In this introduction to the Special Issue “Religion and Democratic Theory,” we sketch how political theory can contribute to understanding contemporary political challenges in the context of religion and democracy. We outline the contributions to this Special Issue in terms of their main claims.

In environmental political theory, the sublime has been invoked to portray nature as an awe-inspiring site of spiritual elevation and restful contemplation. While the sublime has shaped conservation efforts, it also has perpetuated a grandiose yet static vision of nature that obscures the flourishing and vibrant ecosystemic webs of life. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic considerations of nature and his teleological concept of purposiveness, I recover and reconceptualize an ecological sublime, which challenges anthropocentric myth by evoking a sense of uncanniness, revealing displays of agency and creativity that undermine the dichotomous barrier between humans and non-humans. Most importantly, the ecological sublime demonstrates that the web of life will rebuild and continue past this ecological crisis, regardless of whether or not humanity remains.

Debates about the legitimacy of democratic decision-making often treat religion as a central category. In contrast, I propose an institutional account of democratic legitimacy that does not rely on the secular–religious distinction. On this view, religion is not politically special. It is socially special, though not uniquely so. Like science, the arts, or the family, religious practices merit appropriate treatment based on their distinctive characteristics. Thus, rejecting the idea that religion is uniquely special does not preclude democratic states from granting it special treatment. I examine Eisgruber and Sager’s egalitarian account of religious exemptions and argue that the institutional account provides a more compelling explanation of their legitimacy.

While the election of authoritarian-style regimes in the West shocks those with liberal-democratic sensibilities, the authors argue it is not unexpected in a system that was founded upon the same colonial rationalities that produced the capitalist global order. The Cartesian logics that produce the liberal-democratic, autonomous-human subject also enable the emergence of the conquering (ego conquiro) and genocidal (ego extermino) subject – whether through White ignorance, White supremacy, ecocide, or other structures of violence. The authors argue, however, that this moment of shock represents a critical opportunity for us to radically (from the roots) transform our liberal democracies. Turning to multiple, extant Indigenous, alternative, and emancipatory democratic traditions, they call for the composting of liberal democracy’s hyper-individualism through a transformative politics of radical, non-anthropocentric relational democracy.

The question of how to deal with religion is a central problem of the modern state. However, state effects on religious lifeworlds are rarely the object of critical theoretical inquiry. This paper seeks to remedy this lacuna by combining neo-Marxist, Foucauldian, and anthropological theories of the state with critical secularism studies to introduce the framework of state projects. Advocating for more bridge-building between political theory and anthropology, the paper draws on fieldwork in two highly diverse neighborhoods in Munich and London to identify three conflicting state projects organized around the imperatives of security, identity, and diversity. The paper argues that state interventions can sanitize politics from local democratic contestations and fracture the demos by imposing on citizens conflicting demands emanating from different grids of legibility.

What stories might connect democracies to nonhumans and thus support the joint flourishing of humans and nonhumans? This paper examines stories where the territory is one of the main characters: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Michel Tournier’s Friday, and stories told by activists in recent political movements for “The Defense of Water and Territory” in Latin America. Each of these rely on myths to send a political message, but the first two rely on a solitary hero who either conquers or protects the land, while the latter tell stories about becoming strong with others while respecting each one. By conveying a message of collaboration between humans and nonhumans according to democratic principles, they also seek to become new myths linking democracies to the nonhuman world.

When it comes to making political decisions about religion, decision-makers often rely on the testimonies of two kinds of religious experts: religious leaders and academic experts of religion. While such religious experts have epistemic authority for questions of religious identification and religious orthodoxy, their expertise is the wrong kind in a religiously neutral state. Questions of religious identification unfairly treat religion as being uniquely special and questions of religious orthodoxy give priority to religious traditions over individuals. Instead, only the subjective importance of commitments matters for cases of religious freedom, and only the objective interpretation of religious establishment matters in cases of religious establishment. Religious experts having no epistemic advantage here, they should not be playing any special role in making decisions about religion.

