The Role of Religious Communities in the Implementation of Morality Policies

In the course of secularization, religious communities forfeit their traditional power in shaping policy-making of morality issues. However, we lack empirical evidence regarding the phase of implementation. Following Mooney (2001), we would assume that the losers of the policy-making process regain influence in governing citizens’ behavior after the legislative process because morality policy outputs are characterized by vagueness and indefinite terms. These characteristics increases the leverage for semi-public actors such as religious communities. Hence, the paper follows two research questions: firstly, to what extent are religious communities involved in morality policy implementation? And secondly, what are the drivers of their engagement? By drawing on literature on state-church interaction, morality policy-making, and policy implementation, we argue that the involvement of religious groups is a function of their governance capacity, mediated by their willingness to engage. The configuration of the church-state-regime constitutes the general opportunity structures for religious communities to act. For testing this argument, we introduce a new measurement approach of religious groups’ governance engagement during the phase of implementation. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative case study, focusing on different morality policies in Germany and Belgium. Thereby, we contrast the governance activities of the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church and the Muslim community in the regulation of at least two different morality policies (e.g., prostitution and religious education). The paper enhances the existing research on religion and morality policies in three aspects: first, it sheds light on largely disregarded religious communities such as Muslims; second, the influence of religion is explored in a largely disregarded stage of policy making; and third, the paper propose a novel theoretical framework on religious engagement in times of secularization.