About

Robert Hefner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is an anthropologist and comparative historical sociologist who specializes in the study of religion, religion and democracy, citizen belonging, and political ethics and law, including shariah law. Hefner has directed approximately 25 major research projects and organized 19 international conferences on topics such as Muslim politics, shariah law, citizenship, and civic education in Western democratic societies. His recent research themes focus on the politics and ethics of civic-pluralist conflict and co-existence in Muslim-majority societies, as well as social recognition and citizen belonging in Western Europe and the United States. Hefner has published 24 books, both edited and single-authored, and has produced policy reports for the U.S. government and private foundations. His work has been translated into Indonesian, Malay, and Chinese. Hefner has also co-produced films on democracy, plurality, gender, and citizenship in Indonesia with support from the Henry Luce Foundation. He has held numerous academic and research positions worldwide, including visiting scholar roles at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Cambridge, and Gadjah Mada University. Hefner is actively involved in international academic and civil society initiatives, including serving on the Executive Board of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values in Indonesia and organizing conferences on humanitarian Islam and shared civilizational values.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Social Science
• Theology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Political economy
• Law and economics
• History
• Environmental ethics
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• An Anthropology of Religion and Modernity across Eastern Asia

  2026-01-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter focuses on religion and modernity in East and Southeast Asia. The region has been profoundly transformed by the forces of Western colonialism, new religious movements, and capitalisms with a distinctly Asian countenance. Over the past three decades, this region has also been reconstituted by the rise of new middle classes, with their trademark aspirations to higher education, refigured gender roles, and new ideals of human flourishing. The chapter shows that, in much of the region, long-extant patterns of additive and conditional religiosity remain strong. However, in other regions these have given way to more scriptural and “religionized” forms of religious profession. All the major religious traditions across the region also show the imprint of market-friendly prosperity theologies. The trends are themselves highly unstable, however, as religious projects once linked to capitalist subjectivation often acquire an ethical depth far greater than that required for market purposes alone.

  PublisherDOI

• Minority, Cultural Citizenship, and Indonesian Islam: Challenges in a Pluralistic Society

  Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies · 2025-01-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Minority citizenship is a very important dimension that gets attention in a pluralistic country like Indonesia. This is because minority citizens often receive discriminatory, intimidating, and violent treatment from members of the majority religious, ethnic and social groups. Cultural citizenship related to religion, ethnicity and social groups is thus a development study of purely political citizenship studies. Three main findings were obtained through the research. First, multicultural citizenship is a very authentic idea that minority groups aspire to; second, the actions that promote and hinder the recognition of multicultural citizenship in social interactions; and third, the concerns that minority groups in Yogyakarta, and even Indonesia in general, have and experience. This article is intended to contribute to the understanding of multicultural citizenship within the social political life of post reform Indonesia amidst the phenomenon of rampant Islamization. Theoretically speaking, the article aims to contribute to developing a more authentic and strategic citizenship perspective so that the recognition of minority groups in a Muslim-majority country can transpire harmoniously, not confrontationally.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The political mobilization of the Christian community in Malaysia. By Pui Yee Choong. Pp. 220 incl. 2 tables. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024. €104. 978 90 872843 74

  The Journal of Ecclesiastical History · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Indonesia in the global scheme of Islamic things

  2025-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Religion in cultural evolution: Robert N. Bellah and the comparative sociology of religion and modernity Book Reviewed: Edited with an introduction and conclusion by MadsenRSullivanWMSwidlerA, et al. Challenging Modernity: Robert N. Bellah, Columbia University Press: New York, 2024.

  International Sociology · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From the late 1950s to his untimely death in July 2013, Robert N. Bellah was one of the Western world’s most renowned sociologists of religion. His first book, Tokugawa Religion (1957), displayed what was to remain Bellah’s trademark interest in the role of religious ethics in the shaping of modern capitalism, politics, and civil religion across cultures and history. In addition to being rigorously comparative, Bellah’s sociology of religion was distinctive in that it situated the human reality of religion in a cultural-evolutionary framework. While rejecting the stage-like sequence of unilinear development prominent in late nineteenth-century varieties of social evolution, this model emphasized that there were broadly convergent patterns to social and religious change over space and time, as seen most dramatically in the rise of ‘axial age’ religions in ancient times and the transformation of religion under the influence of nation-making and industrialization in the modern era. Introduced and edited by four of Bellah’s lifelong colleagues in the sociology of religion (Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton), Challenging Modernity brings together three of Bellah’s most important final essays; the essays highlight the fate of religious values in light of the political, economic, and ecological crises humanity faces today. Each of Bellah’s three chapters is in turn the subject of critical assessment by seven scholars from the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and ethical philosophy. The editors and the seven commentators assess and extend Bellah’s insights, underscoring the relevance of a historical and comparative sociology for addressing the political, ecological, and moral crises of our age. Far-ranging in its topics and theoretical insights, Challenging Modernity is one of the most important books on religion and modernity published in the years since Bellah’s passing.

