Prophets, Priests, and Religious Markets

Abstract

Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the Many. Edited by Ted Gerard Jelen, Clyde Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 350 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN 0-521-65031-3), $23.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-65971-X). In Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective , Ted Jelen and Clyde Wilcox have compiled an eclectic set of essays on the history and evolution of religious politics in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. Well known for their individual and collaborative contributions to the study of religion and politics in the United States, in this volume Jelen and Wilcox tackle the daunting task of gleaning theoretically significant cross-national generalizations from twelve case studies encompassing more than twenty-five countries. Following Samuel Huntington (1996), the editors argue that religion is an important focus for political study because it plays a key role in explaining political mobilization, policy disputes, identity politics, and other important political outcomes (p. 1). The primary dependent variable in the case studies that comprise Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective is the general nature of religious politics. The authors conceptually divide this variable into two categories: a priestly or accommodating role of religion; and a prophetic or oppositional role (p. 7, also see Leege 1993). The contributors offer several explanatory factors for why religious politics tends to move in one or the other of these two directions, including the concept of religious markets, as outlined by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992) and by Anthony Gill (1998), and the content of religious beliefs and practice, with a particular focus on the distinction between the universalism and monotheism of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and the syncretism of the Japanese Buddhist and Shinto traditions. In each case, the authors …