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When I first came into the field, it was tiny. Now, it's really quite different. It's very big and a lot of the growth has come from religious people coming into the field. And the field's much better for it.

Since September 11, 2001, there's been a lot of interest in Islam. Many writers speak of the varied character of Islam. And yet when you write about Islam, it's fairly straightforward: "Islam couldn't provide the context for science because…" or "Islam couldn't provide the context for abolition of slavery because…"

And it didn't provide the context for witch hunts because…

How do such statements fit into our contemporary desire to build bridges wherever possible?

I don't think that as a scholar or historian it's my job to build bridges. I'm trying to figure out how the world works.

However, if I were to do a book on Islam, there is one thing that I'd stress: Our greatest mistake about Islam is the same mistake that Muslims make about Christianity. They think it's a monolith. Of course, you and I know that there are better than 1,500 Christian denominations in the United States. Well, most Muslims don't know that. And what we don't know is the enormous diversity within Islam, even at the village level.

There's a wonderful guy from Egypt who said to me once, I can take you to any village that has four mosques and it wouldn't take me an hour to find out which one was the "Episcopalian" mosque, which one was the "Baptist" mosque, which one was the "Nazarene" mosque, and which one was the "Methodist" mosque. And apparently there is that much variation across mosques and leaders.

How does your historical work on the monotheistic impulse in social movements inform the present debate about the role of faith-based organizations providing social services in the U.S.?

I think that the notion of separation of church and state has been incredibly abused and misconstrued by enemies of religion, who have managed to fool a majority of the press. It doesn't say in the Constitution that it's illegal to have religion, but you get the notion that one day they're going to say that the President may not go to church because of separation of church and state.

I suppose my concern about the funding of faith-based organizations is that I'm worried about their ruination. I can't see that government funding has been good for anything else.

I'm also concerned there's a general perception that religion is either of no importance or very bad. And yet in the book I'm starting on now, I'm going to argue that everything important about Western civilization can be traced back to Christian rationalism.

We know that the whole Protestant ethic thesis is silly because capitalism precedes the Reformation by 300 to 500 years, and it couldn't have been caused by the Reformation.

I started out to write a book on the real rise of capitalism, and the next thing I knew, that had become how we got Western civilization. How did these barbarians build on the rubble of Rome and a few hundred years later surpass the rest of the world? The title of the book is Victories of Reason, because I'm going to argue that it was the commitment to reason and progress which starts in Christian theology that really was the basis of Western civilization.

Reason, progress, and assurance. The major thing is that pioneers of science, for example, were confident that it could be done. And that that was absolutely crucial. In other religious traditions, it was clear to any educated person that science couldn't be done, that the universe is mysterious and unpredictable.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47