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This chapter examines how a more realistic and historically accurate understanding of religion and democracy can increase the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy in influencing the natural desire of peoples for freedom. It begins with a discussion of the nature of democracy and what makes it stable and lasting. It asks how and why U.S. diplomacy has ignored the connections between religion and democracy, and how the deficit might be remedied. It surveys America's understanding of religion at the founding and beyond. It describes concepts vital to a refurbishing of American diplomacy in an age of faith: religious pluralism and the free market, the “twin tolerations,” and social and spiritual capital. It analyzes the history of Protestant and Catholic experiences with liberal governance and provides insights into the larger question of how religious societies might accommodate themselves to democracy.

The Introduction outlines the areas to be covered in this book, reviewing the literature on civil society peacemaking and the Northern Irish peace process. It emphasizes the neglect of religion, and civil society more generally, in the literature on Northern Ireland’s peace process. This presages the contribution of the book, which lies in three areas: developing a conceptualization to help understand religious peacebuilding in Northern Ireland; more generally, to evaluate the role of civil society in democratic transitions; and to assess the potential for spiritual capital in Northern Ireland post-conflict. The arguments of the book are summarized.

This chapter focuses on ‘blurred encounters’ specifically on encounters between faith groups, academia, government and other partners in the third sector. These encounters are believed to have recently increased in scope and frequency due to current government policy aimed at increasing the role played by the third sector in key policy areas such as local democracy, social cohesion and public service provision. In the following discussion, the phenomenon of blurred encounters is first defined as this provides a basis to the identification and exploration of different levels of miscommunication that occur in the blurred encounters between faith actors and other partners in the public realm. This miscommunication often stemmed from the attempts to use shared language and concepts. And this miscommunication is due to the different understanding and interpretation of faith and non-faith sectors on the key motifs used in government policy. It also discusses the contribution of faiths and the distinction of ‘religious capital’ from ‘spiritual capital’. The chapter concludes by discussing first the strategy of addressing this miscommunication between language and values through a common discourse based on the varying types of social capital and, second the few comments on what can be defined as ‘religious literacy’ and whether there is a further need for bridging metaphors and concepts apart from ‘capital’ within a public political discourse.

The Conclusion summarizes the major arguments, both with respect to the conceptual framework for the comparative analysis of religious peacebuilding and the Northern Irish case study. It offers a critique of current interpretations of the role of religion in the Northern Irish peace process and of the field of religious peacebuilding more generally, making an argument for the utility of the ideas advanced in the book. It makes three provocative and controversial conclusions: that ecumenism failed Northern Ireland, and that, despite its lauding in the international literature, it was exclusive and conservative, the real religious driver of change being the conversion of liberal evangelicals to the peace process; that civil society contributions to democratic transitions can be romanticized and overlook its regressive elements; and that the notion of spiritual capital has limits in societies where religion is wrapped up in the conflict.

This chapter introduces the question of Saudi “religious expansion” — that is, the various processes by which Saudi actors are said to have exerted increasing religious influence beyond the kingdom’s borders in the course of the twentieth century — and it situates the Islamic University of Medina as a key institution in relation to such dynamics. It establishes the contours of the Salafi and Wahhabi traditions, before setting out the historiographical framework employed throughout the remainder of the book. The latter is grounded in a particular conception of a transnational religious economy, comprising flows — both within and across borders — of material capital, spiritual capital, religious migrants and social technologies. The chapter ends with a brief overview of the historical narrative and arguments that run through the book.

Supplies the remembered biographical data and likely public memory of Chakradhar and Jnandev that help shape the context of the four chapters that follow. The chapter also argues that meaning coheres around these received biographies in a way that stabilizes their “value” in a particular kind of spiritual economy of the age. The lives of these two emblematic figures are engaged as metonymic biographies, indexes for a much broader social change.

This chapter explores the role of the Islamic University of Medina’s non-Saudi students, as religious migrants, bearers of spiritual capital accumulated on its campus and mediators of its Wahhabi-influenced message. It considers their experiences in Medina and their trajectories after graduation. It argues that agency exercised by these students, as well as efforts by an array of religious authorities and lay actors around the world to contest their authority to speak in the name of Islam, have contributed to determining the ways in which the impact of the IUM project has played out in diverse locations. This suggests that, while Saudi religious and political elites may be able to exert religious influence abroad through the IUM, that influence does not necessarily constitute control.

This chapter explores what one receives for being ‘saved’, and presents the contentious insight that it is important to consider directly what is gained, with respect to the concept of ‘capital’. Through examination of the relevance for theology of the concepts of social, cultural, and spiritual capital, the chapter highlights, first, non-material but not simply spiritual ways in which salvation is participated in and received. Sociocultural and sociopolitical dimensions of salvation become apparent through such analysis. In the chapter’s second part, the economic and material aspects of salvation are acknowledged and explored. The chapter builds upon recognition of the extensive attention paid to money and material matters in the canonical Gospels in defending the view that material well-being has to be seen as a key feature of salvation when understood as human flourishing.

Chapter 2 investigates evangelicals who create Christian sexuality blogs, message boards, and online stores and examines the tensions they face navigating sex within two seemingly incompatible terrains: conservative evangelical theology and the excesses of sexually explicit and obscene material that are especially pronounced on the internet. Evangelicals use the major tenets of their faith as “spiritual capital” to legitimize online spaces that talk about sex as legitimately Christian. Drawing on their beliefs in personal piety, marital exceptionalism, and God’s omniscience, website creators explain why they are the right kind of Christians to create online spaces to discuss sexuality.