Introduction

“Religion” and “state” are contested concepts. A particularly heated debate has been raging about these concepts for a decade or more among practitioners of religious studies. On the one hand, the majority view is that the terms “religion” and “state” are difficult to define but that they are in principle good enough for analytical purposes. On the other hand is the view of a group of self-styled critical theorists that both terms are illegitimate abstractions that mask ideological positions (Fitzgerald, 2000, 2007; McCutcheon, 2003).

I find this debate intriguing, although it has very few implications for this chapter. This is because I choose to take a social constructionist approach to the sociological understanding of religion (Beckford, 2003). This means that, instead of using generic notions of religion and the state that purport to be valid for all times and places, I prefer to focus on the social processes whereby the meanings of these terms are generated, attributed, deployed and contested in particular social and cultural contexts. This allows me to work with rough and ready definitions that merely identify the outer limits of common usage. For my purposes, then, religion has to do with beliefs, values, motivations, feelings, activities, normative codes, institutions and organizations that relate to claims about the ultimate significance or perceived wholeness of life. Loosely following Max Weber's example, I understand states as formal political collectivities that successfully claim legitimacy over the exclusive exercise of authority, backed by force if necessary, in relation to all human activity in their territories.