An introduction to religion and politics - Jonathan Fox

An Introduction to Religion and Politics offers a comprehensive overview of the many theories of religion and politics, and provides students with an accessible but in-depth account of the most significant debates, issues and methodologies. Fox examines the ways in which religion influences politics, analyses the current key issues and provides a state of the art account of religion and politics, highlighting the diversity in state religion policies around the world.

Topics covered include:

• Secularism and secularization
• Religious identity
• Religious worldviews, beliefs, doctrines and theologies
• Religious legitimacy
• Religious institutions and mobilization
• Rational and functional religion
• Religious fundamentalism
• Conflict, violence and terror

This work combines theoretical analysis with data on the religion policies of 177 governments, showing that while most of the world's government support religion and many restrict it; true neutrality on the issue of religion is extremely rare. Religion is becoming an inescapable issue in politics.

This work will be essential reading for all students of religion and politics, and will also be of great interest to those studying related subjects such as comparative politics, international relations and war and conflict studies.

Jonathan Fox is a Professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He has published extensively on religion and politics.

For far too long, we have labored without a text that unifies social scientific treatments of religion and politics. Fox's An Introduction to Religion and Politics is a theoretical tour de force, providing a broad and deep survey of the major theories of religious presence in politics, tested with his Religion and the State dataset and carefully chosen case studies throughout. It is highly relevant and readable and will serve as a critical reference tool.