A Study Of The Relationship Between Politics And Religion In Constitutional Texts

Church and state relationship described in a nation’s constitutional texture is its fundamental recognition of the relations between magisterium and regime historically. Nowadays most of nations in the world have chosen the separation of magisterium and regime as the national elementary principle. Besides that, the concrete types of church-state relationship are not varied in simple abruption and unification. Based on the statistical data of the stipulations of church-state-relationship in existing constitutions from 193 nations all over the world, I abstracted several key index to form a standard model evaluating the church-state relations of a certain nation. And for those which cannot be categorized into this model, I extracted its religion-related contents, especially of those about the freedom of religion belief, freedom of conscience and similar fundamental rights of citizens, reclassified and compared their details. In this way, we can see that there’s much space for Chinese legislation on religion to be improved. And the very first step to optimize our nation’s religion-regime relationship is to consider in the framework of the Constitution and laws. Only in this way can we truly b o o s t t h e r e l i g i o n a n d p r o t e c t t h e f r e e d o m o f r e l i g i o n o f c i t i z e n s.