"God's Century"

My colleague, Dan Philpott, and his co-authors Tim Shah and Monica Toft, have a new, must-read book coming out, called "God's Century."  Here's some bits from the press release:

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead.” Many have insisted on the accuracy of his observation, believing that religion would wilt in the modern world. On the contrary, religion has flourished globally, and over the past four decades its political influence has surged. Drawing on original analysis and dramatic case studies, scholars Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah address this thorny phenomenon in their new work, GOD’S CENTURY: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics [W. W. Norton & Company; March 14, 2011; $25.95 hardcover]. In the tenth anniversary year of the 9/11 attacks and just as religious groups around the world such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are poised for greater influence, GOD’S CENTURY shows why religion’s influence has soared, what it means for today’s politics, and what religion’s political place ought to be.

Despite claims that religion is exclusively irrational and violent, its political influence is in fact diverse, promoting democracy, reconciliation, and peace in some countries while fostering civil war and terrorism in others. Why is the politics of religion so varied? Among many factors, two stand out: religious actors’ political theology and their independence from the state.

For much of history, religious actors and political authorities formed integrated relationships―they were willingly interdependent, both institutionally and ideologically. However, beginning with the Protestant Reformation in 1517, new developments in Europe—including the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the French Revolution of 1789—caused political authorities to flex their power and increase their control over religious actors. But after the 1960s this relationship surprisingly and dramatically changed yet again as religious actors began to expand their independence, some through conflict and struggle and others through mutual consent and constitutional change. Religious actors increasingly abandoned political theologies of passive obedience in exchange for a more active mindset that often legitimates, if not demands, intense political engagement. What is more, religion has resurged with the help rather than the hostility of the very forces many imagined would weaken it: democratization, globalization, and modernization. . . .