Religion, spirituality, faith and public administration: A literature review and outlook
| Published date | 01 October 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09520767221146866 |
| Author | Edoardo Ongaro,Michele Tantardini |
| Date | 01 October 2024 |
Special Issue: Religion as an explanatory factor in public administration:
Directions for research
Public Policy and Administration
2024, Vol. 39(4) 531–555
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09520767221146866
journals.sagepub.com/home/ppa
Religion, spirituality, faith and
public administration:
A literature review and outlook
Edoardo Ongaro
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Michele Tantardini
Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA
Abstract
This article originates from the consideration that religion, spirituality and faith affect
public administration, its configuration and its workings. Religion, spirituality, and faith are
important explanatory factors and part of explanatory frameworks for several fields of
inquiry in the field of public administration. Specifically, no literature review has been
conducted so far about what has been written on the relationship between religion,
spirituality and faith, and public administration. This study aims to fill this gap through a
literature review of scholarly publications between 1960-2020. On this basis, the article
identifies themes of research at the micro-, meso- and macro-level (that is, the level of
individuals/people, organizations, and administrative systems respectively) about the
manifold relations between religion and public administration.
Keywords
Administrative theory, public administration, governance, religion, faith, spirituality
Introduction
Religion, spirituality and faith may have a profound influence on public administration, its
configuration and its workings (hereafter: PA), and PA may have an influence on aspects
of the religious life in a given jurisdiction. To take an example at the macro level, this
influence may be seen in the case of a public bureaucracy like the Directorate of Religious
Affairs, the Diyanet, in Turkey. The Diyanet, a bureaucracy of the Turkish state, has been
Corresponding author:
Edoardo Ongaro, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.
Email: edoardo.ongaro@open.ac.uk
used to regulate the extent of publicness of religion –the extent to which religion
permeates the public sphere; its role has changed over the years, in certain periods having
operated to limit publicness, in others to expand it; it does so through a range of policy and
administrative tools, like the function of drafting the Friday sermon delivered to all the
mosques in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country. At different points in the history of
modern Turkey this meant pushing religion towards a higher influence on the public
sphere or at the opposite pushing it to the margins of the public sphere. In a similar vein
but in a different constitutional, cultural, political and administrative context, France, with
its interpretations of the notions of s´
ecularit´
e (secularity) and la¨
ıcit´
e (laity), is another
emblematic case of the mutual influence of religion, faith, and spirituality, and public
administration. La¨
ıcit´
e is not a sterile principle in the French constitution but its ap-
plication through laws bears effects potentially affecting the life of all French people. An
example in this direction is the “French law on secularity and conspicuous religious
symbols in schools”(law 2004-228 of 15 March 2004) commonly referred as “the veil
law”, which bans the wearing of symbols or garb which show religious affiliation in
public primary and secondary schools, and which sparked accusation of discrimination
against the French Muslim minority. Another example of the deep interrelationships of PA
and religion, faith and spirituality, focuses on the level of individuals rather than the
macro-level of the relationship of the administrative apparatus and the public sphere, and
it is the influence of profiles pertaining to religion, faith, and spirituality on the con-
stitutive dimensions of Public Service Motivation (PSM), a theoretical perspective to the
study of why individuals choose to work in and for the public service.
However, the significance of religion, faith and spirituality for public administration
seems to have been largely overlooked in mainstream research. This may lead to neglect
an important range of potential “explanatory factors”in the study of several areas of
public administration research and practice - from public service motivation to bu-
reaucratic discretion and street level bureaucracy, from organizational values to em-
ployees’retention and job satisfaction, from the broader governance arrangements for
public service delivery (role of faith-based organizations) to the literature on collaborative
governance and the co-creation and co-production of public services and public value, to
issues of legitimacy and accountability of PA -, thus ultimately limiting the progress of
knowledge in the field of public administration.
To address this limitation, a useful starting point lies in taking stock of the extant
scholarly work in the field. This study therefore aims to fill this gap through a literature
review of the scholarly publications between 1960-2020 in all the English-language peer-
reviewed journals with a 2017 Impact Factor (IF) of 0.75 or greater, or the top fifty
English-language peer-reviewed journals, in the public administration, business/
management, and political science subject areas, in which “religion”,“spirituality”
and “faith”are mentioned (details on methods are reported in the next section). We
identified 67 publications that examine profiles of the relationship between religion, faith
and spirituality, and public administration. The analysis led us to identify a total of
10 themes emerging from the scientific literature, each providing an angle from which to
examine these multifarious relationships which sheds light on certain aspects of public
administration - from whether religion may be a driver to work for the public sector to
532 Public Policy and Administration 39(4)
Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI
Get Started for FreeStart Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting