Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar argue in their book of Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa ( Oxford University Press, 2004), “Religion is the emerging political language of today.” The phenomenon is encountered everywhere, most evidently in both the domestic politics of the United States and in the complexities of the Middle East, but also in Europe where in recent years the post-ancient regime separation of state and church has b een increasingly breached in recent years with the changing demographics of the continent.

In many respects, it is ironic that the separation of religious from political thought was invented in the West and exported to the rest of the world in colonial times when one considers that intrinsic to Europe’s financial revolution more than three centuries ago was the use of mathematics as a way of calculating risk, prompted in part by a new theology emerging from the Reformation. As Max Weber noted, the spirit of capitalist enterprise was originally associated with a religious view of the world.

In the developing world, it was believed that the economic transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of people left their villages to start new lives in cities, would lead to a weakening of religious sentiment. Instead, today it needs to be recognized that progress is not a material issue alone. Moreover, development has too often failed to deliver even the material benefits it promised. Finally, the geopolitical vacuum left by the end of the Cold War, the current resurgence of religion became for many a modern attempt to harness traditional resources for contemporary use.

This phenomenon has assumed global dimensions because of the conflict between the United States and al-Qa‘eda and its affiliates, cast by both parties as a struggle between “the forces of good and evil”: a choice of terms that has the manifest goal of building support. Consequently, following the progressive linkage of politics and religion as well as studying its dynamic is imperative today for understanding contemporary political events—and the Nelson Institute undertakes to do both through an ongoing series of colloquia and publications.