In a growing body of comparative literature on religion and politics, Religion and Regimes stands out with its particular focus: it connects the more narrowly focused scholarship about religion and the state, or church-state regimes in an institutional perspective, with the broader research on national identity and religion. By doing so, the book attempts, as the editors state in the introduction, to “reassess some of the standard models of state-religion relationship … and to offer some preliminary alternative models” (ix). To do so, they have collected a variety of country cases which span across almost all continents and many religious traditions.

The chapters are unusually arranged, as they do not analyze cases country-by-country but instead combine single case studies such as the United States (R. Blum and C. Wilcox), Russia (C. Marsh), Israel (E.A. Oldmixon and R. Samaniego), India (S. Hibbard), and Ireland (M. Dillon) (in that order) with two-country comparisons. While most of the pairing makes intuitive sense (such as Brazil and Chile, by C.A. Gustafson; France and Turkey, by R. Kilinç; Portugal and Spain, by P. C. Manuel, Taiwan and Hong Kong by J.C. Soper and J.S. Fetzer), one such comparison (Iran and Poland, by the editors) cuts across the usual comparisons. A lot can be learned from these empirically rich chapters. The analysis of the United States, along with that of Brazil and Chile, points to the rising power of evangelicalism in all these countries which, in the American case, has contributed to an unusual degree of political polarization. The study of France and Turkey does not stop with the foreseeable comparison of French and Turkish laïcité, but places the cases in an international context, thereby showing how and why similar domestic actor strategies concerning the public role of religion have resulted in diverging paths. In France, fear of Islam undermines the state's neutrality, while international pressures on Turkey have enhanced Christian minority rights. This interaction of national and international forces is also addressed in the chapters on India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the latter case, the authors highlight the role of democratization as beneficial for minority religious groups (e.g., Presbyterians, Buddhist, and Taoist organizations), while in Hong Kong Christian groups encounter problems because they are seen as agents of “Western imperialism.”

The most puzzling chapter is the comparison of Iran and Poland, which begins with the commonality of regime change after 1979 and 1989, respectively. In both countries, the majority religion succeeded in influencing the transition and in safeguarding substantial privilege. However, in Poland this happened in the context of ongoing democratization and liberalization, while the Iranian case stands for an illiberal regime. The authors acknowledge the dissimilarities, and conclude that “the most important lesson this study has to offer is that, in politics, religion is an excellent servant but a poor master” (237). The overall unevenness of the chapters and their foci is redeemed by the editors' insightful conclusion that condenses the chapters' findings in a discussion of appropriate models for the comparative study of religion and the state. These are found in the trias of “quasi-establishment,” “l'ancien regime,” and “religion as national identity,” all of which acknowledge the hegemonic role of a particular religion as a starting point for the national trajectories in the development of the nexus between religion and regimes.

Among the major insights and merits of the book, only a few shall be mentioned. First, variations of regime types and public religions are not spurious, and there are general patterns that go beyond the conventional church-state relationship. A second and related finding concerns the discovery of an underlying logic of path dependency: historically, all countries started their path toward nation-building and liberalization with a hegemonic religion which suffered set-backs along the way, to which the majority religions responded by politicizing and striving to keep or expand privileges well into the present day. Finally, the book's global scope of cases and religions puts the conventional “regional studies” in perspective.

There is much to learn from contrasting the United States or Latin American cases of religion and regime with the cases of regime change in non-Western contexts. Yet, this wide scope comes at a price. The unbalanced country selection of Christian cases focuses exclusively on Catholic countries with the exception of the United States. For a study of religion and regimes, some important countries are missing, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries. The latter group deviates from the paths outlined in the book in that the majority religion kept its hegemonic status in the era of nation-building and liberalization. Today, this fusion of national and religious identity is confronted by the same issues of religious pluralism and diversity found elsewhere. Moves towards disestablishment have begun in Sweden and Norway, but why not in the United Kingdom or Germany, where pressures of pluralization are even stronger? These questions become even more prevalent in Orthodox Eastern Europe, which with the exception of Russia, is equally excluded. What about the interplay of democratic regimes in Romania, or Bulgaria, or Greece, with quasi-establishment, in comparison to Poland or Ireland?

A final deficit is the lack of a conceptual framework of “regime”. The editors left it to the individual authors, some of whom made an effort of conceptualization while most used the term idiosyncratically, which is disappointing. The book strives to compare democratic with non-democratic regimes, or more generally variations of regimes, but the differences remain underspecified. Last, the book would have benefitted from connecting the discussion and findings with the broader comparative literature on politics and religion and conceptualizations of religion-state relations (e.g., Jonathan Fox and others).

Overall, Religion and Regimes provides a lot of food for thought but leaves the reader hungry for more.