Religion, Politics, and the State: Observations of a Comparative Sociologist
N.J. Demerath, III Friday, 1 December 2006
For the first half of my 35 years as a sociologist of religion, the topic was far more interesting to me than to most of my bored colleagues, students, and readers. They tended to see religion as a vestige of a by-gone age, an increasingly irrelevant remnant from a prior epoch of superstition and miseducation.
But about 1979 things began to change. Astonishingly enough, religion took on a new political importance as phrases like "liberation theology," "fundamentalism," "solidarity," and "moral majority" were shouted from the political ramparts in countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Iran, Poland, and the United States. Suddenly I was less boring, and like the scholar whose scoffed-at laboratory work finds an indispensable application, I found people actually cared. But, of course, I was not alone. There were other scholars also wandering in the religious wilderness, and the academic literature in this field has now burgeoned.
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