Constitutional politics and religious accommodation: Lessons from Spain
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Authors
Publication Date
2015-10-02Journal Title
Politics, Religion and Ideology
ISSN
2156-7689
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Volume
16
Pages
411-433
Language
English
Type
Article
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Miley, T. (2015). Constitutional politics and religious accommodation: Lessons from Spain. Politics, Religion and Ideology, 16 411-433. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2015.1132414
Abstract
This article sketches the struggles over and the shifting role of Catholicism in the Spanish body politic. It begins by providing a brief overview of the deep historical ties between Catholicism and Spanish identity. It continues by recounting the dialectical process through which a serious social cleavage on the role of religion in politics emerged and percolated over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This cleavage ultimately pit a militant and reactionary brand of authoritarian Catholicism on the right against an equally militant group of secularist ideologues associated with both bourgeois-republican and revolutionary working class (mainly anarchist) political forces. Following Juan Linz, the article emphasizes the nefarious role played by constitution-makers who pursued a partisan secularizing agenda on questions of Church and state in the breakdown of democracy and tragic onset of Civil War. It then delineates the ideology and institutionalization of “national-Catholicism” under Franco, before turning to contrast republican-era constitution-making dynamics with those of the transition to democracy following Franco’s death. It concludes with a discussion of the content of post-transition conflicts over religion and politics, highlighting the constitutional resources for coping with the somehow new yet very old challenge posed by the presence of Islam.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2015.1132414
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/253140
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