ABSTRACT
The last decades of the twentieth century brought about a global resurgence of religion in the public sphere, labelled by scholars as ‘revenge of god’ (Kepel 1991) or ‘deprivatization of religion’ (Casanova 1994): a development which seemed to contradict the tenets of the so-called secularisation thesis, accepted by most social science classical authors as well as by most nineteenth- and twentieth-century social scientists. According to this thesis, religion is a regressive phenomenon, incompatible with modernisation, and bound to disappear (or, in some versions, to be confined into the private sphere) with the advent of the latter (Haynes 1997; Swatos and Christiano 1999). On the contrary, religion not only did not disappear, but between the 1970s and the 1980s made a spectacular comeback on the political scene, with the creation of religiously oriented parties and social movements in diverse places such as the United States, India, Iran, Israel, Poland and Afghanistan (just to mention the cases with a greater influence at the international level). In many cases, moreover, this resurgence took an aggressive shape, with the development of fundamentalist religious movements and groups aiming at bringing back religion into the public sphere, in some cases with non-peaceful means.
