6 - Patterns of Religion-Politics Interactions

Summary

The genealogy of the key ideas, institutions and norms of what is religious and what is political in each national context sheds light on different types of relations between the religious and political sets of the three Bs: belief, behaving and belonging. The qualitative work on religion and politics in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia has revealed four arenas of politicization of religion: the belonging to the national and the belonging to the religious community line up; the association between national community and religious community is contested; national belonging supersedes religious communities; and the connection between national community and religious community is contested, as well as the actions of the state on the immanent axis. The patterns of politicization of religion for each of these cases were produced by data mining and Python programming applied to the EOS database of Georgetown University.