  PublisherDOI

• The Social Scientific Study of Islam in Indonesia: A 75 Year Retrospective

  STUDIA ISLAMIKA · 2025-04-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay provides an historical overview of broad currents in the social scientific study of Islam in Indonesia from the Modjokuto project of the early 1950s to today. It makes three broad points. First, the essay shows that a perennial influence on the refiguration of Muslim politics and ethics in Indonesia has been, not scriptural principles alone, but the global ascendance of the modern nation state and Muslim intellectuals’ and politicians’ efforts to craft a Muslim public ethics consonant with the realities of a modern and religiously plural nation. Second, the essay shows that another feature of the social scientific study of Islam in Indonesia has been the ascendance of Indonesia-born Muslim intellectuals to positions of intellectual leadership in the field. Third, the overview makes clear that one of the most important recent achievements of this social scientific research has been to explain how Indonesia succeeded in developing the most effective and sustainable democracy in the Muslim-majority world.

  PublisherDOI

• Revisiting the Long Divergence: New Research on Islamic Civilization and the Rise of the West

  Society · 2025-08-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The New Governance of Religious Diversity

  The Review of Faith & International Affairs · 2024-12-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Islam and Politics in Asia

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics · 2024-02-26

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Muslim politics everywhere takes varied forms, but it is especially diverse across the geographic expanse that constitutes East, South, and Southeast Asia. Although in a few areas of South Asia Muslim polities were established during the first wave of Islamic expansion in the 7th century, Islam across most of this region arrived centuries later and through channels other than military conquest. From the late 19th century onward, the spread of capitalist modes of production, the rise of nationalist movements, and the development of new social media and new traditions of learning compounded the diversity of Muslim politics. Although some varieties of Islamic reform have sought to contain or eliminate this diversity, Muslim politics across the Asian region remains highly varied. The diversity has been compounded by Muslims’ engagements with the nation-state, capitalist development, and new practices of religious learning, association, and communications.

  PublisherDOI

• DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC PARTIES: Political Ideology and Electoral Contestation in Indonesia during the Lead-up to the 2024 Election

  JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN ISLAM · 2024-06-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article discusses the electoral contestation and eventual defeat of Islamic parties in Indonesia's past 2024 general election. Data for this article were collected using a mixed-methods approach. Field research was conducted by the authors between March and June 2022. In addition, the authors also collected data from articles written in various national and international journals, as well as official government offices. Collected data were subsequently analyzed using the perspectives of political sociology and gender justice. Islamic parties and nationalist parties sought to gain the votes of Indonesia's Muslim-majority population by raising such issues as women, education, poverty, and the revival and survival of Islam both at home and abroad. This article also argues that the future of Indonesian Islam lies in two civil society organizations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, which represent the moderate Islam. Political Islam, conversely, relies on an essentialist understanding of Islam to attract voter support. Islamic parties do not share a clear political ideology, nor do religious-nationalist parties.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Donald Pollock

  25 shared

• William Merrill

  25 shared

• Howard Clark Kee

  25 shared

• Charles Keyes

  Space Telescope Science Institute

  25 shared

• David Starr Jordan

  25 shared

• Bruce B. Lawrence

  Duke University

  20 shared

• R. Michael Feener

  20 shared

• Ebrahim Moosa

  University of Notre Dame

  18 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Michigan

• M.A.

  University of Michigan

• Ph.D.

  University of Michigan

Awards & honors

• Carnegie Scholar in Islam (2007-2008)
• Lee Kong Chian Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at the Nati…
• President of the Association for Asian Studies (2009-2010)