ABSTRACT
It is very difficult in the modern world to ignore the presence of religion in public affairs. Virtually on a daily basis, the media provide instances demonstrating that the people, institutions, and ideas that make up the religious sphere have a continuing and important relevance to the political realm. A glance at the morning newspaper as I write is as good an illustration as any.1 In it there is a story from Britain concerning a broadcasting bill going through one of the legislative stages on the way to becoming an Act of Parliament-the law of the land. The focus of the story is about the problems of drawing up new rules restricting access to television by religious institutions, rules that have caused ‘a great deal of concern among Christians’, according to a campaigner for religious programming. Another, from the Swiss sub-canton of Appenzell Inner-Rhoden, relates how male voters meeting in the annual Landsgemeinde, or town meeting, of this strongly Roman Catholic area had refused for the third time to give women the vote in local affairs. There is also a report from Harare, Zimbabwe, in which an Anglican priest, ‘prominent in the ranks of anti-apartheid activists and a member of the African National Congress’ was injured by a booby-trapped parcel, allegedly sent by right-wing political elements from South Africa. Perhaps most noteworthy of all is an article about reforms in Albania, famous for its attempt to eliminate systematically all trace of religion from its society. In this article, mention is made of a new generation of younger technocrats described as supporters of religion, and unwilling ‘even in public, to state the official line that the Albanian people were “never religious”’.
