Religion and Politics: Interactions, Boundaries, and Paradoxes

The aim of this Special Issue Religion and Politics: Interactions and Boundaries, is to investigate the long and complex relationship between politics and religion from the late Middle Ages to the present day. The sixteenth century, marked by the Reformation and the profound fracture of Christian unity, represents a decisive turning point. In this period, the new confessional realities that emerged from the Protestant Reformation confronted the resistance of the Roman Church and the repressive mechanisms of the inquisitorial systems, particularly in southern Europe. While in many regions dissenting faiths were suppressed, elsewhere the persistence of religious conflict forced jurists, theologians, and political thinkers to reconsider the connection between religious unity and the stability of the State. Practical needs and a growing awareness of individual and collective rights gradually fostered a new consciousness, paving the way for the modern concepts of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.

Within this broad framework, the essays collected in this Special Issue address different aspects of that evolving dialogue between religion and politics, examining how the boundaries between spiritual and temporal authority have been continuously renegotiated. From the persecutions of heresy in the late medieval and early modern periods to the modern debates on secularization, pluralism, and freedom of belief, the contributions gathered here seek to illuminate the multiple ways in which religious and political phenomena have interacted, overlapped, and reshaped one another across multiple centuries.

1. Faith, Power, and the Perennial Paradox

The relationship between religion and politics is one of the oldest and most enduring subjects of human inquiry but also one of the most paradoxical. From empires that sacralized their rulers to revolutions that secularized belief, from inquisitors who sought orthodoxy to reformers who challenged it, both the alliance and the conflict between faith and power have shaped the world’s moral and institutional landscape. As Harold J. Berman argued in Law and Revolution (Berman 1983), Western civilization itself emerged from the tension between two jurisdictions—the spiritual and the temporal—whose competition generated the modern concept of legal and moral authority. This Special Issue of Religions explores those same tensions across centuries and continents, showing how belief and power, alongside theology and politics, continued to redefine each other from the early modern world to the present day.

This Special Issue was inspired by a historiographical tradition that has profoundly shaped the study of the relationship between religion and power. In particular, it draws on the reflections of Paolo Prodi, for whom the constitutive dualism between political sovereignty and religious legitimacy—analyzed in Il sovrano pontefice (Prodi 1982) and in Una storia della giustizia (Prodi 2000)—formed the structural grammar of Western modernity. The boundaries between Church and State, law and grace, and conscience and obedience were never stable, and their constant renegotiation produced both institutional innovation and moral anxiety. The work of Wolfgang Reinhard (see, in particular, Reinhard 1999) has been pivotal in demonstrating that the formation of the European state was inseparable from religious structures of legitimation. The work of António Manuel Hespanha (see, in particular, Hespanha 1993, 1997) further showed that early modern sovereignty remained grounded in a theological conception of law, where authority was conceived as a reflection of divine order and the State emerged not against religion, but through it.

Editing this collection has also been a reminder that these dynamics reappear, on a smaller scale, within the academic world. The peer-review process, in its own way, echoes the rites of ecclesiastical discernment: editors mediate like confessors, authors await judgment with a mixture of faith and fear, and reviewers—our modern inquisitors—pronounce verdicts that can feel as binding as papal bulls. Yet this constant negotiation between conviction and institution is what gives scholarship, like religion, its vitality.

2. Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Governance of Belief

The first cluster of essays revisits the mechanisms through which early modern Europe sought to govern belief. Neil Tarrant, in Saving Sanctity: The Roman Inquisition and the Initial Prosecution of Girolamo Cardano, reconsiders how inquisitorial control could coexist with intellectual inquiry, balancing curiosity and discipline. Xin Zhu, in Giovanni Botero on Religion and Politics, reads the Catholic response to Machiavelli as an attempt to moralize the ragion di stato, transforming calculation into conscience. Vittoria Feola, in Catholic Martyrs and Canon Law, examines the juridical construction of sanctity in Philip II’s Spain, revealing how law and theology became indistinguishable. Clara Stella, in In Absentia: Politics of Religious Life in Maria Carafa’s Vita by Francesco Maggio (1670), uncovers the political uses of female spirituality in Counter-Reformation Naples, where silence and absence could themselves become instruments of power.

These perspectives—also present in the article by Daniele Santarelli mentioned below—recall the vision outlined by Paolo Prodi in his essay on the Church and society included in the monumental Storia di Venezia published by the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana (Prodi 1994), where Venice’s religious institutions embodied a distinctive fusion of sacred and secular sovereignty—a sacralized republic in which the Doge was both a political and spiritual leader. The studies of Gaetano Cozzi regarding these themes remain fundamental (see, in particular, Cozzi 1995) and have provided an important source of inspiration for this Special Issue. Such studies demonstrated that early modern government derived its legitimacy from its claim to represent divine justice, a notion that António Manuel Hespanha elaborated on in La gracia del derecho (Hespanha 1993), describing the Baroque state as an order of grace rather than a mere juridical machine. In this light, the boundary between theology and politics appears not as an opposition, but as a structural interdependence—one that would profoundly influence later debates on religious coexistence, tolerance, and the moral foundations of political order.

