Religion and Society in the 21st Century 9783110254372, 9783110254365

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Religion and Society in the 21st Century

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Religion and Society in the 21st Century

Edited by Joachim Küpper · Klaus W. Hempfer · Erika Fischer-Lichte

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ISBN 978-3-11-025436-5 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025437-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internat at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preamble: The Reference to God as a Stimulus for Freedom

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Annette Schavan

Preamble – The Reference to God as a Stimulus for Freedom The German Basic Law (“Grundgesetz”) is the constitution of a state that professes ideological neutrality as regards religion. The State is thus open to all religions and confessions. It desires to be home to all citizens, regardless of their religion. As a result, it is out of the question that the State would obligate its citizens to have a certain religion or to hold a specific view of God by means of the reference to God in its preamble. At the same time, this reference means that the State is not blind to the convictions of its citizens, practicing rather an open and supportive neutrality. This neutrality is immediately connected to religious freedom, which it actively promotes. This freedom means that everyone is free to believe or not believe. The State’s self-conception is shaped by what Pope John Paul II said in 1998 in Havana when he recalled “that a modern state cannot make atheism or religion one of its political ordinances” (quoted in: Bakalar/Balkin 2001, p. 3). The reference to God in the preamble to the German Basic Law not only testifies to the State’s self-conception, it also signifies an understanding of religion as a liberating force. Religion does not promote restriction, but rather creates room for freedom. The reference to God establishes freedom and describes a duty simultaneously. The duty meant is that, in our society, it is not only the State and its citizens that are accountable to each other; rather, the State and the community have a common responsibility before an authority surpassing everything governmental. This is a reminder as to the limits of the State’s legislative power. Both of these ideas, the relativity of state power and the community of responsibility, are fundamentally Christian notions. They are directly related to the Basic Law’s idea of mankind. A citizen is never merely an object of government action. The legal system protects any citizen from being turned into a mere object by governmental or societal power. It is this concept that guarantees the inviolable core of self-determination as it is expressed in the Fundamental Rights (“Grundrechte”). The reference to God in the preamble to the Basic Law is therefore fundamental as a stimulus for freedom to the Christian understanding of humankind as it has emerged since the Enlightenment. The self-conception of Christianity as realized in personal confession simultaneously lays the foundation for tolerance. This precept of tolerance may, at first glance, seem like a relativization of Scripture; upon closer consideration, however, it will prove itself as the fulfillment of religion. Given this understanding, the State is not required to demand of its citizens that they endorse a certain religion, the Christian creed. Rather, it calls

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for the State’s humility concerning the religious convictions of its citizens. Christianity belongs to the cultural foundation of our society and obligates the State to respect the religious roots of its own culture. The passage through the conflict-laden European history until the recognition of religious freedom; the consideration of the founding history of the German Federal Republic and its Basic Law, including the reference to God as a stimulus for freedom in its preamble; as well as the self-understanding of Christianity and its realization in personal confession – these are a good foundation in times of increased religious plurality in Germany and many other modern societies. It pertains to their understanding of freedom to create room for such religious confession in private and public spaces, to show consideration for the culturally formative sources, and the sources of moral principles for the community’s citizens. The state does not demand religion. It has a protective function as regards the religious confession of its citizens. The culturally formative power of Christianity in the Western world is based on its ability to have developed the precept of tolerance as an expression of its own self-conception. The focus on meaningfulness and the commitment to values deriving from the Christian tradition have shaped our culture, especially regarding the special position of the individual and its inviolable dignity, its freedom and capacity for taking responsibility. In its various denominations, Christianity professes the acceptance of democracy as the self-realization of the Christian self-conception. It is precisely this that marks a central point in the dialogue with Islam in Europe. This question – very bluntly put – addresses Islam’s capacity for endorsing democracy. Related questions would involve the acceptance of religious freedom and tolerance for the faith of others. This means nothing less than the capacity for peace between religions and an endorsement of their role as liberating forces. By reason of its own history, Europe has a special responsibility in its dialogue with Islam and in interfaith dialogue in general. To be able to accept this responsibility, concrete ways of clarification and elucidation are indispensable. Academia can contribute substantially to this task. I am thinking of area studies as well as of religious studies. Islamic studies helps us to look beyond the current situation and into the rich history of this religion. Considering philosophical and theological questions of Islam in a historical perspective enables us to form a nuanced view of Islam, in the face of which today’s fundamentalist developments appear as a narrowing of Islam’s multi-faceted history. This is why I have been attaching such great importance to supporting area studies and especially Islamic Studies. This holds true also for particular projects such as collaborative research centers (“Sonderforschungsbereiche”) and clusters of excellence – in a national and a European context – concerning the connections between religion, culture and society. In Germany, we decided to establish centers for Islamic theology at

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four different universities. This entails the opportunity to develop an Islamic scholarship in Europe and to promote the transformation of the substance of Islam into the modern world through theological reflection. The discussion of the project did not take place without critical questions, which, ultimately, always come up when the general capacity of an adaptation to the present is addressed in connection with the exegesis of the Koran. This is an ongoing debate. Where, if not in Europe, could the opportunities be better to perform this enlightening process, which is the prerequisite for Islam also recognizing the reference to God as a stimulus for freedom and tolerance. Finally, the countless departments for Protestant and Catholic Theology, the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg and the new centers for Islamic theological studies are a great opportunity for interfaith dialogue in our society – which is becoming ever more pluralistic, also religiously – and for what Karl-Josef Kuschel calls the “Abrahamic ecumenism” (Kuschel/Micksch 2011). The prerequisite for this is to take religion in the public space seriously: to take it seriously as the hope of individual human beings, as the source of principles and values, as part of a cultural memory and the connected images and patterns of interpretation. The academic reflection concerning the theologies of Judaism, Islam and Christianity can contribute to religious peace as a requirement for global peace in the twenty-first century. It is also for this reason that I am very happy that the conference proceedings of the Berlin symposium “Religion and Society in the 21st Century” will be published. I hope this book will find many interested readers. Berlin, December 2012

Bibliography Bakalar, Nick/Balkin, Richard (Eds.) (2001): The Wisdom of John Paul II: The Pope on Life’s Most Vital Questions. New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics. Kuschel, Karl-Josef/Micksch, Jürgen (2011): Abrahamische Ökumene: Dialog und Kooperation. Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck. Schavan, Annette (2010): “Gottesbezug als Freiheitsimpuls”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 23, 2010, No. 273, p. 10.

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Preamble: The Reference to God as a Stimulus for Freedom

Table of Contents Annette Schavan Preamble: The Reference to God as a Stimulus for Freedom fi V Joachim Küpper Introduction fi 1 Volkhard Krech The Religious between Self-Referential Religious Communication, Communication on Religion, and Sacralization fi 13 Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Pluralism, Liberalism and Constitutional Patriotism: A Normative Theory from the Indian Constitution fi 53 Paula Montero The Formation of the Nation-State, Religious Pluralism, and the Public Sphere in Brazil fi 75 Asonzeh Ukah The Midwife or the Handmaid? Religion in Political Advertising in Nigeria fi 87 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi Sacrificial Space: The Hebrew Imagination “Comes Home” fi 115 Schirin Amir-Moazami Religion under Liberal-Secular Governance: Dialoguing with Muslims in Germany fi 135 Martin Riesebrodt Concepts of Religion and Their Political Implications fi 159 Notes on the Contributors fi 179

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Introduction

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Joachim Küpper

Introduction In the present socio-cultural milieu, characterized, as it is, by somewhat persistent schisms in popular and etatiste perceptions of R/religion/s and religio-spiritual identity constructions, it is challenging, to say the least, to configure a trajectory of academic inquiry into the vexed issue of the interaction between “Religion and Society in the 21st Century”. There are multiple issues of theoretical provenance, methodological choices, sample/target area selections and thematic differentiations that need to be grappled with before a serious project can be envisaged that seeks to delve into inter-religious interactions and conflicts, through the prism of the role of the State within the framework of the post-Enlightenment democratic polity. What needs to be ascertained, at the outset, is whether one wants to concentrate on theological issues and/or religious polemic – be it in the modern socio-political context or not – or investigate and interrogate concerns of “deep pluralism”, “constitutional patriotism”, “Gottesbezug als Freiheitsimpuls” (reference to God as a stimulus for freedom) and “Wertegemeinschaft” (community of shared values) that entail an exhaustingly interdisciplinary noetic focus. In the contemporaneous European context in particular, and in the world-situation in general, one needs to remember that in the post-9/11 and Al-Qaida paradigm a marked radicalization of thought and attitudes has appeared on all sides of the multiple religious fault lines that have opened up or widened. It will, perhaps, be somewhat superficial to solely lay the blame for this at the foot of either the so-called “Revolt of Islam” (Shelley 1903) or the Huntingtonian construct of a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996); there can be little doubt, however, that the charged climate prevailing in the present-day inter-religious dialogue has roots in the prehistory of religious conflict in the past. Thus, in studying what seems to be a contested discursive socio-religious register even with the benefit of post-secular analytical methodologies, there appears to be a certain conflict of interest between academic institutes and individuals located in post-secular societies, and the engaged pursuit of a holistic yet, when necessary, particularistic study of religion in post-modern society. One needs to be especially careful not to allow the top-down presumptions of teleological secularity to color academic investigations of religious maneuvering in the public-private matrices of the discourses of immigration and integration – and the latter especially in the German and other Western European contexts. One should refrain, as far as possible, from being drawn into scoring ideologically nuanced debating points, while remaining open and receptive to innovative arguments, born from lateral thinking, and to creative solutions that seek to accom-

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modate differential communal aspirations and identity formations within the broad framework of constitutional democracy. It is in this spirit that the Dahlem Humanities Center organized the three-day “Concept Laboratory” on “Religion and Society in the 21st Century”, which, with the help of an innovatively structured discursive format, dwelt upon the multifaceted possibilities and challenges of inter-religious coexistence and conflict. The participants included eminent scholars of religious studies, sociology, politics, history, theology, comparative literature, anthropology, philosophy and Islamic studies, with varied interdisciplinary orientations and from various universities in Germany, Israel, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2011, from May 4 to 6, there were intensive theoretical-methodological discussions in small groups, with a special address by Professor Annette Schavan, the German Federal Minister for Education and Research at the time, and a panel discussion on the theme “Religions Today: Clash or Coexistence”. Some of the questions raised involved the following issues: the capacities of different post-secular societies for handling religious plurality, the so-called inevitability of religious frictions, the configuration of creative “strategies for peaceful coexistence”, among other things. In this context, the presentations and questions also touched upon the characteristics that a religion must have (or not have), so as to enable it to coexist in peace and even harmony with other faiths. One major discursive focus was the universal referentiality that a religion must demonstrate within a given social collectivity, so as to contribute meaningfully towards the exalted goal of world peace. Furthermore, the dogmatic, polemical or theological content of the different religions and belief systems, which could aid the achievement of this aim, were discussed and opened up to intellectual, and often critical scrutiny; various forms of “paradoxical knowledge”, as brought up by differential theological interpretations of key scriptural tenets, were held up to scrutiny after having passed through a rigorous examination by academic processes. As noted by Annette Schavan in her lecture (the essence of which is documented in her preamble to this volume), one available methodological trajectory that can ascertain the suitability of aggressive manifestations of religious/secular conviction – as seen, for instance, in the headscarf controversy in France especially, and in Western Europe generally – is the approach suggested by José Casanova (2008) in his essay on the balance of religious freedom/s. As he opines, human rights and, most importantly, the right to freedom of religious practice, are currently undergoing a conceptual globalization. However, the gradual evolution of religious freedom into a universal aspiration does not necessarily ensure that it has similar connotations all over the world. What may, for example, constitute such a freedom in various Islamic communities, namely the enveloping of the female body in protective covering, can be – and apparently is – the denial of

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individuality in a Euro-American context. Thus, it may have various connotations in various locales, and many of them may contradict and even conflict with each other; similarly, the otherwise well-intentioned policy measures that seek to globalize unifocal frameworks of religious freedom and toleration, may run aground on alternative cultural constructions of the same, leading to resistance and even aggressive counter-mobilizations, as well as the possibility of a resultant violent radicalization. Another controversial trope is the complex and convoluted relationship between religion and secularism and post-secular atheism, given the new manifestations of an aggressive denial of religiosity coming, according to Richard Schröder (2008), from the “West”; this is said to be a counter-blast to the socalled “Wiederkehr des Religiösen” (return/rehabilitation of religion), after the collapse of state Communism worldwide, and a new alignment of post-Cold War global geopolitics. Until the penultimate decade of the last century, the aggressively materialist influence of a so-called “scientific and progressive” atheism came from the East; after the end of the Cold War, however, this influence dwindled due to the collapse of a dehumanizing totalitarian system. Recently, it seems to be returning with renewed fervor and refurbished “old arguments” from the West: religious belief is dangerous and delusional and the so-called “scientific temper” may not accommodate it. The illusory nature of Godhood, the narrowness of religious education, and the linking of Catholic priesthood with child abuse are (only) some of the latest anti-religion ideas that are bandied about. According to Richard Dawkins (1989, p. 198), “[t]he meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry”. However, what scholars like Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the so-called “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” tend to overlook, and all too conveniently so, is their (often brazen) treatment of “scientific” postulates and axiomatic statements as infallible truths. One merely has to read the zoologist Dawkins’ rather brash forays into popular philosophy, despite his barely concealed contempt for “the subjects known as ‘humanities’[, which] are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived” (Dawkins 1989, p. 1) to grasp the amount of rhetorical belief in many supposedly scientific truth claims. This new dictatorship of reason, however, is not sans its own problematization of polemic – to wit, the eminently readable one-liners and assertions of finality by Dawkins and Dennett – and it ignores, quite blithely, the fact that (in Alan Wolfe’s words) “[r]eligion can lead people out of cycles of poverty and dependency just as it led Moses out of Egypt” (Wolfe 2003, p. 139). It is in this context that scholars like Richard Schröder are demanding arguments, background and consequences of this often one-sided debate from such fierce critics of “religion”. Many questions, apparently answered, continue to trouble our conscience: what

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are the results of raising evolutionary biology to the level of a belief? What are the multifaceted connotations of religion apropos thought, culture, the individual and society? There is an urgent need to reintroduce rationality to the sciencereligion debate in a socio-political context, and the present volume, which follows from the Concept Laboratory in Berlin, seeks to address that intellectual lacuna. One of the high points of this academic event was Annette Schavan’s talk on “Reference to God as a Stimulus for Freedom: On the Liberating Power of Religion in Modern Societies”. With academic rigor, this lecture aimed to explore myriad issues and paradigms apropos the religiosity/secularity struggle and the German constitutional guarantees against faith-based discrimination; the immediate context was the integration debate that has been going on in Germany for the last few years, but the broader scope of the talk dovetailed with the academic study of religions within the Humanities. In certain twentieth century political dispensations, it had been deemed “unscientific” and “non-academic” to propose any scientific study of religion within the noetic spaces of universities and research institutes, due to the decades-old preponderance of certain ideological predispositions in academic power elites; hence it was all the more refreshing and reassuring to hear, from none other than the Minister, that a twenty-first-century academic power structure is interested in, and committed to, a rational debate between various theological and societal positions. In fact, she mentioned that the German government has been setting up four new Chairs in Islamic theology in the country’s universities; and this will be in addition to the substantial investments for augmenting knowledge through academic research, which have already been made by the Bundesregierung. Professor Schavan traced the academic self-configurations of comparative theology through the various vicissitudes of Europe’s intellectual history, the rise of secularizing movements through scientific and technological progress, the intra-Christianity struggles and the rise of what has been termed “secular fundamentalism”; quoting the late Pope John Paul II – “a modern state cannot make atheism or religion one of its political ordinances” (Bakalar/Balkin [Eds.] 2001, p. 3) – she sought to locate the post-WWII Bundesrepublik in an arc of essentially Christian belief, in rejection of the “atheist totalitarianisms” that had plagued Germany, and was to continue to do so until the fall of the Berlin Wall, while emphasizing the rootedness of the Grundgesetz (Constitution) in the idea of tolerance and the consequent liberation of individual beliefs and values. She raised the problematic question of Islamic thresholds of tolerance and inclusivity towards other religious communities, and wondered whether European Muslim societies could field the challenge of developing an “Islamic theology in Europe”; at least in Germany, she hoped, this would have an emancipatory effect upon the

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often-vexed relationship between Islam and the State, precisely through dialogue. In this context, she referred to the somewhat controversial thesis of the Egyptian-German political scientist and Islamwissenschaftler (scholar of Islam) Hamed Abdel-Samad about the cultural decline of Islamic societies; according to Abdel-Samad’s latest book, Der Untergang der islamischen Welt (The Decline of the Islamic World 2010), the so-called “Islamic world” (as a socio-political construct) will go into a downward cultural spiral, having overdrawn its cultural-civilizational account and reneged on the promise of ijtiha¯d or pragmatic, progressive thought. The 38-year-old, held as one of the most eminent Muslim intellectuals in the German-speaking world, was invited to the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (German Islam Conference) in 2010–11 by the Federal Minister of the Interior at the time, Dr. Thomas de Maizière. Schavan, however, expressed the hope that, in the interest of “social cohesion” and the normative democratic “duty to tolerate”, as called for by the German Supreme Court in 1995, Islamic communities will accept the right of non-Islamic entities to the emancipatory effects of mutual toleration as a democratic norm. Volkhard Krech’s paper, “The Religious between Self-Referential Religious Communication, Communication on Religion, and Sacralization”, may be, perhaps, the most challenging one contained in this volume. Basing his argument on a plethora of sociological data, Krech problematizes the rather widespread view of a “return of religion” by arguing that the assumption of a previous vanishing or evaporation of religion may be misleading not only for countries like Poland and the United States, but also for a country like Germany. In a longue durée perspective, the alternative proffered between “secularization (understood as the decline of religion’s significance) and the return of religion (understood as its rising relevance)” seems to be all too schematic. Krech opines, through his interpretation of empirical statistical findings, that the often-claimed chasm between religiosity and modernity does not hold, that more than half of the German population “have theistic or non-theistic beliefs, and roughly a third seems to switch between belief and doubts”, that secularization seems to be characterized differently when notions of religious ritual, e.g., communion, come into play, and that there is a remarkable growth in the publication and readership of popular books on (often esoteric) religious themes. He also finds exogenous factors to be the strongest basis for religious fundamentalism, with a “centrality of religion” and an allegiance to a monotheistic faith being the strongest religious basis thereof. Political fundamentalism, he writes, is separate from its religious variant if influenced by faith-based perspectives, being “an expression of political religion”, an amalgam of political and religious assertions; however, countries like Zimbabwe, the United States, Poland, Nigeria, Egypt and Iraq demonstrate the heady confluence of general and often messianic religiosity, faith-impacted political beliefs and a

