Series ・ 10 parts

Religion and Politics: When Faith Moves Nations

Why did people try to draw a line between faith and the state? From the fusion of religion and rule in antiquity, through the clashes of clerical and royal power and the bloody wars of the Reformation, to the birth of the separation of church and state and freedom of belief. Episode 1 traces two thousand years of European struggle.

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01 Between God and Caesar: The Hard Problem of Separating Church and State Why did people try to draw a line between faith and the state? From the fusion of religion and rule in antiquity, through the clashes of clerical and royal power and the bloody wars of the Reformation, to the birth of the separation of church and state and freedom of belief. Episode 1 traces two thousand years of European struggle.
02 America and the Evangelicals: The Politics of God's Nation In a country that declared it would have no established religion, why does faith move politics so powerfully? America, a land of people who crossed the ocean seeking freedom of belief. Episode 2 traces, weighing both sides, how the evangelicals and the Christian right who grew on that soil came to sway presidential elections over issues like abortion and education.
03 Islam and the State — The Logic of Faith and Governance United In Islam, faith and politics are often said to be inseparable. Yet the reality is far from uniform. Tracing the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the many currents of Islamism, and the tensions with secularism, this third episode looks calmly at how many different political forms a single faith has produced.
04 India's Faith and Nation — Hindu Nationalism Out of the tragedy of religious conflict, India won its independence as a secular state. Yet a current that overlaps the faith of the majority with national identity has quietly shaken that ideal. This fourth episode traces, calmly and with both sides noted, the founding ideal of secularism and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
05 Christian Democracy in Europe — Faith That Quietly Took Root In postwar Western Europe, rising from the rubble of war, parties built on faith took charge of rebuilding the state. How did the Christian Democracy of Adenauer and De Gasperi bind religious values to modern politics, and why did it lose strength amid secularization? A fact-based portrait of a model of moderate church-state relations.
06 The Age of State Shinto — Modern Japan and Religion After the Meiji Restoration, Japan sought to place Shinto at the pillar of the state. From the separation of Shinto and Buddhism to the formation of State Shinto, the tension with freedom of religion, the wartime control of religion, and finally defeat and the separation of religion and state under the Shinto Directive. A calm, fact-based account of the roughly eighty-year path on which modern Japan wavered between religion and politics.
07 Religion and Parties in Postwar Japan: When Faith Holds Seats After defeat in war, Japan's constitution proudly proclaimed freedom of religion and the separation of religion and state. Under that freedom, a party backed by a religious organization won seats and eventually came to share in government. Centering on the path of Komeito and Soka Gakkai, this piece calmly traces the half-century in which faith and politics intersected in postwar Japan, setting out both sides of the debate.
08 The Religious Right and Fundamentalism: A Global Rise Around 1979, in places all over the world, faith was pushed all at once to the forefront of politics. The evangelicals of America, the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the Hindu nationalism of India. Beneath these seemingly scattered movements lay a shared structure: a backlash against secularization and the politics of identity. This piece reads the global rise of religious conservatism and fundamentalism across regions.
09 The Shadow of Faith — Cults and Society Faith can sustain a person, yet it can also become a tool that binds them. This chapter traces, drawing on confirmed facts and within what has been reported, the shock that the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo incidents dealt to Japanese society, the debate over mind control, the suffering of children born into believing families, and the renewed questioning in recent years of the distance between religion, politics, and society.
10 Where Secularization Leads — The Future of Faith and Politics Against the prediction that religion would withdraw, the world sees secularization and re-religionization advancing at once. As the number of people without faith grows, the religious population itself keeps growing too. With the separation of religion and state and freedom of belief as our guides, this final chapter quietly surveys how religion and politics might coexist in diverse societies, without rushing to a conclusion.