An introduction to religion and politics: theory and practice

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

"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 subjects 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."--Provided by publisher.

"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."--Publisher's website.