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heightened sense of national self-configuration. There seems to be a clear stress on faith as an identity marker amongst migrants, though this may be the result of stressing religious differences in the context of self-labeling and local and metalocal societal-cultural conflicts. Krech concludes that, due to the operation of secularization and the resultant issues apropos the application and connectivity of “self-referential religious communication”, the process of sacralization of nonreligious contexts and disciplines is heightened; this, in turn, could connote that religion and its niche in modernity might become a comment on the latter. A section of three papers contained in this volume shed a sharply – and, at times, shockingly – different light on the possibilities of the coexistence of different religions. It may be nothing but a fortunate coincidence that two of these papers present scenarios of a serene coexistence while the third gives a most unembellished picture of a society that is religiously divided, while being simultaneously pervaded by religious precepts in almost every sphere of civil life, and that seems to culminate in a situation of constantly imminent civil war. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, in his paper “Pluralism, Liberalism and Constitutional Patriotism: A Normative Theory from the Indian Constitution”, takes a rather optimistic view of the myriad possibilities through which a “constitutional dispensation [could] be effective in acknowledging pluralist requirements within a liberal framework”, while foregrounding “the normative vision of the Indian Constitution”; he suggests that “the Indian Constitution that was designed between 1946–50 mediates between liberalism and pluralism” and lends itself to the provision of a meta-theoretical perspective upon the international challenges of constructions of belonging and their socio-political negotiations. This civilizational ability to inscribe pluralism outside histories of “competing essentialist identities” has always, in the case of India, been characterized by a “contestation of, and engagement across, shared mental, ritual, cultural, social and political spaces”, which cut across the sectarian divides between Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and other Indian faith-systems. He makes a paradigmatic point when he states that the Indian Constitution attempts to collectivize the expression of certain formulations of individual rights, as in the ability of the State to “impose reasonable restrictions on the freedom of movement, residence and settlement”, in the interest of effecting a balance between the liberal and pluralistic modes of constitutional ideation. In order to guarantee the inescapability of the nation-state mechanism, while furnishing modes of pluralistic normativity that facilitate the interrogation and challenging of nationalistic inevitability, his “key contention is that the Fundamental Rights show that the citizen is taken to be an individual locus of liberty”. He suggests that Habermas’ formulations of constitutional patriotism are inscribed in the “requirement of neutrality towards a plurality of collectives [that] is remarkably similar to the Indian notion of secu-

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larism”. This, he opines, is in keeping with the Indic/Hindu thought tradition, which is essentially pluralist and is geared to attract Indians to “syncretism and blurred boundaries between collective identities”. The Indic Wertegemeinschaft had neither an option nor the civilizational context to develop into anything other than a pluralistic socio-cultural system. There are very tolerant characterizations of what constitutes majorities and minorities as, for instance, in the case of the Bene-Israel, who had come to India after leaving Galilee because of persecutions by Antiochus Epiphanes (175–163 BCE), and had become a kind of permanent minority; this is mirrored in the lack, within the Indian Constitution, of anything “substantive about the notion of a majority”. Thus, given the constitution of the Indian nation-state by multiple minorities, dissent in India is radically different from that in the West, given that it originates in “the historically deep pluralism of ‘India’”. India’s historical negotiation/s with the ideals of Euro-American modernity may thus provide a possible model apropos the quest for suitable theoretical structures that will help to succor and sustain the increasing multiculturalism of public-private global spaces and the negotiations within them. Paula Montero, in her paper “The Formation of the Nation-State, Religious Pluralism, and the Public Sphere in Brazil”, posits that the way various societies deal with religions is primarily connected to the historical process(es) through which the corresponding nation-states were created. In Brazil, with Catholicism having been the political idiom of the colonial and imperial regimes, a religious syncretism that could flourish due to the vastness of the territory and the scarcity of ecclesiastical-political administrators was always sought to be stamped out; hence it became the duty of the contemporary Brazilian State, through the 1988 Constitution, to secure religious and societal multiculturalism as a guarantee of the rights of the marginalized and the impoverished, precisely through the infusion of cultural authenticity in democratic governance. The picture that Montero gives of religious practices in contemporary Brazil is, indeed, a most interesting one if considered from the perspective of societies torn between different competing religions, as, for instance, in continental Europe. In Brazil, there seems to be a relatively easy coexistence of Catholicism, evangelical (Pentecostal) Protestantism and of indigenous or Afro-American cults. What is more: this coexistence does not only concern religious belief at the level of communities, it may impinge upon the individual, as well. Taking communion (according to either Catholic or Protestant rites) in the morning and attending a cultic event of a non-Christian dispensation in the afternoon is not at all uncommon in Brazil, as to Montero . The zone of mediation between different beliefs, according to her, is ritualistic practice, as in symbolic “cleansing” or purificatory rites, for example. Is it, properly speaking, the discursivisation of religion: is it theology that makes religious coexistence such a difficult thing?

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Asonzeh Ukah’s paper brings us from the idyllic plane of peaceful coexistence between divergent belief-systems to the reality of Nigeria, Africa’s biggest nation in demographic terms, its potentially wealthiest country, and a polity divided between a Muslim north and a Christian south that has been stuck for decades in a rather more or less veiled civil war. Ukah, looking at the role of religion and religious inflection in political maneuvering in Nigeria, in his paper “The Midwife or the Handmaid? Religion in Political Advertising in Nigeria” ponders the alternatives of religion as a “midwife, creatively bringing about a form of democracy in tune with the local depths of religiosity, a sort of indigenized democracy”, and of a “handmaid”, who supports and furthers prevalent political dispensations. The picture, presented by Ukah, of the pervasive presence of religious issues, images, stereotypes and motifs within the political discourse, is amazing. In his analysis, religion in present-day Nigeria acts only as a handmaid while totally missing out on its potential to act as a midwife. If Voltaire or Marx were still alive they would not be able to find a scenario better suited to illustrate their theses concerning the devastating influence of religion on society than present-day Nigeria. Although Ukah carefully avoids making any concrete claims, the picture he draws may be read as a powerful pitch for the “privatization” of religions as a prerequisite for their coexistence, at least within societies dominated by proselytizing religions in direct competition with one another for a rich harvest of souls. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s paper, “Sacrificial Space: The Hebrew Imagination ‘Comes Home’”, brings us to a polity where the standard Occidental solution to the problem of the interaction of the State and religions, namely secularization, is not viable, since it would call into question the very existence of the State. The raison d’être for Israel is to establish a safe haven for a religious community that has gone through the bitter experience of realizing that no secular Euro-American State was ready to protect its members against a politics of systematic extermination. As such, the State of Israel evinces that “secularization” cannot be the one and only, the universal answer to the question of religions’ role in a global society of the twenty-first century. This, one might speculate, could be the underlying reason for the constant polemical campaigning of Western secularists, including some of Jewish origin, against Israel. If one takes the link between religion and society as a matter of fact, however, there is, as Ezrahi shows, one very serious problem that emerges. It is the continuation of, in her words referring to Yerushalmi (2005), “the recycling of the biblical topoi as characteristic of collective Jewish memory” in the two millennia of Exile, in the present-day political reality, or, to universalize it as an abstraction, the dialectic between tradition and progress. In one example, Ezrahi paints an impressive picture of the dangers involved in conflating the political and the religious, while cautiously suggesting possible so-

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lutions. The sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, as narrated in Genesis 22, has, in the Jewish tradition, become “a prototype of Jewish martyrdom”, a sort of religionbased legitimization of the readiness to send one’s sons to death in the interest of the greater body of believers. Ezrahi stresses that the Biblical account ends by the substitution of the son by a ram, a substitution executed not by Abraham, but by Yahwe himself. Thus, the story may be interpreted as a stylization of Yahwe’s prerogative regarding the lives of his people’s sons – whether or not He will countenance symbolic substitution – or as an interpretative account of the definitive end of human sacrifice within the Abrahamic tradition; this, by the way, is the current interpretation of the story both within religious studies, as well as in Christian theology. The second device to isolate the scriptural pathways to which Israel’s identity discourse is inextricably bound is the transference of the corresponding patterns to the sphere of literary discourse. Since poetry and fiction are free from the pretence to literal truth, they may playfully explore potential variants of the biblical original, or even deconstruct it. These two different interpretative or re-/ de-constructive ways of dealing with the tradition hold, according to Ezrahi, immense significance for the present-day coexistence of Israel with her Arab neighbors and Jews with non-Jews, through a gradual inversion of the ultra-Orthodox characterizations of Judaism’s public-private interactions and an opening-up of the channels of local institutional authority to non-religious secular humanists, in the context of Israel and the rest of the world. The last two papers in this volume address the situation in present-day Germany. Schirin Amir-Moazami’s paper, “Religion under Liberal-Secular Governance: Dialoguing with Muslims in Germany”, does that in a most direct way, while Martin Riesebrodt, who taught in the United States for decades, reminds his German fellow countrymen not to skip over the solution to the question of religious pluralism as devised in the United States. Amir-Moazami does not conceal her deep discomfort with the German government’s attempt to foster the Muslim communities’ integration into German society by way of a state-sponsored “dialogue”. She feels that, by “enact[ing] a structured conversation with Muslims”, the State determines the agenda and, therefore, if it is its goal to focus on Jürgen Habermas’ “dialogue model, with its emphasis on the consensus of rational, ethnically and ideologically neutralized citizens in non-hegemonic areas of public life”, it should not choose its dialogue partner as, however, it has done by setting up the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK). In addition, she critiques what she sees as the discursive enforcement of an extraconstitutional patriotism, a sort of Grundgesetz-Plus; the latter, she claims, is based on a meta-legal notion of the “Deutsche Wertegemeinschaft” and is symbolic of the State going beyond its brief in promoting its notion of German values. In her opinion, the DIK “does not represent ‘true’ dialogue [with Muslims], but is

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primarily a means for the government to exercise power […]”; hence, it has been reduced to aiming for the reconfiguration of Islamic communities in tune with liberal-secular normativities. The State, she opines, resents the fact that Muslims have used the Constitution to acquire advanced socio-cultural and political rights that the framers of the Constitution had not envisaged for religious or other minorities; in building upon this notion, she discusses the concepts of post-Islamism, constitutional patriotism and “atavistic democracy”, while stressing that religious speech acts have to be translated properly. She refutes the notion that the State, as opposed to civil society, which can be “neutral and inclusive”, can be a neutral sphere, as it is the outcome of the ethical and value-based impregnation of the Constitution. From her perspective, equivalences given to or imposed upon Muslims, in terms of the theater of the dialogic space, are structured and initiated through the performance of top-down dialogue. In this process, a clear difference appears between structural and cultural integration, the latter seeking to grapple with issues like Islamophobia, the so-called clash of values and the public/private spatial dichotomy. Although initially not conceived as a continuation of Amir-Moazami’s critical observations regarding instruments like the Deutsche Islam-Konferenz, Martin Riesebrodt’s somewhat skeptical view of the capacity of religions to alleviate societal tensions and, thus, “actively contribute to global peace”, as expressed in his paper “Concepts of Religion and Their Political Implications”, could be read as a more abstract exposition of positions underlying the argument of the preceding paper. He characterizes the central business of religions as the intercession, to divine entities, for blessings and salvation for their adherents, hence finding religions unsuited for the task of promoting political emancipation and furthering intercultural understanding, which bring up issues of legitimacy and authority. Quoting the example of the Catholic Church’s position on contraception, he questions the ability even of highly organized religions to enforce moral compliance, without creating maverick representatives who lack internal legitimacy. He argues that the State should perceive religious communities from a vantage point of serene indifference. The State should not be involved in the business of conferring a “higher” sense and meaning upon the existence of its citizenry but should leave that function to the religious communities. Riesebrodt opines that it should not pressure them to take an active role in secular matters. Civil peace, harmony and social welfare are the tasks of the State, the intercession with supernatural powers that of religions. In conclusion, one feels that the Concept Laboratory raised more issues than could possibly be dwelt upon within the framework of a single academic event, given the gravity of the issues concerned, and the significance they hold for global peace and harmony; the various normative guarantees of constitutional toler-

Introduction

11

ance, as, for example, in the German Constitution – Article 4.2 states that “the undisturbed practice of religion shall be guaranteed” – will only work effectively if different individuals and communities go beyond mere tolerance and engage in understanding other forms of religious expression than their own. That, one can safely say, is one underlying thread connecting the different presentations in this multi-focal academic volume. As for those papers, which suggest there might be a solution to the problems we are facing, one would need to discuss more, and in depth, the occasionally enunciated and, at times, hidden presuppositions of the arguments expounded. In India there is, indeed, a somewhat serene, if precarious, coexistence of a multitude of religions, including the three Abrahamic ones; but present-day India’s history does not just start with independence but the painful partition into two States in 1947: its religious pacification is a process that began only after the violent separation of a Muslim India nowadays called Pakistan (and Bangladesh) from the “rest” of the country. – The relatively irenic picture of a country formerly dominated by Catholicism, but now open to multi-religious syncretism (as presented here apropos Brazil) refers to a situation that has a history of roughly only two decades as of now – decades characterized not only by religious pluralization and an increasing tolerance, but also, as in India, by a breathtaking economic boom and the concomitant cooling down of intra-societal conflicts concerning material resources. It is, perhaps, not that unreasonable to reserve judgment on the applicability of both of these models of multicultural syncretism to the problems of a Europe that is in economic decline, where the challenges of a diversifying socio-cultural ethos follow on the heels of an apparently irreversible loss of the ability to project politico-economic power globally. – The playful deconstruction of religious frameworks and pathways as inscribed in sacral texts by literary texts, in order to render flexible the impact of a dominant religious tradition, might be a suitable interpretative strategy with those “religions of the book” that consider the concrete wording of their holy books as being mediated by humans; but it may be difficult to apply in the case of religions that consider their book the direct articulation of God’s own voice. – The appeal to let religious communities go about their business without persuading them to make a meaningful contribution to the aims of societies at large, to just tolerate and protect them, is qualified by a seemingly minute formula that would need further elaboration: religions have a right to freely pursue their goals, “within the limits of the law”. What, however, if the commandments of a given religion require something that is in contradiction to the law? And what if a specific religion considers it imperative not only to go about its own business, but rather to control the world and political speakers through religion as well? And is the law, a category rather skipped over in the paper on the Grundgesetz-Plus, a neutral entity or actor? Or do

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our norms of the lawful derive from specific religious traditions? Are “human rights” a universal norm? Or are they rather contingent upon the assumption of a Hellenized sect of Judaism – which flourished and goes on to flourish under the name of Christianity – namely that every human being is endowed with a Godlike “soul” at the moment of their coming into existence? Finally, is the rather widespread positive resonance of this concept the proof of its objective universality, or is it a phenomenon concomitant to the Westernization, in ways both peaceful and violent, of global socio-political, economic and even cultural mores over the last five centuries? It seems there is still a lot to discuss, and the main realization arrived at in the conference might be that, the serious political problems at issue notwithstanding, scholars should not hesitate to err on the side of audacity in their interpretations and reflections as well as in their concrete articulations. Diplomatic resolutions to thorny issues are not one of the primary tasks of academic enquiry, though diplomats and politicians need nuanced and objectively inflected scholarly work as the groundwork for their endeavors. One can only handle the “other’s” susceptibilities in a caring and respectful way if one knows what these susceptibilities are in the first place, and where their origins lie.