3. Tolerance, Pluralism, and the Modern Conscience

In the transition from early modern to modern societies, the problem shifted from the enforcement of unity to the management of diversity. Daniele Santarelli, in Religious Policies and Civil Conflict: “Italian” Perspectives on the French Wars of Religion, draws on Venetian and Florentine diplomatic correspondence to show how Italian envoys perceived the collapse of religious unity in France as a political trauma that threatened the very grammar of sovereignty. Wael Abu-ʿUksa, in Tolerance before Secularism, reconstructs the legal and philosophical roots of coexistence in nineteenth-century Arabic thought, challenging the Eurocentric narrative of secular modernity. Baldwin Wong, in Contributing to Public Deliberation by Religious Behavior, argues that faith-based behavior, rather than abstract debate, can enrich civic life by modeling altruism and restraint.

In this context, the French Wars of Religion—forming the historical background of the author’s own study mentioned above—were not merely a national crisis but a laboratory for European political theology, as Cornel Zwierlein has shown in Discorso und Lex Dei (Zwierlein 2006). The religious conflict generated new conceptual frameworks that redefined the relationship between divine law and secular order, echoing the same anxieties visible in Italian and Iberian thought. From the observations of ambassadors and political actors who experienced events in the very moment of their unfolding, to the reflections of contemporary political and legal thinkers, the sixteenth century demonstrated that the price of religious freedom was political instability—and that stability, in turn, required a theology of authority.

4. Religion, Protest, and Political Imagination

A third group of essays brings the discussion into the modern world, where religion becomes a source of political critique and renewal. Jochen Töpfer, in Understanding an Authoritarian Regime, explores the East German experience of controlled coexistence between the Church and the State, where silence could be a form of dissent. Yongtaek Jeong, in Transcending the Boundary between the Religious and the Secular, shows how Protestant movements in 1970s Korea transformed human rights into a theological calling. James Ndlovu and Tigere Paidamoyo Muringa, in No to Third Term!, analyze the prophetic intervention of Zimbabwean churches against presidential authoritarianism. These cases demonstrate that religion continues to provide moral grammars of protest when politics loses its ethical compass.

5. Memory, Heritage, and the Politics of the Sacred

A last group of essays examines how sacred memory shapes collective identity. Ting Zhou and Won-il Cho, in Isomorphic Heterotopias of Martyrdom Spaces and the Overlapping of Memory, study Catholic and Protestant sites of martyrdom in Seoul as heterotopias of coexistence, where rival theologies inhabit the same geography. Simone Lonati, in The Heritage of Priests between Religion, Culture and Politics in an Italian Peripheral Area, explores how the legacies of two twentieth-century priests became instruments of both devotion and bureaucratic control. Cole Brent Cloyd, in Bringing Back God: Goldenberg and the Vestigial State in American Religion, rethinks the idea of religion as a “vestigial state”, portraying it instead as a dynamic system of symbolic sovereignty. Darryl Dejuan Roberts, in The Role of Black Christian Beliefs in the Civil Rights Movement, returns to the moral foundations of activism, showing how theology structured political emancipation.

These works recall Wolfgang Reinhard’s insight that confessionalization was not merely repression but also social organization—a means of creating identity through ritual and memory. The persistence of the sacred in public life, whether in Venice’s civic liturgies or in Seoul’s urban martyria, reveals how power continually appropriates transcendence to define legitimacy.

6. The Paradox Endures

At the intersection of the historiographical traditions outlined above lies the author’s own scholarly trajectory, which provided the main inspiration for the creation of this Special Issue. In Il papato di Paolo IV nella crisi politico-religiosa del Cinquecento (Santarelli 2008, 2012) and in the collaborative volume I giudici della fede (Al Sabbagh et al. 2017), I explored the political and institutional mechanisms through which ecclesiastical authority sought to translate divine law into governmental practice, tracing the networks and local jurisdictions of the Roman Inquisition. The creation and long-term development of the digital encyclopedia ERETICOPEDIA (www.ereticopedia.org, accessed on 15 October 2025) have likewise aimed to map this intersection between religious dissent, political power, and institutional memory, extending the inquiry to new digital forms of historical dissemination. More recently, my research, in collaboration with Domizia Weber, on witchcraft and inquisitorial culture (Santarelli and Weber 2021, 2022), has revisited the nexus between control, imagination, and the sacred, contributing to a broader reflection on how religious and political systems codify fear, deviance, and moral order.

If a single idea unites the contributions in this Special Issue, it is that religion and politics share not opposition but dependency. Both claim truth; both generate obedience; both require ritual to sustain legitimacy. As Paolo Prodi observed, their separation was never a clean divorce but an ongoing negotiation between two orders that could not exist without one another. The same negotiation underlies our own scholarly practice. Some reviewers defended orthodoxy with the rigor of inquisitors, others argued for reform with evangelical fervor, and between them—through debate, revision, and, occasionally, mutual absolution—the final synthesis emerged.

The paradox endures: faith without power is mute, and power without faith—of any kind—is blind. The essays collected here confirm that the history of religion and politics is the history of their continuous mutual misunderstanding and that this misunderstanding, fertile and unresolved, remains the condition of our moral and intellectual life. And if the modern peer-review process occasionally resembles an autodafé, it is at least one whose flames illuminate rather than consume, leaving behind, after revision, a trace of grace.