The political role of churches in the secular state: Measuring churches' authority and their policy relevance in Western democracies in the 21st century

As various indicators demonstrate ongoing processes of secularization in Western societies, the concept of "public religion" (Casanova) is continuously being put to the test. This paper raises the question to which extent churches can still play a political role, i.e. exert authority over significant parts of the population of Western nation states not just as moral guidance but also – as it used to be in the postwar era in many Western countries – as interest groups and policy advocates. Building on the concept of churches as interest groups and their moral authority, as developed by Anna Grzymała-Busse and others, the paper develops a broad and empirically more nuanced index of church authority and applies it to a set of 19 country cases of Western democracies. It will be shown that church authority is consequential in a variety of moral politics issues, particularly those pertaining to gender and the role of women in modern society, such as family policy (work and life). This role is accentuated by the particular denominational or confessional culture in which church and society are embedded, low levels of secularization and the strength of religious parties such as Christian Democracy. This will be shown by applying the index to measurements of family policy such as parental leave regulations, childcare opportunities and others, in the post-2000 environment (based on OECD and UNICEF data). In a final step of the analysis, the role of the churches during the COVID-19 pandemic will be highlighted to explore their contribution to the governance of the crisis, especially in light of the conventional wisdom of religious sociology that religion in the modern and secularized West can still play a role in coping with contingency and precariousness at an individual as well as societal level.