I am grateful to Brandon Kendhammer for reviewing my book with the same care that he used to map the worldview of Nigerian Muslims. It is humbling to have one’s book interrogated with such an extraordinary level of thoughtfulness, and is a credit to Kendhammer’s erudition.

Both of our books examine the worldview of moderate Muslims. While Nigerian Muslims seek more state enforcement of Islamic law than do most Indonesian Muslims, they are similar in demanding a nonsecular democracy. We reached that conclusion through markedly different pathways, suggesting an emerging trend in scholarship on religion and politics away from secularization theory. Likewise, both Kendhammer and I aspire to more modest ends, namely, “middle-range” theories about the power of religion in politics. We both find that religion, like other aspects of culture and identity, is heterogeneous over time and space, and that its significance for politics depends on context. Given the move toward the “micro” in comparative politics and international relations, there is reason to believe that this trend will continue. In that respect, political science may be catching up with disciplines that, unlike ours, never stopped studying religion. In sociology there is a movement toward “everyday religion,” in history toward “lived religion,” and in anthropology toward the deconstruction of the concepts and assumptions underlying world religions.

That said, unlike in sociology, history, and anthropology, there is a durable, normative bias toward secularization in political science. Given the rise of global populism in recent years, we may soon see a return to scholarship rooted in secularization theory due to a belief that it provides the sole pathway to democracy. Kendhammer and I both believe that such a reversion would be a mistake. Scholars investigating the interconnections between religion and democracy would be better served by continuing to explore religious actors’ visions for more enchanted variants of democracy, investigate how non-Western democracies govern religion, and assess the costs and the benefits of public religion.

My review opened with questions that are worth revisiting here. Are demands for Sharia compatible with religious pluralism? Kendhammer’s answer is “no,” while mine is “partially, as long as we look beyond secular democracy.” How do Islamic political movements affect the interreligious bonds and social capital that are necessary for civil society? His refreshingly honest answer is “negatively,” while I argue that the result is a form of truncated pluralism. If successful, is state application of Islamic law compatible with the differentiation of state and religion that is essential for making democracy work? We both follow Alfred Stepan in arguing that democratic institutions have a remarkable capacity to accommodate diverse visions of human flourishing. Yet in his review, Kendhammer also notes the fragility of such forms of social tolerance and state toleration.

Recent evidence suggests that on this last point, Kendhammer may be right. In the past 15 years, Stepan directed research projects on Islam and democracy in Turkey, Senegal, Indonesia, India, and Tunisia. Of those cases, Turkey is fully authoritarian, Senegal is sliding into authoritarianism, and Indonesia’s democratic progress is stalled. It is unclear that state institutions can absorb moderate Muslims’ demands for either Sharia or group rights based on religion. In this respect, he may be more prescient than the rest of us in seeing the limitations and fragility of postcolonial democratic institutions.