Bibliography Abdel-Samad, Hamed (2010): Der Untergang der islamischen Welt: Eine Prognose. Munich: Droemer. Bakalar, Nick/Balkin, Richard (Eds.) (2001): The Wisdom of John Paul II: The Pope on Life’s Most Vital Questions. New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics. Casanova, José (2008): “Balancing Religious Freedom and Cultural Preservation”. In: The Review of Faith & International Affairs 6. No. 2, p. 13–77. Dawkins, Richard (1989): The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996): The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Schröder, Richard (2008): Abschaffung der Religion? Wissenschaftlicher Fanatismus und die Folgen. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1903): “The Revolt of Islam”. In: An Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: Being a Collation Thereof with the Printed Texts, Resulting in the Publication of Several Long Fragments Hitherto Unknown, and the Introduction of Many Improved Readings into Prometheus Unbound, and Other Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wolfe, Alan (2003): The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim ([1982] 2005): Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Foreword by Harold Bloom, with a new preface and postscript by the author. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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The Religious between Self-Referential Religious Communication, Communication on Religion, and Sacralization 1 Secularization or Reenchantment of the World? The concept of secularization has been contested for quite some time. Some scholars describe the theory of secularization as an ideology or a “myth” (Aubrey 1954; Comblin 1981) with which modern society reflects on itself without regarding the “facts”. Others do not share this skeptical view and try to strengthen the notion of secularization in various modifications. However, from the perspective of conceptual history there are no pure facts as such, but facts are constructed and dealt with in order to describe and evaluate the world we live in. In his book Formations of the Secular (2003), Talal Asad presents a genealogy of the secular and of secularism, rather than a history of social and societal processes which are generally thought of as “modern”. He did not want to write a history of secularization, not even a history of secularization as a concept. Rather, his book intends to be “an exploration of epistemological assumptions of the secular that might help us be a little clearer about what is involved in the anthropology of secularism” (Asad 2003, p. 25). While the secular is “an epistemic category”, secularism is a “political doctrine” (Asad 2003, p. 1). Asad (2003, p. 25) understands the secular as “a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life”, i.e. a notion that has a certain impact on the individual’s conduct of life, perceptions and feelings – and even on the body. Secularism is a derivate from the secular and is based on “the secularization thesis [that] in its entirety has always been at once descriptive and normative” (Asad 2003, p. 181). Following Asad’s genealogy, one might assume that there is a more complex history of religious development than the secularization thesis suggests, and maybe even a preconception inherent in empirical research on secularization. “The secular […] is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred)” (Asad 2003, p. 25). From this perspective the ambiguity of the secular and of secularism arises – whether or not one accepts secularization as a given “fact”, or tries to substitute it by confronting ideas such as “re-sacralization” or “re-enchantment” (cf. Berman 1981; Isenberg 2000), or the idea of a post-secular society (cf. Haber-

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mas 2002; Eder 2002). These notions are still just negative affirmations of the idea of secularization. On the one hand, the epistemic concept of the secular and the derived doctrine of secularism are contingent social constructions, which – once they are in the world – have influence on our behavior, feelings and cognitions; but, on the other hand, there is no doubt that analytical notions of process are necessary within social sciences in general, and religious studies in particular, to grasp larger historical developments. If the socio-cultural reality would just be recognized as a continuum, there would be no change and no history as such and ergo no historical consciousness. In consequence: if everything simply were in flow, we could not perceive anything in its historic dimension. Notions and concepts – including the ideas of process – are necessary for perception and knowledge; this is just commonplace in philosophy. A notion – if it is not to be understood as scientific positivism – represents the condensation of a question at hand. As such, concepts represent and structure the empirical reality, as well as research programs, with an open end. Even if they are basic ideas, fundamental terms, they represent a question which only arose in its historical setting. This historicity of questions urges us to recognize that “the history of phenomena is foremost a history of the controversial explanation of these phenomena” (Graf 2004, p. 69; my translation). This statement is true for all phenomena, but especially so for religious ones, and, as such, for the idea of secularization and the questions represented by it. Herrmann Lübbe (1965) presented the politics of ideas concerning the notion of secularization in detail, while Herrmann Zabel (1968) and Ulrich Ruh (1980) described secularization as a category of interpretation.1 Numerous sociologists of religion, the first among them Thomas Luckmann in the 1960s, and many social scientists and historians with him, doubt the concept of secularization in part or generally – to name just a few: Sarah Williams, Stephen Yeo, Jeffrey Cox or Linda Woodhead (Heelas/Woodhead 2005). Other historians like Hugh McLeod (1999) and sociologists like Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce (2002), David Martin (2005), and in Germany Detlef Pollack (2003) for example, still think of secularization as a productive idea. In the French-speaking countries, the word déchristianisation is used instead of secularization, and Hartmut Lehmann (1997) suggested analyzing the interactions between the ideas of processes of secularization, dechristianization and rechristianization. The ideas of the de-institutionalization of religion and the processes of the diffusion of religion would have to be added to Lehmann’s advice.

1 As far as the philosophical view in general is concerned: cf. Jaeschke (1976); Jaeschke/Laeyendecker (1996); Jaeschke (2001).

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The heuristical power of the secularization concept depends on what is to be understood by the idea of it. In its strongest version, the concept of secularization suggests nothing less than the unilinear, irresistible and irreversible process of religion losing all of its significance – from marginalization to complete annihilation. Responsible for this is the universal and equally irresistible and irreversible process of rationalization, according to which everything is reduced to being just a question of (intentional) accountability. Or, to phrase this in accordance with the history of semantics: the complex and, historically speaking, rather dynamic relation between divine forethought and individual trials has changed into matter of fact appreciations of risks. The most radical concept of secularization combines this idea with a strong optimism toward progress, according to which the rational world view means nothing less than a total emancipation from religious dependency. Another notion in this radical concept is the idea of the deterioration of good morals and social cohesion due to religion’s loss of significance in modernity. According to both assumptions, modernity and religion are considered incompatible. Thus, religion functions as the negative blueprint for the concept of modernity. Even if this characterization has some empirical evidence from the intellectual history of modern times, it still seems an exaggeration. If such a strong concept of secularization is purported dogmatically, it becomes mere ideology. Accordingly, this narrow concept has been softened by several modifications. What came out of this modification process, however, is secularization describing the development of religion in modern times as (a) an ongoing process and not as seasonal fluctuations, during the course of which (b) religion no longer has the importance that had formerly been ascribed to it (not taking into account the question of whether religion really did have more significance in earlier times).2 José Casanova (1994) has presented what are perhaps the most severely analytical considerations on the secularization thesis. He points to three elements in that thesis, all of which have been taken to be essential to the development of modernity: (1) increasing structural (functional) societal differentiation, (2) the privatization of religion, (3) the declining social significance of religious belief. Casanova holds that only the first and the third elements are viable. I am not planning on adding another definition of secularization. Instead I would like to take up Asad’s definition of the secular as an epistemic concept, and, in the same instant, present some empirical observations on the social and societal history of religions – being aware of Asad’s (1994) examination of the role

2 With Lucian Hölscher one should rather assume that the European societies of the 18th century had an ideational affiliation with religion (cf. Hölscher 1990, p. 597).

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statistical representation has played in creating the world of modern power that social scientists inhabit. On the one hand, I agree with Asad’s methodology of genealogy: we have to sharpen the scientific understanding of the problem of handling the idea of secularization within scientific and public discourses. Thus, I will point out some dimensions that have to be distinguished when dealing with the question of secularization, and I will present some considerations concerning the interaction between the history of religions, social history, and the history of semantics. On the other hand, just reflecting on the constructions and conducting discourse analysis might be insufficient. If epistemic concepts – and as such the secular – have impact on people’s behavior (this being what Asad states), we have to look for quantitative indicators in order to be able to measure them, and thus evaluate their relevance. We certainly cannot take quantitative data as a simple copy of reality, since quantitative as well as qualitative data (such as texts) are much less complex than the social practice they represent. However, we need a heuristic epistemology of the “empirical reality” behind, or followed by, the epistemic concept of the secular. The following text proceeds abductively: after some introductory conceptual and methodological considerations, I will turn to empirical observations, and finally draw some conceptual conclusions.

2 Introductory Conceptual Considerations With regard to both longue durée and synchronic comparative perspectives, the idea of there being a fundamental alternative between either secularization (understood as the decline of religion’s significance) or the return of religion (understood as its rising relevance) may be misleading. We probably have to consider both secularization processes and the persistence or even revival of religion. There are various reasons for this assumption. Firstly, the social and societal impact of religion in the 21st century varies greatly when observed on a global scale. Despite globalization and de-territorialization processes, religion still seems to be bound to national conditions. I agree with Paula Montero3 when she states that the way different societies deal with religions has to do, mostly, with the historical characteristics of their nation-state construction. However, there are other factors beyond the nation state which should be mentioned, and which are responsible for the varying significance of religion, such as gender, age, economic background, and, last but not least, different characteristics of specific religious traditions.

3 See her contribution in this volume.

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Secondly, the assumption of a religious decline stems from an emphatic notion of religion that includes faith and a certain way of leading one’s life. It became dominant in Europe during the 19th century and is used today to evaluate the social and societal significance of religion. I very much support Martin Riesebrodt’s (2007) call for a clear-cut definition of religion;4 otherwise, we would not know what we are talking about, and how to conduct empirical research. On the other hand, diachronic and synchronic comparisons need careful conceptualization to avoid a temporal or spatial bias or even restriction. I do not want to start a theoretical discussion on what the correct concept of religion is; I only wish to suggest – as a result of my experience in trying to compare different cultures and times – taking the following elements of a definition as a starting point for further conceptualization. The attribute “religious”, or the noun “the religious” and other notions that are in a relationship of family resemblances to “religion”, cover four dimensions – namely knowledge, experience, action, and a certain way of dealing with materiality. With regard to these dimensions the religious may be characterized by the focus on, and meaningful interpretation of, contingency, the duplication of reality (foremost by distinguishing between transcendence and immanence; cf. Luhmann 2000, p. 58–64), which includes: – a comprehensive and – by trend – all-encompassing, but not necessarily exclusive interpretation, – furthermore “[…] powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations […]” (Geertz 1966, p. 8), as well as, – “strong evaluations” (Taylor 1989, p. 4) to form a social identity and to guide ritual and ethical actions, – and, last but not least, an auratization of material objects and bodies as well as certain events and spaces. In principle, the four dimensions interact with one another, but in a certain case one dimension might be stressed; e.g., the significance of faith as a specific articulation of the cognitive dimension and the relevance of religious rituals as an expression of the action oriented dimension strongly vary in the history of religions over time and space. The significance of religion should not be reduced to religious convictions, to emotional aspects, or to ritual, and respectively to ethical actions. A third argument against seeing secularization and the return of religion as fundamental alternatives I would like to mention is that the presumed return of religion follows, in part, from the secularization thesis, i.e. in the form of its de-

4 See also his contribution in this volume.

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nial, and partly from a new interest in religious matters. I do not want to deny revival tendencies. However, we must be careful not to claim that there is a return of religion now, as a consequence of exaggerated assumptions made about a former decline of religion. Fourthly, in order to examine the relevance of religion in modern or modernizing societies, it is important to distinguish between the micro-level of people, the meso-level of intermediary institutions and organizations, and the societal macro-level.

3 Empirical Findings and their Interpretation After these initial conceptual considerations, I would like to turn to the interpretation of some empirical findings. The data selection might seem a bit arbitrary. However, I have tried to consider data from various countries and surveys for systematic reasons in line with my conceptual considerations.

3.1 The Religious Situation on a Global Scale I will start with the religious situation on a global scale. Figure 1 shows a selection of countries reflecting the degrees of modernization achieved5; as an indicator I use the Human Development Index listed on the vertical axis. The percentage of the agreement to the item that religion is very or at least rather important in life may be seen on the horizontal axis. The distribution clearly shows that religious convictions are in high gear especially in less developed countries (Pearson’s correlation coefficient = –.607**). However, the often claimed incompatibility between religion and modern society cannot be upheld. As has long been known, countries like the USA, Ireland, Poland, Canada, Italy, and Singapore, show that a high degree of modernization is compatible with a comparatively high degree of religiosity. Figure 2 shows some of the already mentioned countries in a different arrangement. The horizontal axis relates to the question of belief in God, and the vertical axis to the percentage of those who answered “yes” when asked whether they find well-being and strength through religion – the findings on

5 All figures and tables, as well as the respective empirical analyses in this article, are based on the author’s own findings.

Fig. 1: Religiosity at a Global Scale. Source of data: World Values Survey, 5th wave (2005–2008).

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Fig. 2: Degree of religiosity in dominant religions. Source of data: World Values Survey, 5th wave (2005–2008).

20 Volkhard Krech

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both questions were again taken from different waves of the World Value Survey. In addition, I have named the countries according to each of their dominating religions. On the top right corner, where belief in God and strength derived from religion are strongest, it is apparent – with the exception of India – that exclusively countries dominated by Muslims, Roman Catholics, as well as independent Christian churches and denominations are represented. These findings support my argument that aside from the nation state, the characteristics of specific religious traditions also have an influence on the degree of religiosity. Having drawn attention to the dominating religion in different countries, we must also take religious diversity into account. On the world map shown in figure 3 different degrees of religious diversity are represented6. The darker the color, the higher the degree of religious diversity. We do not yet know very much about the impact of religious diversity on religious convictions and practice, but we must at least be aware of the fact that there are no monolithic blocks such as “Christianity”, “Islam”, “Judaism”, “Buddhism”, “Hinduism”, and so forth, but that religious traditions develop in mutual dependence, and that those entities are internally differentiated.

3.2 The Relevance of Religion at the Micro-, Meso-, and Macro-levels My second point regarding empirical findings concerns the relevance of religion at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. For reasons of availability of data, I will restrict myself to empirical data from Germany during the 20th century.

3.2.1 Micro-level: Personal Religiosity I will start with personal religiosity at the micro-level and use two indicators, namely membership of a religious organization as an element of social identity, and the degree of individual religiosity independent of membership. Figure 4 shows religious affiliation to the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches during the “Kaiserreich” (German Empire), the “Weimarer Republik” (Weimar Republic), the “Drittes Reich” (Third Reich), and in the reunited Ger-

6 The measurement is based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index that is also used to measure cultural and ethnic diversity.

Fig. 3: Religious Diversity at a Global Scale. Source of data: The World Factbook 2009; World Religion Database (2005).

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Fig. 4: Religious Affiliation in the “Kaiserreich” (German Empire), the “Weimarer Republik” (Weimar Republic), the “Drittes Reich” (Third Reich) 1871–1945, and the Reunited Germany 1990–2002. Source of data: Church Statistics (own analysis).

many until 2002. The two major German churches combined show no significant change in their number of members until 1910. From then on the number of members drops until 1940. From 1910 until 1925, the Catholic Church loses members while the Protestant Church gains more members. This changes between 1925 and 1939. The biggest difference concerning membership in the two major German churches arose between 1945 and 2002, which is hardly surprising. It is well known that Protestantism in the German Democratic Republic lost many, if not most of its members due to socialism along with state-decreed atheism. The Roman Catholic Church was not as severely affected during this period. A com-

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Fig. 5: Religious Affiliation in East Germany 1946/1991/2002. Source of data: Religionswissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst (2010).

Fig. 6: Religious Affiliation in West Germany 1900–2002. Source of data: Religionswissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst (2010).

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Fig. 7: Religious Diversity in Germany (2009). Source of data: Religionswissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst (2010).

parison of membership at specific moments in time (figure 5) illustrates this quite clearly. The statistics of church membership in figure 6 show that the two major churches in the Federal Republic of Germany experience no significant change in membership from the end of WWII to the 1960s. When one church loses members, the other gains members. With the end of the 1960s the situation changes. At first, it is only the Protestant Church that loses members drastically. In the beginning of the 1990s this also happens to the Roman Catholic Church. Still, who are the “others” mentioned in figure 6? With regard to religious diversity, about 10 % of the German population belong to religious organizations other than the two major Christian churches (figure 7 shows the respective distribution). Islam is the third largest religion after the two major Christian churches.

3.2.2 Religious Convictions However, religiosity does not have to be restricted to an adherence to a religious organization. In contrast, affiliation to a religious community does not necessarily say something about religiosity, since adherence might have various reasons. Thus, religious convictions have to be taken into account apart from affili-

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ation. This consideration is also reflected in various theoretical and empirical approaches to religion. Especially since Thomas Luckmann (1967) coined the term “invisible religion” in the 1960s – and from a theological point of view even as early as Friedrich Schleiermacher around 1800 – the individual and deinstitutionalized forms of religiosity have come under scrutiny (Davie 2008). Sociologists discuss the question of whether the paradigm of individualization should replace the idea of secularization (Pollack/Pickel 1999; Wohlrab-Sahr/Krüggeler 2000; Pollack 1996). So it is participation and affiliation as indicators for religiosity that have to be complemented by other indicators. One of these can be the personal attitude towards questions or problems arising from religion.7 As a first indicator, I would like to refer to the question of how many people deem themselves religious. A sociological survey from 2002 presents the following data: Valid percent not religious -1-

22,6 %

-2-

8,6 %

-3-

7,8 %

-4-

4,0 %

-5-

9,5 %

rather not religious

52,50 %

-6-

8,3 %

-7-

11,1 %

-8-

11,7 %

-9-

6,9 %

religious -10-

9,5 %

rather religious

47,50 %

Fig. 8: Religious Self-assessment. Source of data: Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaft 2002 (ALLBUS).

According to the data shown in figure 8, 47.5 % of the German population think of themselves as fairly religious, 52.5 % as not really religious. According to the

7 The problem is that the empirical material has been available only since the 1960s and 1970s.

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Fig. 9: Importance of Church and Religion Between 1980 and 2000 (Rounded). Source of data: Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaft 2002 (ALLBUS).

studies on changes in values conducted by Ronald Inglehart, this figure has been a little higher in Western democracies over the last 20 years, namely 55 % (Inglehart/Minkenberg 2000, p. 136ff.). However, this gives rise to the question of what such an indicator actually measures: is this really the attitude towards religion or

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does this have more to do with the expectations linked to orthopraxy? For this reason I will use the question of the importance of church and religion as a second indicator. As was to be expected, there are large differences between the East and West German population, as figure 9 shows. While 40 % of the people in the Western parts of Germany regard religion and church as important, only 18 % of East Germans think likewise. Processes of religious socialization have been largely abandoned here – and for a long time already. What I want to focus on is the fact that the numbers, and accordingly the attitude towards the church, have been roughly the same for the last 20 years in Western Germany. Though these numbers give a rather undisputed insight into the attitude towards religion and church, one has to ask what has been measured by the indicator named “general religiosity”. While formal membership is probably too rough an indicator, measuring general religiosity is not specific enough. Therefore I would suggest taking concrete questions and statements of belief into account: Q.16 Please indicate which statement below comes closest to expressing what you believe about God

West 1991

1998 2008

1991

1998 2008

I don’t believe in God

10 %

12 %

10 %

49 %

54 %

53 %

I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out

10 %

12 %

12 %

14 %

12 %

13 %

I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind

22 %

24 %

18 %

10 %

11 %

10 %

9%

11 %

12 %

9%

8%

8%

While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God

21 %

18 %

21 %

9%

6%

8%

I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it

27 %

23 %

27 %

9%

9%

8%

I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others

East

Fig. 10: Religious Convictions in West and East Germany 1991–2008 (Rounded figures). Source of data: ISSP 1991, 1998, 2008 (Germany).

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According to the data from the International Social Survey Programme (2008), about 78 % of the West German and approximately 34 % of the East German population share – at least temporarily – religious convictions (see figure 10). Around 55 % of Germans have theistic or non-theistic beliefs, and roughly a third seem to switch between belief and doubt. These figures have not varied in any substantial way over the last 20 years.

3.2.3 Meso-level: Significance of Organized Religion Theological church statistics of the 19th century already used participation in Sunday service and communion as the most important indicator of “true religiosity”. I will now refer to communion statistics to exemplify participation in church life – not for theological reasons or consideration of church politics but rather for sociological reasons: as Lucian Hölscher mentions in his Datenatlas (2001), participation in communion is an indicator for genuine religious participation in church life, in contrast to participation at baptisms or funerals, which may simply be motivated by conventional thinking. The communion statistics for the Protestant Church in Germany show the following results (see figure 11):

Fig. 11: Communion Statistics for the Protestant Church in Germany (1910–2001). Source of data: Bureau for Statistics of the Protestant Church in Germany.