This article examines the intertwined political rationalities of “Islamism prevention” and democracy promotion in state-led programs in Germany. Drawing on critical scholarship on prevention, democracy promotion, and securitization, the article pursues two interrelated arguments. First, it shows that the politics of distinction between “Islam” and “Islamism” is not merely epistemological but constitutes a governing tool. Such distinctions racialize Muslim minorities by measuring them against unmarked standards of “proper” religion. Second, the article argues that democracy promotion programs tied to preventive rationalities depoliticize democracy by framing it as a stable order to be upheld instead of as a contested political project. This displaces deeper exclusions embedded in the modern nation-state and its racialized borders into individualized ideals like resilience, tolerance, or civic virtue.

Drawing on fermentation materially and metaphorically, this article argues an earthly democracy must be understood not only through inclusion and participation but through multispecies myths and transformations. Engaging Earthborn Democracy alongside the transdisciplinary art constellation Fermenting Feminism, the article develops three central contributions: it reconceives the demos as materially composed through multispecies processes; it advances exit and transformation as democratic values alongside inclusion; and it articulates a democratic necropolitics that treats death not as political failure but as a generative condition of democratic life. By foregrounding fermentation’s intertwining of liveliness and decay, the article expands democratic imaginaries beyond life-centered and anthropocentric frameworks, offering a political vocabulary attuned to multispecies flourishing and dying well together.

Legal cases in the policy area of religion—concerning religious exemptions, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, or religious education—are fiercely contested. Although democratic theory has long debated the role of religion in court, the normative challenges of religious strategic litigation have yet to be discussed. I conceptualize religious strategic litigation as a political practice in which groups take legal action based on norms concerning religion in order to pursue broader political agendas. Challenging the notion that religious strategic litigation is special, that is, that it raises particular concerns of democratic legitimacy, I argue that it shares its problematic features with strategic litigation in other policy areas. Democratic theory should focus on how strategic litigation in any policy area can potentially disempower citizens.

Feelings of sentimental affection for local environmental features are common—but there are good reasons to doubt that such feelings could ground a radical eco-politics. Thinking with the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, I develop an account of “undomesticated love” that allows us to take on board forms of local eco-affection while avoiding concerns around provincialism, paternalism, and political irrelevance. Undomesticated love culminates in the work of collective action, oriented toward flourishing multispecies relationships. What’s more, this ethic primes practitioners for the work of political insurgence. I offer a radical political ethic—which I term the “virtues of articulation”—that is prefigured by undomesticated love. Ultimately, this article articulates an ecological vision beyond ruination—and a politics offering the hope of messy, imperfect love as a mode of life.

Whether “evening philosophy” or the political theory of “daybreak,” political theory and climate activism often affirm the ethical role of hope to meet this historical moment, which is characterized by ecological and political crises. This article addresses hope’s promise and limitations for meeting the demands of the day. Even when hope is divested from the narrative of progress, it retains an anticipatory residue that keeps hope bound to a cycle of disappointment or disfulfillment. In this article, I argue that hope is what James Martel refers to as an ideological archon (or invisible power), whose anticipatory gaze is bound to disappoint and diminish agency. Rather than binding climate activism to a disappointing principle or affect, I argue that political theory should move beyond hope.

As ecological and political collapse force us into collective descent, we need mythic structures that can help us integrate darkness and decline into democratic practices and institutions. Enlightenment demands for perpetual ascent from darkness toward luminosity are ill-suited for these challenges. We develop an alternative mythos through contrasting readings of two texts. First, Ursula Le Guin’s story of “Omelas” reveals how enlightened societies maintain themselves by proscribing empathetic engagement with their underworlds. Second, the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld, offers a radically different cosmology wherein voluntary descent with open ears, radical vulnerability, and empathetic engagement with suffering become conditions for sociopolitical transformation. “Earth democracy” creatively embraces rhythms of descent and regeneration. We suggest ways social movements might embody these principles.

The animal question in politics is as old as politics itself. It is a question that drives my own work, where I consistently confront an absence of animals viewed on their own terms, in and for themselves, in conceptions of political life. Animals are often part of the story, but as mystical and allegorical figures, sacrificial bodies, and constitutive limits of the civil state. Modern liberal democracies take on the latter position of marking animals as the exit from politics, largely writing them (and nature more generally) out of the narrative altogether.