How Political and Religious Ideologies Shape History
How Political and Religious Ideologies Shape History
Political and religious ideologies are organized systems of ideas through which people interpret society, define justice, establish collective identities, and decide how political authority should be exercised. They can inspire reform, solidarity, resistance, and liberation, but they can also legitimize hierarchy, exclusion, repression, conquest, and violence.
Ideologies do not operate only through formal political parties or religious institutions. They influence laws, schools, economic systems, cultural traditions, social movements, public rituals, historical narratives, and everyday understandings of citizenship and belonging. Their consequences depend on historical circumstances, institutional power, political leadership, and the ways ordinary people interpret and apply ideological principles.
Understanding Ideology
Ideology can refer to a political doctrine, a worldview, a source of social identity, or a framework used to justify existing power. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, fascism, nationalism, feminism, religious nationalism, and anticolonialism are examples of ideological traditions that have shaped modern history.
Some theories describe ideology primarily as distorted belief or propaganda that conceals domination. Other approaches emphasize that all societies depend on shared ideas to interpret political life and organize collective action. An ideology may therefore defend an unjust social order in one setting while helping people challenge oppression in another.
Ideologies become historically significant when they are incorporated into institutions, laws, political parties, religious organizations, educational systems, and mass movements. Their influence is rarely determined by abstract principles alone. It also depends on who holds power, whose interests are served, and whether dissent and pluralism are protected.
Liberalism, Conservatism, and Democratic Thought
Liberalism developed around ideas such as individual liberty, natural rights, private property, religious toleration, equality before the law, representative government, and limits on state power. Liberal thought helped inspire constitutional democracy, civil liberties, and modern human-rights traditions.
Liberal societies, however, have often coexisted with slavery, colonialism, racial inequality, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. Critics argue that formal legal equality does not necessarily eliminate unequal access to wealth, education, security, or political influence.
Conservatism emphasizes inherited institutions, tradition, social continuity, moral order, property, authority, and cautious reform. Conservative ideas can restrain reckless political experimentation and preserve valuable institutions. They can also be used to defend established hierarchies or delay necessary social change.
Republicanism defines political freedom as protection from arbitrary power and stresses civic responsibility, constitutional limits, and public participation. Historically, however, many republics excluded women, workers, enslaved people, racial minorities, and religious minorities from full citizenship.
Libertarianism places individual liberty, private property, voluntary exchange, and freedom from government coercion at the center of politics. Critics contend that minimal government may leave individuals vulnerable to private economic power and unequal access to essential services.
Communitarianism emphasizes that identities and moral values are formed through families, neighborhoods, religions, cultures, and political communities. It challenges excessive individualism but can also be invoked to enforce conformity or subordinate people who reject dominant traditions.
Socialism, Communism, and Economic Ideology
Socialism encompasses diverse movements seeking greater equality, democratic control of economic life, worker protection, social ownership, and collective responsibility. Socialist movements contributed to trade unions, public education, social insurance, labor protections, health-care programs, and welfare institutions.
Marxism interprets history through material conditions, class conflict, and the relationship between labor and ownership. It inspired labor movements, anticolonial struggles, and challenges to capitalist exploitation.
Communist revolutions promised worker power, equality, land redistribution, and an end to class domination. The Russian and Chinese revolutions transformed global politics and encouraged revolutionary movements throughout the world. Yet many governments established in communism’s name created one-party states characterized by censorship, political imprisonment, forced economic transformation, personality cults, and violent repression.
Neoliberalism favors competitive markets, private enterprise, deregulation, free trade, and institutional limits on government economic intervention. Neoliberal reforms encouraged investment and international commerce in some countries, but critics associate them with inequality, weakened labor protections, privatization, and the transfer of public authority to private institutions.
Anarchism questions the legitimacy of coercive authority, hierarchy, and the state. Anarchists have promoted voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, direct democracy, and resistance to domination. Critics question whether stateless political arrangements can consistently provide security, resolve disputes, and protect individual rights.
Fascism, Nazism, and Authoritarian Rule
Fascism is an authoritarian and ultranationalist ideology that rejects liberal democracy, glorifies hierarchy and national unity, and subordinates individual rights to the state or nation. Fascist movements have relied on propaganda, political violence, militarism, scapegoating, and hostility toward pluralism.
The Nazi Party used economic crisis, antisemitism, racial ideology, electoral politics, intimidation, and conservative political miscalculations to obtain power in Germany. The Reichstag Fire and Enabling Act demonstrate how authoritarian leaders can exploit emergencies and legal procedures to eliminate constitutional protections.
Nazi rule absorbed or destroyed independent political parties, labor unions, civic organizations, cultural institutions, and local governments. Propaganda and censorship promoted loyalty to Adolf Hitler while spreading antisemitism, militarism, racial hierarchy, and hatred of political opponents.
Nazi ideology also entered schools, youth organizations, universities, medicine, law, and public-health institutions. Eugenic claims about racial and biological improvement helped justify forced sterilization, exclusion, persecution, mass murder, and genocide.
Churches and religious leaders responded to fascism in different ways. Some collaborated with authoritarian governments or accommodated them to protect their institutions. Others resisted state interference, defended targeted populations, or challenged particular policies. These varied responses demonstrate that religious traditions do not produce a single political outcome.
Nationalism and National Belonging
Nationalism defines people as members of a political community united by history, culture, territory, ethnicity, language, or religion. It can support self-determination, anticolonial liberation, democratic participation, and solidarity. It can also justify imperial expansion, forced assimilation, ethnic exclusion, and hostility toward outsiders.
Patriotism can encourage civic participation and sacrifice for the common good. When treated as unquestioning obedience, however, it can silence dissent and excuse state violence.
Religious nationalism merges a majority religion with national identity and political legitimacy. Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Shinto traditions have all been connected to nationalist movements in different historical settings.
Religious nationalism can create solidarity and a shared moral language, but it may treat minority-faith, immigrant, secular, or nonreligious citizens as less authentically national. Debates over whether national leaders should share the majority religion and whether sacred texts should influence national law reveal tensions among faith, popular sovereignty, constitutional rights, and equal citizenship.
Zionism, Antisemitism, and Competing National Claims
Zionism emerged as a modern Jewish nationalist movement shaped by European antisemitism, religious attachment to the land, nationalism, and the search for Jewish security and self-determination. Competing Zionist traditions developed, including secular, socialist, cultural, political, and religious forms.
Zionism contributed to the establishment of Israel while also profoundly affecting the Palestinian population. Its history involves unresolved tensions between Jewish self-determination, Palestinian national rights, settlement, displacement, security, sovereignty, and competing historical claims.
Religious Zionism connects Jewish theology with support for Jewish political sovereignty. Some Jewish religious communities historically opposed Zionism because they believed that establishing sovereignty before the coming of the Messiah violated religious teachings.
Christian Zionism became influential in American evangelical politics and foreign-policy debates. Biblical prophecy, Holocaust memory, Cold War politics, and the Christian Right strengthened Christian support for Israel.
