The phenomenon of “New Religious Politics,” specifically the rise of Islamism and Hindu Nationalism, has induced a revision of the secularization narrative, the idea that modernization and the withdrawal of religion necessarily go hand in hand. The hypothesis of “multiple modernities,” first formulated by Shmuel Eisenstadt, has received more and more attention with the emergence of several programs of autochthonous modernization across the globe.

The literature on New Religious Politics continues however to reflect simplistic assumptions about the interplay between Transcendence, religious symbolization and political order. New religious politics is generally approached either though the question of terrorism or through a post-modernist perspective that reduces religious experience to “identity politics.”

My book Eric Voegelin et l’Orient (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2016) shows that the political and religious phenomenology of Eric Voegelin provides a credible alternative for studying New Religious Politics. The study of Voegelin also opens new perspectives in Comparative Religion, Comparative Political Theory as well as for the research program on the Axial Age and its consequences for the understanding of modernity, its symbolic and ethical foundations.

Renaud Fabbri