Studies of morality policy have long noticed the significance of religious values in conflicts over morality issues. What Americans typically know as the ‘culture wars’ on abortion or same-sex marriage are really conflicts over the relative weight given to religious or secular values in politics. Given the references to religion, scholars may over interpret the direct impact of religion. While religious values are often involved in morality policy conflicts, the relative religiosity or secularization of a given country is not a barometer of their policies. Modern political systems have developed independence from religious creeds historically, i.e. permissive morality policies can coexist with religious societies and highly secular societies may hold on to conservative policies without the religious backing.
The paper proposes an understanding where the politicization of morality issues is largely dependent on the ability of the political parties in a given country to conflict over the role of religious and secular values in public life. Whether or not this is the case is determined by factors internal to the political system rather than the level of religion in society. Some party systems easily serve up opportunities for actors to politicize morality issues and perhaps also the role of religious values in society whereas morality conflicts are excluded or reframed into something else in other systems.
The argument is based on a comparative study that not only aims to broaden the empirical scope of the literature on morality policy. In what still remains a literature largely dominated by single case studies, we compare five European countries and five morality issues in order to determine what role, if any, was played by religious values in each case. Altogether, this should provide a more grounded view of the relative independence of morality policy decisions from the confessional status of a country.