Antisemitism has appeared in religious, cultural, racial, economic, and political forms. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists transformed older religious prejudices into racial conspiracy theories that excluded Jews regardless of religious practice or cultural assimilation. Antisemitic propaganda ultimately contributed to persecution, mass violence, and the Holocaust.
Islam, Sharia, and Political Islam
Islamic political thought contains diverse legal, theological, reformist, democratic, nationalist, conservative, and revolutionary traditions. Political Islam should not be treated as a single unified ideology.
Sharia refers to a broad tradition of Islamic ethical and legal interpretation rather than one universally fixed legal code. Muslim-majority governments and political movements have interpreted sharia in different ways, ranging from personal religious practice and democratic legislation to authoritarian enforcement.
The Muslim Brotherhood combined religious education, political activism, electoral participation, and social-welfare programs. Its rise and repression in Egypt illustrate the complicated relationship among Islamism, elections, military power, authoritarian government, and popular organization.
Islamist movements in Malaysia, Indonesia, and other Asian societies have been shaped by electoral competition, religious education, identity politics, social services, capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism. Some movements participate peacefully in democratic systems, while others promote majoritarian restrictions or political violence.
Iran’s political system combines elected institutions with clerical authority. The Iranian Revolution challenged monarchy and foreign influence but established religious institutions that restrict dissent, pluralism, and individual freedom.
Christianity, Catholicism, and Political Power
Christianity has supported monarchy, empire, colonial expansion, nationalism, abolitionism, civil rights, pacifism, social welfare, and revolutionary reform at different points in history.
The Protestant Reformation challenged papal authority, expanded vernacular religious culture, and transformed relationships between rulers and churches. It contributed to religious pluralism but also intensified political and sectarian conflict.
Catholic institutions have sometimes supported traditional authority and conservative social arrangements. In other settings, liberation theology, grassroots Catholic organizations, clergy, and lay activists defended poor communities, resisted dictatorship, and contributed to democratic transitions.
Religious anti-poverty movements have promoted charity, social services, labor reform, and structural change. Religious communities frequently disagree over whether poverty should be addressed through personal generosity, institutional reform, economic redistribution, or government action.
American evangelical politics became increasingly influential during the Cold War through anticommunism, debates over civil rights, opposition to abortion, economic conservatism, and electoral mobilization. Progressive and liberal evangelicals developed competing interpretations of Christian political responsibility.
Christian nationalism identifies Christianity with national identity, political authority, or ethnic belonging. It may encourage religious participation in public affairs, but it can also weaken church-state separation, pluralism, minority rights, and democratic accountability.
Buddhism, Hindu Nationalism, and Asian Political Traditions
Buddhist teachings have supported compassion, nonviolence, welfare, democratic activism, and anticolonial resistance. Buddhism has also been joined with ethnic nationalism, authoritarian government, militarism, and the exclusion of religious minorities.
Colonialism transformed modern understandings of Buddhism by portraying it as rational, textual, scientific, or philosophical. Asian reformers adopted and resisted these categories while using Buddhism to support education, cultural revival, national identity, and anticolonial politics.
In Japan, the Meiji state centralized political authority, industrialized the country, and connected Shinto institutions to emperor-centered nationalism. Modernization expanded state capacity while supporting militarism, imperialism, cultural assimilation, and colonial rule.
India’s Hindu nationalist movement demonstrates how democratic elections can strengthen rather than necessarily moderate religious majoritarianism. Hindutva politics connects national identity, religion, caste, culture, and political citizenship in ways that have significant consequences for minority rights.
Food practices in India have also become markers of religious, caste, cultural, and national identity. Disputes involving diet and sacred animals show how ordinary customs can become instruments of political inclusion and exclusion.
Colonialism, Imperialism, and Anticolonial Liberation
Colonialism involved conquest, settlement, economic exploitation, cultural domination, and the imposition of foreign political authority. European empires often claimed to spread civilization, Christianity, science, or progress while dispossessing and subordinating colonized peoples.
The transatlantic slave trade produced racial categories and economic inequalities whose effects continue to shape modern society. Claims that African societies lacked history or civilization helped legitimize enslavement and colonial domination.
Colonial governments and missionaries frequently dismissed Indigenous religions as primitive or superstitious. Indigenous communities nevertheless preserved and reinterpreted spiritual traditions as sources of identity, solidarity, cultural survival, political legitimacy, and resistance.
Anticolonial nationalism helped colonized peoples organize against foreign rule. It could create mass participation and national unity, but postcolonial movements sometimes reproduced ethnic division, authoritarian government, or unequal colonial institutions.
Frantz Fanon examined the psychological and political effects of colonialism, racism, revolutionary violence, and national liberation. His work inspired anticolonial movements while generating continuing debates about violence, national identity, postcolonial elites, and human emancipation.
Apartheid, Scientific Racism, and Eugenics
Apartheid transformed white-supremacist ideology into an extensive system of racial classification, territorial segregation, labor control, and political exclusion in South Africa. It protected white economic and political power by restricting the movement, residence, education, employment, and citizenship rights of nonwhite South Africans.
Internal resistance, international pressure, sanctions, economic change, and political negotiations contributed to apartheid’s collapse. Its end demonstrates how sustained organization and changing global human-rights norms can dismantle an entrenched ideological system.
Eugenics presented racial, class, disability, and gender prejudice as biological science. Governments and medical institutions used eugenic ideas to justify forced sterilization, institutionalization, immigration restriction, racial persecution, and the denial of reproductive freedom.
Under Nazism, eugenics and racial hygiene became foundations of state policy. Medical professionals, universities, courts, and bureaucracies helped convert pseudoscientific ideology into organized persecution and mass murder.
Feminism, Race, and Liberation Movements
Feminist political thought challenged traditions that treated male experience as universal and confined women to subordinate roles. Feminist movements transformed debates about citizenship, employment, education, family life, bodily autonomy, political representation, sexuality, violence, and the relationship between public and private power.
Socialist, Marxist, materialist, and intersectional feminists connected gender inequality with capitalism, class, unpaid care work, colonialism, racism, and law. Latin American feminisms developed through experiences of dictatorship, Indigenous marginalization, enslavement, Catholic influence, economic inequality, and colonialism.
Movements benefiting one group do not automatically promote universal equality. Political figures such as Rebecca Latimer Felton combined advocacy for white women’s advancement with white supremacy and support for racial violence.
Religious traditions played contradictory roles in struggles over race and gender. Christianity was used to defend slavery, segregation, patriarchy, and colonialism, while Black churches, women, Indigenous communities, abolitionists, and civil-rights activists used religious teachings to challenge oppression.
Religion, Civil Rights, and Social Reform
Religious institutions provided leadership, meeting places, moral authority, music, financial support, and organizing networks for abolitionism and the American civil-rights movement. Black Christianity, Islam, and African-derived traditions also supported community autonomy, Black nationalism, anticolonial thought, and struggles for human rights.
Religious peace movements challenged war, militarism, nuclear weapons, and support for authoritarian governments. Quakers, Mennonites, Catholic Workers, clergy, and interfaith activists used conscientious objection, civil disobedience, humanitarian work, and nonviolence.
