In October, the British Parliament approved Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s request for a general election, which will occur on Thursday. After the House of Commons blocked then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the European Union and then Johnson’s, the Conservatives hope the election will give them enough seats to “get Brexit done.” Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party hope to prevent the prime minister from winning a clear majority so that they can form a government and implement a second referendum on Brexit. If recent polls are correct and the opposition fails, the United Kingdom will officially leave the EU next month, which would be one of the most historic moments in the country’s post-World War II history (though this would not be the end, as more negotiations with the EU would continue, perhaps for years).
Since the June 2016 referendum in which 52 percent of British voters chose to leave the EU, most discussions on Brexit have focused on the decision’s economic and technocratic dimensions. And almost all studies and books on European integration focus on similar materialistic and bureaucratic questions. Virtually no one considers the theological reasons for British Euroscepticism or why some European countries are more likely than others to accept ever closer union. Into this void, Mark Royce’s The Political Theology of European Integration (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) introduces the theory that differences in Catholic and Protestant political theologies help explain phenomena like Brexit.
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