Reconceptualizing Houses of Worship to Advance Comparisons across Religious Traditions

Abstract

The study of religion and politics has struggled to find concepts, methods, and approaches that advance productive comparisons of phenomena across different religious practices and traditions. Consequently, scholars who seek to understand the impact of religious practice on political outcomes across religious traditions encounter challenges in aggregating findings and advancing scholarly inquiry. A reconsideration of the role of houses of worship as an intermediary variable connecting religious practice to political outcomes yields a potentially fruitful avenue for comparative investigation. While social processes that take place within worship spaces are frequently presumed in the mechanisms linking religious variables to political outcomes, these worship spaces are generally undertheorized and overlooked within the study of religion and politics. A body of scholarship has substantiated the significance of congregational variation within the study of Christianity, yet the most commonly cited quantitative literature on religion and political participation omits discussion of this level of variation. Drawing on the shared conceptual space across worship domains from several religious traditions, this article examines houses of worship as an organizational concept that can be employed productively for theoretical and empirical analyses of religion and politics.