Religious martyr narratives gave spiritual and political meaning to suffering within abolitionist, anti-lynching, Indigenous, missionary, and civil-rights movements. Such narratives encouraged solidarity and sacrifice but could also be manipulated to glorify political violence.
Religious feminism challenges patriarchal interpretations of sacred texts, rituals, institutions, and religious art. Feminist artists and theologians have reclaimed spiritual authority and expanded the representation of historically excluded identities.
Religion, War, Terrorism, and Peacebuilding
Religion can intensify conflicts involving territory, sovereignty, sacred places, ethnic identity, and political authority. Political leaders may portray war as a divine mission, moral sacrifice, or defense of a sacred community.
Terrorism can emerge from ethnic, nationalist, revolutionary, or religious movements that believe their communities are oppressed or denied political rights. Violent factions should be distinguished from the broader religious or nationalist traditions they claim to represent.
Religion can also contribute to mediation, reconciliation, humanitarian relief, nonviolence, and postwar peacebuilding. The same religious traditions used to legitimize war have frequently inspired pacifism and resistance to militarism.
Religion, Law, and Secular Government
Church-state separation developed as a means of protecting religious freedom and limiting official religious authority. Its meaning remains contested in disputes over education, public funding, elections, religious expression, and national identity.
Secularism is not simply the absence of religion. It is also a political framework that defines which beliefs and practices count as religious, where religious expression may occur, and how governments recognize different communities.
Public reason proposes that coercive political rules should be justified with arguments that citizens holding different religious and moral beliefs can evaluate. Supporters view it as essential to pluralistic democracy, while critics argue that it may require religious citizens to suppress or translate important convictions.
Supreme Court decisions concerning establishment, free exercise, public funding, equality, and education demonstrate that American church-state relations have been shaped by changing compromises rather than complete institutional separation.
Terms such as “Judeo-Christian” and “Abrahamic” expanded recognition of some religious minorities and encouraged interfaith cooperation. They may nevertheless exclude Indigenous, Asian, non-Abrahamic, and nonreligious traditions from prevailing definitions of national identity.
Ideology in Education, Culture, and Public Life
Ideology is communicated through schools, books, newspapers, radio, film, music, art, architecture, ceremonies, monuments, parades, and sacred spaces. Governments and movements use these cultural forms to define citizenship, create political loyalty, and shape historical memory.
Authoritarian governments often combine censorship with mass communication and education. Democratic and liberation movements likewise use literature, music, art, and public ritual to challenge official narratives and recover suppressed histories.
Religious architecture and public ceremonies can provide stability, visibility, and solidarity for communities. They can also become contested symbols of majority privilege, immigration, colonization, exclusion, or cultural change.
Governments selectively remember and reinterpret wars, revolutions, leaders, and social movements. Historical memory can therefore legitimize political institutions, strengthen national identity, conceal state violence, or support demands for justice.
Benefits and Dangers of Ideological Commitment
Ideologies help people identify injustice, imagine alternatives, coordinate political action, and construct institutions. Liberalism advanced civil liberties; socialism supported labor protections; feminism challenged patriarchy; anticolonialism promoted national liberation; and religious reform movements contributed to abolitionism, civil rights, humanitarian service, and peace activism.
Ideologies can also simplify complex societies into rigid divisions between insiders and outsiders. When leaders claim exclusive possession of truth, ideological commitment may encourage censorship, persecution, forced conformity, political violence, and authoritarian government.
The danger is especially great when an ideology becomes embedded in powerful institutions without meaningful opposition, judicial independence, press freedom, or protection for minorities. Nazi Germany illustrates how elections, emergency powers, law, propaganda, education, medicine, and bureaucracy can be coordinated to destroy democracy and human rights.
No ideology should be judged only by its stated ideals. Its historical effects must also be evaluated by examining how it distributes power, treats dissent, defines membership, protects minorities, and responds to evidence or criticism.
Conclusion
Political and religious ideologies have profoundly shaped revolutions, governments, economic systems, national identities, colonial empires, liberation movements, and struggles for human rights. They have provided languages of freedom, justice, solidarity, faith, equality, and self-determination. They have also supplied justifications for hierarchy, exclusion, imperialism, authoritarianism, and mass violence.
The same tradition can support sharply different political projects. Religion can legitimize conquest or inspire peace; nationalism can advance liberation or ethnic exclusion; socialism can expand social protection or become authoritarian; and liberalism can defend individual rights while coexisting with severe inequality.
Understanding ideology therefore requires more than identifying doctrines. It requires examining historical context, political institutions, social power, and lived consequences. Critical study makes it possible to recognize the constructive achievements of ideological movements without overlooking the people harmed, excluded, or silenced in their name.
Understanding Ideology
Ideology
| Robin Celikates and Sally Haslanger | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | March 7, 2025
Examines ideology as a worldview, political doctrine, source of group identity, and means of legitimizing power. The article explains how ideologies can inspire collective reform while also concealing injustice, sustaining domination, and discouraging people from questioning established institutions.
Theories of Ideology: Origins, Development, and Prospects
| Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell | Cambridge University Press | 2024
Traces competing theories of ideology and considers how systems of belief can either defend oppressive institutions or help social movements transform them. It provides a useful framework for evaluating ideology as both a source of political cohesion and a potential instrument of manipulation.
Five Conceptions of Ideology
| Jack M. Balkin | Yale University | n.d.
Describes five ways scholars understand ideology, including distorted belief, class interest, domination, social cognition, and cultural interpretation. Balkin emphasizes that ideas acquire ideological effects through the historical circumstances in which they are used.
Political Ideologies
The Russian Revolution
| History.com Editors | History | March 12, 2024
Describes the revolutions that destroyed Russia’s imperial government and enabled the Bolsheviks to establish the first lasting communist state. The revolution promised peace, land, and worker power but led to civil war, political terror, centralized rule, and a global ideological confrontation.
Solidarity in Social and Political Philosophy
| Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | March 25, 2023
Traces solidarity as an organizing ideal within socialism, liberal nationalism, trade unionism, Catholic reform, and other movements. Solidarity can create mutual responsibility and collective action, although it can become exclusionary when restricted to favored classes, nations, religions, or ethnic groups.
Karl Marx
| Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | December 21, 2020
Introduces Marx’s critique of capitalism, theory of class conflict, historical materialism, and vision of human emancipation. Marxism inspired labor movements and challenges to exploitation, but governments claiming its legacy also established authoritarian political and economic systems.
Communism
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | June 10, 2019
Explains how communism developed as an alternative to capitalism and far-right politics before becoming a major global force. Communist movements promoted class equality, worker organization, and expanded social provision, while many communist states imposed one-party rule, censorship, political imprisonment, and violent repression.
Fascism
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | May 28, 2019
Defines fascism as an ultranationalist and authoritarian political movement that rejects liberal democracy, glorifies hierarchy, and places the nation above individual rights. Fascist governments mobilized populations and centralized authority while producing dictatorship, persecution, aggressive war, and genocide.
Liberalism
Surveys the development of liberal ideas concerning individual liberty, equality, private property, toleration, and limits on government power. Liberalism helped advance constitutional government and civil rights, although critics argue that liberal institutions can preserve economic inequality and disguise unequal power.
