Abstract
This chapter addresses three main deficiencies in the political science literature dealing with the relationship between politics and religion: its narrowly legalistic-institutional approach, resulting in viewing the political significance of religion exclusively through models of “church-state relations”; its normative overload, whereby the research is informed by philosophical preconceptions on the proper place of religion in the public sphere; and its methodological eclecticism, resulting in the failure to provide a coherent account of religion as a power resource and religious organizations as political actors, grounded in theoretical frameworks of political science. The critique is a starting point to proposing political science of religion as a consistently political science approach supplanting the “church and state” and “religion and politics” paradigms and integrating the study of religion into the mainstream of the discipline, instead of singling it out for a special treatment.
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Notes
- 1.
Chapters 3 and 4 of Part II are based on my previous Polish-language book (Potz 2016) devoted entirely to theocratic political systems.
- 2.
There are, admittedly, less teleological versions of deliberative democracy, i.e. not explicitly invoking reaching consensus on common good as the ultimate goal of deliberation.
- 3.
To take another example, authors of a selection of sources on the attitude of various religious groups to the Polish constitution finish their perceptive and highly informative introduction with an odd conclusion that the “influence of religious communities, and particularly the Catholic church” on the Constitution “may not be assessed positively” (Borecki and Janik 2012, 42). Such an evaluation adds nothing to the content of the study, poses the question of the normative standpoint from which it is made and, ultimately, works to undermine the credibility of the authors.
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Potz, M. (2020). Introduction: Why We Need Political Science of Religion. In: Political Science of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20169-2_1
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