Book excerpt: Introduction : Democracy's anxious returns / David Kyuman Kim and John L. Jackson, Jr. - "Look, baby, we got Jesus on our flag" : robust democracy and religious debate from the era of slavery to the age of Obama / Edward J. Blum -- Forerunner : the campaigns and career of Edward Brooke / Jason Sokol -- Iran's French Revolution : religion, philosophy, and crowds / Roxanne Varzi - Democracy's new song : Black reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 and the melodramatic imagination / Marina Bilbija - Habits of the heart : youth religious participation as progress, peril, or change? / Monica R. Miller and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman - Populism and late liberalism : a special affinity? / Jean Comaroff -- Chadors, feminists, terror : the racial politics of U.S. media representations of the 1979 Iranian women's movement / Sylvia Chan-Malik -- The end of neoliberalism : what is left of the left / John Comaroff - Religion as race, recognition as democracy : Lemba "Black Jews" in South Africa / Noah Tamarkin - The race toward caraqueño citizenship : negotiating race, class, and participatory democracy / Giles Harrison-Conwill - The racialization of Islam in American law / Neil Gotanda