John Rawls
| Leif Wenar | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | January 9, 2017
Explains Rawls’s liberal theory of justice, equal basic liberties, fair opportunity, and political cooperation among people with different beliefs. His work illustrates how ideology can provide a moral blueprint for democratic institutions and the distribution of social resources.
Apartheid: Definition and South Africa
| History.com Editors | History | October 7, 2010
Explains how South Africa’s National Party transformed white-supremacist ideology into an extensive system of racial classification and segregation. Apartheid protected white political and economic power by restricting where nonwhite South Africans could live, work, study, travel, and participate politically.
Patriotism
| Igor Primoratz | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | June 1, 2009
Considers the moral benefits and dangers of patriotic loyalty. Patriotism can sustain civic participation, social trust, and sacrifice for the common good, but uncritical patriotism can excuse state violence, silence dissent, and encourage hostility toward outsiders.
Antisemitism in the Era of Nationalism, 1800–1918
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Shows how nationalism and rapid social change created new forms of political antisemitism in nineteenth-century Europe. Expanding citizenship benefited Jewish communities, but politicians and movements also used conspiracies and ethnic exclusion to portray Jews as enemies of the nation.
Everyday Encounters with Fascism
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Experiencing History | n.d.
Uses historical sources to show how fascism entered schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, youth organizations, and ordinary social relationships. The collection demonstrates that authoritarian ideology becomes powerful not only through leaders but also through institutions and everyday participation.
The Spanish Civil War
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Examines the conflict between Spain’s Republican coalition and Nationalist forces that included monarchists, conservatives, Catholic traditionalists, and fascists. The war demonstrates how communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, and religion can combine with social divisions to produce mass political violence.
The End of Apartheid
| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d.
Describes how internal resistance, international sanctions, economic pressures, and political negotiations contributed to the collapse of apartheid. The transition illustrates how organized opposition and changing international ideas about human rights can dismantle an entrenched ideological system.
Religious Ideologies and Political Power
Understanding Sharia: The Intersection of Islam and the Law
| Kali Robinson | Council on Foreign Relations | December 17, 2021
Explains the diversity of Islamic legal traditions and distinguishes personal religious practice from debates about state law. The article challenges the idea that sharia is a single unchanging code and examines how different governments and movements interpret it for democratic, authoritarian, conservative, or reformist purposes.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
| Zachary Laub | Council on Foreign Relations | August 15, 2019
Traces the development of one of the world’s most influential Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood combined religious teaching, political activism, and social-welfare programs, gained power through elections, and was subsequently removed and severely repressed by Egypt’s military.
Catholic Church Advocacy in Latin America
| Amy Erica Smith | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | January 25, 2019
Explains how liberation theology and Catholic grassroots organization encouraged clergy and laypeople to support poor communities, resist authoritarianism, and participate in democratic transitions. The article shows that religious institutions can reinforce existing power or become vehicles for social justice and political change.
The Rise of Islamist Groups in Malaysia and Indonesia
| Joshua Kurlantzick | Council on Foreign Relations | February 27, 2018
Examines the growth of Islamist movements in two Muslim-majority societies often associated with religious moderation. It considers how electoral competition, religious mobilization, identity politics, social services, and militancy can reshape civil law, minority rights, and democratic institutions.
Liberalism in American Religious History
| Leigh E. Schmidt | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2018
Explores how liberal ideas about conscience, voluntary association, reason, minority rights, and religious freedom reshaped American religion. It also considers how Protestant liberalism influenced American secularism and required Catholics, Jews, and other minorities to adapt to institutions formed by a Protestant majority.
Religion and Politics in Iran
| Lionel Beehner | Council on Foreign Relations | June 19, 2008
Explores the institutional relationship between religious authority and elected government in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s system demonstrates how revolutionary religious ideology can challenge foreign domination and create political unity while also limiting dissent, pluralism, and individual freedoms.
Martin Luther’s Life, 1517–1525
| Christopher Ocker | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Examines how Martin Luther’s religious arguments developed into a reform movement with enormous political consequences. The Reformation challenged papal authority, expanded vernacular religious culture, altered relations between rulers and churches, and contributed to both religious pluralism and violent sectarian conflict.
The Separation of Church and State in the United States
| Steven K. Green | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History | n.d.
Traces the historical origins and changing interpretations of church-state separation. The principle has protected religious freedom and limited official religious power, but disagreements over its meaning have repeatedly shaped education, law, elections, and national identity.
Social Justice, Anti-Poverty Work, and Religion
| Lew Daly | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | n.d.
Studies the religious foundations of anti-poverty campaigns, charitable organizations, and movements for social justice. Faith can motivate service and challenges to unjust institutions, although religious approaches may also conflict over whether poverty should be addressed through charity, structural reform, or state action.
Nationalism, Religion, and Identity
Religious Nationalism Around the World
| Jonathan Evans and Manolo Corichi | Pew Research Center | January 28, 2025
Compares religious nationalism across numerous countries and faith traditions. The findings show how majority religions can become symbols of national belonging, political legitimacy, and social solidarity while potentially marginalizing religious minorities, secular citizens, immigrants, and dissenters.
Antisemitism: An Introduction
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | January 10, 2025
Traces the religious, cultural, racial, and political forms of antisemitism that developed over many centuries. The article shows how inherited prejudices and modern ideological propaganda enabled discrimination, persecution, mass violence, and ultimately the Holocaust.
Christianity’s Place in Politics and Christian Nationalism
| Gregory A. Smith, Michael Rotolo and Patricia Tevington | Pew Research Center | March 15, 2024
Examines American attitudes toward Christian nationalism, biblical influence on law, and church-state separation. The survey illustrates the continuing tension between religious participation in public life, democratic majority rule, and protections for people who hold different beliefs.
Herzl’s Troubled Dream: The Origins of Zionism
| William Eichler | History Today | June 6, 2023
Examines Zionism as both a Jewish national-liberation movement responding to European antisemitism and a movement whose settlement project affected the Palestinian population. It presents the ideology’s origins within European nationalism and the historical tensions between Jewish self-determination and Palestinian rights.
Eugenics
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | October 23, 2020
Shows how eugenic ideology presented social prejudice as biological science and supplied justification for forced sterilization, institutionalization, racial persecution, and mass murder. Its history demonstrates how political movements can combine nationalism, racism, medicine, and bureaucracy to make oppression appear rational and beneficial.
Zionism
| Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies | University of Michigan | 2009
Introduces Zionism as a modern Jewish nationalist movement shaped by persecution, religious attachment to the land, European nationalism, and colonial-era assumptions. It describes competing forms of Zionism and explains how the movement contributed to Israel’s establishment and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Religious Zionism
| My Jewish Learning Staff | My Jewish Learning | n.d.
Explains how religious Zionism joined Jewish theology to the modern nationalist project of establishing and supporting a Jewish state. It also describes opposition from Jewish religious groups that believed political efforts to establish sovereignty before the coming of the Messiah violated traditional teachings.
