| Popis: |
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. |
