Introduction

The increasing presence of religion in public life has provoked an ambivalent response from contemporary scholars trying to understand what the nature of religion is, what its proper role should be, and what its efflorescence means for our understanding of the nature of politics and society. This has especially been the case for scholars on the left, particularly in the West, where it had long been assumed that religion would continue its gradual withdrawal into a realm of private experience and leave behind its unwarranted and dangerous forays into public life. One result of this assumed separation has been that, when religion does appear outside the personal and private, it often gets read as a sign for something else: an idiom through which marginal groups express political demands; a salve in times of crisis; a vehicle of social mobilization and solidarity; an instrument by which cynical leaders manipulate their supporters. A chief fear in this regard is that religious movements and the forms of violence that sometimes accompany them further what are "really" barely disguised political projects lurking under the name of religion. Christian fundamentalists in the United States, the rise of Hindutva in India, or Islamists in Turkey are all frequently invoked as a confirmation of this suspicion. The progressive response has often been to shore up some notion of the secular as a space of neutrality unsullied by such religious ambitions, from which they may be judged and within which a progressive politics may be nurtured and maintained. Whatever the value of this endeavor, it has tended to give support to the intellectual habit of not taking religion seriously: of not having to pay attention to the specificity of its discursive forms and bodily practices, to the theologies that animate it, to the forms