Racial Antisemitism, 1875–1945
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Explains how older religious hostility toward Jews was transformed by pseudoscientific racism and nationalist politics. Politicians used racial myths and conspiracy theories to mobilize supporters, redefine citizenship, and exclude Jews regardless of their religious practices or cultural assimilation.
Political and Economic Ideologies
Neoliberalism
| Kevin Vallier | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | June 9, 2021
Examines neoliberalism as a political and economic philosophy favoring competitive markets, private enterprise, limited government, and institutional restraints on public power. Neoliberal reforms encouraged trade and investment in some countries but have also been criticized for increasing inequality, weakening labor protections, and transferring public authority to private institutions.
Socialism
| Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | July 15, 2019
Surveys the many forms of socialism and their shared concern with equality, democracy, freedom, solidarity, and collective control over economic life. Socialist movements helped build labor protections and welfare institutions, although centralized socialist experiments sometimes produced bureaucracy, economic inefficiency, and authoritarian rule.
Anarchism
| Andrew Fiala | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | October 3, 2017
Explains anarchism as a family of theories questioning the moral legitimacy of coercive authority, hierarchy, and the state. Anarchists have promoted voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, direct democracy, and resistance to domination, while critics question whether a stateless society could maintain security and protect individual rights.
Public Reason
| Jonathan Quong | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | May 20, 2013
Explains the principle that political rules should be justified with reasons that citizens holding different moral and religious beliefs can reasonably evaluate. Public reason can support pluralistic democracy, although critics argue that it may unfairly require religious citizens to translate or suppress important parts of their convictions.
Kant’s Social and Political Philosophy
| Frederick Rauscher | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | July 24, 2007
Explores Immanuel Kant’s ideas about freedom, republican government, legal equality, individual dignity, and international peace. Kant’s work influenced liberal constitutionalism and human-rights thinking, even as historians debate contradictions between his universal philosophy and some of his writings about race and colonial peoples.
Locke’s Political Philosophy
| Alex Tuckness | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | November 9, 2005
Examines John Locke’s theories of natural rights, religious toleration, property, consent, revolution, and limited government. Locke’s ideas helped inspire constitutional democracy, but his theory of property and involvement in colonial institutions have raised questions about liberalism’s relationship to dispossession and slavery.
Ten Conservative Principles
| Russell Kirk | Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal | 1993
Presents conservatism as a disposition favoring inherited institutions, social continuity, moral order, private property, voluntary community, and cautious reform. The essay shows how conservatives view tradition as accumulated social knowledge, although excessive deference to tradition can preserve unjust hierarchies and delay necessary change.
Colonialism, Imperialism, and National Liberation
How the Transatlantic Slave Trade Continues to Affect Modern Life
| Smithsonian Books | Smithsonian Magazine | November 7, 2024
Explores how ideologies created during the transatlantic slave trade continue to influence racial categories, economic inequality, education, culture, and historical memory. European claims that African societies lacked history or civilization helped legitimize enslavement and colonial domination.
Frantz Fanon
| Lewis R. Gordon | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | March 14, 2019
Introduces Fanon’s analysis of colonialism, racism, psychological domination, revolutionary violence, and national liberation. His writings inspired anticolonial movements worldwide while generating continuing debate over violence, nationalism, postcolonial elites, and the meaning of human emancipation.
Colonialism
| Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 29, 2017
Examines the political theories used to justify and criticize colonial conquest, settlement, exploitation, and cultural domination. The article highlights the contradiction between European claims about liberty and the subjugation of colonized peoples, while introducing postcolonial and Indigenous critiques of dispossession.
The Meiji Revolution
| Mark Ravina | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History | April 26, 2017
Describes Japan’s transformation from a decentralized hereditary order into a centralized constitutional monarchy committed to industrialization and national power. Modernization expanded rights and state capacity, but it also supported militarism, imperial expansion, cultural assimilation, and colonial rule.
Philosophy in Mexico
| Guillermo Hurtado | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | December 8, 2016
Traces Mexican debates involving liberalism, conservatism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, and Indigenous identity. These ideological conflicts shaped struggles over monarchy, republicanism, church authority, education, land, foreign intervention, and national modernization.
Nationalism and Party-System Formation in Southeast Asia
| Allen Hicken and Yuko Kasuya | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | n.d.
Examines how nationalist struggles and postcolonial conflicts shaped political parties in Malaysia and Indonesia. Ethnic, religious, class-based, and anticolonial organizations helped build mass participation but also created durable political divisions and opportunities for authoritarian government.
Gender, Race, and Liberation Movements
Who Was Abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward?
| R. J. M. Blackett | Smithsonian Magazine | March 24, 2023
Reconstructs the life of Black abolitionist, minister, newspaper editor, and labor advocate Samuel Ringgold Ward. Ward’s career illustrates how Christian conviction, racial justice, freedom of the press, labor activism, and international antislavery politics combined within abolitionism.
The Nation’s First Woman Senator Was a Virulent White Supremacist
| Rebecca Boggs Roberts | Smithsonian Magazine | November 21, 2022
Examines Rebecca Latimer Felton’s combination of women’s political advancement, white supremacy, and support for lynching. Her career demonstrates that campaigns benefiting one social group can reinforce oppression when they exclude racial justice and form alliances with reactionary movements.
Religious Frames and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
| Frederick Harris | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | June 25, 2019
Explains how churches, clergy, sacred texts, spiritual traditions, and religious ideas supported the American civil-rights movement. Faith provided leadership, organization, moral authority, and a language of nonviolence, although religious institutions were also divided over segregation and racial equality.
Latin American Feminism
| Amy Oliver | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | December 12, 2018
Traces feminist ideas formed through Latin America’s histories of colonialism, enslavement, Indigenous marginalization, dictatorship, economic inequality, and religious influence. The article emphasizes that Latin American feminisms contain diverse and sometimes competing approaches to gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, and community.
Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion in North America
| Kathryn Lofton | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | February 27, 2017
Explores how religious ideas helped construct—and sometimes challenge—racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies in North American history. Christianity was used to justify colonization and slavery, while Native Americans, African Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ communities also drew on religion as a resource for resistance.
Feminist Political Philosophy
| Mary G. Dietz | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | March 1, 2009
Surveys feminist challenges to political traditions that treated male experience as universal and confined women to subordinate social roles. Feminist thought transformed debates about citizenship, work, family, bodily autonomy, political representation, violence, and the distinction between public and private life.
Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work
Examines the relationship between capitalism, class inequality, unpaid care, paid employment, patriarchy, and women’s liberation. Socialist, Marxist, materialist, and intersectional feminists have shown how gender inequality is connected to economic institutions as well as law and culture.
Asian Religious and Political Ideologies
Buddhism in Colonial Contexts
| Douglas Ober | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | October 30, 2019
Explains how colonial rule transformed modern understandings of Buddhism as rational, textual, scientific, philosophical, and distinct from ritual. Asian reformers selectively adopted and resisted European categories, using Buddhism to support cultural revival, education, nationalism, and anticolonial politics.
The Inclusion-Moderation Thesis and India’s BJP
| Amrita Basu | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | September 30, 2019
Examines whether participation in democratic elections moderates radical political parties, using India’s Hindu nationalist movement as a major case. It traces the relationship among the RSS, Hindutva ideology, the BJP, democratic competition, religious majoritarianism, caste, and minority rights.
