ABSTRACT
Western societies have grown increasingly profane and religion as a social force has increasingly become a matter of individual belief, rather than a collective concern. This chapter presents a complex terrain between the material and spiritual, mapping out different ways of understanding the power of belief and charting the expression of the ideas at different spatial scales. Fundamentalist religious belief, whether from the neo-conservative moral majority in the USA or from resurgent Islam, is a powerful force in the new millennium, and other new religious beliefs are emerging in the secular West. The Islamic revolution in Iran led to a profound change in the basis of Iranian civil society and also strongly encouraged the global resurgence of fundamentalist Islamic politics. Ideological change is fuelling powerful disagreements central to contemporary geopolitics: F. Fukuyama’s view that history ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union has proved naïve and over-simplistic.
