Introduction

THE PUZZLES OF RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE ON POLITICS

In late 1988, a group of Catholic bishops met privately with communist officials in a Polish parliamentary commission. Their purpose: to discuss a legislative proposal that would outlaw abortion.

Abortion was legal in communist-era Poland, but the regime was beginning to crumble, and the communist government hoped the proposal would divide its resurgent opposition. For the church, eliminating abortion was not a new priority, but an especially timely one—the hierarchy was keenly aware that public attention was elsewhere, focused on possible regime change and the Round Table negotiations between the opposition and the communist regime. And so, over the next few months, bishops and church lawyers drafted a bill that would unconditionally ban abortion in all circumstances and impose jail sentences on both patients and doctors for violation of the law. Parliamentary discussion of the proposed legislation began in May 1989, only a month before the communists were swept from power. Despite widespread public opposition (59% of Poles opposed the restrictions), the church bill remained the unquestioned basis for all subsequent debate in the democratic parliament, and for the final abortion law of January 1993.

The procedure was now limited to cases in which the mother's life was threatened, testing indicated severe and irreversible damage to the fetus, or the pregnancy was due to rape or incest. The law also required a consensus of doctors that one of the conditions had been met, and doctors commonly disagreed upon what constituted a threat to the mother's life or severe and irreversible damage to the fetus. What's more, in 1991 the National Association of Physicians forbade its members from performing the procedure, making the required consensus virtually unattainable. As a result of this law, the number of legal abortions performed annually in Poland fell a thousandfold, from over 100,000 in 1988, to only 312 a decade later. The official abortion rate plunged from 18% to 0.07% of all pregnancies. And today, despite legal challenges and unfavorable rulings by the European Court of Human Rights—in Polish cases involving the denial of abortion to a woman facing blindness as a result of pregnancy, and a fourteen-year-old victim of rape—the law remains unchanged. The Roman Catholic Church had effectively banned abortion in democratic Poland.

Churches embody the sacred and the divine, but their interests and influence extend well beyond the spiritual realm. Many countries are "nations under God," where churches are powerful political actors, shaping policy and transforming lives in the process. This book explores how and why some churches gained such enormous political power—and why others did not. It argues that churches ironically gain their greatest political advantage when they can appear to be above petty politics—exerting their influence in secret meetings and the back rooms of parliament rather than through public pressure or partisanship. A church's ability to enter these quiet corridors of power depends on its historical record of defending the nation—and thus gaining moral authority within society and among politicians.

Church influence on policy varies widely from country to country. In some democracies, churches have succeeded in couching political debates in religious terms, vetting government appointments, and influencing legislation in domains ranging from education to abortion to the drafting of constitutions. In Poland, the Roman Catholic Church has achieved most of its policy goals, including the effective ban on abortion. The church is a major political figure. Priests have blessed soccer games—and they helped ensure Poland's entry into the European Union in 2004.

But in other countries, religious representatives have been roundly ignored—or even castigated, by politicians and commentators alike, for even voicing their concerns. When in 2010 the Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet expressed his opposition to abortion (a stance the Roman Catholic Church has consistently advocated for decades) the public reaction in Canada was furious, with physicians declaring themselves "blue with rage" and one columnist wishing the Cardinal a "long and painful death." Ouellet's public comments—condemning the legality of abortion and indicating disapproval of government funding to clinics performing the procedure—were rejected as a wildly inappropriate attempt to influence state affairs.

Surprisingly, stark differences in the extent of religious influence persist across countries that are otherwise similar in patterns of religious belonging, belief, and attendance. For example, Ireland and Italy are both "Catholic societies," with close to 90% of the population identifying as Catholic. Yet the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland influenced the public debate and the eventual laws concerning abortion, divorce, and education far more (and for far longer) than it did in Italy, where the church has been markedly less influential, at times struggling against a tide of political opposition and popular indifference. Similarly, while the Roman Catholic Church in newly democratic Poland heavily influenced policy, the church in—equally Catholic—newly democratic Croatia failed to limit abortion (much less abolish it), forestall civil unions for gays, restrict stem cell research, or constrain divorce. If anything, religiosity in Croatia increased over the 1990s, with rates of "firm believers" doubling from around 40% in 1989 to nearly 80% in 2004; yet religious influence on policy actually decreased, with many politicians openly opposing the enacting of church preferences.

We also see disparities in church influence in more diverse religious settings. Both the United States and Canada have relatively high rates of belief and attendance, especially when compared to other developed democracies (96% of Americans and 90% of Canadians believe in God, and 49% and 36%, respectively, attend church more than once a month). Both are over two-thirds Christian, with a large Roman Catholic minority. Yet the degree to which religion has influenced policy differs dramatically. In the United States, religion has become a central political cleavage, and conservative Catholic and Protestant religious groups made considerable inroads toward their policy goals, especially in curtailing access to abortion, contraception and sex education, and stem cell research. In Canada, in contrast, public policy debates are rarely framed in religious terms, even when the policies in question have moral overtones and stand in clear opposition to religious doctrines. Despite the efforts of the Catholic Church and conservative Christian groups,...