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This chapter gives an overview of the history of religious competition and secular-religious politics in the twentieth century. It introduces two key terms of this volume, secularism and apologetics. It proposes apologetics as a novel way to understand not only how religious but also secular actors defend their ideological positions. Following a history of the term apologetics in church use, this chapter proposes a model of apologetics neutralized of its narrowly Christian context that can be used for comparison across time and space. This introductory chapter then offers some general findings about the nature of religious competition in the twentieth century, before discussing in a comparative fashion the contributions to this volume.

Christian literature of the first and second centuries CE contains few references to unborn children; where they are found, however, the unborn become an important rhetorical site for constructing relationships between competing religious groups. The Gospel of Matthew’s genealogy for the unborn Jesus provides him with a rich and contended heritage that displays his destiny as well as his origin. In the Gospel of Luke, the narrative of the joyful recognition of the unborn Jesus in Mary’s womb by the unborn John the Baptist establishes not only the relationship between Jesus and John as adults but also the place of John’s disciples within the Christian movement. The second-century Protevangelium of James tells of Mary’s perception of “two peoples” in her womb, one lamenting and the other rejoicing; these “peoples” signify divergent social and religious responses to Jesus. The practices of joy and lamentation as projected onto the unborn provide a means for negotiating religious differences and shaping a genealogy of religious origins.

Explains the rise of secretism by summarizing three related arguments: First, Candomblé had no option to remain silent about the religion, only to either be represented or to take part in the control and production of those representations. Here, secretism follows the pattern of the incitement to discourse theorized by Foucault, as part and parcel of the creation and required administration of the public sphere. Second, claims to secrets are now circulated as a system of intrareligious prestige, a competition for limited rewards. In this competitive context, claims to deep secrets (secretism) are stimulated, compared to their former relative stability in traditional ritual practice. Third, secretism attempts to resecure the locative identity of Candomblé by discursively constructing boundaries for the experience of place, the ritual ideal of acquiring “foundation.” Secretism has therefore grown in direct proportion to Candomblé's publicization.

This chapter details how Muslims dealt with being a religious minority. Political power over a variety of religious groups may have influenced how some people viewed the truth of the Prophet's message, but they did not free his followers from the very real task of figuring out how their religious traditions related to those of the people they now ruled over, especially Jews and Christians. These were two groups who had, long before the rise of Islam, developed answers to a whole host of religious questions that Muslims now had also to confront. Moreover, the answers, traditions, antiquity, and confidence of these communities meant that though the followers of the Prophet enjoyed political power, in the realm of religion, the communities they ruled over had a certain deep historical experience and authority that Muslims did not. One notable result of these circumstances was a need to assert Muslim precedence over non-Muslim alternatives and competitors.

This chapter presents a theory about the origins of religious liberty as rooted in religious pluralism and the political incentives to recognize and protect it. The argument of the chapter is that political leaders will favour religious liberty when they perceive its tangible benefits to their political aims. By applying a religious economies framework, the chapter demonstrates how conditions of religious pluralism enhance such political incentives, which in turn help to propel greater pluralism. The chapter applies this model by comparing expansion of religious pluralism and freedom in the American colonies in the 18^th Century with that of Latin America in the 20^th Century.

Mormonism seemed to be exploding in rural northwestern Tennessee in the mid-1880s, thanks largely to the efforts of Elder John Gibbs. This engendered considerable resentment among many local residents. Some Protestant ministers, responding to rumors about the missionaries and the increased religious competition they represented, condemned the Mormons, and a few preachers explicitly encouraged mob violence to drive the missionaries out of the area. This low-level conflict climaxed on Sunday, August 10, 1884, when a group of approximately a dozen masked men attacked an LDS worship service, resulting in the deaths of four Mormons, including Gibbs, as well as the mob leader. Following what came to be known as the Cane Creek (or Tennessee) Massacre, the county effectively degenerated into mob law, as vigilantes forced LDS converts and friends to vacate their homes and farms. The state legislature also passed strict anti-polygamy legislation.