Religious Traditions in Politics: Buddhism
| Christopher Ives | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | February 25, 2019
Surveys Buddhist political traditions across Asia and challenges the assumption that Buddhism always produces peaceful or politically passive behavior. Buddhist teachings have supported compassion, nonviolence, welfare, and democratic activism but have also been combined with authoritarian government, ethnic nationalism, and exclusion.
Al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Society and Religion
| Nadja Germann | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | June 15, 2016
Explores al-Farabi’s attempt to adapt Greek political philosophy to the social and religious circumstances of the medieval Islamic world. He treated religion as a means of communicating philosophical truths and moral principles to political communities through laws, symbols, stories, and rituals.
Islam and Politics in Asia
| Vedi R. Hadiz | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | n.d.
Examines the diverse ways Muslim communities in Asia have responded to colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, democracy, religious education, and the modern state. It shows that political Islam is not a single ideology and that its movements range from democratic and reformist organizations to authoritarian and militant groups.
Religion, War, and Government
Medieval Political Philosophy
| Cary J. Nederman | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | July 14, 2025
Surveys medieval debates about monarchy, law, justice, church authority, secular government, community, and the purposes of political power. Medieval thinkers disagreed over whether rulers should serve religious institutions, control them, cooperate with them, or operate within a distinct sphere of authority.
War and Religion: An Overview
| Jeffrey Haynes | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics | March 26, 2019
Investigates the complicated relationship between religion and armed conflict. Religious identity can intensify struggles over territory, sovereignty, and sacred places, but religious communities and leaders can also support mediation, reconciliation, humanitarian relief, nonviolence, and postwar peacebuilding.
Religion in Post-1945 America
| Kevin M. Schultz | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History | August 31, 2016
Traces the influence of religion on Cold War identity, civil rights, economic policy, electoral coalitions, cultural conflict, and ideas about American exceptionalism. It shows how both conservative and progressive religious movements shaped public debate even as formal government institutions became more secular.
Spinoza’s Political Philosophy
| Justin Steinberg | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 21, 2008
Explores Baruch Spinoza’s defense of freedom of thought, religious toleration, democracy, and state authority over public religious affairs. His work helped shape secular political thought by challenging clerical power while still recognizing religion’s capacity to encourage ethical conduct and social cooperation.
Religion and Political Theory
| Christopher Eberle and Terence Cuneo | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | January 8, 2008
Examines whether religious arguments should influence coercive laws in pluralistic democracies. The article addresses religious freedom, public justification, toleration, citizenship, secular reasoning, and the challenge of creating legitimate institutions for people with fundamentally different worldviews.
The Ethnic, Nationalist, and Religious Roots of Terrorism
| David C. Rapoport | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies | n.d.
Examines how terrorism can arise from ethnic, nationalist, revolutionary, and religious movements that perceive their communities as oppressed or denied political rights. It also distinguishes broad religious and nationalist traditions from the small factions that adopt violence against civilians.
Democratic and Civic Ideologies
Jürgen Habermas
| James Gordon Finlayson and Dafydd Huw Rees | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2026
Surveys Habermas’s theories of democracy, communication, public debate, constitutional patriotism, religion, and legitimate government. His work argues that democratic authority should emerge through inclusive public reasoning rather than propaganda, coercion, inherited privilege, or unquestioned tradition.
Libertarianism
| Bas van der Vossen and Billy Christmas | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | September 5, 2022
Presents libertarianism as a family of political theories that place individual liberty, private property, voluntary exchange, and freedom from coercion at the center of political life. Critics argue that minimal government may leave people vulnerable to economic domination and unequal access to essential services.
Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy
| Thom Brooks | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | June 3, 2021
Examines Hegel’s theory of freedom through family, civil society, law, political institutions, and the constitutional state. His philosophy influenced liberals, conservatives, nationalists, socialists, and Marxists, demonstrating how the same intellectual tradition can generate sharply different political ideologies.
Communitarianism
| Daniel Bell | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | May 21, 2020
Examines the belief that identities and moral values are formed through families, cultures, religious traditions, neighborhoods, and political communities. Communitarianism challenges excessive individualism but can also be used to defend conformity, traditional hierarchies, and restrictions on people who reject dominant community values.
Republicanism
| Frank Lovett and Philip Pettit | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | June 19, 2018
Traces republican thought from classical and Renaissance writers to modern theories of freedom as protection from arbitrary power. Republicanism encourages civic participation, constitutional restraints, and public responsibility, although historical republics frequently excluded women, enslaved people, workers, and religious minorities from citizenship.
Conservatism
| Andy Hamilton | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 1, 2015
Explores conservatism as a philosophy emphasizing tradition, inherited institutions, practical experience, authority, property, and gradual reform. Conservatism can protect social continuity and restrain reckless political experimentation, but it may also preserve unjust institutions and resist necessary expansions of equality.
Revolutionary Ideologies and Authoritarian Rule
The Enabling Act of 1933
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | April 3, 2026
Explains how legislation passed under intimidation allowed Hitler to make laws without parliamentary approval, becoming a cornerstone of Nazi dictatorship. The act illustrates how democratic institutions can be destroyed through apparently legal procedures when opposition, judicial independence, and civil liberties have been weakened.
Nazi Rule
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | September 23, 2025
Describes the Nazi coordination of political parties, trade unions, education, culture, law, business, and local government under a single authoritarian system. Independent organizations were abolished or absorbed so that ideology and loyalty to Hitler penetrated nearly every area of public life.
Nazi Propaganda and Censorship
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | September 23, 2025
Shows how Nazi authorities combined censorship with newspapers, radio, film, art, education, and mass spectacle to manufacture support for dictatorship. Propaganda glorified Hitler and national unity while spreading antisemitism, militarism, racial ideology, and hatred of political opponents.
The Nazi Party
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | July 21, 2025
Traces the Nazi Party’s development from a radical postwar movement into the organization controlling a totalitarian state. Economic crisis, political violence, propaganda, antisemitism, ultranationalism, and hostility toward democracy allowed the party to attract support and eliminate its opponents.
The Reichstag Fire
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | June 30, 2025
Describes how the Nazis used the burning of Germany’s parliament to portray communism as an existential threat and obtain emergency powers. The episode demonstrates how leaders can exploit fear and crisis to suspend civil liberties, arrest opponents, and dismantle constitutional government.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Rise to Power, 1918–1933
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | June 23, 2025
Explains that the Nazi takeover was not inevitable but resulted from economic crisis, political miscalculation, electoral campaigning, violence, propaganda, and exploitation of democratic institutions. The Nazis used participation in elections as a means of weakening and eventually destroying democracy.
China’s Overlooked Role in World War II
| Rana Mitter | History | May 18, 2022
Examines China’s resistance to Japanese imperialism and explains how later communist and Cold War narratives reshaped public memory of the conflict. The article shows how governments select, suppress, and reinterpret history to support national identity and political legitimacy.
