Religion in politics

Graham Fuller has argued for a broader notion of Islamism as a form of identity politics, involving "support for [Muslim] identity, authenticity, broader regionalism, revivalism, [and] revitalization of the community.

A more strictly prescribed version, Laïcité, is practiced in France, which prohibits all religious expressions in many public contexts.

[13] In such a framework, religion is treated as a fungible label that can be ‘activated’ and constitute a criterion for membership in an ethnic group.

[14] The latter perspective has been argued by relatively recent scholars, advocating for “(More) Serious”[11] attention to religion in Comparative Politics.

Several analyses even regard religion as a variable so potent that it is able to reinforce other identities, and as a result allows religious components in secular spheres of society (see: Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006; Trejo, 2009; Grossman, 2015).

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has argued that "faith and state should be kept separate" as "the most sinister and oppressive states in the world are those that use God to control the minds and actions of their populations", such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

[19] To this, Dawn Foster has responded that when religion is fully unmoored from politics it becomes all the more insular and more open to abuse.