Books in the Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics series

Through an analysis of Christian communities in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica, this book analyzes how religious groups talk about the politics surrounding economic life.

For readers interested in how international context interacts with domestic politics in producing state policies toward religious minorities in Turkey and France. It is the first study that employs international context in the study of state policies toward religion and that compares Turkey and France with regard to religious minorities.

For social scientists studying transnational civic engagement, activism or religious movements, this book analyzes how empathy, awareness, and motivation are organized through travel and cross-cultural engagement. Educational leaders who promote experiential learning or global citizenship programs can critically reflect on the organizational and cultural challenges of those initiatives.

Is secularism a growing force in American politics? Is a Secular Left emerging? Secular Surge is for anyone seeking to understand the stunning decline in American religion-and what politics has to do with it. This book will appeal to readers interested in politics, religion, sociology, history, and constitutional law.

Are societies outside the West secular? What precisely would that entail? This book examines notions of religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007).

American Jews have built a political culture based on the principle of equal citizenship in a secular state. This book examines how this worldview developed and how it has influenced American Jews' political behavior since the founding. It offers insights for readers interested in history, law, politics, religion, and Judaism.

This book explains the development of religion and nationalism in the United States, Israel, India, Greece, Uruguay, and Malaysia. It presents a new theoretical framework for understanding different models of church-state arrangements and their emergence and stability over time.

This book documents a fundamental change in American politics. Rather than conservatives emphasizing morality and liberals emphasizing rights, both now wield rights arguments. Using extensive historical and survey data, Lewis provocatively explains how the prototypical culture war issue - abortion - has motivated the conservative rights turn over the past half-century.

This book explores religious attitudes from an African American Catholic perspective. It shows that the vast majority of African American Catholics do not perceive racial marginalization in the church and are stronger than white Catholics in their faithfulness and religious identity.

A fascinating account of how Islam can be deployed or resisted to shape minority rights and religious change in Muslim societies.

This book shows how campaigns for more or less secular policies in education were shaped by their interactions with the state throughout American and Australian history. In so doing, it explains how and why religion comes to be embraced or excluded from public life.

This book explains why the United States, a country that values religious freedom, has persecuted some religious minorities while protecting others. It explores the experiences of Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Catholics, and Muslims arguing that the state will persecute a religion if it sees it as a political threat.

This book explains what tolerance means to the leaders of the world's largest Islamic organizations. It is based on two years of research in Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim-majority country and a consolidated democracy - including hundreds of archival documents, in-depth interviews, personal observations, and a new survey.

This book analyzes the place and influence of religion in European politics. Francois Foret presents the first data ever collected on the religious beliefs of European decision makers and what they do with these beliefs. Discussing popular assumptions such as the return of religion, aggressive European secularism, and religious lobbying, Foret offers objective data and non-normative conceptual frameworks to clarify some major issues in the contemporary political debate.

Through a case study of community organizing in the global city of London and an examination of the legacy of Saul Alinsky around the world, this book assesses the construction of citizenship as an identity, a performance, and a shared rationality.

Mormons have long had an outsized presence in American culture and politics, but they remain largely unknown to most Americans. Recent years have seen the political prominence of Mormons taken to a new level - including the presidential candidacy of Republican Mitt Romney, the prominent involvement of Mormons in the campaign for California's Proposition 8 (anti-gay marriage), and the ascendancy of Democrat Harry Reid to the position of Senate Majority Leader. This book provides the most thorough examination ever written of Mormons' place in the American political landscape - what Mormons are like politically and how non-Mormons respond to Mormon candidates. However, this is a book about more than Mormons. As a religious subculture in a pluralistic society, Mormons are a case study of how a religious group balances distinctiveness and assimilation - a question faced by all faiths.

Seminal thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - all predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis has experienced the most sustained challenge in its long history. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of secularization and existential security. Sacred and Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in comparative religion, sociology, public opinion, political behavior, political development, social psychology, international relations, and cultural change.

Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans? challenges a conventional wisdom in which recently mobilized religious and Secular extremists captured the parties and created a God gap. Using surveys (1960-2008), Claassen investigates the motivations of religious and non-religious activists and produces a new way of understanding the religious divide in American politics.

This book examines the political consequences of growing religiosity in countries where politics are repressive and religious freedoms are in flux. The study compares how two authoritarian regimes - Russia and China - manage religion and how religious communities navigate restrictive political environments to pursue their own spiritual and economic interests.

How, when, and why did ordinary people began to care for the fate of distant strangers? This book addresses these questions by reconstructing, for the first time, the historical origins of global humanitarianism. Peter Stamatov investigates these origins in the context of European overseas imperialism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book examines how the competition between religious and secular forces influenced state religion policy between 1990 and 2008. While both sides were active, the religious side had considerably more success. The book examines how states supported religion as well as how they restricted it.

This book revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies with a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems.

The Price of Freedom Denied shows that, contrary to popular opinion, ensuring religious freedom for all reduces violent religious persecution and conflict. Others have suggested that restrictions on religion are necessary to maintain order or preserve a peaceful religious homogeneity. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke show that restricting religious freedoms is associated with higher levels of violent persecution. Relying on a new source of coded data for nearly 200 countries and case studies of six countries, the book offers a global profile of religious freedom and religious persecution. Grim and Finke report that persecution is evident in all regions and is standard fare for many. They also find that religious freedoms are routinely denied and that government and the society at large serve to restrict these freedoms. They conclude that the price of freedom denied is high indeed.

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book examines the impact of ideological struggles on public policy making. Specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion ('passive secularism'), whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility ('assertive secularism').

This book revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies with a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems.

Djupe and Gilbert investigate how membership in organized religious bodies shapes the political life of members. They develop a theoretical framework that captures the multifaceted elements of church life that combine to affect individual political attitudes and actions, emphasizing church membership as an essential element of American civic and political life.

This book delves into the extent of government involvement in religion between 1990 and 2002 using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The study is based on the Religion and State dataset, which includes 175 governments across the globe, all of which are addressed individually in this book. The forms of involvement examined in this study include whether the government has an official religion, whether some religions are given preferential treatment, religious discrimination against minority religion, government regulation of the majority religion, and religious legislation. The study shows that government involvement in religion is ubiquitous, that it increased significantly during this period, and that only a minority of states, including a minority of democracies, have separation of religion and state. These findings contradict the predictions of religion's reduced public significance found in modernization and secularization theory. The findings also demonstrate that state religious monopolies are linked to reduced religious participation.

Throughout history, governments have attempted to control religious organizations and limit religious freedom. Anthony Gill argues that political leaders are more likely to allow religious freedoms if such laws enhance economic well-being or political power of their country.

This 2004 book analyzes state accommodation of Muslims' religious practices in Britain, France, and Germany, first examining three major theories: resource mobilization, political-opportunity structure, and ideology. It then proposes an additional explanation, arguing that each nation's approach to Muslims follows from its historically based church-state institutions.

This book explains the development of religion and nationalism in the United States, Israel, India, Greece, Uruguay, and Malaysia. It presents a new theoretical framework for understanding different models of church-state arrangements and their emergence and stability over time.