H. Zeynep Bulutgil's most recent book, The Origins of Secular Institutions: Ideas, Timing, and Organization, is an important work that makes significant contributions to the fields of religion and politics, state formation, and political parties. Using a nested research design that combines quantitative cross-national analysis (for the period 1800–2000) with meticulously researched paired historical case studies (of France, Spain, Turkey, Morocco, the United Kingdom, and Tunisia), Bulutgil presents a compelling argument about how and why secular institutions were established in contexts where religious organizations had influence over or directly managed both the public and private spheres.
Because the book is primarily concerned with explaining institutional secularization, it is worth spending some time discussing how Bulutgil defines “secular” contexts and which countries she includes in her analysis. First, secular contexts display “the absence of religious or religiosity tests for fundamental political rights” and second, “the existence of a legal structure (including family law) that is not based on religious rules and rituals” (pp. 3–4). In the quantitative analysis portion of the study, this is operationalized as country-years where all three of the following conditions are met: religious actors and organizations are not given the power to create, apply, or supervise laws; there are no religious requirements for citizenship, voting, or public office; and family law is not based on religion. Including only countries where more than 50% of the population professed monotheistic religions, it largely excludes countries in East, South, and Southeast Asia and the African continent. Moreover, as of the mid-twentieth century, most of the rest of the world is thus classified as secular, apart from countries in the Middle East. These scope conditions help to create limits on a study that is already ambitious in its breadth but raise some questions about the applicability of the whole of her theory.
Related to the scope of the study is how successful Bulutgil is in crafting a strong research design and engaging in meticulous empirical analysis. As demonstrated in her definition and operationalization of institutional secularization above and further developed in the identification and measurement of her various dependent and independent variables and the mechanisms that connect them, Bulutgil tests a multi-faceted theory that proceeds in two steps and involves several factors that work with each other. The first part of her theory seeks to explain when and why secularizing political movements emerge. The second explains how and why they are successful in secularizing the state. She argues that secularizing political movements emerge in contexts where religion was not able to maintain a monopoly on society—namely, where secular materials could be disseminated freely due to the existence of a capitalistic print market and the free exchange of ideas across borders with varying levels of censorship (highlighting the importance of linkage and diffusion as causal mechanisms). But for these ideas to develop into successful parties that capture governmental power and shape state institutions, she argues that timing and competition are what matter. Briefly, it is when secularizing parties emerge before religious parties and can tap into an existing vibrant secular civil society that they can beat out religious interests to shape the state institutions that control the political and legal rights of citizens. Though she touches on some other potentially important explanatory factors (such as level of religious diversity, degree of religiosity of society, public opinion, and state capacity) in her deep case studies, they are not included as major indicators of competition or timing in this study. Nevertheless, she utilizes an impressive range of quantitative and qualitative materials to support her arguments, demonstrating the strength of mixed-methods analysis in approaching large-scale theorizing.
Though I am convinced by the claim that understanding institutional secularization does require an inquiry into the actors involved in crafting state institutions, the nature of her two dependent variables makes me question how the two parts of the theory are connected. To link the development of parties with the development of state institutions assumes that political parties determine state institutions, which is not the case in many authoritarian contexts (even in electoral authoritarian regimes), or even in all the cases she considers (i.e., Morocco). Moreover, even in secular contexts where religious parties can win elections (as in present-day Turkey), how those secular institutions were shaped determines the outcome of specific policies. For instance, on page 149 Bulutgil argues that in recent years, the ruling AKP has not pushed for a more religious agenda because, having lived under secular institutions for a century, there is little public support for it. Yet this ignores the design of Turkey's secular institutions, which gives the state's religious bureaucracy a large degree of control over religious practice in the country. With a religious party in charge of this bureaucracy, it might not feel the need to impose a more overt religious agenda when it can use its power to channel more resources toward supporting religious personnel, buildings, and education. This is very different from France, where control over secular institutions allows the ruling party to control a bureaucracy that is structured more toward restricting religious practice than promoting it.
Rather than discounting the work, these concerns point to the richness of institutionalism and the need to distinguish between political and state institutions, especially in the study of religion and politics. I commend Bulutgil for her effort to disentangle these two sets of institutions using a multi-pronged theory and hope that more scholars will continue this effort. Moreover, there are a multitude of important insights contained in her analysis that could be developed further, and I encourage scholars to give this study a careful read to uncover more ideas for future work.
