Commentary: Global Politics and Religion

October 12, 2008 by Poipoi · Leave a Comment

Around the world religious organizations are openly rejecting the secular ideals that dominate most national policies, appearing as champions of alternative, confessional options. In keeping faith with what they interpret as divine decree, increasingly they refuse to render to nonreligious power either material or moral tribute. They are increasingly concerned with political issues, challenging the legitimacy and autonomy of the primary secular spheres, the state, political organization and the market economy. They are also refusing to restrict themselves to the pastoral care of individual souls, instead raising questions about, inter alia, the interconnections of private and public morality and the claims of states and markets to be exempt from extrinsic normative considerations. Intent on retaining social importance, many religious organizations seek to elude what they regard as the cumbersome constraints of temporal authority, threatening to usurp constituted political functions. In short, refusing to be condemned to the realm of privatize belief, religion is once again appearing in the public sphere, thrusting into issues of moral and political contestation.

My argument is that, around the world, religion is leaving, or refusing to accept, its assigned place in the private sphere. This is true, I believe, even in highly secular societies like that of England where mainline Christian churches have recently re-emerged as important social, moral and - to a degree - political voices. There, building on a tradition established during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, the publication in October 1996 of the Catholic Church’s 13,000-word pamphlet, The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching, was an important intervention in the political debate between the Labor and Conservative parties. Politicians - especially of the latter party - saw it as an endorsement of Labor’s policies. Six months later - in April 1997 - 11 churches collectively published a further report entitled, Unemployment and the Future of Work, an outspoken attack on the inability of the main parties in Britain to focus upon the amelioration of the suffering of the underprivileged. The report accused them of putting tax cuts before solutions to poverty and unemployment in the battle for victory in the May 1997 general election (Bellos & White 1997).

Concerned with overtly political issues, The Common Good and Unemployment and the Future of Work were both manifestations of the contemporary process of depolarization of the increasingly private religious and moral spheres in England. The reports represented an attempt to reestablish ethical norms of behavior and activities in public and political spheres and to present a political case for so doing. In the publications, mainline churches endorsed what were clearly political goals, expressing opposition to the dualism between religion and politics, and arguing that the concerns of social justice were, in fact, not only scripturally rooted, but also wedded to the defense of liberal democracy, pluralism and the market economy (Watson 1994 149; Huntington 1991, 1993). In short, the central issue for the churches was the degree to which the consumerist version of politics should be modified or balanced by the social dimension (Edwards 1990; Glassman 1996).

However, it is not only churches in England that are concerned with social, economic and political issues. Globally, numerous religious organizations and institutions share a desire to change their societies in a religious direction. In pursuit of this objective, they use a variety of tactics and methods some, like the British churches, lobby, protest and publish reports at the level of civil society; others seek desired changes via political society - for example, the American New Christian Right regularly endorses electoral candidates with the most ‘pro-religion’ (or ‘pro-life’) policies; a few - Islamists in Algeria and Egypt - regularly resort to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals. However, from the perspective of academic inquiry the means to achieve goals are perhaps less important than the ends pursued whatever the chosen modes of political interaction, what is new and unexpected in all this is the remodeling and resumption of public roles by religion which theories of secularization had long condemned to social and political marginalization.

What is happening in the sphere of religion and politics, on the one hand, involves widespread, if patchy, ‘detribalization’ of previously privatized religions in the Western world, where there is a more or less clear tripartite division of democratic polities into state, political society, and civil society; according to conventional social science wisdom such an arrangement should - inevitably - lead to religion’s privatization and corresponding decline in social and political importance. On the other hand, where the process of religious privatization is not so far advanced - that is, in nearly all Third World countries - it is the fear of imminent or creeping privatization which provides the main stimulus for religion to act politically.
<to be continued>