This chapter describes the European political geography of invention, upon which the Anglo-Dutch-American process would draw. Much of the technology underpinning the rise of early modern Europe, including printing, navigation, and gunpowder, developed in China first. Yet in China, long-range voyaging was suppressed, as was printing in Constantinople. These were successful political attempts to control the movement of people and of ideas. In Europe, there was no central power capable of exercising such control, even had the will existed to do so. On the contrary, despite strenuous attempts to shield valuable information from rivals, in Europe new developments and discoveries tended to unleash a field of competitive response. As a result, the early modern acquisition of global empire was the work of many powers, rather than one. Political and (from 1517) religious competition were primary motors of the process, driving it faster and further than would otherwise have been the case.

This chapter surveys the various types of interaction between religion and government. The object is not to posit yet another typology of religion-state relations, but to consider which model or models best advance religious freedom in a liberal state. These models include theocracy, Erastianism, separationism and secularism, religious ‘establishment’, Pluralist models, neutrality models, and the competitive market model. Overall, it is difficult to single out one model of the religion-state relationship as indisputably the best in terms of religious freedom. Several systems — mild establishment, pluralism, and substantive neutrality — seem to score highly in that they recognize that a measure of interaction and cooperation between government and religious communities is useful. Others, by contrast, such as theocracy and Erastianism, can be safely rejected as inimicable with religious freedom. Some models, such as separationism, deserve at best only cautious approval. Its secularist philosophy can in practice produce a climate of hostility to religion and its free exercise.

This chapter chronicles the rise of the most important devotional figure at the Santuario de Chimayó, the Santo Niño de Atocha. Two arguments are offered as to why the Santo Niño gained prominence in Hispanic devotions: the first relies on religious competition with the Medina Chapel, adjacent to the Santuario, while the second rests on the idea that the Santo Niño’s popularity spread throughout the region independent of the Medina Chapel. The chapter also explains how the features of the Santo Niño’s devotion have made him a more winsome figure than the crucified Christ.

This chapter examines the significance of religious identity in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean, in particular the role that it played in broader social and political change. It engages with some thought-provoking recent analyses of late medieval identity-making among Greeks and Latins as well as with a conspicuous strand of current thinking in the historiography of the Crusades, which argues for the central importance of distinct, and usually hostile, religious identities in medieval contexts. It suggests that before we make assumptions about religion as a unifying factor which provided long-term immutable boundaries between different communities, we should pay close attention to the social and political contexts within which the evidence for clearly defined religious identities was produced. Among the most important of those contexts was intense religious competition, itself a product of the fluid and flexible political structures that so often typified the region.

This chapter offers an extensive evaluation of the academic explanations for American religious vitality. It takes on the task of weighing and measuring Finke and Stark’s thesis of disestablishment-produced religious competition, looking at the data, the interpretations of the data, and the critical questions of definitions and terminology. The matter, the chapter finds, is anything but clear. It further considers a range of alternative accounts of American exceptionalism and makes a strong argument for what has been called the “complexity assumption.” It concludes that “only a narrative, filled with contingencies,” can account for religion in American.

This chapter addresses the development of the new ritual expert conceived in the G?hyasātras and legitimated in the dharma literature. While the Brahmanical authors draw upon Vedic models of mediation—specifically Agni, the god of Fire—to authorize the human mediation in ancestral rites, the Buddhists draw upon the same model to legitimate their own ritual experts. Both traditions speak volumes about the qualifications of the ritual expert, frequently with the competitive religious environment in mind and the purpose of excluding the ritual experts of other religious traditions, and occasionally using the same metaphors, for example, of the field which yields fruit.

This chapter discusses the Buddhist reference to the śrāddha-rite found in the Pāli Canon in order to show that the early tradition understood the ancestral rites to be a part of their proper religious practices. Further, stories from the Petavatthu are shown to indicate a cultural memory of the śrāddha-rite that plays a part in the development of the dāna (religious gifting) tradition in Buddhism. These two types of evidence serve not only to highlight the interdependent nature of Brahmanical and Buddhist conceptions of ancestor worship, but to indicate the competitive nature of their relationship in the ancient Indian religious marketplace.

This and the following chapter describe Pentecostal Christianity’s practices and effects in the slum. This chapter describes how a church is normally viewed as depending on the charismatic appeal of the pastor who runs it and who engages in intense competition with other pastors to maintain high levels of pastoral care to retain his flock. Yet this pastor-centric view of slum Pentecostal churches overlooks a component of Christian activity that is central to maintaining the congregation—the prayer networks run and managed by lay women. These networks create and reproduce intense affective relations that displace the culpability women otherwise feel for their own misfortune as the result of the moral fault lines described in chapter 3.