International Journal of Religion November 2020 Volume: 1 | Number 1 | pp. 1 – 3 ISSN: 2633-352X (Print) | ISSN: 2633-3538 (Online) journals.tplondon.com/ijor INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RELIGION All rights reserved @ 2020 Transnational Press London First Received: 6 November 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33182/ijor.v1i1.1221 Editorial: Launching the International Journal of Religion Jeffrey Haynes 1 , Ahmet Erdi Ozturk 2 , Eric M. Trinka 3 Introduction The International Journal of Religion (IJOR) was founded to fill a gap: to discover more about how religion impacts on society and politics both within and between countries. IJOR will examine how and why religion influences national and international politics, society, and economics. IJOR will be comprehensive, inter-disciplinary and researched-based. IJOR will do all it can to be a respected social scientific journal of high academic quality. IJOR invites scholars, researchers, thinkers and practitioners working on and interested in these issues to contribute, in what the journal intends to be a conducive environment to stimulate critical and independent thinking. IJOR’s raison d’être is the long running and continuing debate about how secularisation influences the public roles of religion. The debate has lasted half a century or more. It was stimulated in the 1960s by the prediction of the sociologist, Peter Berger, that both industrialised and hence modernised, as well as industrialising and hence modernising, countries would inevitably become secular over time, implying that religion’s influence would decline significantly. Today, while it is widely agreed that the public role of religion is variable in countries around the world, overall it has not lost influence to the extent that Berger and other believed it would. Instead, its influence has evolved in ways that often significantly affects our lives (Fox 2019). As evidence, we can mention some important events, including: Iran’s Islamic Revolution (1979), the USA’s Carter Doctrine which influenced international religious freedom, the emergence of religious political parties around the world, including in the ‘secular’ West and, tragically, the 9/11 attacks (on 11 September 2001) which killed 3,000 people directly. These events underline that religion has not gone away – instead, its influence is often very great on politics and society around the world (Haynes 2011; Thomas 2005; Sandal and Fox 2013). Debates about religion’s public role include (1) how central is religion to political outcomes, both domestically and in international relations, especially in relation to conflict? (Philpott 2007; Norris and Inglehart 2011; Haynes 2008; Fox 2018; Bettiza 2019). (2) How do we theoretically explain religion’s involvement in politics and society? (Sandal and James 2011) (3) How does religion affect our understanding of economics? (Gill 2019) (4) What is the social impact of religion in public spaces, for example, in the controversial issue in many Western countries of Muslim women wearing face 1 Jeffrey Haynes, PhD, Emeritus Professor, School of Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, Department of Political Science and International Relations, London, UK. E-mail: tsjhayn1@londonmet.ac.uk 2 Ahmet Erdi Ozturk, PhD, Lecturer, Department of Political Science and International Relations, London Metropolitan University, London, UK. E-mail: e.ozturk@londonmet.ac.uk 3 Eric M. Trinka, PhD, Lecturer, James Madison University, United States. E-mail: trinkaem@jmu.edu