Book Reviews 203

priorities of the institutional church are so misplaced, their political victo-

ries in state legislatures may be, in the long run, pyrrhic victories.
This is an important book that may be used in courses on Religion and
Politics (a good reason to produce a paperback version quickly).
Unfortunately, such a substantively important book has been marred by
sloppy copyediting and proofreading. The book is littered with typograph-
ical errors, ungrammatical sentences, and omitted words. Jo Renee
Formicola deserved better from her editors at Palgrave MacMillan.
Nonetheless, she has produced a comprehensive, impressive study of the
Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal in the United States.

The Varieties of Religious Repression: Why Governments Restrict

Religion. By Ani Sarkissian. New York, NY, Oxford University
Press, 2015. 264 pp. $29.95 Cloth
doi:10.1017/S1755048315000905

Jocelyne Cesari
Georgetown University and University of Birmingham

In The Varieties of Religious Expression, Ani Sarkissian seeks to explain

the variation of state repression vis--vis religion in non-democratic con-
texts by combining rational choice theory and studies on authoritarianism.
Such an approach is new because it aims at filling in a gap in the existing
literature: on one hand, scholars adepts of the rational choice theory do
not explore political situations outside the West and on the other hand,
scholars of authoritarian regimes do not pay attention to religion. In
order to bridge this gap, the author presents a typology of non-democratic
regimes according to: (a) their level of repression of religion; and (b) their
religious divisions (measured by the Social Hostility Index from the Pew
Forum). The use of these two dimensions leads to four classification types:
(1) Regimes that repress all religions with Iran, Saudi Arabia, China,
and Azerbaijan being the relevant case studies; (2) Regimes favoring
one and repressing all others such as Turkey, Russia, Georgia, and
Indonesia; (3) Regimes operating a selective repression of religions like
Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, and Singapore; and (4) Regimes with no repression
of religion which includes Albania. Cambodia, Senegal, and Peru.

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 204 Book Reviews

The authors intention to bridge the gaps in study of religion of politics

is her most significant contribution to the existing literature. Her imple-
mentation of such a perspective, however, raises crucial questions.
First, repression is defined as restriction of worship, festivals, or restric-
tions on places of worship. Such a definition is too narrow and does not
take into account more nuanced and gradual aspects of repression that
sometimes blur the line between repression and control. Because of this
lack of nuance, the category of repressing all religions does not reflect
very important differences between the regimes which appear side by
side under this rubric. More specifically, putting Iran and Saudi Arabia
in this category is problematic, because it gives the impression that
Islam is repressed as much as minority religions, while that is far from
being the case. Actually Iran and Saudi Arabia are better defined as reli-
gious states (Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series
Analysis of Worldwide Data) or states with a hegemonic form of religion
(The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the
State). In these countries, the state certainly controls and regulates Islam
but does not repress it. In fact, the dominant Islamic institutions, clerics,
and schools, have been absorbed within state institutions, while all other
religions (including other denominations of Islam) are discriminated, re-
pressed, or oppressed.
Additionally, all the Muslim states listed in the different categories are
actually characterized by hegemonic forms of Islam, since all of them, in-
cluding Turkey, have nationalized a particular brand of Islam by turning
their clerics into civil servants absorbing all endowments and mosques
into the state institutions without providing the same status to all other re-
ligions or even recognizing them. Indonesia, Senegal, and Lebanon are the
only exceptions to this very specific situation. In these conditions, the
question worth rising is: Why are most Muslim majority countries charac-
terized by hegemonic forms of Islam? The author somewhat points to it
when she wonders why most of Muslim countries are repressing religions,
but her framework of analysis does not fully allow her to respond to the
question.
In the same vein, some of the countries discussed by the author, like
Senegal, Turkey, or Indonesia, cannot actually be considered non-demo-
cratic since they experience free and fair elections, division of power,
and rule of law. In this regard, it would have been relevant to make
better use of the growing literature on hybrid regimes in order to overcome
the sharp divide between democratic and non-democratic regimes, which
does not reflect a more fluid and complex reality.

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 Book Reviews 205

Additionally, the author apprehends religious divisions through the

social hostility index of the Pew Forum. Relying on this sole indicator
is problematic because religious divisions and social hostility do not auto-
matically line-up. Social hostility vis--vis religion can happen even with
no religious divisions (for example, repression of all religions in commu-
nist regimes or lacit in France). Religious divisions on the other hand,
refer to religious differences that are institutionalized by law and state pol-
icies without automatically entailing social hostility. In fact, state actions
are crucial in institutionalizing social divisions and creating hierarchies
between groups that then turn hostile to each other. Scholarly work
(The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power) has
shown that these social divisions among religions are the direct
outcome of the policies of the post-colonial states that emerged on the col-
lapse of the Ottoman Empire. In these conditions, religious divisions are
not a variable but an outcome of the state repression.
In sum, the overall goal of the book is very important and timely but the
findings are constricted, if not biased, by the limits of the existing theories
of political science, which is a problem far beyond the undeniable exper-
tise of the author. It leaves the reader with no clear understanding of the
factors that could efficiently explain why states repress religions. To do so,
a more in depth investigation of state-society interactions based on an his-
torical approach of the continuous interactions between state religion, and
society, is needed.

Politicization of Religion, the Power of Symbolism: The Case of Former

Yugoslavia and its Successor States. Edited by Gorana Ognjenovic and
Jasna Jozelic. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xxi + 223
pp. $105.00 Cloth
doi:10.1017/S1755048315000656

Tibor Purger
Rutgers University

When presidential elections in three republics of a secularized federation

are won by a former Communist general turned founder of a political

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