For thirty years, in the early modern period of the seventeenth century, Central Europe was ravaged by wars justified with reference to differences in religious interpretations. Looking back at the wars between various Protestant and Catholic states in the Holy Roman Empire, scholars have pointed out that those dubbed religious wars were equally about “worldly” matters of politics, power, ethnicity, or social grievances (Palaver, Rudolph, and Regensburger 2016). Yet the urge to understand—and perhaps even isolate the significance of—religion has prevailed in contemporary times. Religion has remained on the agenda of social sciences, and with less “secular resistance” after 9/11 than in the previous centuries, for good reasons, not least since statistical data have shown that conflicts involving self-defined religious actors and religious claims have increased over the past decades, rather than following the curve of other conflict types that are generally decreasing (Svensson and Nilsson 2018).
There...
University of California Press