Constitutional Politics and Religious Accommodation: Lessons from Spain

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 c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Miley, Thomas Jeffrey (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 2015
In: Politics, religion & ideology
Year: 2015, Volume: 16, Issue: 4, Pages: 411-433
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2156-7697
Contains:Enthalten in: Politics, religion & ideology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2015.1132414