others who cannot be in communion with the Church of England. It is maintained that a political disinclination to address and, as necessary, challenge the real as opposed to the formal position of the Church of England vitiates the government's approach. Moreover, it is asked whether the policy process itself should not become more open and democratic both within the UK and between the realms.     

The travails of the secular: puzzle and paradox in Turkey

Abstract

Conflicting claims of Muslim marginalization and injury and alarmist narratives of encroachment on secular spaces and intimidation of its citizens have dominated public debates in Turkey. The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the web of meanings associated with the ‘secular’ and to analyse the political fortunes of secularism. It specifically attempts to elucidate how and why critiques of lack of accountability, authoritarianism and militarism were mapped onto an onslaught on secularism itself. It argues that the historical shallowness of civic notions of citizenship was compounded by the instrumentalization of religion by the secular establishment, the embedding of Islamist actors in the electoral politics of patronage and the consolidation of Islamic capital in the wake of neoliberal policies since the 1980s. It concludes that the terms ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ have become empty signifiers and tropes mobilized by contending political actors in their search for hegemony and the consolidation of their power.     

Religion and the Scottish Independence Referendum

The Scottish independence referendum debate, like the Act of Union of 1707, has significant religious dimensions. The Act gave special recognition through the monarch to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Church, a national church, has not yet declared a position on independence, but is seeking to protect its existing privileges whatever the result. The Roman Catholic Church, recognised by the Scottish Parliament, unlike its formal rejection by the UK Parliament and monarchy, symbolically associates itself with the case for independence. Paradoxically, Catholics supporting independence subject themselves, in their religious lives, to an authoritarian foreign power. The SNP Scottish Government attempts to draw Roman Catholic support for independence from its traditional support base in the Labour Party by cultivating a sense of religious grievance that is not justified by the evidence. Old religious divisions are still relevant but non‐religion is growing fast and resulting in new perspectives on the independence debate.     

Religion,globalization and commodification in online world news slideshows: the dis/connection of images and texts

Lately, possibilities of producing and spreading news pictures have increased explosively through online media. Concurrently, religion has become increasingly salient in politics and news. Both processes are connected to globalization. This study encompasses globalization, religion and online images and aims to convey how online world news slideshows represent religion, and more particularly how linguistic and visual parts of picture paragraphs are interrelated, as well as related to representations of different religions. Methodologically multimodal analysis and discourse analysis are combined, focusing on composition of images and (dis-)connection of images and texts. Theories on globalization and possibilities and particularities of online news (pictures) and slideshows, frame the analysis. Tendencies to templates for different religions are found. Many religions appear as aesthetic commodities in images, whereas Islam in texts “sells” images of violence/destruction. Image–text relations are thus crucial both in the creation of meaning and of commodities in online news image culture. Two main image–text types are identified: “Religion in text, (potential) violence/destruction/despair in picture” (Islam) and “Spirituality/worshipping/aestheticism” (other religions). The world news slideshows have crucial roles as containers for these polarized image–text types, where they are related to and defined by each other in the genre's (cl)aim to cover the whole world.