Robert V. Robinson

Robert V. Robinson is the Class of 1964 Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Schuessler Institute for Social Research. He received his B.A. from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Yale University and has published widely on the role of religion in politics in dozens of countries around the world, winning recognition from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Sociological Association's sections on the sociology of religion and collective behavior and social movements.

Robinson's CLAIMING SOCIETY FOR GOD, co-authored with Nancy J. Davis, won a gold medal in the Religion category of the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 2013 Scholarly Achievement Award of the North Central Sociological Association. The book shows how religiously orthodox (what some would call "fundamentalist") movements of Christians, Jews and Muslims worldwide have converged on a common strategy to install their religion at the center of society. Rather than terrorism, as much post-9/11 thinking suggests, the strategy-in-common is a patient, under-the-radar transformation of civil society. Telling the stories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sephardi Torah Guardians or Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the U.S., Robinson and Davis show how, one institution at a time, these movements are building massive, grassroots networks of religion-based social service agencies, hospitals and clinics, clubs, rotating credit societies, schools, charitable organizations, worship centers, and businesses--networks that are often called states within states, surrogate states, or parallel societies. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's vast social network brought the movement to power in the country's first free parliamentary and presidential elections. Bypassing the state, rather than directly confronting it, allows these movements to quietly accomplish their theological, cultural, and economic agendas across the nation, address local needs not being met by the state, and establish a broad base of popular support that some of them use to push their agendas in the arena of party politics. This bottom-up, entrepreneurial strategy is not mere reformism or accommodation to the state; it is aimed at nothing less than making religion the cornerstone of society.

A Facebook page for the book, with updates on these movements, study questions, and news about other religiously orthodox movements is at www.facebook.com/ClaimingSocietyForGod