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Between 1910 and 1945, participation in communion rapidly declined. In the 1960s it leveled out at about 25 %. In the 1980s attendance suddenly increased dramatically and leveled out until today. A possible reason for this increase is a strong interest in ritual performances in addition to rites of passage. Rituals are obviously not only to be celebrated traditionally, but with a concentration on the religious dimension. The large numbers for Eastern Germany strengthen the hypothesis that the church in Eastern Germany is more dependent on its members’ declaration of belief and religious interaction than is the church in Western Germany. Secularization appears in a different light once qualitative aspects like religious actions are taken into account in addition to statistics on church membership.

3.2.4 Macro-level: Relevance of Religion in the Public Sphere In a further step I would like to deal with the societal virulence of religion beyond the personal and organizational dimensions. When taking a closer look at the societal public, it becomes quite clear that secularization is born from modern society, beyond, and maybe even independent of, empirical evidence. Anyway, the discussion concerning “secularization” itself – and that is the point I want to make – becomes an empirical fact. The history of the idea of secularization shows that – except for the legal term “secularization” – the notion of secularization stems from theology, from within the religious sphere. The world conference on mission in Stockholm in 1928 dealt with the topic of “the fight against secularization”. Parallel to church building and the organization of mass-religiosity, Protestantism developed an idea of religious practice during the 19th century, which is based on authenticity, faith and emphasis, in light of which actual religious practice could only be seen as deficient. From within the religious field, the idea of secularization was used as a societal stimulus for religion within the public, and from thereon became an analytical term in the social sciences beginning in the 1950s. This transfer from the religious sphere, via the public, to the social sciences led to a rapid increase in the production of books concerning the idea of secularization, as figure 12 shows. Even if one does not go deeper into the content of the books produced, the sheer number of books on the subject of secularization can be used as an indicator of secularization being in greater and greater demand during the course of the 20th century. After a slow start at the beginning of the century, the curve rises rapidly from the beginning of the 1950s until today. The responsibility for this development lies with the supporters and with the critics of the idea of secularization at the same time.

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Fig. 12: German Book Titles Containing “säkular”, “Säkularisation”, or “Säkularisierung” 1900–2003. Source of data: Gemeinsamer Verbundkatalog GBV, search criteria: “säkular”, “Säkularisation”, and “Säkularisierung” (April 2004).

In a second step I want to compare the numbers of church exits with the course of the statistic on literature concerning secularization. The comparison in figure 13 shows that literature on secularization booms just before waves of church exits. This proves valid for the beginning of the century, at which time secularization literature was in demand, while the first large wave of church exits began in 1918. After the end of World War II, secularization literature was being produced in ever increasing numbers beginning in the 1950s. The corresponding wave of church exits started at the end of the 1960s. If taken with a grain of salt, one could propose the idea that from then on secularization literature and church exits increase in proportional progression. I do not want to construct a singular and thus simple causal relationship between these two indicators; but they do tend to inspire the idea that the history of the concept of secularization and its scholarly reflection stimulated church exits in addition to social and religious factors, and vice versa. In addition to literature on secularization, I have recorded the number of books on religious topics in comparison with the book production in general. The top curve in figure 14 shows the entire book production in Germany. The middle curve shows the production of scholarly literature on religion and the lower one, which rises disproportionally, shows the number of popular, nonacademic literature on religion. While church membership has been in decline since the 1990s, the production of popular religious books is increasing. The

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Fig. 13: Secularization Literature and Church Exits in Germany 1900–2000. Logarithmic scale; Sources of data: Gemeinsamer Verbundkatalog GBV, search criteria: “säkular”, “Säkularisation”, and “Säkularisierung” (April 2004); Bureau for Statistics of the Protestant Church in Germany: church exit data.

“Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung” (GfK Group) diagnosed a growth rate for the esoteric book market of 20 %. In 1998, the volume of sales in this sector exceeded 100 million Deutsche Marks. If one tries to understand these facts as a growing interest in religious topics, one could easily argue that organized religion changes into “vagrant” or “vicarious religion” – in accordance with Ernst Troeltsch (1912), Thomas Nipperdey (1994), and Grace Davie (2008). Again, I do not want to state that there is a singular and direct connection between the above-mentioned topics and facts, but I just want to point out in which way indicators for societal virulence of religion can be built. The “vagrant religion” is an indicator for the growing interest in religious matters via media. However, it might not be considered religious communication, but rather as communication on religious topics. Thus, the data does not necessarily support the assumption of a religious revival, but at least is an indicator of the growing interest in religious matters.

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Fig. 14: Scientific and Popular Literature on Religion in Relation to the Entire Book Production in Germany 1991–2002. Logarithmic scale; Sources of data: Gemeinsamer Verbundkatalog GBV: “Scientific Literature on Religion”, search criteria: “säkular”, “Säkularisation”, and “Säkularisierung” (April 2004); Amazon: “Popular Literature on Religion”; Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen (1992–2003): “Entire Book Production”.

3.3 Fundamentalism I will now turn to a topic that has been the subject of much debate, namely fundamentalism. However, this term represents a rather chatoyant concept and is used in religious, political, and scientific discourses with very different connotations. I would suggest distinguishing between religious fundamentalism – defined as a holistic and dualistic religious attitude, and characterized mainly by exclusive adherence to a particular religious orientation, on the one hand; and political fundamentalism influenced by religious elements on the other.

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3.4 Religious Fundamentalism

Model 1 -.07 -.01 -.08 -.40 Adjusted R2 = .33

.22

Model 2 .03 -.03 -.08 -.26 Adjusted R2 = .51

.09

-.03

Buddhist

Hindu

Muslim

Jewish

Christian

Individual religious factors

Religious centrality

Ecological religious factor

Religious diversity

Gini coefficient

Ecological nonreligious factors

HDI

Education

Gender

Age

Individual nonreligious factors

.41 .10 .08 .27 .03 .04

Fig. 15: Regression Analysis of Factors Influencing Religious Fundamentalism. Source of data: Bertelsmann Religion Monitor 2007.

According to a regression analysis of data from the Bertelsmann Religion Monitor (see figure 15 which covers surveys in 21 countries all over the world), individual and ecological exogenous factors explain religious fundamentalism to a large degree, namely 33 % of the variance. One might get the impression that religious fundamentalism tends to function as a way of compensating for economic and political disadvantages. Among the religious factors, which are behind almost another 20 % of the variance, centrality of religion for individuals (in the sense of Stefan Huber’s [2003] concept of centrality) is the most significant one, followed by adherence to a monotheistic religion. Religious diversity does not seem to have a strong influence on religious fundamentalism.

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3.5 Political Fundamentalism Influenced by Religious Elements Although different from genuine religious fundamentalism, political fundamentalism may be influenced by religious attitudes. If this is the case, it does, however, remain distinct from genuine religious fundamentalism, because it still belongs to the political sphere or is an expression of a political religion, which can be described as a mixture of politics and religion. To find out more about the relationship between religious and political views, I have created and calculated an index for political religiosity and for national identity, respectively. The index for political religiosity is based on the respondent’s level of agreement with one of the two questions asked in the World Value Survey – “it is better for the country if more people with a strong faith take up public office” (5-point scale) and “politicians who do not believe in God are not suitable for public office” (5-point scale). The index for national identity is based on the combination of the primary attachment of the respondent to the respective country (against local, regional, or transnational belongings), and a pronounced sense of national pride. In order to identify national specificities, I have applied both indices to some countries already listed (see figure 16). Political religiosity and national identity are particularly pronounced in Egypt and Pakistan, followed by Nigeria, Iraq, Tanzania, Algeria, South Africa, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. Turkey, the USA and Albania are at the lower edge of the upper right-hand field. Countries like India, Canada, Poland, Ireland and Vietnam do show a high degree of national identity, but have a relatively weak level of political religiosity. Admittedly, to analyze the findings in more depth one would need comprehensive, individual country studies. Nonetheless, I would like to give some ideas for analysis and interpretation using selected countries whose religious situation is marked by the large influence of independent Christian churches and movements, or that are predominately Roman Catholic or Muslim. As outlined above, general religiosity is very pronounced in these segments of the religious field. I intend to put this finding to the test and gain more detailed insight by using selected countries; these are: – Zimbabwe, with a high percentage of Pentecostal/Charismatic movements and followers of indigenous religions, – the USA, whose religious situation is also marked by the strong influence of independent Christian churches and movements, – Poland, which is very Roman Catholic, – Argentina, whose religious situation is also characterized by the strong influence of Roman Catholicism, – Nigeria, where Christian denominations face strong Muslim portions of society

Fig. 16: Political Religion and National Identity. Source of data: World Value Service 1st–5th wave.

36 Volkhard Krech

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– –

37

Egypt, shaped by a majority of Sunni Muslims, and Iraq, where the majority of the population are Shi’ite.

For each country, I have carried out cluster analyses (k-means) with the indices already introduced on general religiosity, national identity and political religiosity. In addition, I have also taken into account an at least moderately approving attitude towards a democratic form of governance (“A democratic political system is 1) very good, 2) fairly good, 3) fairly bad, 4) very bad for governing this country” [World Value Service 1st–5th wave]). As there is largely a high level of general religiosity in the selected countries, this usually appears as a constant variable in the cluster analyses. Generally constant variables are excluded from cluster analyses which serve the purpose of data reduction. However, in this case, and in line with the question I am researching, the variables allow different patterns of attitudes towards the relationship between religion and politics in situations of pronounced general religiosity to be identified.

3.5.1 Zimbabwe The religious situation in Zimbabwe8 is as follows: Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation) Independent Christians Ethnoreligionists Protestants Roman Catholics Unaffiliated Christians Anglicans Muslims Baha’is Hindus Jews

% (rounded off) 43 29 17 10 8 2.5 1.0 0.3 0.2 0.1

Fig. 17: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Zimbabwe. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

8 I compiled these and the subsequent (Fig. 17 to Fig. 30) statistics on religion for the countries selected from the World Factbook (2005) and the World Christian Database (2005); the tables show rounded off figures, and generally only take into account larger religious communities and movements.

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A look at the distribution (by percentage) of the religious communities in Zimbabwe shows that the largest group, with 43 %, are the Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic movements, followed by 29 % for the followers of ethnoreligions, 17 % Protestants and 10 % Roman Catholics. With these figures, one must bear in mind that double affiliation is possible. Followers of Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic movements usually show an especially pronounced general and political religiosity. Cluster 1

2

3

64 %

8%

28 %

General religiosity

.92

.89

.69

Political religiosity

1.00

.79

.00

National identity

1.00

.00

.94

.82

.81

.70

Positive attitude towards democracy

Fig. 18: Country-wave-study-set-year = Zimbabwe [2001]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

The cluster analysis shows that – with a more or less equally pronounced, relatively positive attitude towards a democratic system of government – 64 % of the population combine pronounced general religiosity with a high degree of national identity and are, at the same time, in favor of political religiosity. Eight percent have a relatively high level of general religiosity as well as a relatively high level of political religiosity, but do not identify with their country. This may be due to their expectation of their government to adopt a greater religious slant in their policies. Twenty-eight percent of the population show less pronounced general religiosity and a high level of national identity, but are not in favor of a closely institutionalized relationship between religion and politics.

3.5.2 USA The second example I would like to give regarding the influence of independent Christian churches is the situation in the USA.

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Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation)

39

% (rounded off)

Independent Christians Roman Catholics Protestants Unaffiliated Christians Nonreligious Marginal Christians Orthodox Jews Muslims Buddhists Anglicans Hindus Neoreligionists Ethnoreligionists

24 23 20 16 11 4 2 2 2 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5

Fig. 19: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in the USA. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

Forty-four percent of Americans are part of the mainstream Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal/Charismatic or independent Christian spectrum. Roman Catholics and Protestants each account for around a fifth. Regarding these figures, one must bear in mind that many Americans count themselves as part of the independent spectrum as well as of one of the two major Christian churches. Around 14 % of the population belong to other religious communities and religious movements; only the larger of these are listed in the statistics. Cluster 1

2

3

6%

24 %

70 %

General religiosity

.69

.00

1.00

Political religiosity

.08

.29

.73

National identity

.42

.98

.98

Positive attitude towards democracy

.39

.87

.89

Fig. 20: Country-wave-study-set-year = United States [1999]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

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Six percent of Americans do not combine a relatively high religiosity with a political religiosity, and identify moderately with their country, but are also more skeptical towards a democratic form of government. Twenty-four percent are not generally religious and have a low level of political religiosity, but a high level of national identity and a positive attitude towards democracy on the other hand. Seventy percent of Americans have both a very high level of religiosity and are strongly in favor of a close institutional relationship between religion and politics under democratic conditions, and identify strongly with their nation.9

3.5.3 Poland The religious situation in Poland is as follows: Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation) Roman Catholics Nonreligious Unaffiliated Christians Orthodox Marginal Christians Independent Christians Protestants

% (rounded off) 92 3 3 1.5 0.5 0.5 0.5

Fig. 21: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Poland. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

9 As the figures are from 1999, it would be advisable to verify, using more recent data, whether the attitudes of the American population have changed since the events of September 11, 2001, with regard to political religiosity. To date, however, no more recent data comparable to the World Value Survey is available from which the same indices could be compiled.

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With a figure of 92 %, the vast majority of Poles consider themselves Roman Catholic. Around 6 % belong to other Christian churches and movements. Cluster 1

2

3

40 %

9%

51 %

General religiosity

.96

.02

.63

Political religiosity

.73

.12

.00

National identity

.98

.71

.97

Positive attitude towards democracy

.49

.20

1.00

Fig. 22: Country-wave-study-set-year = Poland [1999]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

For Poland the cluster analysis reveals the following pattern: 40 % combine a very high level of general and political religiosity, feel very close ties to their nation, but have only a moderately positive attitude towards a democratic form of government. For 9 % of the Polish population, religion has no significance for, or effect on, their own lives, and there is scarcely any political religiosity. There is, however, a high degree of national identity, while democracy tends to be rejected. This may be the influence of the Communist Party of Poland coming through here. So the trend of rejecting a democratic form of government is not due specifically to religious reasons. There is, however, a certain skepticism, which can surely be considered as having something to do with religion.

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3.5.4 Argentina In the case of Argentina – a country also marked by Roman Catholicism – the situation can be described as follows: Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation)

% (rounded off)

Roman Catholics Protestants Independent Christians Nonreligious Marginal Christians Muslims Atheists Unaffiliated Christians Jews

90 7 7 3 2 2 1 1 1

Fig. 23: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Argentina. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

Just like in Poland, with a figure of 90 % the vast majority of Argentinians are Roman Catholics. Members of other Christian denominations and movements account for around 17 %, although, here again, double affiliation must be kept in mind. Beyond this, Muslims account for 2 % and Jews for 1 % of those living in Argentina. Cluster 1

2

3

28 %

37 %

35 %

General religiosity

1.00

.00

1.00

Political religiosity

.00

.26

1.00

National identity

.87

.83

.93

Positive attitude towards democracy

.81

.88

.84

Fig. 24: Country-wave-study-set-year = Argentina [1999]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

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As the cluster analysis shows, in the case of Argentina three attitude patterns towards the relationship between religion and politics are, first of all, clearly different from one another, and, secondly, relatively evenly distributed. The positive attitude towards a democratic form of government overall and a strong national identity is matched, in 28 % of the population, by a very high level of general religiosity, although without any political religiosity. Thirty-seven percent are not religious and are only slightly in favor of political religiosity. Thirty-five percent of the Argentinian population, on the other hand, show a very high level of general and political religiosity at the same time.

3.5.5 Nigeria The religious situation in Nigeria is as follows: Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation) Muslims Independent Christians Protestants Roman Catholics Anglicans Ethnoreligionists Marginal Christians

% (rounded off) 44 17 15 13 13 10 1

Fig. 25: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Nigeria. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

Forty-four percent of the Nigerian population are Muslims, with the vast majority being Sunnis. Around 18 % belong to the Evangelical, Pentecostal/Charismatic or independent Christian spectrum. Mainstream Protestants account for 15 %, Roman Catholics and Anglicans for 13 % each. Followers of ethnoreligions make up 10 %. With these figures, however, it is important to bear in mind that many Nigerians count themselves as both part of the independent church spectrum or ethnoreligions, as well as of one of the two major Christian churches.

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Cluster 1

2

3

85 %

7%

8%

General religiosity

.98

.90

.95

Political religiosity

1.00

.00

1.00

National identity

1.00

.87

.00

.94

.95

.88

Positive attitude towards democracy

Fig. 26: Country-wave-study-set-year = Nigeria [2000]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

According to the cluster analysis, 85 % of the inhabitants of Nigeria combine pronounced general religiosity with the desire for religion to have an influence on politics. They feel very close to their nation and are in favor of a democratic form of government. This finding is remarkable in the sense that the conflicts in Nigeria are partly based on religion. However, the vast majority of Nigerians believe that the conflicts should be resolved under democratic conditions. Seven percent have a high level of religiosity, which is not politically influenced, as well as a pronounced national identity, and are in favor of democracy. Eight percent of Nigerians combine a high level of general, and a very high level of political religiosity, yet do not feel close to their nation, but are supportive of democracy. Perhaps in this case there is no sense of national identity because the respondents in this group believe that politics are not defined enough by religious beliefs, or because the nation is religiously divided.

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3.5.6 Egypt In the case of Egypt, the religious situation is as follows: Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation)

% (rounded off)

Sunni Shi’ite Oriental Orthodox Protestant Roman Catholic Independent Christians

84 1 13 0.7 0.4 0.2

Fig. 27: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Egypt. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

The vast majority of the Egyptian population are Sunnis, 1 % Shi’ites, 13 % belong to the Oriental Orthodox Churches and a little over 1 % to other Christian denominations. Cluster 1

2

3

92 %

1%

7%

General religiosity

1.00

1.00

.99

Political religiosity

1.00

.00

1.00

.99

.97

.98

1.00

.90

.00

National identity Positive attitude towards democracy

Fig. 28: Country-wave-study-set-year = Egypt [2000]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

The cluster analyses show that 92 % of Egyptians combine pronounced general religiosity with a very high level of political religiosity and national identity, and at the same time are extremely positive towards a democratic form of government. One percent of Egyptians combine pronounced general religiosity with a very high degree of national identity, but do not demonstrate a political religiosity. Seven percent of Egyptians, on the other hand, have a very high level of gen-

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eral and political religiosity and identify with their country, whilst rejecting democracy. This, alongside other factors, is a religiously based potential risk to the development of democracy in Egypt.

3.5.7 Iraq The final example I wish to cite is the situation in Iraq. Religious affiliation 2005 (incl. double affiliation)

% (rounded off)

Shi’ite Sunni Roman Catholic Unaffiliated Christians

65 35 1 0.5

Fig. 29: Breakdown of the Religious Communities in Iraq. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

The religious situation here is characterized by 65 % Shi’ites, 35 % Sunnis, 1 % Roman Catholics, as well as a host of religious communities not included here because of their marginal nature. Cluster 1

2

3

5%

4%

91 %

General religiosity

.43

.62

.97

Political religiosity

.14

.25

.94

National identity

.22

1.00

.97

Positive attitude towards democracy

.89

.00

.80

Fig. 30: Country-wave-study-set-year = Iraq [2004]. Sources of data: World Factbook (2005); World Christian Database (2005).

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The cluster analysis reveals that 5 % of Iraqis moderately combine general religiosity with weak political religiosity and national identity, but at the same time are positively inclined towards a democratic form of government. Four percent of Iraqis are, generally speaking, somewhat religious, have a pronounced sense of national pride, but reject democracy. The rejection of a democratic form of government is not due to religion in this case. Ninety-one percent of Iraqis combine a very high level of general and political religiosity with a high level of identification with their nation, and are in favor of democracy. The differences that exist in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi’ites should therefore be resolved under democratic conditions according to this attitude pattern. This finding, however, contradicts the fact that around one in five Iraqis firmly agrees with the statement that a truly Islamic country should not have a parliament with the right to pass laws. Of course, in the case of Iraq, geopolitical factors play an important role. The data I have used were collated in 2004, hence under the direct impression of the Iraq War. Still, to enter into this in detail would go far beyond what is possible in this article.

3.6 Religion as a Strong Identity Marker Another point with at least political implications is the fact that religion may become a strong identity marker. As far as we know from various studies on the connection between migration and religion, and as a survey on the religious situation in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) shows, religion is an important factor of identity and of the way many people with migration backgrounds lead their lives. A total of about 43 % of all migrants and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe are involved in religious organizations. That is more than twice as many as in the Protestant and Catholic Churches. As church membership studies show, here 15–20 % at most belong to the inner circle of members (cf. Hero/Krech/Zander 2008). However, these findings do not necessarily indicate a high degree of religiosity. The identity of migrants might be marked by religion due to social and cultural conflicts. Generally speaking, religion may become a strong identity marker and dominate other identity factors when labeling one’s self and others at certain stages of local, regional, national, and global social and cultural conflicts. Other examples of this assumption are the conflict in Palestine, and the differences between Hindus and Muslims in India. For the latter case, the anthropologist Julia Eckert (2004) has shown that Hindu nationalists in particular refer to religious elements when a political solution is at hand. In this case, defining the conflict as a religious one weakens the possibilities to negotiate the conflict, which would strengthen the Hindu nationalist organizations.

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4 Conceptual Conclusions I will now come to my conclusions and further conceptual considerations. Firstly, as the example of Germany during the 20th century shows, the quantitative significance of religion differs on the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. While church membership declines, there is convincing evidence to support the assumption that self-referential religious communication (indicator: communion) is becoming more clearly contoured. General religiosity can be ascribed to about 55 % of the population (according to ALLBUS 2002 and ISSP 2008), a figure which has not changed over the last 20 years. In contrast, the interest in and communication on religion (indicator: sales of popular books on religious topics) have increased. Thus, in general there is neither just a decline nor a clear revival of religion in Germany. This is probably also true for other modern societies. Secondly, secularization may not only be understood as the loss of religion’s significance, but also as the specification of religion’s function and competence. The distinction from other societal spheres offers more freedom for recursive, self-referential religious communication. Thirdly, processes can be observed that are distinct from self-referential religious communication, and in which non-religious contexts (e.g., politics, economics, the arts, cultural identity) are enhanced with religious elements in order to provide them with an otherwise unavailable or inescapable aura. The aforementioned political fundamentalism influenced by religious elements and – in part – the use of religion as a strong identity marker in social and cultural conflicts (at a local, regional, and global level) are examples of this process, which might be called sacralization – from the sacralization of the self to the sacralization of certain issues, such as human rights or political attitudes, and all the way to the sacralization of the nation state. By “immanent sacralization” I mean a process through which non-religious communication reverts to religious meanings of its own accord, or generates them and thereby gives “profane” circumstances a religious aura. It must be distinguished from religious communication, as well as from communication on religion, and is, to a certain extent, somewhere between the two. In contrast to communication on religion, regarding sacralization processes we are dealing with a fusion of religious elements and other areas of communication. In contrast to religious communication – which is based on the distinction between immanence and transcendence and through this distinction duplicates all of reality – sacralization “auratizes” and renders unfamiliar something that at the same time remains the object of other forms of communication. It gives circumstances which are specific, because they have already been communicatively defined, a cloak of mystery and of unquestionable validity. It is a way of dealing with the contingency of circumstances, which, at the same time, remain in other

The Religious between Self-Referential Religious Communication …

49

patterns of contingency management. In this way, sacralized circumstances are set apart from others, which then appear as “profane”. Fourthly, with regard to the question of whether the social and societal significance of religion is declining, increasing, or remaining the same, it is necessary to empirically distinguish not only between the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels, but also between self-referential religious communication, sacralization, and communication on religious matters. The religious – as defined in my first considerations – may take two directions: it either leads to self-referential religious communication or attaches itself to other social and societal circumstances, especially to personal and social identity, to politics, and to the arts. Fifthly, communication on religion has to be distinguished from self-referential religious communication, as the debates on secularization or the revival of religion show. The analytic model of functional differentiation might help to explain the rise of the secularization concept as the attempt to express the formation of religion as a functional system within society. From this perspective, secularization describes the internal differentiation between diffuse and emphatic religiosity, as well as the outer distinction between a religious and a secular description of the world. As such, secularization is part of religion’s own positioning of itself inside a modern and functionally differentiated society. This perspective makes it quite clear that the religious and the secular are interdependent; the one cannot exist without the other. Taking this one step further, one could say that secularization is an ambivalent process with two directions: secularization, if looked at from the perspective of a modern – i.e. an emphatic – concept of religion, is interpreted as a process through which the importance and significance of religion in society diminishes. At the same time, secularization reinforces and strengthens religion’s position within society as it makes religion refocus on its specific function as a distinct societal sphere. Sixthly, as a result of sacralization processes and communication on religious topics, one might be left with the impression that religion and its place in modernity, as well as the contested distinction between the religious and the secular, are becoming a figure of reflection on modernity itself, even more so as the orthodox and orthopractic version of religion seems to be losing its relevance – at least in most of the Western societies.

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Bibliography Asad, Talal (1994): “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power”. In: Social Research 61. No. 1, p. 55–88. Asad, Talal (2003): Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Aubrey, Edwin E. (1954): Secularism a Myth: An Examination of the Current Attack on Secularism. New York: Harper. Berman, Morris (1981): The Reenchantment of the World. New York: Cornell University Press. Bruce, Steve (2002): God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (Ed.): Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen, 40.1992–51.2003. Frankfurt a.M.: MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH. Casanova, José (1994): Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comblin, Joseph (1981): “Säkularisierung: Mythen, Realitäten und Probleme” [1969]. Tr. by KarlHermann Bergner. In: Heinz-Horst Schrey (Ed.): Säkularisierung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, p. 312–323. Davie, Grace (2008): “From Believing without Belonging to Vicarious Religion: Understanding the Patterns of Religion in Modern Europe”. In: Detlef Pollack/Daniel V. A. Olson (Eds.): The Role of Religion in Modern Societies. New York: Routledge, p. 165–176. Eckert, Julia (2004): Partizipation und die Politik der Gewalt. Hindu-Nationalismus und Demokratie in Indien. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Eder, Klaus (2002): “Europäische Säkularisierung – ein Sonderweg in die postsäkulare Gesellschaft?” In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 12. No. 3, p. 331–343. Geertz, Clifford (1966): “Religion as a Cultural System”. In: Michael Banton (Ed.): Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. London: Tavistock Publications, p. 1–45. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm (2004): Die Wiederkehr der Götter. Religion in der modernen Kultur. München: C. H. Beck. Habermas, Jürgen (2002): “Glauben und Wissen”. In: Dialog – Zeitschrift für Interreligiöse und Interkulturelle Begegnung 1. No.1, p. 63–74. Heelas, Paul/Woodhead, Linda (2005): The Spiritual Revolution. Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Malden: Blackwell. Hero, Markus/Krech, Volkhard/Zander, Helmut (Eds.) (2008): Religiöse Vielfalt in NordrheinWestfalen. Empirische Befunde und Perspektiven der Globalisierung vor Ort. Paderborn: Schöningh. Hölscher, Lucian (1990): “Die Religion des Bürgers. Bürgerliche Frömmigkeit und protestantische Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert”. In: Historische Zeitschrift 250, p. 595–630. Hölscher, Lucian (Ed.) (2001): Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland. Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Huber, Stefan (2003): Zentralität und Inhalt: ein neues multidimensionales Messmodell der Religiosität. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Inglehart, Ronald/Minkenberg, Michael (2000): “Die Transformation religiöser Werte in entwickelten Industriegesellschaften”. In: Religion und Politik – zwischen Universalismus

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und Partikularismus. Vol. 2. Heinz-Dieter Meyer/Michael Minkenberg/Ilona Ostner (Eds.). Opladen: Leske + Budrich, p. 125–138. Isenberg, Wolfgang (Ed.) (2000): Konsum als Religion? Über die Wiederverzauberung der Welt. Mönchengladbach: Kühlen. Jaeschke, Walter (1976): Die Suche nach den eschatologischen Wurzeln der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine historische Kritik der Säkularisierungsthese. München: Kaiser. Jaeschke, Walter/Laeyendecker, Leo (1996): “Säkularisierung/Säkularismus”. In: Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon. Internationale theologische Enzyklopädie. Vol. 4. Erwin Fahlbusch et al. (Eds.). Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, p. 37–43. Jaeschke, Walter (2001): “Säkularisierung”. In: Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe. Vol. 5. Hubert Cancik/Burkhard Gladigow/Karl-Heinz Kohl (Eds.). Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: Kohlhammer, p. 9–20. Lehmann, Hartmut (Ed.) (1997): Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Luckmann, Thomas (1967): The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan. Luhmann, Niklas (2000): Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Lübbe, Hermann (1965): Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg i. Br., München: Alber. Martin, David (2005): On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. McLeod, Hugh (1999): “Comparing Secularisations: Germany and Britain”. In: Anselm DoeringManteuffel/Kurt Nowak (Eds.): Religionspolitik in Deutschland. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart. Martin Greschat zum 65. Geburtstag. Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: W. Kohlhammer, p. 177–192. Nipperdey, Thomas (1994): Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1918. Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist. Vol. 1. München: C. H. Beck. Pollack, Detlef (1996): “Individualisierung statt Säkularisierung? Zur Diskussion eines neueren Paradigmas in der Religionssoziologie”. In: Karl Gabriel (Ed.): Religiöse Individualisierung oder Säkularisierung: Biographie und Gruppe als Bezugspunkte moderner Religiösität. Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlags-Haus, p. 57–85. Pollack, Detlef/Pickel, Gert (1999): “Individualisierung und religiöser Wandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland”. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 28. No. 6, p. 465–483. Pollack, Detlef (2003): Säkularisierung – ein moderner Mythos? Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Riesebrodt, Martin (2007): Cultus und Heilsversprechen. Eine Theorie der Religionen. München: C. H. Beck. Ruh, Ulrich (1980): Säkularisierung als Interpretationskategorie. Zur Bedeutung des christlichen Erbes in der modernen Geistesgeschichte. Freiburg i. Br./Basel/Wien: Herder. Taylor, Charles (1989): Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The World Factbook 2005. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook 2009. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency. Troeltsch, Ernst (1912): Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika/Krüggeler, Michael (2000): “Strukturelle Individualisierung vs. autonome Menschen oder: Wie individualisiert ist Religion? Replik zu Pollack/Pickel:

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Individualisierung und religiöser Wandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland”. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 29. No. 3, p. 240–244. Zabel, Hermann (1968): “Verweltlichung/Säkularisierung. Zur Geschichte einer Interpretationskategorie.” PhD diss., Universität Münster.

Sources Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaft (ALLBUS) (2002): http://www.gesis.org/allbus/allbus-home Bertelsmann Religion Monitor (2007): http://www.religionsmonitor.com Bureau for Statistics of the Protestant Church in Germany International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) (2008): http://www.issp.org/ Religionswissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst (REMID): http://www.remid.de/ index.php?text=info_zahlen (accessed: April 20, 2010). World Christian Database: http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ World Religion Database: http://www.worldreligiondatabase.org World Values Survey: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org

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Pluralism, Liberalism and Constitutional Patriotism: A Normative Theory from the Indian Constitution1 1 Introduction The problematic that this paper2 seeks to address is what happens to the sense of belonging amongst citizens in constitutional democracies when the cultural hegemony provided by a shared imaginary of liberal values is put under pressure by the pluralisation of society. In the specific case of such countries as Germany and the United Kingdom, an argument has emerged in recent years that a social solidarity provided by a culturally specific political liberalism (with a long, gradual history in the United Kingdom, and a dramatically rapid, redemptive one in Germany, but both tethered to half a millennium of political philosophy) has been challenged by the immigration of groups without that shared history. Can there be any shared commitment to the same nation-state without the solidarity given by a common culture available, and only through historical memory? Has not the multicultural policy oriented at giving these new groups their own cultural space made the fragmentation of society worse? Of course, there are unpleasant and extreme versions of this anxiety, but it has been expressed in the political mainstream of these countries, as well. The response in this essay is deliberately focused on a narrow, yet generally held view of democratic nation-states and belonging: the view that a relatively stable polity with a democratic constitution based on the values of liberal individualism ought to have the loyalty of its citizens, whose belonging to it entitles them to its freedoms. There are many ways of querying this attitude, of course, from radical democracy with its insistence on the primacy of equality and cosmopolitanism, with its argument for a worldwide community of human beings, to authoritarian demands for loyalty to an economically efficient state, as well as to still-existing

1 This paper uses a substantial amount of material from another paper, with a somewhat different focus: Ram-Prasad (2012). 2 This paper, inasmuch as it is part of my thinking on issues of philosophy, religion, politics and Indian thought, is deeply influenced by the work of Bhikhu Parekh and conversations with him over the past two decades.

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Marxist ideals for a post-national, post-capitalist society; not to mention some varieties of theological calls for submission to the singular sovereignty of God. Addressing, then, a fairly standard view of the situation as one about how liberalism copes with pluralism in a constitutional democracy, I suggest that if there is to be a shared commitment to the nation-state on the part of both those who locate themselves in its cultural history and those who have become members of it more recently, then the constitutional dispensation must be effective in acknowledging pluralist requirements within a liberal framework. Such a perspective must offer a view of the citizen as an individual who is also given identity through collectives, a view I argue is found in the normative vision of the Indian Constitution; for, read as a philosophical document independently of its subsequent practice, it conceives of a liberal democratic state whose society has historically been deeply plural – so plural that there is no agreement at all on what the common historical memories of a national Indian civilization ought to be. If a constitutional dispensation (in whatever form, since constitutions vary a great deal in the Western societies in question) is such that political life is founded on individual liberty, but also invites plural senses of belonging, then it might be possible for loyalty to be encouraged towards the constitution from which such political life flows. As such, commitment to that constitution need not be a dry rationalisation of citizenship in the place of emotional bonds, as critics of constitutional patriotism have said; rather, commitment to the constitution would be loyalty to provisions and processes that would themselves show faith in the dignity and entitlement to freedom of all citizens. There would be no need to think that pluralism and liberalism were always in tension in a polity. (I mean, of course, only the need for a theory; how it would work out in practice is quite another matter, but one must start somewhere.)

2 Pluralism within Liberalism: Theory, Practice and European Experience3 Let us begin by stating relatively conventional, if highly abstract, understandings of the two concepts of “liberalism” and “pluralism”. By “liberalism”, I mean here

3 Of course, the literature on liberalism and pluralism is vast, with formidable contributions from a range of thinkers. For my purpose, my own tour d’horizon of the relationship between them suffices. But for a range of views, see Bellamy (1999), Brooks (2002), Crowder (2002), Kekes (1992) and Talisse (2004).

