Introduction: religion and politics - American and European experiences

There can be little doubt that if the study of religion and politics had for a long while become less interesting to the general scholar (and therefore the preserve of the specialist few) this has dramatically changed in the past decade. A number of factors (including the exacerbation of existing religious tensions, the emergence of new religious conflicts, the relevance of these to international security and terrorism and the international prominence of several national 'cases' e.g. in Turkey, Denmark and the Netherlands) have, among other things, brought religion back to central focus in the study of politics. If the literature had been broadly shaped, previously, by the secularisation thesis, then the emergence of the above factors pose a challenge to the social and political sciences. This Symposium brings together several papers by both American and European scholars to explore the rich and diverse religion-politics nexus in the two continent