Berger Peter L. (ed.) The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics

Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. — 145 p. — ISBN 0-8028-4691-2In 1996 John Kizer, president of the Greve Foundation, approached Andrew Bacevich with an idea. Bacevich was then executive di­ rector of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The news, Kizer said, was filled with reports of the impact of religion on politics: the evangelical upsurge in Latin America, Muslim-Christian rivalries in Africa, disputes between Arabs and Israelis, secularist-religious strug­ gles in Turkey, Muslim fundamentalists fighting a secularizing mili­ tary in Algeria, Hindu fundamentalists beating the Congress Party in India. How about taking a longer look at these phenomena to see how religion is likely to influence politics in the coming century?
Accepting the challenge, Professor Bacevich consulted us at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where the impact of religion on public life is a central concern. Could the Nitze School and the Cen­ ter together launch a lecture series on this subject, attempting to cover the main religions and regions of the world? We quickly roped in Professor Peter Berger of Boston University, perhaps the world’s leading sociologist of religion: would he help us think through the project and choose the speakers, and would he deliver the first lec­ ture himself? He agreed to do so, and we began our work.
The product of that joint effort is presented in this volume, whose title is taken from Professor Berger’s powerful keynote lecture. We were fortunate to be able to recruit as lecturers some of the leading students of religion and politics in the world: Tu Weiming, the direc­tor of the Harvard-Yenching Institute; Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth; George Weigel, my prede­ cessor at the Center and the author of a forthcoming biography of Pope John Paul II; David Martin, the leading student of the evangeli­ cal upsurge in the Third World; Grace Davie, a British sociologist who is an expert on religion in Europe; and Abdullahi An-Na’im, an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights. We owe a debt of gratitude to our seven authors, for traveling to Wash­ ington to speak and for the additional work they did to prepare their papers for publication.
I would like as well to thank Professor Bacevich for asking us to collaborate with him, always a task both intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding. On his behalf and my own, I wish to thank John Kizer and the Greve Foundation for his initiative, his counsel throughout, and the foundation’s financial support. Finally, these es­ says were edited for publication by Carol Griffith, editor at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, to whom we at the Center and all who read this book are in debt.