This Dispatch examines how religious symbolism and anti-migrant mobilization converged in Poland in mid-2025 to perform a sanctified politics of protection. Focusing on Catholic sermons, protests, and citizen border patrols, it shows how exclusion is recast as moral duty and care. Drawing on publicly circulated materials, the analysis develops the concept of affective legitimacy to capture moments when moral rightfulness is enacted through emotion, ritual, and ethical vocabularies as institutional trust wanes. The Polish case is treated as a diagnostic vignette of an emergent repertoire in which protection is felt rather than procedurally justified, highlighting how democratic authority can be reconfigured through affective publics rather than liberal-democratic accountability.

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.

As climate crises intensify, youth inclusion in climate governance becomes increasingly important, for their presence could help mitigate the structural restraints of conventional democracies, which inherently incentivise short-term policies. This dispatch reflects what is happening on the ground and examines youth participation in climate governance, comparing three key youth inclusion models: quota-based (Rwanda), consultative (Finland), and donor-supported (Pakistan). The analysis employs a triangulated analytical framework combining Structural Injustice, Participation Ladders, and Intergenerational Justice Theories. Cross-case analysis demonstrates that all models provide partial but insufficient pathways toward intergenerational accountability and ecological sustainability. The research outlines a Youth Quotas Climate Democracy Framework combining youth quotas with safeguards for autonomy, intergenerational youth councils, and democratic innovations to systemically reconfigure democracy toward more inclusive climate governance for future generations.

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.

The New Prometheans is divided into four sections. Section I, “The new political quadrilateral,” reviews the formation of a new quadrilateral in the United States: right-wing neoliberals, white evangelicals, Trumpian fascists, and rich tech bros. Each folds to some degree into the priorities and ethos of the others to form a larger resonance machine. It is also unstable. Section II, “Dreamscapes of the tech bros,” explores more closely the existential priorities, rage against death, crude understandings of intelligence, and economic patterns of insistence of the tech bros, focusing on quotations from figures such as Marc Andressen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. After advancing a preliminary critique, Section III, “Steps toward an alternative onto-cosmology,” presents alternative images of nonhuman modes of production, the porosity of knowledge, the element of creative responsiveness in thinking, the ubiquity of events, and the exploration of timescapes. These provide better ways to challenge and displace the shallow and cruel images of human mastery, smartness, computer brain uploads, time, and capitalist expansion. Critique is important but never enough. Finally, in Section IV, we look at how earthbound, entangled humanists can offer an alternative to the dreamscape of escape to Mars.

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 offers a Confucian conception of ownership and a different approach to equality based on a concept of relational person that could provide an alternative philosophical framework for economic democracy. The Confucian concept of nonexclusive and non-absolute co-ownership, conditional on owners fulfilling their social responsibilities and sustained in networks of relationships mitigates the drive to appropriation and resistance to redistribution even without formalizing legal rights of equal ownership. Confucian texts’ condemnation of wide disparities between rich and poor corresponds with distributive ideas that balance equal satisfaction of needs with merit-based incentives for productivity constrained by social harmony. Without advocating democracy directly, Confucian philosophy contains insights for contemporary inquiries into the crises of democratic polities and market societies.

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.

Liberal electoral democracies face serious intrinsic as well as external problems that threaten their viability. Associative democracy (AD) holds the promise of alleviating them. I argue that a long but currently strangely ignored tradition of (neo-)corporatism has demonstrated the feasibility of associative governance arrangements. Nothing prevents governments to push corporatism into domains other than labor relations, such as education, health, housing, or climate change. I propose a two-tiered structure of AD in which extended classic corporatism forms Tier 1 and a layer of commons Tier 2. To maintain their creative, authentic organization, which collides with the organization of state bureaucracies, commons must not be integrated into state structures. Instead, they must be institutionally represented through confederate bodies which are mandatorily consulted by Tier 1 actors.

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.

This paper develops an ethics of compromise inspired by Paul Ricœur’s philosophy. Although Ricœur explicitly addressed compromise only once (1991), his broader work provides conceptual resources for rethinking it beyond moral failure or political opportunism. Rather than offering a textual exegesis, the paper mobilizes Ricœurian concepts to establish compromise as a fundamental dimension of intersubjectivity and democracy. It advances three arguments: first, ethics and politics should be understood through their intersection rather than separation or hierarchy; second, compromise is redefined as the “voluntary and innovative intersection of conflicting domains,” rather than a mere exchange of concessions; third, compromise rests on the ethical disposition of the capable yet fallible subject, committed to deliberation and the common good despite enduring disagreement.

Working with a national U.S. sample and data collected from our work with the nonprofit bridging organization Living Room Conversations, we counter the assertions of conflict profiteers. People in the U.S. are far less polarized than imagined, there is a great deal of trust in the election system, and a subsequent “reveal” strategy of this common ground thus becomes as, if not more, important than the need to “bridge” imagined chasms between citizens. With this strategy in place, those interested in or involved with bridging can further set the conditions for democratic dialogue by designing interventions that involve more and different kinds of people in their work, focusing on long-term impacts, and stretching definitions of participation from dialogue to civic action.