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the core commitment to individual liberty as the fundamental requirement of any political settlement. Individual liberty is based on an understanding that each human is an autonomous entity whose capacity to exercise agency, express selfhood, and seek ends is their own and not derived from others. Set within a democratic constitutional context in which there is formal equality for all such individuals, we have a general, if rather idealized description of the polity of most Western nation-states. This philosophical understanding of liberalism is usually traced back, through 19th and 20th century interpretations, to the Enlightenment’s novel exploration of the human individual as a rational human, capable of free thought and action, which, therefore, is to exist ideally in a political space where such freedom would be guaranteed. Of course, both the idea in itself and its genealogy are much more complex, as well as contested. (Of what does that freedom consist? What should constitute that political space? How is freedom practically guaranteed? What are the limits of freedom and what limits it? And so on.) Here, I only want to draw attention to two aspects of liberalism relevant to this essay: (i) it conceives of citizens of democratic polities as essentially autonomous individuals; and (ii) such a conception is understood as having developed through a particular historical experience, in Western Europe and North America, at least. By “pluralism” I mean, minimally, the co-occurrence of different, and at least at some level incommensurable and possibly conflicting values or value-sets; and even if they are not self-contained and systematically structured, these values can be seen as clustering around certain norms, sources of authority, patterns of conduct, interpretations of reality, modes of discursive self-representation, and the like. Within the more abstract, philosophical issue of value pluralism, we have the substantive fact of a plurality of cultures within some shared habitat. It could be said that the dialectic between liberalism and pluralism has been formulated, broadly, in two ways. The first, memorably going back to Isaiah Berlin, emerged in the troubled experience of early and mid-20th century Europe, and evolved in his work as a quest to understand the relationship between liberalism – a commitment to the liberty to exert agency in choosing values and permitting others to do likewise – and pluralism – a commitment to the existence of multiple values that need not be ranked or even be amenable to mutual evaluative comparison (therefore being incommensurable). This tradition has generated a rich literature about the abstract question of the universality of values, the possibility or desirability of absolute values, and the threat of incoherent relativism between values. The debate here is whether liberalism and pluralism are compatible in any way: does individual freedom, and the practices and guarantees that surround it, derive from or imply multiple, conflicting ways of living? The second form of the dialectic has been grounded in the actual experience of Western European and North American societies since the latter part of the 20th

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century, where liberal democratic polities have had to engage with various pluralising trends. Usually, this dialectic has taken the form of debates over policies of multiculturalism, and there are diverse groups within these societies that do not find their own set of values compatible with the liberal framework, but that also do not see the liberal democratic state as capable of providing them with the collective outcomes they seek. In other words, where the philosophical discussions about pluralism concern values in a moral sense, here we have pluralism broadly concerned as having cultural roots, be they derived from language, ethnicity, race, ancestral nations or – ever more importantly – religion. In the U.S. in particular, public debates over a plural society engage with cultural diversity, especially religion, ethnicity and race, as well as with moral pluralism. In Europe and Canada, by contrast, moral plurality does not prompt quite as much public agonism, while cultural diversity, in the form of immigration and Islam, does so very much. There is also the complex issue that, while some manifestations of cultural diversity like music and cuisine are relatively unproblematic in liberal societies, when cultural diversity is closely tied to larger values, including global conceptions of the good, then it becomes difficult to make easy distinctions between philosophical and practical conceptions of pluralism. This essay is concerned with the second form of the dialectic much more than the first, although, of course, they are conceptually related. When looking at the practical tensions between liberalism and pluralism, it often seems as if the more abstract or philosophical version is culturally circumscribed, in that the value of the pluralism in question seems to be founded in the cultural history of those discursively hegemonic countries that are called “Western”. This is not always the case: the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or between Quebecois and English-speaking Canadians surely have their origins entirely in the “Western” historical experience. It is true, however, that the challenge of what Charles Taylor calls “deep diversity” in places like Canada does indeed seem to concern groups outside the cultural history of the West: native tribes in Canada, both Aboriginal tribes and Asian immigrants in Australia, Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany, Maghrebi in France, or various immigrant groups in the United Kingdom. So, liberalism is both an evaluative reading of modern Western European history, and a theory of procedural negotiation of rights, duties and identities. It can accommodate a certain amount of pluralism or diversity, including that which is generated by religion, ethnicity and language. If we start from a general liberal commitment to individual autonomy within a democracy, certain sorts of diversity seem to be permitted for a liberal society worthy of its name. However, at a certain “depth” of plurality, liberalism finds itself challenged by pluralism. This is the situation in the pluralizing societies of the West, but perhaps especially in

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European countries that do not have a self-conception, as do such immigrant nations as the U.S., Canada or Australia, for the imperfections over who is included. (Of course, the challenges of identity politics are not limited to European countries, and the immigrant society of the U.S. was in fact the place where the whole debate on identity was first articulated as a problem for liberalism [Young 1990].) In European countries like Germany and the United Kingdom, the abstract dialectic quickly thickens into heated discussions over Muslims. There are various political positions regarding the supposed relationship between the values and consequent practices of liberalism in European countries on the one hand, and the values and consequent practices of plurality-making groups like Muslim communities on the other. They map somewhat uneasily onto the philosophical discussions we have considered above. Abstract views about the incompatibility of liberalism and pluralism do not have the bite of political arguments that also assert such incompatibility. From such a political perspective, it seems that there are countries with a particular history of hard-won freedoms based on the essential autonomy of the individual, with rights and duties centred on each citizen in and of herself, and freedoms guaranteed by constitutional democracy. Such a liberal conception is at once historically specific to the cultural achievement of Europeans, and also apparently universally applicable. Both in terms of a citizenship that extracts conformity to juridical requirements and in terms of the universality of the values expressed through those requirements, Muslims must, it is said, set aside their commitments to their own conception of the human, with its embeddedness in authoritative values, wherever those values are incommensurable with democratic liberalism. In such a perspective, of course, liberalism is interpreted in a very culturally particular – even ethnic – way.4 From the 1970s onwards, it came to be understood that ways had to be found of preserving the autonomous individual of classically conceived liberalism, even while accommodating pluralism – with the latter being conceived as the presence of collective identities that de-emphasized the autonomous individual and took evaluative readings of history from sources other than those of (“Western”) liberalism. So pluralizing societies in nation-states founded on a historical reading of liberalism were seen by the liberal elites to be facing the task of developing a normative political account and practice of common belonging that was not simply exclusivist or assimilationist. Now, if liberalism were to be interpreted as a broader and culturally unconditioned notion of liberty, the alleged inconsistency

4 On ethnic cores in liberal conceptions of nation (or “liberal nationalism”), see Abizadeh (2004).

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between democratic liberalism and the sort of value pluralism represented by most of the Muslim (and other diversity-forming) populations might not seem quite so compelling. This more liberal liberalism has partly informed the theory and practice of multiculturalism. For the purposes of this essay, I propose to understand the actual policy of multiculturalism as a process of assigning symbolic value and allocating public resources to groups based on collective (non“Western”) cultural norms (in a process penetratingly analyzed by Will Kymlicka)5 while preserving the political process as one concerning a public citizenry of autonomous individuals. This, I would argue, is precisely because of a paradox in European liberalism. A great deal of cultural pluralism, in its expressive forms – like music, cuisine, art, and the like – is seen as compatible with the dominant notion of liberal European society, where there is very little debate about value pluralism; but precisely because of this, where cultural minorities also express their identity through commitment to values outside of European liberalism, they find themselves challenged, rejected or pressured into conformity. Thus, liberalism that permits pluralism, so long as the latter is “purely” cultural, rejects it when cultural pluralism is seen to derive its self-expression from value pluralism; and this is so, because European liberalism has taken itself to be the culturally hegemonic form of European values. Seen in this way, multicultural policy seems to flow naturally from liberalism. The major political battle has been with entrenched conservatives, whose more restricted notion of cultural identity rejects cultural pluralisation in the first place, let alone resources for groups causing such pluralisation. In short, the pluralism that is seen as consistent with liberalism is largely one of non-political diversity of self-expression; if there was any perception of the deep value pluralism that might inform religious and other aspects of these groups, it has been either ignored, or seen as amenable to eventual dispersal through cultural freedom. Over the past forty years, the political sphere of liberal practice has not engaged with the value pluralism implied ultimately by burgeoning cultural diversity; it is a critique of this liberal limitation – within a broadly liberal framework – that has informed the work of such thinkers (in their different ways) as Bhikhu Parekh (2000; 2008) and Charles Taylor (1994; 1998). (Others have, of course, made even sharper claims about the incompatibility of liberalism with pluralism, like John Gray [2000].) This multicultural settlement, however, has not seen collective identities dissolve into the individualism required of liberal political processes. In other words, the expectation has not been met that newly arrived groups would assimi-

5 See Kymlicka (2007), part II, for a cogent summary of his formidable oeuvre.

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late into the host society in return for recognition of symbolic presence and collective cultural activities through resource allocation. Instead, the opposite has occurred: a greater divide has opened up between group identities and the hegemonic and normative requirement of liberal individualism. Collective identities have been reinforced either through the complex process of contesting and/or receiving group-oriented resources, or through estrangement from the settlement of resource allocation. In a system whose commitment to liberalism requires political activity to be founded upon the agency of autonomous individuals – which, indeed, takes democracy primarily to be about the freedom of individual choice – citizens whose self-conception is imbued with collective cultural influences have been given no other choice but to shed such influences. This is not a simple task in the moral psychology of political representation. Life experience, orientation towards sources of authority, the epistemic framework of judgements, even simple emotional bonds and impulses are all obviously culturally conditioned. Alienation appears to have been the result of the pressure on citizens from immigrant backgrounds to be separating the collective forms of self-expression, which a multicultural policy has allowed, from the individuality required normatively in political engagement. The well-worn commitment to the formal privatization of religion in modern Europe, coupled with the role religion (primarily Islam) has played in collective cultural identities, has combined to generate a sense in the dominant public discourse that pluralism should certainly be very restricted in a liberal polity. This is the context in which we find ourselves today, and which informs the discussions that shape most of the essays in this collection. It is clear that the cultural pluralisation of broadly liberal polities has raised questions about the relationship between liberalism and pluralism. While multiculturalist policies have constituted the liberal strategy of containing plurality in cultural diversity alone, they have had limited success. On the one hand, the liberal expectation that pluralism could be contained, and collective identities dissolved into liberalismas-dominant-Western-culture, appears misplaced. At the same time, citizens, for whom collective identities are significant in terms of self-expression, have found barriers to their hopes of influencing political life, because such life has been conceived as not negotiable in the dominant constitutional discourse of liberal democracies as normatively determined by liberal individualism. It seems appropriate to ask whether the very nature of political negotiation and constitutional provision should be re-imagined in the face of the historical trend towards pluralisation. To approach this task, I turn to the very different history of India and the constitutional philosophy that resulted from it, in order to ask how fundamentally liberal democratic provisions can nonetheless be understood within a context of deep pluralism in a national society.

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3 The Pluralist History of India and its Impact on the Nature of the Indian Constitution Unlike mid-century Britain or Germany, the framers of the Indian Constitution had no real alternative to dealing with a deeply plural polity. Although unified within those particular borders for the first time, India had had a diffuse but nonetheless recognisable civilizational existence for millennia. This existence was, from the beginning of recorded history, marked by a diversity of views about human reality, debates about authority, and relatively little concern for shifting political boundaries. In the longue durée view, the new nation-state was forming out of a land and people of extraordinary diversity. There were always syncretism and blurred boundaries between collective identities, whether marked by social status (importantly, caste), or religion (different Buddhist and Jain, but also sectarian Hindu groupings, and later, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism), language (there are over 850 dialects today), or political belonging (despite several unifying imperial formations, there were innumerable kingdoms and city-states). This history of pluralism was not one of competing essentialist identities, but rather a staggering variety of fungible senses of collective and individual self: Buddhist metaphysics might, over the course of centuries of philosophical dispute, also be adapted by Hindu philosophers; elaborately ritualised worship carried out by the high Brahmin caste of priests and intellectuals could include devotional poetry composed by saints at the other end of caste hierarchy; political confrontation between Hindu kings and Muslim generals could co-exist with the practice of Sufi shrines visited by both Hindus and Muslims. There was a contestation of, and engagement across, shared mental, ritual, cultural, social and political spaces. The combination of syncretism and contestation led to constantly re-formulated common epistemic systems – in texts, processes, and artefacts, whether in the Sanskrit language of classical Indian philosophy, or the elaboration of iconography in pre-Islamic traditions, or the development of cross-cultural architectural idioms in the pre-colonial period. That this had not changed by the time of India’s independence, was, indeed, only strengthened by modernity, which may be identified roughly as starting in the early 19th century, when British military, administrative and intellectual re-configuration of Indian territory slowly began to be internalised by Indian intellectuals striving to explain their situation in the light of the explanatory techniques of the Enlightenment. The 19th century, when the mercantile and intellectually lively activities of the East India Company were slowly replaced by a more racist and ideologically informed imperial strategy, saw Indian intellectuals receiving European conceptions of nation, ethnicity, and governmentality as markers of political identity.

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Previously, collective identities had been largely societal, with political identity mainly confined to ruling elites. With the notion of national identity as a marker of society, nationalism grew in late-colonial India as a distinctively modern conception of collective self-determination. Earlier notions of identity were subsumed – but by a society whose deep plurality was only emphasised by modern nationalism, as contestation shifted to debates about who collectively constituted a polity. The key to this shift was, of course, the Indian National Congress, originally started by a Scotsman sympathetic to Indian culture, gradually developing as a loyal and restrained group of highly educated men, and finally transforming, from the 1920s onwards, and under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, into a middle-class mobilisation of – for the first time in history – millions of people from all class backgrounds; but even this self-conscious political modernity was fundamentally pluralistic. The Congress itself contained intellectual multitudes, from religious reformers and liberals to rational modernists to bourgeois Hindu traditionalists; beyond Congress, there were highly conservative Hindus in the Hindu Maha Sabha; and various shades of non-Congress Muslim opinion were contained in the Muslim League. There were many other types of political organisations, like the Akali Dal/Panthik Akali that sought to protect the interests of Sikhs, and the Justice Party that campaigned for the social rights of marginalised castes in South India. Whereas, eventually with the partition of British India, Pakistan was formed out of one reading of nationalism – a polity conceived as the home of a supposedly homogenous Muslim people so that they would not be a permanent minority in a unified India – India was envisioned as a pluralistic polity, guided especially (despite their deep and fundamental differences) by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar. Although Gandhi played no part in the Constituent Assembly (his vision was too radical for constitutional processes), most of the significant intellectuals of that time ensured that the Indian Constitution that was designed between 1946–50 mediates between liberalism and pluralism. It articulates a parliamentary, federal democracy, with universal franchise. (It is worth noting that, as the Constituent Assembly began, Germany and Italy were facing life after authoritarian regimes; Spain, Portugal and Greece were a generation away from democracy; France and Switzerland had not enfranchised women; and Australia and the U.S. had racially discriminatory electoral systems; while Britain still had an empire in Africa in which “natives” had few rights, if any.) The Constitution enshrines fundamental civil rights and duties, but also allows for the protection of minorities and affirmative action for disadvantaged groups, which concerns collectives. In particular, the framers were keenly aware of the religious tensions that informed independent India’s historical pluralism, and sought to negotiate between minorities and majorities, individuals and

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groups. In short, as a deliberated outcome of normative political theory, the Indian Constitution should be seen as the effort of a nascent nation-state to grapple with a degree of diversity unmatched in a liberal democratic framework. This is the reasoning behind my suggestion that we look at the Indian Constitution in this way, as a philosophical document that might indicate how liberal societies respond constitutionally to the growth of plurality.

4 The Indian Constitution as a Philosophical Expression of Liberal Citizens in Plural Societies The Constituent Assembly and the Indian Constitution that resulted as a consequence therefore had to struggle with the historically deep pluralism of “India”: the epistemological fact of world-views developed from often radically different sources of authority and frameworks of debate and self-exploration. Such pluralism also fed directly into deep inequalities, many of them elaborately developed by powerful groups to preserve their actual socio-economic domination, but also to try and close off the narrative spaces of dissent on the part of marginalised groups, who usually had their own, alternative accounts of selfhood, in oral narratives, counter-cultural rituals, social practices, and the like. While the Constituent Assembly itself was the result of debate from a plurality of views, it sought to write a constitution that could do justice to that very plurality, as Rochana Bajpai (2011, chap. 2) has admirably recounted and analysed. The Indian Constitution sought to express both the fundamental individuality of Indian citizens as beings of equal worth and the fundamental collectivity of their many identities. The Constituent Assembly sought to draw up a document that was committed to principles of liberal nationalism, which are instantly recognisable today in the “Western” world. Nevertheless, it also strove to express the reality of complex and multi-layered collective identities, based on religion, ethnicity, language and social histories. It is this latter feature that is of concern for us here, as the discussion in this essay is set within the pragmatic framework of a liberal constitutional democracy. (The culturally multiple ways in which the Indian Constitution approaches aspects of the liberally conceived individual citizen is a matter for another time.) Rajeev Bhargava (2008) has eloquently made the case for the study of the Constituent Assembly Debates, and the Indian Constitution itself, as sources for political theory; my essay is, in many ways, inspired by his work (cf. also Bhargava 2010). The Indian Constitution is read here as a document of normative political philosophy; its complex and often grievously flawed practice in the Indian State is

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quite a different matter, not to be considered here.6 Its role in this essay is to open up and globalise the debates over liberalism and pluralism. This is, by no means, to say that it is a morally unflawed document. I want to suggest only that, within its great length, but especially in the Fundamental Rights on which I focus, it offers a vision of the citizen that integrates the demands of liberal individuality and plural belonging; and in contrast to multiculturalism in the West, does not seek to confine plural belonging to state-sponsored allocation of resources for collective private self-expression. I present its treatment of rights and identity as expressing a view of the human being as a person constituted through the complex interaction of individuality, autonomy, mutual responsibilities and multiple historical belongings. The document (as normative theory) thus functions to provide a constitutional representation of citizens within a pluralistic national society. When we consider those of its features relevant to this essay, we note that its provisions indicate a holistic view of the citizen, as individuals-within-collectives. This was the response of the fathers and mothers of the Constitution to the need to take the new citizens of India as both individuals and members of groups in a deeply plural society. As such, it offers a conception of citizens that questions the need to think of liberalism as threatened by pluralism. (Whether its precise provisions are adequate to support this vision of the citizen is yet another matter.) The key to our understanding of the moral thought of the Indian Constitution lies in its repeated concern for vulnerable minorities, as Martha Nussbaum (2007, p. 128) has pointed out in her extended study of constitutional democracy and religion in India. Before explaining how this has a direct bearing on the relationship between pluralism and liberalism, let me explore the way in which this concern is shown. The Indian Constitution can be said to demonstrate its concern for vulnerable minorities in three inter-related ways in the Fundamental Rights. First, there are those Fundamental Rights that are impeccably liberal in their formulation, such as Article 14, on equality before law; Article 19 on freedom of speech, assembly, movement, etc. (albeit carefully circumscribed by requirements for public order and the preservation of India’s integrity); or Article 21, on the protection of life and personal liberty. While in the Indian context, they are important because they address a history of profound inequality, philosophically they can be seen to be of a piece with what would now be thought the norm of any constitutional liberal democracy. (There are also more elaborately stated individual freedoms that have become a template for newer and economically developing countries, such as rights against exploitation.)

