found in the Handbook of the Sociology of Religion(2003), edited by Michele
Dillon, thirty of whose thirty-four contributors are based in the United States
(of the remaining four, one is based in Canada, one in Great Britain, and two
in Israel). Among the issues debated by sociologists, scholars of religion have
generally been concerned with the issue of secularization, a debate that
sometimes has been conducted with acrimony and more often than not in a
historical vacuum. North American exceptions to this trend are two articles by
Philip Gorski, ‘Historicizing the Secularization Debate’ (2000) and his ‘Agenda
for Research’ published in the Handbook. Related to the presence or absence
of secularization are two related issues: the phenomenon of fundamentalism, a
term that has become part of everyday language, and the connection between
religion and violence. Research on the first has been gathered in the five-volume
‘Fundamentalism Project’, edited by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby
(1991–1995), a vast work that deals with this phenomenon cross-culturally,
and whose contributors come from a variety of disciplines. While in the popular
imagination, as well as among politicians, journalists and religious repre-
sentatives, episodes of religious violence tend to be understood as betrayals of
religion, scholarly research in a number of fields, from ethology to history, shows
that, on the contrary, religion and violence tend to go hand in hand. Violence
involving religion, common in the context of millenarian or apocalyptic
movements, has been the subject of numerous studies, several of which were
published around the year 2000: Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, edited
by Thomas Robbins and Susan Palmer (1997); Catherine Wessinger, How the
Millennium Comes Violently(2000); Millennium, Persecution, and Violence,
edited by Wessinger (2000); John Hall, Apocalypse Observed(2000). When
the publication of those studies had ceased, the attacks on the United States in
September 2001—an event usually referred to, apocalyptically, as ‘9/11’—led
to a renewed interest in the relation between religion and violence, mainly in
relation to Islam. Exemplary in this regard has been Bruce Lincoln’s Holy
Terrors(2003), a work devoted among other things to the study of the parallels
between the dualistic, violent worldviews of Osama bin Laden and George W.
Bush. It may be pointed out that the focus on Islamic violence, especially on
the nature of Jihad—further intensified by the destruction unleashed in Iraq by
the US invasion—has contributed to the neglect of the role played by violence
in other religions, especially those in South and East Asia, which tend to be
regarded as paragons of peace; but this is changing, as shown, for instance, by
a session devoted to violence and Buddhism at the 2006 meeting of the American
Academy of Religion.
Interest in the interaction between religion and the economy is not new, going
back to the days of Max Weber; what is relatively new is the study of religion
using the tools provided by economics. Significant in this regard is Laurence
Iannaccone’s work, especially those articles that deal with the issue of free-riding
and the popularity of strict churches. This kind of work can be supplemented254
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES