This Special Issue of Religions examines the transitions that are occurring in Catholic Church–State relations, a phenomenon that is beginning to accelerate in a negative way [...]
In contrast to the tendency to focus on political and social reasons for the rapprochement between the Soviet government and the Russian Orthodox Church, between Stalin and the later patriarch Sergei, this article deals with theological and ecclesio...
Following the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the Korean government announced restrictions on religious activities such as worship services and small group gatherings. Unlike their Buddhist and Catholic counterparts, who responded relatively pliably to th...
Over the past two decades, clerics in the Russian Orthodox Church have found a new outlet for morality policy discussions: news portals, blogs, and other sites that comprise a virtual public sphere of Russian Orthodox online media. One prominent issu...
In many North American Protestant circles, especially those with Baptist or Free Church roots, the notion of the total separation of church and state is presented as the ideal to be attained in all church and state relations. We are told that the sta...
Right-wing populists across many western countries have markedly intensified their references to Christianity in recent years. However, Christian communities’ reactions to such developments often vary significantly, ranging from disproportionate supp...
The Catholic Church is becoming a waning influence in global civil society. This is due, in part, to demographic changes that show an increasing loss of adherents within the Church’s traditional strongholds. Coupled with the growth of liberal social...
The Second Republic of Zimbabwe has witnessed continued political and socio-economic crises. Despite the worsening crisis under the new dispensation, there have been calls for extending the current administration’s term limit beyond 2028. The i...
This article presents the first systematic, empirical mapping of explicit references to religion in Australian federal legislation. Drawing on a dataset of 288 statutes in force as of March 2024, the analysis employs a dictionary of 71 religious term...
The Russian Federation is a secular state, and the church is separate from the state. Nonetheless, during Putin’s rule, a seemingly desecularising transition has taken place in Russia. This transition can be observed on legal, ideological, and...
This article critically assesses existing scholarship on the roles that religious groups play in collective contention. Researchers disagree on three main issues: (a) whether religious doctrines and values make religious groups more or less likely to...
The findings and recommendations emanating from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012–2017) have advised religious organisations that they need to undertake significant changes to legal, govern...
The Zimbabwean Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a pastoral letter on 14 August 2020. Its title, “The March is not Ended”, echoed the words of the late American civil right activist and politician John Robert Lewis. In the introdu...
This article examines church–state relations in the early period of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by scrutinising the thoughts and the administration of Chao Tzu-chen—a prominent Chinese Christian leader—at Yenching Uni...
Classical paradigms of the church-state relations may be reflected in how the church has tried to work and live out her integrity in different cultural-political contexts. The churches in Estonia have envisioned Christian integrity in relation to the...
The Reformed Church in Hungary is a Reformed Protestant church in terms of its confession of faith, in which both adjectives, Reformed and Protestant, are emphasized. From this formulation follows the critique and firm rejection of a form of organiza...
Contemporary scholars share a common vision of the phenomenon of autocephaly as a virtue empowering a local Orthodox church independently to elect its supreme hierarch and run its domestic affairs without the endorsement of another church leader. Whi...
The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces emerged against the background of growing cooperation between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. A key aspect of that re-energised relationship has been the intensified engagement of State and...
This study examines the jurisdictional disputes between the bishop of Malta and the grand masters of the Order of St John during the first half of the seventeenth century, specifically from 1563 to 1650, in the wake of the Council of Trent. It focuse...
The Philippines’ new religious movements (NRMs) emerged in the context of the rise of the religious nationalism movement and gradually flourished during the martial law period in the 1970s. Compared with traditional Catholicism, the theology of...
The different contexts of America and Europe have a significant impact on the development of comparative theology, especially in the German-speaking countries. The latter have found other solutions to the problem of religious pluralism that are not r...
This paper discusses the types, faith attributes, development characteristics, and limitations of Christian social organizations in China. China’s religious social service organizations mainly include four types of organizations: associations, privat...
Low competitiveness is a common denominator of historically Roman Catholic countries. In contrast, historically Protestant countries generally perform better in education, social progress, and competitiveness. Jesus Christ described the true and fals...
Religion and partisanship remain deeply intertwined in contemporary American politics, especially in public debates on religious expression in state institutions. This study examined whether religious identity and behavior continue to influence publi...
This article aims to provide an account of the political thought of Archbishop John Carroll on the topic of religious liberty as a core principle of the American founding. It examines the relationship of Church and State through the lens of a develop...