The Long March
| History.com Editors | History | November 13, 2009
Recounts the Chinese Communists’ military retreat of 1934–1935 and Mao Zedong’s emergence as the movement’s dominant leader. Communist mythology transformed the march into a story of sacrifice, unity, and revolutionary determination, helping legitimize Mao’s leadership and the later communist state.
The Cultural Revolution
| History.com Editors | History | November 9, 2009
Describes Mao Zedong’s campaign to restore revolutionary ideological purity and eliminate perceived bourgeois and traditional influences in China. The movement mobilized young people and challenged established authority but produced persecution, factional violence, educational disruption, cultural destruction, and widespread suffering.
Indoctrinating Youth
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Explains how Nazi ideology entered schools, textbooks, youth organizations, sports, and leisure activities. By controlling education and social life, the regime attempted to replace family, religious, and individual loyalties with obedience to Hitler, racial nationalism, militarism, and the Nazi state.
The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933–1939
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Examines how Nazi racial ideology transformed medicine, public health, universities, law, and social policy. Claims about biological improvement were used to justify exclusion, forced sterilization, professional purges, persecution, and the removal of individual rights.
Religion under Fascism and Authoritarianism
Christian Nationalism’s Threat to Global Democracy
| Nilay Saiya | The Review of Faith & International Affairs | 2024
Analyzes Christian nationalism as an international rather than exclusively American phenomenon. It argues that movements merging Christianity with ethnic and national identity can weaken pluralism, civil liberties, democratic accountability, and the political equality of minority communities.
Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective
| Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs | Georgetown University | March 30, 2022
Explores how Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions became connected to modern nation-state formation. Religious nationalism can create shared identity and political solidarity, but it can also turn majority faiths into tests of citizenship and marginalize religious or ethnic minorities.
Martin Luther and Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism
| Thomas Kaufmann | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2016
Investigates Luther’s anti-Jewish writings and their later reception in German religious and political culture. The article explains how inherited theological hostility could be detached from its original setting and combined with nationalism and racial antisemitism.
The German Churches and the Nazi State
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Examines Protestant and Catholic responses to Nazi rule, ranging from accommodation and active collaboration to limited institutional opposition and individual resistance. Some Protestants promoted a Nazified Christianity, while other Christians rejected state interference or objected to particular Nazi policies.
Religion, Reform, and Resistance
Feminism and Religious Art
| Angela Yarber | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | April 16, 2025
Examines how feminist artists have challenged patriarchal interpretations of sacred figures, texts, rituals, and institutions. Religious art has become a field in which women reclaim spiritual authority, represent excluded identities, and expose the political consequences of traditional gender ideology.
Buddhist Chaplaincy
Explains how Buddhist spiritual care developed within hospitals, prisons, universities, militaries, and other formally secular institutions. Its growth reflects increasing religious pluralism and the effort to make public institutions responsive to people outside historically dominant Christian traditions.
The Imamura Families and the Making of American Buddhism
| Michihiro Ama | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | January 25, 2019
Traces Japanese American Buddhist adaptation, community leadership, and political identity across generations. The article shows how racial prejudice and wartime nationalism portrayed Buddhism as foreign and disloyal while treating Christianity as evidence of American patriotism.
Martyrdom and Religion in North America
| Arthur Remillard | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | February 27, 2017
Examines how the language of martyrdom gave political and spiritual meaning to suffering and death in North American history. Abolitionists, anti-lynching activists, missionaries, Indigenous communities, and civil-rights movements used martyr narratives to inspire solidarity, sacrifice, and resistance.
Peace Movements and Religion in the United States
| David C. Hostetter | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2017
Traces religious opposition to war, militarism, nuclear weapons, and American support for authoritarian governments. Quakers, Mennonites, Catholic Workers, clergy, and interfaith activists used conscience, nonviolence, civil disobedience, humanitarian service, and international solidarity to challenge state policy.
Martin Luther in the Ecumenical Movement
| Sarah Hinlicky Wilson | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | December 22, 2016
Describes efforts by Lutherans and other Christians to overcome divisions inherited from the Reformation. Twentieth-century ecumenism promoted dialogue, cooperation, reconciliation, and shared social action while preserving distinct theological identities.
Religion in Public Culture
Mysticism: An Overview
| William B. Parsons | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | November 22, 2019
Surveys mystical traditions and the modern transformation of mysticism into a category of personal religious experience. Mystical ideas have inspired reform, pacifism, equality, and challenges to institutional authority, although they have also been interpreted through colonial, racial, gendered, and Orientalist assumptions.
Music and Religion in American Public Life
| Jason C. Bivins | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | January 24, 2018
Explores how hymns, spirituals, popular music, patriotic songs, and religious performances communicate political ideas. Music has supported national identity, protest, civil rights, revivalism, war, peace activism, and challenges to established religious authority.
Religious Parades and Processions in America
| Rodger M. Payne | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | December 19, 2017
Examines how religious communities use public streets, ceremonies, and processions to assert identity and belonging. Such events can promote recognition and community solidarity, but they can also generate conflict over public space, majority privilege, minority visibility, and the boundaries between religion and government.
Space, Architecture, and American Religious Diversity
| Peter W. Williams | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Studies how churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, gurdwaras, missions, monuments, and sacred landscapes express political power and cultural belonging. Religious buildings can provide community stability while also becoming contested symbols of colonization, immigration, exclusion, or pluralism.
Enlightenment, Humanism, and Modern Political Thought
Desiderius Erasmus
| Erika Rummel | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 9, 2017
Presents Erasmus as a leading Christian humanist who combined classical learning, biblical scholarship, education, moral reform, and criticism of religious corruption. His preference for persuasion and peace over coercion influenced later arguments for toleration, intellectual freedom, and reform within religious institutions.
John of Salisbury
| Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 24, 2016
Examines a medieval Christian thinker who compared political society to a living body and distinguished legitimate rulers from tyrants. His work contributed to debates about moral limits on political authority, relations between church and government, and whether resistance to tyranny can be justified.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
| Christopher Bertram | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | September 27, 2010
Explores Rousseau’s theories of popular sovereignty, inequality, freedom, education, the general will, and civil religion. His writings inspired republican, democratic, nationalist, socialist, and revolutionary movements while also raising concerns about whether claims to represent a collective will can suppress dissent.
Enlightenment
| William Bristow | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 20, 2010
Examines the Enlightenment challenge to political authority founded on inherited privilege, religious mystery, and unquestioned tradition. Enlightenment thinkers promoted reason, science, individual liberty, toleration, and institutional reform, although their universal ideals often coexisted with colonialism, slavery, racism, and the exclusion of women.
Auguste Comte
| Michel Bourdeau | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | October 1, 2008
Examines Comte’s positivism and his attempt to organize society according to scientific knowledge rather than theology or metaphysics. Positivism influenced governments, educational systems, social sciences, and modernization projects but could also encourage technocracy, hierarchy, and excessive confidence in expert authority.
Justus Lipsius
| Jan Papy | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | August 23, 2004
Describes Lipsius’s effort to combine Roman Stoicism with Christianity during Europe’s religious wars. His philosophy of discipline, constancy, political prudence, and strong government offered stability amid conflict but also influenced arguments supporting centralized state authority.
