Gill - The Political Origins of Religious Liberty

I am not sure how many people read prefaces, but if you have made it this far I urge you to continue. In the course of the next few short paragraphs, I hope to provide you with a little insight into why this book was written and how to read it.

This work is an extension of my earlier research that began while I was in graduate school and which resulted in a dissertation and a previously published book, Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America . The primary conclusion of that book was that religious competition, primarily from evangelical Protestants, prompted the Latin American Catholic Church to pay attention to the needs of its parishioners more closely. In countries where the number of Protestants was expanding rapidly, the Catholic Church tended to take a more preferential option for the poor and denounce governmental institutions deleterious to the nations citizenry. In the final analysis, I concluded that this is a good thing. However, the one question that I never got around to answering was why Protestants happened to be more numerous in some countries than in others. In a subsequent article published in Rationality and Society , I discovered that religious liberty accounted for the varying growth rates of Protestants throughout Latin American countries. This finding would seem rather mundane; of course minority religions would expand where there were fewer laws preventing them from expanding. Despite this obvious conclusion, some early reviewers of that manuscript commented that such logic was counter-intuitive. Nonetheless, I persevered in my belief that religious freedom and religious vitality were linked.

The next question that naturally arose from my course of study was why some countries would have more liberal regulations governing religious groups and others would maintain stricter laws. The fact that there were significant degrees of difference throughout countries with similar cultural backgrounds and religious traditions ruled out the possibility that culture was at work. Moreover, other research I conducted with my graduate student Arang Keshavarzian revealed that similar patterns of church-state relations could be seen in countries with radically different cultural traditions, most notably Mexico and Iran. All of that set me to thinking about the role that political interests play in regulating religions. Because religious liberty is really just the accumulation of numerous laws telling churches and believers what they can and cannot do, it would make sense that the interests of lawmakers would be of crucial importance in determining the shape of those laws.

The process of exploring this idea led me first to examine Mexico and a few other countries in Latin America. I then turned my attention to the United States, realizing that the writing of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was a major milestone in the history of religious liberty, at least in the modern era. I found great joy in going back and reading U.S. colonial history, and I found additional pleasure in the fact that it took me back into European history. Finally, I decided to pursue an exploration of Russia, which in 1997 implemented a highly restrictive set of regulations on religious minorities. Though not an expert in Russian politics or history, I gathered up the courage to move ahead, realizing that this case offered up a remarkable test of my hypothesis. Fearing my lack of knowledge would inhibit me in this area, I recruited a graduate student who was taking one of my classes at the time Cheryl ilinskas. Cheryl suggested that the Soviet-dominated Baltic States would also make a great case study, and because she was planning a dissertation on the topic, I agreed to let her help me. The result of my thinking on this topic is what you now hold in your hands. I hope you enjoy it.