Religion and the State

Abstract

The continuation of religious intolerance, carried out internationally and expressed violently, was a major reason for the authorship of the New Atheist books. Some historians see the problem in a larger context as a “clash of civilizations.” This term was first used by Bernard Lewis (b. 1916), scholar of Islamic history, in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (47–58) titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Historian Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) expanded on the idea with a 1993 article in the magazine Foreign Affairs and then with a book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). In this context, “civilization” is “culture” writ large, and the identification of religion as an important aspect of culture is consistent with this outlook.