In this paper, we offer some preliminary insights into a comparison of Islam and Roman Catholicism as transnational or “transcivilizational” political phenomena. We note that both traditions are monotheistic, offer universalist theologies, and have p...
Freedom of conscience and religion is one of the fundamental freedoms of person. This freedom is a constitutionally registered freedom and its exercise, like its constitutional guarantees, is the foundation of the modern concept of a democratic state...
In its declaration of principles, the 1987 Philippine Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State. While the principle honors distinctions between temporal and spiritual functions, both Church and State maintain a unique and cooperat...
In August 2015, a group of pastors and elders from an urban house church in Chengdu, Sichuan, posted 95 theses online. This bold move, challenging the state and the Chinese churches has created controversy in China and abroad. The theses address a se...
This study explores the complexities of mission-state and church-state relations from a micro-level perspective, asking how the missionaries, teachers, and pupils at the Lutheran Middle School in Hunan Province negotiated conflicting claims on church...
This paper examines the separation of church and state in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, contextualizing it within the process of American overseas expansion and considering it as one of the projects of imperial hegemony c...
This article analyzes Pentecostal churches in Paraguay and Chile, tracing how their older ethos of politics as worldly and corrupt is gradually changing and why. It explores changing church–state relations and conceptions of political culture a...
Russian officials and the Moscow Patriarchate have worked together in recent years to promote a socially conservative policy agenda, both domestically and beyond the Russian Federation’s borders. Examining official documents and the statements...
This essay will explore white Americans’ use of the rhetoric of church/state separation as a discourse of racial difference during the period from roughly the Revolution to the Spanish American war, when the United States both conquered vast spaces o...
Wenshi Ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) are spaces where contemporary Chinese official discourse and local self-expression are coordinated. But these spaces are extremely limited on religious issues. The Pingli missionary case in the Shaanx...
The paper analyses state religious policy in different historical periods and its impact on the development of religious doctrines about marriage within the Old Believer community of Latvia. Based on published and unpublished historical sources, legi...
From the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, religious missions occupied an important place in the internal organisation of colonial empires. Their contribution to the ideological structuring of imperialism and the inte...
This study examines the exercise of religious freedom within the Polish penitentiary system, focusing on the intersection of legal frameworks, religious pluralism, and secularization. While Poland’s Constitution and penal legislation guarantee...
This essay analyzes Pope Francis’ social teaching on relationality within his 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli tutti [Brothers all]. The relationship between the Church and modern nation-states is an important macro-level social dynamic, and Fra...
This essay explores the rise of Protestant Christianity at the contemporary stage of China’s globalization as a unique social and cultural phenomenon. Globalization can be seen as not only a homogenization process in political and economic term...
The relations between the Chilean Church and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) are often characterized as conflictive. After a short period of accommodation and legitimation, the Chilean episcopate started to confront the dictato...
Our paper focuses on the tax progressivity and nonreligion in central and eastern Europe using an example of the Czech Republic, one of the most atheistic countries in the world. Religion might imply formal affiliation with a certain confession or ac...
This article portrays how the Catholic Church in Indonesia in the 1980s faced some legal civil decrees that were contrary to Catholic beliefs, but they nonetheless responded in a wise manner. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has...
The article explores the intersection of Black Lives Matter and the synodal process within the U.S. Catholic Church, focusing on the church’s stance on racism and racial justice. Drawing upon Pope Francis’ call for the church to become a...
Social reconciliation has received much attention in Christian churches since the late 1980s. Both the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway initiated reconciliation processes with the Saami (also “Sami” or “Sámi”),...
There has always been a conviction in the ecumenical movement that social service is part of the essence of what it means to be the church. The strengthening of social and political witness of churches through church-related agencies and networks in...
To effectively carry out its tasks, the church needs a stable financial system. The aim of this article is to present issues related to ensuring the stability of the Catholic Church financing system in times of significant demographic and socio-cultu...
The paper offers a historical perspective on the division within the Roman Catholic Church in mainland China, focusing on the appointment of bishops, the constitution of ecclesial provinces and dioceses, and the problematic establishment of the natio...
In the context of the Chinese churches, religio-political relations or interaction is an unavoidable but widely controversial issue. On the one hand, the political control of religion can be regarded as the dominant model of the relationship between...
In a recent publication, I introduced the theoretical framework of neosecularisation with regard to the Orthodox Church and society in Bulgaria. I argued that neosecularisation, as a complex process of decline of religion’s importance and the h...
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