6 See the essays in Bhargava (2008) for a range of views on the theory and practice of the Indian Constitution.

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Second, some rights are explicitly cast in terms of groups, and are often juxtaposed with – and indeed, constrain – individual rights. An interesting example is Article 19 (5), which states that the State can impose reasonable restrictions on the freedom of movement, residence and settlement, not only in the interests of “the general public” but also “of any Scheduled Tribe” (i.e., those groups listed in a Constitution Order through the power conferred by Article 342). Third, there are provisions that do not make the schematic and unrealistic assumption that fundamental rights can be a purely individual matter. This means that what ostensibly seems to be purely a matter of individual rights, on closer examination turns out to be best expressed only in relation to collective rights. This happens most strikingly in constitutional provisions for equality, a famously problematic notion in liberal theory. Before most other constitutional democracies, the Indian Constitution enshrined the right to equality (Article 14), prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. (Compare, for example, the chequered and relatively recent history of antidiscrimination legislation in the United Kingdom with its famous “unwritten constitution”.) Inequality is seen to hold primarily between groups, but the consequence is felt by individuals, so that, when the formal equality of all individuals threatens to preserve actual inequalities for individuals belonging to particular groups, then the State should support collective rights. Article 15 (3–4) makes this explicit, stating that the State reserves the right to make special provisions for women, children, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes (the latter as listed in a Constitution Order through the power conferred by Article 341). Notably, Article 17 abolishes “untouchability”, the horrendous practice of treating a number of groups as being beyond the realm of the caste system and therefore spiritually polluting if touched. The articles relating to the Right to Equality therefore admirably combine a liberal commitment to the individual and a pluralistic commitment to the collective contexts, which play such a crucial role in the identity of the individual. In short, it can be said that these provisions do not look at each citizen as a generic individual, but as located within multiple collectives, whether it be gender, or social status, or any other marker. Equality has a different bearing on each citizen, so each provision implicitly distinguishes between citizens, depending on, for example, whether their caste group practices or faces discrimination. At the same time, of course, the liberal value of the individual remains – so that the one who finds himself or herself in conformity with these provisions, or as one who benefits from them, is that particular citizen of India. Articles 25–28, under Rights to Freedom of Religion, show this complex and visionary understanding of the citizen as standing at the locus of liberal individualism and pluralistic identity. Of course, the Constituent Assembly had as a model the radically original and elegantly minimal 18th century articulation of the

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freedom of religion in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Nevertheless, it was precisely the deep pluralism of the Indian situation that called for a very different sort of State neutrality, which has come to be understood as the Indian version of secularism:7 that is, the State’s having no established or favoured religion; but furthermore, the State’s treating of all religious groups equally, with the further proviso that it could intervene to protect vulnerable groups, either within a religion or as groups constituting minority religions. It is, as Gary Jacobsohn says, an “ameliorative” model of secularism (Jacobsohn 2003, p. 49–50; p. 94). So, with regard to the situation within the broadly conceived “Hindu religion”, while 25 (1) entitles all persons to “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion”, 25 (2)(b) permits the State to intervene for the sake of “social welfare and reform”, and the “throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus”. The framers had in mind high-caste Hindu practices such as those of excluding lower castes from temples. Immediately the Constitution not only guarantees liberty, but also reserves the power to provide for equality; and this equality is directly articulated in collective terms (namely, the groups excluded by caste from temples). Still, freedom of religion also extends collectively to protection of minority religions. Under Cultural and Educational Rights, not only is discrimination in access to State-funded education prohibited, but Article 30 permits minorities to establish educational institutions, and safeguards them from discrimination. Out of this discussion, let me attempt to draw an interpretation of the philosophical conception of the citizen in the Indian Constitution, which, I want to argue, offers an original and illuminating relationship between the normative commitments of liberalism and the real force of pluralism. My key contention is that the Fundamental Rights show that the citizen is taken to be an individual locus of liberty, but with identities drawn from collectives. Clearly and directly, this is the case with minorities; and although the Indian Constitution does not explicitly talk of them as being vulnerable, it is obvious that this is what it has in mind. (For example, the highest Hindu caste, the Brahmins, form less than 3 % of the Hindu population, and the wealthy mercantile Parsis, or followers of the Zoroastrian religion, are even smaller, but such minorities are not the subject of protection.) Of course, vulnerability is not easily determined, and is mostly left to the courts in order to offer flexible interpretations in the future; but occasionally, mi-

7 For discussions of the Indian version of secularism in the context of various political theories concerned with the Western experience, see the essays in Bhargava (2008).

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nority provision is concerned with the symbolic value of the political and demographic situation of the concerned minority: so Explanation I under Article 25 permits the carrying of the knife (kirpan) that is required in the Sikh religion, because, although Sikhs were not socio-economically vulnerable, their crucial position as a community born out of conflict and interaction with Islam and Hinduism was deemed worthy of special recognition. Moreover, even socio-economically vulnerable minorities are minorities in often very different ways: provisions for Muslims, say, are often quite different from those for Scheduled Tribes. From the constitutional discourse on minorities, several points relevant to our discussion of the relationship between liberalism and pluralism emerge. Firstly, talk of minorities offers an implied contrast with a “majority”, which is a powerful construct. The majority is technically one, simply by virtue of being all of the population that is not subject to special provision; but this technicality immediately shows the constructed nature of the majority, because it is a very thin notion, merely a logical negative (“not a minority”). Of course, this is not to deny that a psychologically powerful imaginary does surround the idea of a majority. The otherness of minorities appears sufficient to contribute to the rhetoric of the majority, as when we see, even in constitutional democracies, anti-immigration or Islamophobic campaigns in Europe, or Hindu nationalist ones in India, all of which talk of a native majority whose vast internal differences are conveniently set aside. (Would magical solidarity result from the expulsion of brown-skinned folk from Europe?) Yet by precisely not speaking of majorities, the Indian Constitution implies that there is an asymmetry of moral duty here. Whatever natural majority there is in a democracy, its interests are already provided for by the presence of the liberal provisions, for simply treating everyone as equally free is to privilege those who are already equipped to benefit – demographically, economically and socially – from freedom.8 This is an important circumscription of the liberal assumption that liberty suffices for the good of all citizens. It shows that a polity should be one that, in seeking to bring about the good life for all, should go beyond individual freedoms to forms of protection that can only be understood collectively (even when the aim is that individuals should benefit). Still, it also heightens the constructed nature of majorities, because it asks precisely how they can be described except in the logically negative sense. So, while majoritarian ideas (which have subsequently played such a deleterious role in India through

8 Indeed, a criticism of the Indian Constitution is that it did not make justiciable the articles under the Directive Principles of State Policy (that call for these principles to guide future laws), given that these principles are primarily concerned to bring about a fairer society in which justice is articulated primarily in terms of equality.

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the imagined homogeneity of an essentialized Hinduism) do indeed have potency, the Indian Constitution’s silence on the majority implies that there is nothing more than the thin, negative sense; there is nothing substantive about the notion of a majority.9 This shifts the focus back, for those mentioned under minority provisions, to fundamental individual rights: even while recognising that classic individual liberties tend in practice to privilege the already privileged, the Indian Constitution nevertheless builds collective rights on the bedrock of individual rights. This simultaneously additive and contrastive reading of the relationship between individual and group rights is vital to the conception of a polity in which liberalism and pluralism are not set in opposition, but in fact moderate each other through interaction. The second important point that emerges from the Indian Constitution’s protective provisions for minorities concerns what it says about the role of plural communities. It is not just that, unlike in multiculturalist policy, the allocation of resources is not a merely legislative reflex, but a structural feature of the polity. More significantly, it locates the plurality of communities (symbolised by vulnerable minorities) within the political life of all individual citizens of the country. Collective identities are legitimate markers of a citizen’s presence in that political life, not mere tokens of a private existence that receives alms through the disciplinary motives of liberal governmentality. A citizen – an acknowledged participant in the political life – is an individual whose liberty includes the freedom of belonging to collectives. The richly disputatious existence of democracies is taken to include the cultural dynamics of identity (“identity politics”, not as the bugbear of liberal castigation but as the constituent of a plurally liberal mode of self-expression). There is, here, no false contrast between the solidarity of shared liberal (or even illiberal) nationhood and disuniting alterity; in the conception of the Indian Constitution, the truly shared culture is the culture of a pluralistic society. Finally, this concern for minorities in the Indian Constitution becomes emblematic of how a truly liberal concern for citizens is the moral guarantee for pluralism. Every citizen is offered self-conception as, ultimately, an individual whose identity is given by belonging to collectives; after all, it is this that culminates in the belonging signified by the opening words of the Constitution, “We, the people of India […]”. If this account is at all persuasive, then a rigorously moral conception of constitutional provision for a plurality of collectives, set within a well-grounded liberal democratic theory of the nation-state, is required for liberal but pluralised

9 It is another, controversial matter that the institutional culture of the Indian State is seen by some to in fact make a majoritarian Hindu identity substantive.

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societies. In the final section, I take up the concept of “constitutional patriotism” as a commitment to a nationalism free of ethnocentricity, explore the conventional thought that it is incompatible with pluralism, and end with the argument that if in fact there is a constitutional framework along the lines argued for here, then constitutional patriotism turns out to be precisely the sort of commitment that can be asked from citizens of a pluralistic society.

5 Reinterpreting Constitutional Patriotism for a Pluralized Society Let me reiterate what I said at the beginning: my discussion is focused quite specifically on commitment to a liberal constitutional democracy. It is in this context that I bring up the eminently centrist notion of constitutional patriotism. It is well known that Jürgen Habermas initially articulated the idea of constitutional patriotism as a form of identification for West Germans through commitment to the purely political principles enshrined in the democratic constitution; he offered this to counter what he perceived was a conservative tendency to treat German identity as once again, even after the gas chambers, going back to traditional forms of national pride. Of course, for conservative nationalists given to fundamentally ethnocentric notions of identity, this commitment to rational deliberation was never going to be acceptable; and that would be the case with constitutional patriotism in the context of any nation-state, whatever its history. Equally, the very notion of patriotism would render it anathema to cosmopolitans seeking a larger identity with a common humanity. Still, this essay is deliberately limited to a discussion of a liberal theory of polity, so let us look more closely at the relationship between liberalism and constitutional patriotism, before I turn to my own interpretation. The standard criticism of Habermasian constitutional patriotism from the perspective of a liberal theory of the nation-state is that, by requiring loyalty to political norms and the constitution that guarantees them, there is no way of explaining why someone should be attached to their particular polity; if someone found another country’s constitution to deliver more elegantly the liberal principles to which she was committed, she could legitimately switch her loyalties. Still, Habermas’ commitment to the universal relevance of liberal political principles did not actually lead him to propose a constitutional patriotism that was thoroughly interchangeable across all liberal democracies. As Jan-Werner Müller (2007, p. 38) has pointed out, Habermas was not trying to be particularly inclusive when initially expounding his theory of constitutional patriotism. That is to say, he was not talking about either all liberal democracies or all citizens in a cul-

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turally pluralistic democracy. His constitutional patriotism was directed at German citizens, in the very specific context of a national culture coming to terms with a horrific near past. It was a call to solidarity from those who could no longer simply rely on history to give them a collective national identity. So, Habermas’ constitutional patriotism was not abstract at all, but very concrete – and its concreteness was founded on liberalism. Despite Anglo-American liberal criticism that constitutional patriotism cannot extract a nation-based loyalty from citizens, its basic compatibility with liberalism is not in question. Indeed, in later writings, Habermas (1994) strives to argue that constitutional patriotism anchors the liberal value of individual autonomy, and its relationship with rights in a constitutional democracy, better than traditional liberalism does. In effect, constitutional patriotism moves the ethical significance of liberalism (that is to say, the constitutive freedom of the individual) from the cultural history of the nation, as in traditional liberalism, to the rational ordering of the principles and procedures of state; it is, and in this sense alone, post-nationalist (Cronin 2003, p. 19). From this perspective, Habermas’ later articulations of constitutional patriotism seek to locate cultural pluralism well within, and subordinate to, liberal autonomy, albeit in conformity with his abstract and legal requirements for a political life. Moving away from the earlier context of post-war Germany, Habermas ponders (in the paper cited) in a wider Western experience, such as in Canada, the tension between liberal individualism and collective cultural identities. It is with this later theory that I wish to engage. In a spirited defence of the later Habermasian position, John Fossum (2001, p. 193) has brought out the significance of a two-level theory that hierarchizes “individual rights” and “ethical-cultural values” – i.e., the content of liberalism and the demands of pluralism, respectively. Let me explore this further in the light of my concerns. On a first reading, Habermas seems perfectly willing to acknowledge the role of cultural identity in autonomous individuals in a way that might seem compatible with the view of the citizen that I have suggested can be drawn from the normative thought of the Indian Constitution: “A correctly understood theory of rights requires a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed” (Habermas 1994, p. 113). On closer examination, however, it turns out that Habermas thinks a two-level theory is required for this purpose: The ethical substance of a political integration that unites all the citizens of the nation must remain “neutral” with respect to the differences among the ethical-cultural communities within the nation, which are integrated around their own conceptions of the good. The uncoupling of these two levels of integration notwithstanding, a nation of citizens can sustain the institutions of freedom only by developing a certain measure of loyalty to their own state, a loyalty that cannot be legally enforced. (Habermas 1994, p. 137)

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What is interesting here, in the context of our earlier discussion of the Indian Constitution, is that – although he shows no evidence of knowing about it – Habermas’ requirement of neutrality towards a plurality of collectives is remarkably similar to the Indian notion of secularism (articulated much earlier), as is his argument that loyalty cannot be legally enforced but arises out of citizens sustaining the institutions of freedom provided by the constitution itself. Where I want to differ is with regard to the two-level theory. As Fossum (2001, p. 193) reads Habermas (in my opinion correctly), “Groupdifferentiated rights such as cultural rights provide citizens with access to their own culture and can thus be justified insofar as they provide citizens with the necessary resources for utilizing their basic civil and political rights”. In other words, this is the case for multiculturalism within a framework of an abstract political liberalism; for political life is seen as constituted by the actions of autonomous individuals, whose cultural inclinations are met by resources delivered as a result of liberal political deliberations. (Habermas is responding here to Charles Taylor’s [1994] more radical concern that pluralist group rights concerning authentic identity are severely restricted by the homogeneity implied by liberalism’s autonomous individuality.) Seen in this way, constitutional patriotism flows from liberalism alone (albeit in its political rather than its cultural formulation), while pluralism, in the form of cultural diversity, is not part of the political life of individual citizens. By contrast, I would argue that the political life should be one in which the citizen participates as an individual in relation to collective identity. What we saw with the Indian Constitution is that it does not separate individual and collective rights, let alone hierarchize them. It is true that the very notion of political freedoms is a liberal one, and nobody questions the essentially liberal framework of the Indian Constitution – that is, indeed, the reason why I am using it philosophically in engagement with debates in the constitutional democracies of the West. Even so, its great insight is that citizens are neither generic individuals with no relevant culturally varied identity, nor members of a real or imaginary homogenous culture. Rather, they are both the individual loci of liberal freedoms and persons of specific collective identity. In a plural society with inequalities and asymmetries of power, it is precisely the guarantee of liberty that must be underwritten with provisions relevant to the situation of individual citizens. That relevance may be given by gender, it may be caste, it may be religion, it may even be age. Some contexts change, some may not involve permanent membership of vulnerable minorities, some may be minorities but elite ones, and so on; justice requires specific concern for those who are, at any point, vulnerable. Still, all of this can flow only from the initial conception of citizens as cultural individuals, a composite site of liberal autonomy and plural belonging.

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Consequently, political life under the Constitution is lived by persons who share the universal rights of liberal freedom, but also – more subtly – the universal right to specific contextual rights. While contextuality concerning vulnerability is the primary concern of the Indian Constitution, it also implies that the context of citizens might be given by more powerful collective identities, as when it reserves for itself the right to reform the practice of upper-caste temples to permit entry to all Hindus (including those who profess to be Jain, Buddhist or Sikh; Indian Constitution, Art. 25 (2) (b) including Explanation II). In short, the Indian Constitution conceives of citizens – participants in the political life of the nationstate – as autonomous individuals given identity as members of cultural, social, religious and other groups: so, e.g., a Dalit woman’s freedoms are those of any other citizen, but also of those resulting from provisions against discrimination against women, and those following from the abolition of untouchability. The fullness of liberty therefore requires the recognition of pluralism at the level of the liberally conceived individual.10 If constitutional provisions are seen this way, then the Habermasian point about the institutions of freedom of a nation being sustained only by legally unenforceable loyalty on the part of its citizens becomes reinforced through a much more complex conception of the constitution and the citizens it creates. All citizens, including those whose collective identity is vulnerable in different ways – by numbers, by newness of presence in a polity, by economic marginality, etc. – would live in a constitutional dispensation, whose commitment to liberal democracy had actually been displayed in its acceptance of their identity as individuals-with-collective-identities. Some citizens may not share, for example, the ancestral memories of the nation in which they were immigrants; and yet, their loyalty to it would come from the fact that they are not expected to choose (not just by the State, but even by its critics) between stripping away their collective identity and rejecting liberal values. Of course, multicultural policy has struggled with the question of how to permit entry of collective identities into the political sphere; this is why theorists like Parekh have argued that a fundamental reconceptualisation of the political process of engagement between cultural collectives is required. Nonetheless, a key problem with multicultural policy has been that the failure to contain a plurality of collective identities through resource allocation has been met by other

10 This is the reason why I take this discussion to be quite different from ones about multiculturalist policies regarding group rights, such as rights of self-government, territorial autonomy, public funding of cultural life, etc. (cf. Kymlicka 2007). While some of these are indeed policy consequences of provisions of the Indian Constitution, they are also, in Western countries specifically, distinguished from liberal citizenship.

