One of the great coincidences of late last century was the emergence of a ‘third wave’ of democratization at the same time that much of the world was undergoing a powerful religious revival. Although religious organizations played a supporting role in democratic transitions in Spain, Poland, the Philippines, and Indonesia, many political analysts seemed to feel that democratization and religious revival had little to do with each other. Indeed, if they took notice of the revival at all, most analysts viewed it with concern. They worried that religion might stir up sentiments incompatible with democracy, opening the way to the scenario outlined in Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996).

Another indication of the ships-passing-in-the night approach to these two events was that one of the more potent theoretical concepts developed in the 1990s for understanding democratization, i.e., the concept of social capital, was at first rarely applied to religious organizations. In the literature on politics and democracy, social capital has been the subject of myriad definitions, not all of them compatible (see below). In the 1990s, however, Robert Putnam's seminal works on civic traditions in modern Italy (Putnam 1993) and the putative decline of social capital in the United States (Putnam 1995, 2000) catapulted the concept to the centre of political discussion.

Putnam defined social capital as ‘features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’ (1995, 664–5).