Defying the Twin Tolerations? The Curious Case of Church Asylum in Germany

Since the comeback of religion on the agenda of mainstream political science, the principle of the twin tolerations (Stepan, 2000) has turned into one of the most widely accepted categories in the emerging subfield of politics and religion. In fact, due to both its many reprints in edited volumes (e.g., Diamond et al., 2005; Shah et al., 2012) and its favourable reception in major journals (e.g., Philpott, 2007; Driessen, 2010), it quickly acquired the status of a rarely criticized key concept in the study of religion and democracy as it finally debunked the discipline’s analytically flawed, secularist assumptions. In my paper, I argue, however, that Stepan’s conception of the twin tolerations is in itself highly problematic because (a) it is conceptually underspecified and (b) it is misrepresenting the empirical reality of state-religion-relations in consolidated democracies. To substantiate my conceptual critique and to develop an empirically more adequate conception of the twin tolerations, I will introduce the curious case of church asylum in Germany – an illegal practice of Christian parishes which offer shelter to hundreds of Muslim refugees who face expulsion. As “The Daily Telegraph” correctly reported, "a quiet revolution in Germany is underway as hundreds seek sanctuary in churches to avoid deportation because no German police officer will drag the m away” (Huggler, 2015). Drawing on this example, I will, first, demonstrate that Stepan’s conception is ignorant of an important, structural asymmetry in democratic state-religion-relations because, in case of doubt, there is one twin (i.e., the state) that defines who qualifies as the other twin, that is, as “a religion” (cf. Beckford, 1999). Afterwards, I show that we need to study exceptional cases (such as controversies over religious sanctuary) if we seek to specify Stepan’s institutional threshold approach and to overcome the inherent problem of degreeism.