Conventionally, it has been assumed that there existed an inevitable long-term trend towards secularization, that is, the declining salience of religious belief and practice especially in the public sphere. The Weberian perspective suggested that the development of science would displace reliance on and confidence in faith. The Durkheimean perspective, which tended to emphasize more the functional role of religion, assumed that as the state and other social organizations took over more of the functions, like education and social services, once performed, to the extent they were performed, by religious organizations, there would be seen to be less and less of a role for religion.

Such developments as the emergence of Islamic revivalism and its assumption of a political role, the increasing political involvement in religious traditions like Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism, which had not in the past been politically active, and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India inspired reconsideration of the secularization thesis, and scholars even started writing about desecularization. Current scholarship tends to adopt the view that both the secularization thesis and the desecularization thesis may have been too simple, and reliant on essentializing approaches that failed to appreciate diversity and the role of context. The contributions in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, while somewhat uneven in quality as is almost unavoidable in such collections, are valuable precisely because they accurately reflect the sort of insights and limitations characteristic of the current state of the field, not because they succeed in surmounting those limitations.

The study of religion and politics, as reflected in even the best of the recent literature, has rediscovered the relevance of religious belief, practice and organizations but struggles with the amorphous quality and lack of precise definition of both “religion” and “politics.” The more one considers it, the less clear it becomes what qualifies as “religion.” One can discern certain beliefs and the profile of organizations and institutions of varying kinds among elements of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, but it becomes less clear among traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and Confucianism. It becomes even less clear when one considers Santeria, agnosticism, atheism—what some have referred to as civil religion—or even includes consideration of nationalism as religion.

The contributions here belong to a body of literature that has filled an important gap created by the tendency either to see religion as less and less relevant or to see religion as simply one form of “false consciousness” utilized by rulers or ruling classes cynically as cover to grant apparent legitimacy to crasser motives. In his contribution, Slavica Jakelić observes that “If religions used to be dismissed because of a belief in their unavoidable decline, they are now frequently perceived as a significant albeit irrational and divisive social force” (124). Reality is more complex. W. Cole Durham, Jr., and Elizabeth Clark, in their contribution, note that “Like romantic love, religion is deeply implicated in much that is highest, but also in much that is lowest, in the human condition” (282). Patrick Mason insists that “To argue that religion is either inherently violent or peaceful is to peddle in crass reductionism, ignoring tremendous diversity within and between religious traditions as well as the complexity and, indeed, messiness naturally attendant to human relations and institutions (of which religion is among the most historically significant)” (213).

The starting point for much of the discussion in this volume is Scott Appleby's 2000 book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, which argues that while religion can be associated in specific instances with discord and violence, it can and genuinely has also contributed substantially and in a practical way in specific instances to reconciliation and peacebuilding. Those who are not yet familiar with this work may well wish to read it as well.

In the introductory contribution to this collection, Atalia Omer stresses that “Appleby's thesis is more complex than the mere framing of the ‘religious peacebuilder’ as the mirror image of the ‘religious terrorist’: the one perfects religion, the other perverts it. Both constructs are problematic and deserve a sustained interrogation of the question of causality: Does religion cause violence? Can religion cause peace?”(18). In his contribution to this volume, Appleby concedes that, although there has been a substantial volume of work on a subject like religion and violence, as a body of work it remains somewhat “incoherent,” to use the adjective applied by Appleby. Nevertheless, he insists “There is much to be admired in the sheer volume of data collected and concepts developed to order it. In addition, one can perceive distinct lines of analysis and interpretive ‘schools’ taking shape. This amounts, one might become convinced, to a mighty groaning toward coherence. Can a first sustained attempt at a comprehensive general theory of religious violence be far off?”(47-48).

Similarly, Timothy Samuel Shah observes that “‘We know too little to be dogmatists,’ to quote Pascal, ‘but we know too much to be skeptics.’ We know very little relative to what we would like to know, but we know enough to have some confidence about what the world is not” (382).

Some of the contributions in this worthwhile volume that specialists and university libraries should have consider religion in a broad sense as an influence on political culture; other contributions examine religion in the narrower sense of the influence of specifically religious institutions or organizations, or of religiously inspired individuals.