Politics and Religion

Georgetown's political science graduate student association has been doing a good job of late at promoting inter-subfield discussions on topics of interest to all subfields. Lately, they hosted one on religion.

The political theorist's comments were from a Tocquevillian perspective. He maintained that if religion gives rise to politics and if religion is the permanent state of mankind, then we need to think about whether liberalism, with its separation of church and state, is an aberration or we need to think about what sorts of religion allow for the separation of church and state that we find so beneficial in the contemporary world. He maintained that when you study religion, you have to study the showing forth of religion, rather than the essence itself. You have to look at the expression, while knowing that there is another dimension to it.

The Americanist studies evangelical Christianity. He spoke about the way in which fundamentalist beliefs are more plastic than he expected--that they adjust their teachings to deal with real life challenges. His insight into studying religion was that it is not that religion never changes and that people keep on believing one thing. In fact, political actors often try to mobilize religious groups, and so, where this is successful, politics bleeds back into religion itself.

There was also a Comparativist there, but I think I just didn't follow him very well.