This book challenges some of the most basic assumptions underpinning the growing interest in religion, including: that religion is increasing and secularisation is decreasing and that religion is the main component of identity for all minority ethnic people.

Through a nationwide survey, the authors of this study conclude that US Evangelicals may actually be preserving the racial chasm, not through active racism, but because their theology hinders their ability to recognise systematic injustice.

Although scholars of religion acknowledge religion’s deep interconnectedness with race and ethnicity in (and occassionally class), we nonetheless typically study religion as a factor that is independent from other social structures. Likewise, we rarely systematically examine class, race or gender differences between or within religious groups. This journal issue will highlight research that moves beyond these weaknesses by publishing papers that intentionally examine aspects of inequality as they relate to religion. Papers that explore these connections historically or in contemporary times and internationally or locally are all encouraged.

The resolution of conflicts based on religious and ethnic contradictions is a time-consuming process. Under certain conditions, a religious conflict became a form of expression of class, estate, interethnic contradictions, and the confrontation of states. However, we know that all religions call for peace, tolerance, and understanding. There is a need to realize that social injustice, inequality, and hostility toward any religious and ethnic groups fluctuates depending on the extent to which religious and ethnic differences are linked to economic, political, or national interests. The Handbook of Research on Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Conflicts and Their Impact on State and Social Security forms a civil position and identity and provides knowledge of the development of conflict preconditions. This research explains conflict avoidance and solutions and creates a solid base for ethnic and religious integration while being aware of conflict consequences and avoiding xenophobia. Covering topics such as economic crisis, radicalization, and spiritual security, this book is an indispensable resource for students of higher education, professors, faculty, libraries, researchers, policymakers, community leaders, human rights activists, religious leaders, and academicians.

2012 Winner of the C. Calvin Smith Award presented by the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. 2014 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Section Conventional wisdom holds that Christians, as members of a “universal” religion, all believe more or less the same things when it comes to their faith. Yet black and white Christians differ in significant ways, from their frequency of praying or attending services to whether they regularly read the Bible or believe in Heaven or Hell. In this engaging and accessible sociological study of white and black Christian beliefs, Jason E. Shelton and Michael O. Emerson push beyond establishing that there are racial differences in belief and practice among members of American Protestantism to explore why those differences exist. Drawing on the most comprehensive and systematic empirical analysis of African American religious actions and beliefs to date, they delineate five building blocks of black Protestant faith which have emerged from the particular dynamics of American race relations. Shelton and Emerson find that America’s history of racial oppression has had a deep and fundamental effect on the religious beliefs and practices of blacks and whites across America.

For all its foundation on the principles of religious freedom and human equality, American history contains numerous examples of bigotry and persecution of minorities. Now, author Philip Perlmutter lays out the history of prejudice in America in a brief, compact, and readable volume. Perlmutter begins with the arrival of white Europeans, moves through the eighteenth and industrially expanding nineteenth centuries; the explosion of immigration and its attendant problems in the twentieth century; and a fifth chapter explores how prejudice (racial, religious, and ethnic) has been institutionalized in the educational systems and laws. His final chapter covers the future of minority progress.