Modelling the Anchor and Range of State-Religion Relationships in Australia and Italy: Towards a New Understanding of State-Religion Typologies

This article argues that states exhibit characteristics of multiple categories of statereligion relationships, which may be adjacent to one another on a continuum or other model, but that state-religion relationships should first be understood as existing within a range of potential relationships permitted by a jurisdiction’s foundational documents. This paper therefore proposes a new methodology to interpret and apply the Durham and Scharffs loop model which first identifies anchors to the state-religion relationship before interpreting those anchors to determine the range of all potential state-religion interactions. In order to demonstrate how this methodology might be applied, it is used to compare the state-religion relationships in Australia and Italy, exploring why Durham and Scharffs classify both Australia and Italy as cooperationist states, despite very different underlying foundational documents.