State help for faith and authorities legitimacy in Christian-majority international locations
By Onathan Fox, Bar-ilan Collegeand Jori Breslawski, Tel Aviv College
Most individuals assume that when governments help a faith, they achieve this within the hope that it’s going to enhance their legitimacy. Nonetheless, a rising literature means that help for faith can scale back a authorities’s legitimacy for 3 causes. First, political secularism, an ideology that requires the separation of faith and state or state restrictions on faith, is more and more common. Second, authorities help for faith can undermine spiritual vitality. Third, help for faith implies a component of presidency management over faith, which may undermine a faith’s perceived authenticity. We check this relationship between help and legitimacy in Christian-majority international locations from 1990 to 2014 utilizing knowledge from the Faith and State and World Values Survey, which incorporates 54 international locations and 126 nation years. We discover that authorities help for faith is related to decrease ranges of particular person belief in authorities. We consider that this has essential implications for our understanding of the premise of legitimacy.