ABSTRACT

The interaction between religion and politics in Taiwan is a broadly peaceful one. This relative quietness may explain why only a few of the political scientists working in English in Taiwan have studied the interaction between religion and politics there. Most of those who do pay attention to the relevance of religion to politics are historians, anthropologists, and sociologists who study religion in Taiwan and occasionally write about the political significance of religious activities, rituals, and institutions. The limited number of scholars in political science who explore the interactions between religion and politics may arguably mirror the general lack of attention in the discipline paid to the intersection of politics and religion in liberal democratic societies, a problem recently acknowledged in the field (Kettell 2014; Grzymala-Busse 2012). This is not the place to extrapolate the causes for this shortcoming: rather, the goal of this chapter is to present the existing research on this subject, as religious actors are becoming increasingly more assertive in politics within Taiwan, but also in interactions across the Taiwan Strait. Researchers looking at politics in Taiwan could establish the specificity of their field relatively easily because of the differences in the political systems between China and Taiwan, but it is more complicated for those who study religion. 1