Cosmopolitanism
| Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | February 23, 2002
Traces the belief that all human beings belong to a shared moral or political community extending beyond national, ethnic, or religious boundaries. Cosmopolitanism contributed to human-rights and internationalist thought, but critics argue that supposedly universal ideals can conceal Western power and weaken local self-determination.
Religion, Law, and Secular Government
The Judeo-Christian and Abrahamic Traditions in America
| K. Healan Gaston | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2018
Traces the political use of “Judeo-Christian” and “Abrahamic” as descriptions of American identity. These concepts encouraged interfaith cooperation and greater inclusion of Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, but they could also exclude non-Abrahamic religions and nonreligious citizens.
Law, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Religion
| Derek H. Davis | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2016
Surveys Supreme Court decisions involving religious establishment, free exercise, public funding, equality, education, and political participation. The article shows that American church-state relations involve shifting compromises rather than an absolute institutional separation.
Spatial Constructions of the American Secular
| John Lardas Modern | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Examines how governments and scholars distinguish religious spaces from allegedly secular public life. It argues that secularism is not simply the absence of religion but a political framework that defines where religion may appear and which forms of religious expression receive recognition.
Spatial Politics and American Religious Pluralism
| Bret E. Carroll | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Explores religious pluralism as an ongoing negotiation over neighborhoods, buildings, monuments, public ceremonies, and civic belonging. American pluralism expanded opportunities for minority religions while continuing to operate within a landscape historically shaped by Anglo-Protestant dominance.
Race, the Law, and Religion in America
| Sally M. Promey | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Examines how racial and religious identities were defined through legislation, court decisions, government policy, and cultural assumptions. Religious liberty existed alongside laws and institutions that treated certain racial and religious communities as threats to national security and social order.
American Religious Reform and Political Movements
Dr. Betty Shabazz
| Russell J. Rickford | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | November 20, 2024
Examines Betty Shabazz’s role in preserving and expanding Malcolm X’s legacy of Black liberation, human rights, Muslim identity, and social justice. Her activism demonstrates how political memory is constructed through education, family leadership, scholarship, community institutions, and public commemoration.
War and Religion in American History
| Jonathan H. Ebel | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | December 19, 2017
Investigates how religious beliefs have justified, interpreted, challenged, and memorialized American wars. Clergy and governments presented warfare as sacrifice or divine mission, while pacifists and antiwar activists invoked religious ethics to resist violence and militarism.
Ideas of the Afterlife in American Religion
| Kathryn Gin Lum | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | June 28, 2017
Examines how ideas about heaven, hell, judgment, and salvation affected earthly politics and social behavior. Oppressed groups used divine judgment to condemn injustice, while religious authorities sometimes used the threat of punishment to enforce conformity and defend established hierarchies.
Civil Rights Movements and Religion in America
| Paul Harvey | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | 2014
Explains how Black churches and Christian thought helped undermine the white-supremacist order in the United States. Religious institutions supplied leadership, meeting places, moral language, music, financial support, and organizing networks for campaigns seeking civil and political equality.
Social Progressivism and Religion in America
| Christopher D. Cantwell | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Explores how religious imagery, theology, and moral argument shaped abolitionism, anti-lynching campaigns, labor reform, women’s activism, and other progressive movements. Reformers used Christian symbols to condemn injustice, although religious language also reflected disagreements over race, class, gender, and political strategy.
African Americans and Religion
| Paul Harvey | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Surveys the relationship among Black Christianity, Islam, African-derived traditions, Black nationalism, anticolonial thought, civil rights, and conservative religious movements. African American religion has supported liberation and community autonomy while encompassing considerable political and theological diversity.
American Evangelical Politics during the Cold War
| Angela M. Lahr | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Explores evangelical involvement in anticommunism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, economic policy, and electoral politics. Evangelical politics eventually contributed to the Religious Right, although liberal and progressive evangelicals developed competing interpretations of Christian public responsibility.
Revivals, Awakenings, and Conversion in American Christianity
| Candy Gunther Brown | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | n.d.
Traces revivalism as a force in American religious and political life from colonial awakenings to modern Pentecostalism. Revivals democratized religious participation and energized reform movements, but they could also reinforce social conformity, missionary colonialism, and conservative political authority.
Zionism, Evangelicalism, and Foreign Policy
Christian Zionism in the United States, 1930–2020
| Daniel G. Hummel | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | September 20, 2023
Traces Christian support for Jewish settlement and the State of Israel, particularly among conservative American evangelicals. Biblical prophecy, Holocaust memory, Cold War politics, and the Christian Right helped make Christian Zionism an important influence on American foreign-policy debates.
Muslims and Literature in North America
| Dany Doueiri | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | June 21, 2023
Examines Muslim writing from the period of enslavement through immigration, civil-rights activism, postcolonial literature, and responses to the War on Terror. Literature became a means of challenging stereotypes, recovering suppressed histories, and expressing diverse Muslim political and cultural identities.
Asian Religion, Nationalism, and the State
Shinto: An Overview
| Michael Pye | Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology | n.d.
Introduces Shinto as a diverse collection of Japanese beliefs, rituals, shrines, local practices, and imperial ceremonies. During the Meiji era, the state centralized Shinto institutions around the emperor, helping connect religious ritual to national identity, modernization, and imperial authority.
Food and Nationalism in India
| Arjun Appadurai | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies | n.d.
Explores how food practices became connected to colonial resistance, caste, religious identity, domestic life, hunger, and nationalist politics in India. Debates over diet and sacred animals demonstrate how ordinary cultural practices can become powerful markers of political belonging and exclusion.
Indigenous Religion, Colonialism, and National Identity
Indigenous Religions in West Africa
| Birgit Meyer | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion | February 22, 2023
Examines how colonial government, Christian missions, Islam, African nationalism, and Pan-Africanism transformed Indigenous West African religions. Practices dismissed by colonial authorities as superstition were later reclaimed as sources of cultural pride, ethnic solidarity, political legitimacy, and national heritage.
Ideologies of National Belonging
Religious Nationalism and National Identity
| Jonathan Evans and Manolo Corichi | Pew Research Center | January 28, 2025
Compares the degree to which people in different countries view a historically dominant religion as essential to genuine national membership. Connecting faith with citizenship can strengthen shared identity but can also treat minorities, converts, immigrants, and nonreligious citizens as less authentically national.
Religion, National Leaders, and Political Legitimacy
| Jonathan Evans and Manolo Corichi | Pew Research Center | January 28, 2025
Examines whether citizens believe national leaders should possess strong religious commitments or share the majority’s faith. Such expectations can provide moral legitimacy and cultural representation while restricting the political opportunities of minority-faith and nonreligious candidates.
Sacred Texts and National Law
| Jonathan Evans and Manolo Corichi | Pew Research Center | January 28, 2025
Compares public attitudes toward the influence of the Bible, Quran, Hindu teachings, Jewish scripture, Shinto teaching, and Buddhist dharma on national law. The findings illuminate tensions among religious authority, popular sovereignty, constitutional rights, and equal citizenship.
