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.Three 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.

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