ABSTRACT
Discourses and actions deployed by dogmatic religious voices and groups are a major influence in determining the contours of sexual politics in the early 2000s. The need to better understand the origins, resources, scope, and direction of the religious turn in contemporary politics is important. As we argued in the Introduction, terminology such as the ‘growth of fundamentalism’, the most widely used descriptor of the phenomenon, is both problematic and ahistorical, and its widespread usage requires deconstruction. It is also important to situate religious extremism, which many authors in the USA particularly define in terms of ‘the religious right’, in relation to, and separate from, religiosity and spirituality at large, and to examine more closely how these forces intersect with political, cultural, and economic influences. Finally, since many voices are trying to reactivate secularity and laicité2 as a response to the policy inroads of religious conservatism, our discussion must also revisit the trajectory of secularization as well as its potentialities and limits.
