Concept Misformation in the Study of Religion and Politics: A Sartorian Critique of the Twin Tolerations

Since the comeback of religion on the agenda of mainstream political science, the twin tolerations (Stepan, 2000) have become one of the most frequently cited categories in the subfield of politics and religion. Due to its reprints in edited volumes (Diamond et al., 2005; Shah et al., 2012) and its favourable reception in flagship journals (Philpott, 2007) and the foreign policy community (Farr, 2008; Hertzke, 2013), it quickly acquired the status of a rarely criticized key concept since it finally debunked the discipline’s normatively flawed, secularist assumptions about religion and democracy. Yet, on closer examination, it turns out that the twin tolerations are not suited for comparative research because the concept is underspecified and, hence, lacking discriminatory power. What was said to be a new, “institutional approach” (Stepan, 2000: 38), has turned out to be an IKIWISI-approach: I know it when I see it. In my paper, I will put the twin tolerations under the kind of scrutiny that Alfred Stepan himself advocated throughout his entire career (Stepan, 2001: 4). For this purpose, I will establish a set of core criteria for concept formation by drawing on the legacy of Giovanni Sartori who conceives of concepts as both “the units of thinking” in the process of theory-building and “data containers” (Sartori, 2009 [1975]: 75). In a second step, I will apply these criteria to the twin tolerations in order to assess whether the concept suffers from any defects (i.e., vagueness and/or ambiguity). Afterwards, I will discuss why the concept is, indeed, defective and why the late Alfred Stepan failed to conceptualize the twin tolerations in a way that allows for sorting our universe of cases (i.e., patterns of state-religion relations) into jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories (i.e., either democratic or non-democratic). In short, the argument is that the twin metaphor is the reason for both the defects of the concept and its success. In a fourth step, I will illustrate the distortive consequences of concept misformation for the cumulative acquisition of knowledge by referring to three publications which use the twin tolerations for the study of religion and democratization – a special issue edited by Jeff Haynes (2009), an article by Michael Driessen (2010), and a monograph by David Buckley (2017). Fifth and finally, I will argue that the uncanny success of the twin tolerations is indicative of a more general problem: a widespread disregard for questions of concept formation. Despite the importance of conceptual clarity for theoretically sound scholarship, researchers pay scant attention to these matters because at the moment, much energy is spent on two related, yet very different strands of literature: on efforts at measuring state-religion relations quantitatively (Traunmüller, 2012) and on “religion” as a Western, Christian category that is highly politicized and normatively charged (Menchik, 2017). Future contributions to these two contrary, if not contradictory, fields of inquiry should not be at the expense of classical concept analyses since the Sartorian perspective on concepts might have the potential of mediating between the two contending camps.