Religious issues in the political discourse: Parliamentary debates on civil unions and the public funding of religious institutions

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the political debate on the two key issues about Church-state relations in Poland: public funding of religious institutions and introducing civil unions. It employs analytical tools of the sociological discourse analysis, document analysis, and, to a limited extent, conversation analysis to explore religion’s presence and influence in the public sphere. The analysis is focused on the established actors of the public debate: state institutions, political parties and Church official bodies. It encompasses disputes over legislative initiatives from the period 2003–2018. The chapter has two objectives. Firstly, it aims at extracting and describing major threads of the debate on the civil unions and public funding for religious institutions. Secondly, it tries to assess the influence of religion on the political debate in Poland.