Rethinking religious competition

In his book Rendering Unto Caesar, Anthony Gill suggests that in countries with repressive authoritarian governments, religious competition plays a crucial role in determining whether the dominant religious institution will support or oppose the regime. Gill's theory, however, assumes that religious institutions are unitary rational actors. While this assumption may be reasonable in Catholic countries of Latin America where Gill based his theory on the hierarchical National Bishops' Councils, it is not applicable to Sunni Islamic countries of North Africa because of the decentralized Sunni Islamic religious structure. This finding suggests that although religious actors behave rationally in the religious market to maximize the souls for their religion, not all religious actors necessarily view the same religion and its role in the politics of the society in the same manner: in some cases, intra-religious competition is a larger factor in church-state relations than inter-religious competition.