Response to Karrie Koesel

Koesel's final comment raises, I think, one of the most important questions that the book attempts to grapple with, namely whether government favoritism of religion, as attractive a solution as it might seem for any country looking to overcome a democratically-hostile religious past, could ultimately undermine the larger democratic project, especially in more religiously plural settings. The data presented in the book indicates that some types of religious favoritism, including when religious language is embedded in a constitution or religious education in public schools, do not have a negative effect on many of the measures that democracy indices use to compare democracies with each other. [...]there is reason to believe that some types of religious grounding might actually strengthen those democratic projects at least in some of its features.