Borns Jewish Studies Program

This course offers a critical introduction to the effects of religious belief, behavior, and institutions on political processes and public policy. We will focus on competing conceptions of what it means in practice that modern, liberal societies are secular, meaning that the state is understood to maintain a position of neutrality regarding the religious beliefs and practices of citizens. We aim to understand how controversies arise in this light if and when religion serves as an alternative source of public legitimacy in contemporary societies, liberal democracies in particular. We will proceed in three units, which taken together will offer a comparative lens on the ways such controversies present themselves in (i) the United States; (ii) the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations and (iii) Continental Europe, specifically France and Germany. In this way, we hope to apprehend to what extent the differences we will find are based on the ways the political systems of these societies practice secularism, and to what extent they are the effect of the religious institutions and practices of different faith communities in these societies.