In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.

This chapter asks whether there is anything we might productively characterize as an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations. I use the example of the Essential Religious Practices (ERP) Doctrine as a window into this analysis. The ERP Doctrine offers the best-case argument for the existence of an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations because, after its initial articulation by the Indian Supreme Court, it has been widely influential within South and Southeast Asia. I use two of the contexts where ERP analysis has been influential – Malaysia and Sri Lanka – to show how there has indeed been significant conceptual migration within Asia with regard to religious freedom jurisprudence. The ERP Doctrine’s travels are clearly reflected in the flow of jurisprudential ideas and via robust campus-court exchanges. At the same time, differences in the theoretical networks and sociopolitical contexts within which the ERP Doctrine has traveled prevent it from constituting a homogenous and hermetically sealed Inter-Asian approach.

Modern Hebrew literature has been driven by a call to productivity from its inception. Zionist history was born out of a break with its traditional and religious past, a historical transformation that coincided with the birth and perseverance of the productive Jew. However, even well into twentieth and twenty-first-century Hebrew literature, these tensions remain active. They illuminate not only the ways in which capitalization and secularization are ongoing processes but also latent yet available possibilities of resistance to the demands of productivity. The chapter focuses on the figure of the Shabbat and other forms of inoperativity and nonwork inherent within it in the poetry of Zelda Schneurson. It offers a reading of Zelda’s poetry from a materialist and political-theological perspective to locate her poetry and her depictions of nonwork within the intertwined histories of Zionism, secularism, and capitalism.

Abstract: The Conclusion argues that the state of nature remains central to understanding the fractured condition of modern Western thought, particularly in the fields of colonialism, secularism, and ecology. It highlights the continuing relevance of the notion for interpreting the fragmented imaginaries of Western modernity.

Ch. 1 The secular “immanent frame,” of Western cultures requires a corresponding “transcendent frame” equipped with a “soft” Metaphysics, so that moral arguments and the religious life can be supported.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.

How did the dual model of mobilization emerge from the founding era of the republic through the 1960s? Chapter 3 answers this question in four thematic sections. The first discusses the radical changes religious institutions and symbols underwent following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, in 1923. I use this context to situate the responses of religious actors, which planted the seeds of the dual model’s first dimension: the idea of influencing institutions from within. I show that many former ulema participated in newly created state institutions to transform government practices from within. The next theme delves into the dual model’s second dimension: that of changing the system from outside. I show that the Naksi sheikhs led this effort through a variety of clandestine and formal sites. In the third theme, I discuss the intellectual thought of Said-i Nursi, a prominent Turkish Muslim thinker who popularized an "evolutionary method of change," along with the Egyptian Islamist Hasan al-Banna, whose influence shaped generations of Islamist actors in Turkey. In the final theme, I turn to transnational ideas and thinkers who developed the "revolutionary method of change" and provided Turkish Islamists with a framework for activism following the 1960 military coup.

The book concludes with recommendations for the future of religion in America, suggesting that a commitment to pluralism and inclusive civil religion is necessary to maintain one, indivisible nation. The authors make a case for allowing for public and private expressions of religion, promoting respectful religious pluralism, carefully balancing religious mission and activism, and broadening American civil religion beyond Judeo-Christianity to foster a vibrant American religious landscape.

This chapter explains the reasons for the popularity of the anti-Iranian movie Not Without My Daughter in 1990s Türkiye despite the country’s own harrowing experience with Hollywood’s Midnight Express (1977). In conjunction, I analyze a moment of failed outreach from Iranian woman reformists to a devout, US-educated Turkish woman politician called Merve Kavakçı, who was denied her seat in parliament because of her headscarf in 1999. The chapter demonstrates how US discourses and Iran–Türkiye comparisons influenced the work of Turkish and Iranian women’s activists who sought to expand Muslim women’s political participation and reform repressive clothing codes in the 1980s and 1990s.

The book concludes with sober thoughts on how propagandist language use threatens Indian democracy. One of the primary reasons for the book is to underline the urgency of studying and identifying linguistic trickery. While each chapter does so, the conclusion highlights the consequences of linguistic trickery for Indian Muslims. Academic work on language use such as this has argued for studying not just the language but also what is actually does to people.

The aesthetics of the sublime, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, has frequently been seen as part of a process of secularization: What is “absolutely great” now becomes the object of an aesthetic experience that need have no reference to the divine or to religion. Kant in particular has been accorded a key role in the development of a modern aesthetics that establishes the autonomy of art and of the aesthetic vis-à-vis both religion and politics. Setting out from a seldom-read passage in Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” on the power of the sublime to liberate the imagination from tutelage by the church and by the state, this chapter traces the intimate connection in Kant’s text between religion, political emancipation, and the sublime in order to challenge widely shared if frequently unstated assumptions about the secular status of the sublime and of Kantian aesthetics more broadly. The sublime emerges as power that resists containment within the modern divisions between politics, religion, and aesthetics. In the process, Kant’s text is read as providing an implicit critique of the logic of secularism avant la lettre.

The chapter articulates a political theory of secularism that can be defended against common, legitimate criticisms of existing forms of secularism. What I call minimal secularism is not vulnerable to the claim that secularism is hostile to religion, marked by an ethnocentric legacy of church-state separation, or committed to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, conception of religion. In addition, it is more structured and precise than liberal philosophies advocating state ‘neutrality’ towards the plurality of conceptions of the good life. Minimal secularism is a thin, yet attractive, transnational ideal for progressive politics.

Five contexts conditioned papal relations to enslavement 1500–1800. (1) From Roman times, Christians understood enslavement as morally licit, and Christian thought was necessarily conservative when it came to social action. (2) Centuries of Christian–Muslim military conflict and mutual enslavement in the Mediterranean – and thus religious and not racial concerns – underwrote bulls authorizing Portuguese slaving in Africa. (3) While popes could make recommendations and excommunicate transgressors, the forces of state power and creeping secularism were infinitely greater. Thus, when popes called to cease or modify terms of enslavement, burgeoning capitalist goals often led colonial settlers and individual merchant opportunists to ignore these directives. (4) In Rome, the Papal States, and the early modern Mediterranean, popes employed slaves of various ethnicities to labor throughout their realms. (5) Both at home and overseas, papal will was extended, mediated, and at times altered by a broad universe of agents such as cardinals, nuncios, and missionaries.