The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies - Softcover

Readers of Pro Rege may be surprised to find such insightful and articulate authors writing to such a broad audience with pleasingly familiar insights and arguments... The authors are to be commended for articulating an orthodox Reformed vision of justice for a broken world, and doing so within the parameters of inferences based upon comparative research... Without burdening the text with Reformed terminology, Monsma and Soper have seriously challenged governing elites and their intellectual supporters to actually redeem fallen and sinful structures of contemporary democratic governments. This is exemplary reformational scholarship. -- Jack R. Van Der Slik Pro Rege One of my favorite books on religion in public life. On a subject especially in need of light, insight, and balance, its very readable historical, legal, and comparative analyses are most enlightening and fair. I recommend it for college classes and as good reading for ordinary citizens. -- Christian Smith, director, Center for the Study of Religion and Society, University of Notre Dame

Now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, this essential text offers a rigorous, systematic comparison of church-state relations in the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, and England. Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper examine the historical roots and contemporary strategies of the different approaches each government has taken. Providing clarity on the little-understood, evolving relationship between church and state in the West, this book provides an invaluable comparative analysis of a topic that is increasingly a source of profound political and social conflict. The authors persuasively argue that the United States can learn a great deal from other Western democracies in promoting religious neutrality and the free exercise of religion.