ABSTRACT

This fully revised edition offers a comprehensive overview of the many theories of religion and politics and provides students with an accessible, in-depth guide to the subject’s most significant debates, issues, and methodologies.

It begins by asking the basic questions of how social scientists see religion and why religion remains relevant to politics in the modern era. Fox examines the influence of religious identity, beliefs, institutions and legitimacy on politics, and surveys important approaches and issues found in the literature on religion and politics. Four new chapters on religious policy around the world, political secularism, and religious freedom and human rights have been added to fully revised content covering religious identity, rational choice approaches to religious politics worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, ideologies, institutions and political mobilization, fundamentalism, secularization, and religion and conflict.

This work will be essential reading for all students of religion and politics, comparative politics, international relations, and security studies.

chapter 1|9 pages

Introduction

chapter 3|17 pages

Religious identity

chapter 5|14 pages

Religious legitimacy

chapter 7|15 pages

Rational religion

chapter 8|12 pages

Religious fundamentalism

chapter 9|17 pages

Religion and conflict

chapter 12|13 pages

Political secularism

chapter 13|13 pages

Religious freedom

chapter 14|11 pages

Religion in international relations

chapter 15|5 pages

Conclusions