Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

Rethinking German identity after the Nazi experience: French memories of Germans in Sartre’s Roads to freedom

UK Sartre Studies conference
Institut français in London
September 2007

‘From the ‘roads to freedom’ to the ‘roads of humanism’? Sartre and his literary alter ego Mathieu in Les Chemins de la liberté (1938-1949)’

War and Memory international conference- Poetics after ’45,
QUB, Belfast, June 2008

Dimensions of religious and national identity among Irish adolescents growing up in two jurisdictions

This poster explores the impact of growing up in different socio-political environments in the border areas of the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and Northern Ireland (NI) on adolescents’ evaluations of their religious and national identities. The vast majority of the population of the Republic of Ireland are Catholic and Irish whereas in Northern Ireland, the majority are Protestant and British. 713 adolescents (NI= 415; RoI=298), who categorised their religious identity as Catholic and their nationality as Irish completed the Collective Self – Esteem (CSE) scale (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990) with reference to either their religious (N=350) or national identity (n=363). The overall rating of CSE for the Irish identity was significantly higher than the rating of CSE for the Catholic Identity. This result was modified by a significant interaction - adolescents in the Republic of Ireland rated the CSE of their Irish nationality higher than those in Northern Ireland (20.99 vs. 19.95), whereas adolescents in Northern Ireland rated the CSE of their Catholic religious identity higher than their peers in the Republic of Ireland (19.97 vs 18.87). Further analysis of the CSE subscales revealed differing patterns of relationships according to the scale. The evaluation of the Public Collective Self-Esteem of national and religious identities were significantly higher in the Republic of Ireland than in Northern Ireland, however Private Collective Self-esteem did not differ according to jurisdiction. These findings are discussed in relation to the social context and current theoretical accounts of collective identification processes.

Adolescents’ relationship with God and internalizing adjustment over time: The moderating role of maternal religious coping

A growing literature supports the importance of understanding the link between religiosity and youths' adjustment and development, but in the absence of rigorous, longitudinal designs, questions remain about the direction of effect and the role of family factors. This paper investigates the bidirectional association between adolescents' relationship with God and their internalizing adjustment. Results from 2-wave, SEM cross-lag analyses of data from 667 mother/adolescent dyads in Belfast, Northern Ireland (50% male, M age = 15.75 years old) supports a risk model suggesting that greater internalizing problems predict a weaker relationship with God 1 year later. Significant moderation analyses suggest that a stronger relationship with God predicted fewer depression and anxiety symptoms for youth whose mothers used more religious coping.