{"id":33799,"date":"2018-06-27T10:39:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T14:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=33799"},"modified":"2021-02-03T16:38:49","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T21:38:49","slug":"menchik-publishes-journal-article-on-soft-separation-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2018\/06\/27\/menchik-publishes-journal-article-on-soft-separation-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Menchik Publishes Journal Article on Soft Separation Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IF\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeremy Menchik,<\/a>\u00a0Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal article <\/span> examining states with a \u201csoft separation\u201d between church and state rather than a wall as in the U.S.<\/p>\n

The article focused on states where there is\u00a0religious education in state schools, significant financial support for religious traditions, limitations on the freedom of nontraditional faiths, and where public opinion favors strong support for religion in public life and state policies. These states–Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, India, Indonesia, and Switzerland–demonstrate the need for scholars of democracy to look beyond secularism as the normative\u00a0or institutional baseline for modern governance.<\/p>\n

Menchik’s article, entitled “Soft Separation Democracy<\/a>,” was published in\u00a0Politics and Religion<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>on June 26, 2018.<\/p>\n

From the\u00a0abstract of the article:<\/p>\n

How do nonsecular democracies govern religion? Despite two decades of research on the many ways that church and state overlap in modern democracies, scholars lack an adequate answer to this question. Many consolidated democracies have a soft separation between church and state rather than a wall. These are not defective versions of democracy, but rather poorly understood institutional arrangements. To remedy this lacuna, this paper investigates institutional arrangements in six consolidated democracies with a soft separation between church and state: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, India, Indonesia, and Switzerland. After describing the institutional workings of these states, the paper develops hypotheses for the origins of soft separation democracy as well as addressing the challenges of this form of government. The paper concludes by suggesting three other potentially fruitful lines of analysis as well as elucidating the implications of soft separation democracy for U.S. foreign policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jeremy Menchik\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.\u00a0His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world\u2019s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History<\/em>, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Politics and Religion<\/em>, and South East Asia Research<\/em> as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, <\/em>and USA Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Jeremy Menchik discusses \u201cSoft Separation Democracy\u201d in an article published in Politics and Religion.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11588,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8432],"tags":[10745,8362,8379,8378,9434],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11588"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33799"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33877,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33799\/revisions\/33877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}