Research

Established in 2007, the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ will continue to study the complex relationship between religion and politics across epochs and cultures until 2027. The approximately 150 researchers from 20 disciplines in the humanities and social Sciences focus on Europe and the Mediterranean region, and their interconnections with the Middle East, Africa, North America and Latin America. The Cluster is the largest of its kind in Germany and the only Cluster of Excellence to focus on religion. Since its inception the Cluster addresses a wide range of historical and contemporary issues.

From 2026, the globally unique "Campus of Theology and Religious Studies" will bring together Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic theology and institutions of non-denominational religious research at the university and promote inter- and transdisciplinary as well as interreligious exchange. In order to secure the future of interdisciplinary research and international exchange in all its magnitude and diversity, the University has established the profile area 'Religion and Society'. Numerous research institutions and third-party funded networks offer an optimal research environment for the academic examination of the tension between religion and politics.

The Cluster of Excellence is marked by a high degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological diversity, with more than 20 disciplines from seven departments of the University of Münster being involved. Hardly any other institution of religious research in Germany or abroad has such a broad spectrum of disciplines, methods, religions, epochs and cultures involved. This results in a unique combination of historical and contemporary questions, theoretical and empirical perspectives, normative and descriptive approaches, as well as denominational and non-denominational religious research. The Digital Humanities also play a prominent role in the research work of the Cluster of Excellence. A guest professorship in religion and politics, the “Hans Blumenberg Professorship” (named after the famous Münster philosopher), brings innovative momentum from international research to Münster and strengthens its interdisciplinarity.

The research structure is divided into three fields of research. In addition, there are theory platforms and research clouds. Current interdisciplinary working groups take up ideas from ongoing research in light of new questions, such as those relating to belonging and non-belonging. The aim of this fundamental research is not least to create an analytical distance from pressing questions of the present and to avoid simplifications, with members of the Cluster of Excellence contributing socially relevant and self-reflexive knowledge to current debates. The Centre for Research Communication disseminates research from the humanities and social sciences to a large number of target groups in society in transfer formats that are tailor-made to a particular theme.
 

  • Research questions

    Religion clearly plays a central role in the profound processes of change that we are currently witnessing in the world. All the more controversial, however, is the question of whether religion is merely a symbolic medium in which social conflicts are played out, or whether it is only used as an instrument for the pursuit of political and economic interests – or whether, indeed, it is an independent factor in such conflicts. Given the lack of clarity here, it is necessary to discover how religion is involved in social conflicts and what role it plays in them.

    The work of the Cluster of Excellence focuses on the question of how religion can stimulate, contain and modify social and political conflicts; on what it derives its dynamic power from, in the past and present, and in different cultures; and on which external conditions foster or limit its ability to mobilize people. Unlike secularization theory, the Cluster of Excellence therefore takes religion seriously as an independent factor of social change, and draws attention to the active potential of religion in political and social conflicts in the past and present.

    Not least among the aims of research in the Cluster is to foster an analytical distance from urgent questions of the present, and thereby avoid giving simplistic explanations of current problems. Members of the Cluster therefore provide reflexive knowledge that is socially relevant. The Centre for Research Communication disseminates research from the humanities and social sciences to a wide range of target groups in society in formats that are tailor-made for a particular theme.

  • Interdisciplinarity

    The research of the Cluster of Excellence is marked by a high degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological diversity. Involved are more than 20 disciplines from seven departments: history, law and political science, sociology of religion and religious studies, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Islamic theology, Jewish studies, psychology, classical and modern philology, as well as philosophy, art history, Arabic and Islamic studies, ethnology, Assyriology, archaeology, Egyptology and Byzantine studies.

    This interdisciplinarity enables, first, the exchange between non-denominational research on religion and denominational theologies, and thus the connection between external and internal perspectives on religion, which is essential for the central question concerning the intrinsic power of religion.

    Second, it enables a link to be made between empirical analyses and normative questions, which is important because there is currently an increased socio-political need for reflection on the normative foundations of the social order and on the public place that religion can or should occupy in that order.

    And, third, the large number of disciplines in the Cluster of Excellence facilitates the linking of hermeneutic-interpretative methods from cultural studies on the one hand, and explanatory methods from the social sciences on the other, with research at the Cluster of Excellence bringing these methods together and thereby helping to overcome the growing gap between these two academic cultures.

    Methods and sources

    The diversity of disciplines in the Cluster of Excellence results in a broad spectrum of methodological approaches: besides hermeneutical methods of historical-critical research, there are explanatory approaches of the social sciences; besides long-term perspectives from cultural history, ethnological case studies; besides macroscopic comparisons, approaches that investigate the history of cultural transfer; besides qualitative approaches, quantitative methods; besides descriptive approaches, normative questions of political theory, law, philosophy and theology.

    Methods from the Digital Humanities play an important role in the research of the Cluster of Excellence, as do oral history, narrative interviews, participatory observation, discourse analyses, numismatics and archaeological approaches, as well as text mining and handwriting recognition. These different methods are used to explore the rich material of religious history such as normative texts, pictorial symbols, material artefacts, and ritual practices.