Introduction to: Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty

The core argument of this book is that religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have rationalised their governance and marked out their sovereignty-as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. Our authors, selected from a host of contributors to seven workshops held between 2009 and 2012, bear out the argument through a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, moral philosophy, theology and religious studies, combining theory with the detailed empirical analysis of contexts as diverse as India, Japan, Mexico, the United States, Israel-Palestine, France and the United Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served the ends of modern government.