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forms of governmental discipline, such as creating officially sanctioned represented bodies (in the manner critiqued by Schirin Amir-Moazami in this volume). What has not been considered is that individual citizens are also members of collectives, so that it is “ordinary” liberal politics that should include questions of group identity. Then the question of representativeness – moot at present, because officially sanctioned bodies are not part of routine democratic processes like voting – would become simply the question of democratic campaigns and debates. There has to be a virtuous circle between changed constitutional regard for pluralism and a changed politics of representation. Obviously, it would be a matter of enormous complexity to consider what the specific changes in a constitution would have to be in different countries, since so many of the specific provisions of the Indian Constitution are quite beside the point in European contexts. In this essay, I have not been able to discuss any of these further issues, rendering it quite programmatic as it stands. All that I have argued for here is that, in the face of a pluralist society, the constitutional dispensation of liberal democracies should offer a more sophisticated vision of citizens, one in which liberal autonomy is not brought into tension with plural belonging. Many (especially socio-economically struggling) immigrant groups in Western Europe have experienced attempts by governments to buy them off with resources for non-political cultural activity, while having found it insufficient when their political life is restricted by the cultural norms of liberalism, and having become alienated from the political process. Governments have accused many such groups of failing the qualification of assimilation and loyalty to their new country. If, through an enlarged constitutional vision, political life permits collective concerns emblematic of pluralism to be integral – indeed, necessary – elements of liberal freedoms, then there might be a much better chance of encouraging constitutional patriotism in these new citizens. Constitutional patriotism would then become the loyalty to the rational procedures of the nation-state, a political commitment to its processes, just as originally envisaged; but when the constitution is one that integrates pluralism into its liberal framework in the way I have drawn from the normative ideas of the Indian Constitution, then such loyalty could well arise entirely unenforced. Such a situation could come only through a profound reorientation of political thought in the countries at large; but pluralization is happening apace, and nationalist calls (even so-called “progressive” ones) for assimilative solidarity is psychologically unrealistic in a world of global flows. If liberal democracies are to be adequate to the task of working in pluralized societies, then the very constitutional theory of the citizen must be re-worked. The task may be opposite to the one faced by India, where a potentially visionary constitution has been battered

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by the failures of the political system;11 if the political resources of rich Western countries are taken to be capable of handling new challenges, then it is their vision that must change.

Bibliography Abizadeh, Arash (2004): “Liberal Nationalist versus Postnational Social Integration: On the Nation’s Ethno-Cultural Particularity and ‘Concreteness’”. In: Nations and Nationalism 10. No. 3, p. 231–250. Bajpai, Rochana (2011): Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev (Ed.) (1998): Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhargava, Rajeev (2008): “Introduction: Outline of a Political Theory of the Indian Constitution”. In: Rajeev Bhargava (Ed.): Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 1–40. Bhargava, Rajeev (2010): The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bellamy, Richard (1999): Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise. London: Routledge. Brooks, Stephen (Ed.) (2002): The Challenge of Cultural Pluralism. Westport: Praeger. Cronin, Ciaran (2003): “Democracy and Collective Identity: In Defence of Constitutional Patriotism”. In: European Journal of Philosophy 11. No. 1, p. 1–28. Crowder, George (2002): Liberalism and Value Pluralism. London/New York: Continuum. Fossum, John Erik (2001): “Deep Diversity versus Constitutional Patriotism: Taylor, Habermas and the Canadian Constitutional Crisis”. In: Ethnicities 1. No. 2, p. 179–206. Gray, John (2000): Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: New Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1994): “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State”. In: Amy Gutman (Ed.): Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition/Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 107–148. Indian Constitution, at: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html. Jacobsohn, Gary Jeffrey (2003): The Wheel of Law: India’s Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kekes, John (1992): “The Incompatibility of Liberalism and Pluralism”. In: American Philosophical Quarterly 29. No. 2, p. 141–151. Kymlicka, Will (2007): Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner (2007): Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2007): The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

11 For a wide-ranging and incisive collection of views on the vision of the Indian Constitution and the challenges it has faced in practice, see the essays in Seminar (2010).

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Parekh, Bhikhu (2000): Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parekh, Bhikhu (2008): A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi (2012): “Liberalism and Pluralism: Reading the Indian Constitution as a Philosophical Document for Constitutional Patriotism”. In: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2012.691765. Seminar (2010): “We the People: A Symposium on the Constitution of India after 60 Years, 1950–2010”. Seminar 615. Talisse, Robert B. (2004): “Can Value Pluralists Be Comprehensive Liberals? Galston’s Liberal Pluralism”. In: Contemporary Political Theory 3. No. 2, p. 127–139. Taylor, Charles (1994): “The Politics of Recognition”. In: Amy Gutman (Ed.): Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition/Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 25–73. Taylor, Charles (1998): “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion”. In: Journal of Democracy 9. No. 4, p. 143–156. Young, Iris Marion (1990): Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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The Formation of the Nation-State, Religious Pluralism, and the Public Sphere in Brazil 1 The Colonial Prehistory The way in which various societies deal with religion is connected primarily to the historical process through which the corresponding nation-states have been created. This paper intends to demonstrate that to understand the peculiarities of the religious field in Brazilian society, as well as how religious differences coexist, it is necessary to take into account the historical developments that led to the hegemony of the existing, pervasive Christian culture. From a historical perspective, it is important to underline that the Brazilian territory was controlled, under the rule of the Royal Patronage, as a Portuguese colony for over three centuries. The Royal Patronage was a combination of privileges and obligations established by the Vatican, which, from the 16th century to the 19th century, granted the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns the monopoly and control of territories in South America and parts of Africa and Asia. The colonial State was allowed to build cathedrals, churches, and monasteries, to appoint bishops and archbishops, to administrate ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and to veto any papal bull that might oppose its interests. In this sense, the Royal Patronage was a legal agreement in which the Catholic church was rooted in the State structure (Ecclesia est in statu). This historical fact is not without important consequences for the role of Catholicism in Brazilian society. We can point out at least three major features resulting from this long-term process: First of all, it is possible to posit that, in Brazil, Catholicism was the political language of the colony, as well as that of the imperial regime. It was quite common for Christian officials to take over political and bureaucratic functions in the structure of the state. In this sense, the bureaucratic organization of the church was entangled with the bureaucracy of the state; the territory and its subjects/ Christians were controlled based on a very similar administrative apparatus and conception of space. Secondly, the vastness of the territory awaiting control and the scarcity of ecclesiastical and political administrators led to the flourishing of a very popular and autonomous form of Christian faith in everyday experience. In many local situations, these practices were mingled with the sortileges of African slaves and the practices and rituals of native Indians.

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Thirdly, the Christian religion became the paradigm which evaluated, controlled, and educated all sorts of popular practices, both in the realm of religion and in the public space of the cities. Catechesis and civilization were perceived as interchangeable public policies. If we take this historical background into account, it is impossible to assert the existence of a religious field made up of many different religious systems in the newly born Brazilian society before the establishment of the republican political system in 1889. The religious pluralism legally preserved in contemporary Brazil is not a result of the historical regulation of the conflict between different religions by the state, as is the case in France, for instance; on the contrary, it is possible to say that, almost until the middle of the 20th century, it was commonly understood that popular magical practices were considered to be non-religious (or barbarian) customs. For over fifty years, magical cures, African rituals, and ecstatic dances were considered a public threat to morality and order, as well as practices that were dangerous to individual health. As such, they were prohibited and attacked. This controversial repression came to an end when such practices were finally recognized by law as religious practices after a written doctrinal corpus and an organized liturgical system had been set up and produced. In the same course of action, the magical forces manipulated for practical purposes were transformed into transcendent gods. Considering the characteristics of this long and complex historical process in Brazil, we can assert that religious conflicts – beginning in the monarchical period and throughout the first republican regime – opposed mainly Protestant and Catholic interests regarding the social and political privileges they could obtain from the state: Catholicism fought to remain the state’s religion, and Protestantism challenged its position. In this sense, religious differences and values themselves did not become a political issue in the historical construction of Brazilian modernity, as was the case in European societies. In fact, the following pages will reveal how religious pluralism took a very different path in Brazil.

2 Religious Pluralism in Brazil Some of the most significant features of the Brazilian religious field are its immense diversity of creeds, its ongoing capacity to invent new religions, and the widespread belief in God’s existence among the major part of the population. It is important, however, to provide our reader with equivalent ethnographic details on these three main characteristics, in order to offer a general overview of the grounds upon which my main arguments are built.

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Despite the Catholic hegemony, the Brazilian religious field is traditionally perceived as being very heterogeneous. It is possible to name at least a dozen different religious groups, and this number is still increasing. Although the majority of the population (170,000,000 people, or 73.8 %) still describes itself as Catholic, the last census in 2000 indicated the presence of 15.4 % Protestants, 1.3 % Spiritists, and less than 1 % Jews (101,000), Muslims (27,000), Hindus and Buddhists (427,000), practitioners of African religions (571,000), Indian shamanism, and other esoteric traditions (Romero Jacob et al. 2003, p. 34). Researchers agree that there is a general acceptance of this diversity today. Moreover, individuals very often take part in many other rituals without necessarily abandoning the religion in which they were raised. It is also important to underline that, except for Catholics and some Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, most believers adopted their new creeds in their adult life. Some of the existing religions in Brazil are typically “homemade” (or remade) and characterized by syncretism. Spiritism, for instance, Allan Kardec’s French doctrine, imported to Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the 19th century by French immigrants, was widespread in a middle-class milieu of physicians, lawyers, journalists, public officials, and freethinkers. Initially propagated as a religious science, that is, a sort of intellectual criticism of the materialistic aspect of science and the formalism of Christianity, its mediumistic therapeutic practices ended up being prohibited by the Republican Penal Code in 1890. Since then, spiritism has become a mediumistic religion strongly dedicated to healing purposes. Another good example is provided by Umbanda, a popular combination of African witchcraft, spiritism mediumnity, and Catholic morality. Another case in point is the neo-Pentecostal inventive introduction of African possession rituals into its own ordinary cult. A more recent phenomenon is the reorganization of traditional South American Indian shamanistic practices in urban contexts into an “ayahuasca religion system” (Antunes 2012, p. 32; my translation), such as Santo Daime [Saint Daime] or União do Vegetal [Union of the Vegetable]. Still, the “invention” of new religions is not a random process. In fact, in order to be accepted as a “religion”, the new practices have to follow a certain kind of implicit historical code. It includes the avoidance of personal or for-profit purposes as an explicit aim of the new form of organization. It is interesting to stress here that the Christian idea of “charity” is essential for any cult to be recognized and accepted as a religion in Brazilian society. Free assistance to the poor and sufferers is the unconscious model, organizing the disputes for authenticity in the Brazilian religious field. Paradoxical to ordinary perception, the power of any spiritual force also depends on its capacity to deal with and control African sorcery. The prevailing magical perspective in Brazilian popular cosmology, es-

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pecially in relation to illness and different forms of healing, definitively explains the constant circulation of people across different religions with no need to remain faithful to any particular theological or doctrinal system. Besides the two traits described above, one of the most striking features of Brazilian religiosity is the almost universal belief in God’s existence even among unbelievers, or among those who do not profess any religious creed. This concept of Godhead, taken after Christianity, retains the idea that this uncreated being is the source and the force sustaining all human realities. This eternal and omnipotent being is also the supplier of all forms of justice and loyalty. In this sense, each religious movement is seen as a different path to promoting general welfare and the common good. Each religious system is perceived as the owner of a particular segment of the universe of sacred forces. The key idea here is “faith” (and not belief – a doctrine that a person or group accepts as true). “Faith” – in the sense of the capacity a given religion has for being able to gain public confidence in its monopoly of sacred attributes – is what moves the Brazilian religious field. An atheist, the very opposite of a religious person, is regarded with diffidence and perceived as untrustworthy because of his/her lack of faith; that is, his/her refusal to have bonds of reciprocity and allegiance with any supernatural sphere and, ultimately, with other human beings. Based on this ethnographic description of the Brazilian religious sphere, I would like to contribute to the contemporary debate on inter-religious interactions and conflicts by developing four major arguments. They are related to some theoretical and ethnographic views that I consider to be fruitful for a better understanding of religious conflicts: religious differences are historical constructions; secularism has brought new conceptions of “religion”, “ethics”, and “politics”; religious meanings are produced in relation to local perceptions, and there are many different ways (which are not entirely dependent on doctrine) in which different religions can gain visibility and legitimacy in the public sphere.

3 The Historical Construction of Brazilian Religious Diversity If we take into account the enormous flexibility and creativity of the Brazilian religious field as described above, it is necessary to enlarge our concept of religion in order to have a better understanding of what is said and done in its name. As we have already mentioned, the political movement resulting in the end of the monarchical regime in 1889 did not come along with any form of an atheistic disposition; and one can also say that when the republican regime was installed,

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the political elite was not aware of any existing religious conflict. On the contrary, beginning with the imperial regime, the constitution guaranteed the right to religious freedom as a way of fostering the immigration of European Protestant workers. Moreover, the construction of the nation-state never went through the experience of religious conflicts due to the evident historical hegemonic status of Catholicism: on the one hand, there has been some competition between Catholics and Protestants, but there has never been violent antagonism; on the other hand, various outlawed popular practices have gradually transformed themselves into religious movements by drawing on Catholicism as a religious paradigm in order to be recognized as such, and to have their rituals and beliefs accepted as authorized behaviors. Of course this relationship has never been peaceful. For almost one century the Catholic church denigrated Afro-Brazilian traditions and accused them of being instruments of the devil and immorality. More recently neo-Pentecostal churches have taken on the same role. The fast expansion of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the 1980s was followed by a violent crusade against Afro-Brazilian practitioners, which included physical aggression against those wearing religious bead necklaces and white dresses. The weakening of this tension – or, at least, that of its socially controlled form – came onto the political horizon when Afro-Brazilian traditions were acknowledged as an essential component of the National Intangible Heritage in 2009. The historical perspective allows us to assert that religious phenomena are contextually defined and cannot be taken for universal and ahistorical events. In this sense, the concept of religion as proposed by this Concept Laboratory – that is, “the transcendental and spiritual system of redemptive expectation”1 – does not fit many of the recent movements described by the current literature as “religion”. This classical definition is, in my view, a heritage of the historical construction of Western secularism. In fact, these qualifications better fit the Jewish/ Muslim/Christian traditions, for instance, rather than the range of religious configurations that exist in modern Brazilian society. The historical examples above are particularly illuminating for the perspective defended here; from this point of view, it is impossible to think of the conditions that enable the peaceful coexistence of different religions without taking into account the particular legal forms – and the cultural conventions that support them – in which differences tend to be organized within a specific state.

1 I am quoting from the prospectus for the Dahlem Humanities Center “Concept Laboratory” on Religion and Society in the 21st Century (May 4–6, 2011) that was sent to participants in January 2011 by Joachim Küpper.

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It is quite clear that the constitution of 1988 became a turning point in the Brazilian paradigm for dealing with cultural differences and minorities: the traditional miscegenation ideology gave way to different claims of cultural recognition and respect for the public visibility of religious differences. As has been the case with many contemporary nation-states, the historical Brazilian pattern that conceived of the nation’s cohesion in terms of syncretism – that is, the political, symbolic, and ideological mixture of different races and religions – has been displaced by the paradigm of multiculturalism; that is, the recognition and juridical preservation of cultural and religious minorities. Since then, numerous social movements have sought legal protection for their claims. Examples are the Quilombola (slave descendants who claim to have rights to the land of their ancestors), the deaf community (requesting new public policies based upon sign language to cope with the cultural particularities of the deaf), ayahuasca groups (who defend the freedom to drink the Indian beverage ritually), etc. In this sense, Brazilian multiculturalism became politically efficient in order to produce both a new form of empowerment of the poor and other minorities, and a more popular form of governance. The point here is that new religious borders, as well as ethnic frontiers, were constructed during this process of political negotiation and social interrelations. Not only the content of religious doctrines, but also the dynamics of these interactions and the understanding of the interests they put into motion are crucial when trying to make sense of religious conflicts. However, the problem about multiculturalism is that, when it becomes a political doctrine, it does not take into account that the processes of representation of ethnic and religious differences are based on the fiction of their authenticity. For nearly one century, Brazilian intellectuals had to cope with the puzzling issue of the construction of a national identity out of different races and cultural traditions – mainly African, indigenous peoples, and Portuguese. Various models were proposed, all of which were based on a public policy of racial whitening. In this sense, democracy has never been considered a key element in the imaginary of the nation’s representation. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, has to do with the construction of a new form of democracy, based, not only on universal values, but also on the public expression of different religions and creeds.

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4 Democracy, Religious Secularization, and the Public Sphere The international consensus that nation-states have to protect and give equal rights to minorities is very recent. Thus, the nation’s existing legal frameworks for dealing with cultural differences have to be renegotiated in order to be adjusted to contemporary conditions. In Brazil, the end of two decades of dictatorship raised the issue of how to reconstruct the basis for a new democratic regime. In order to deal with the democratic deficit, the Brazilian constitution of 1988 stimulates new government arrangements intended to include citizens in the governance process. The key word summing up this political moment is “democratic participation”. Inspired by this international movement demanding that more political responsibility be given to the common citizen, priests, pastors, and other representatives of different religions have addressed many positions in the new fora created to deliberate on issues related to national public policies. In this sense, it is possible to assert that secularism, insofar as it has become the state’s political doctrine, may not be only a simple requirement to separate religious institutions from secular ones as far as government is concerned. As Talal Asad (2003, p. 2) suggests, it also “[…] presupposes new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’”. One must say that this is very true of the Brazilian democratization process. Many contemporary observers tend to consider the main characteristic a religion must have, in order to respect the requirements of democracy and the secular order, either that of contributing to the construction of a civil society, such as Catholicism has done in Poland and Brazil, or that of promoting public debate over liberal values, such as individual freedom or human rights. The problem here is that, as Talal Asad (2003, p. 182) has pointed out, “[w]hen religion becomes an integral part of modern politics”, their practitioners are not “indifferent to debates about how the economy should be run, or which scientific project should be publicly funded, or what the broader aims of a national education system should be”. As mentioned, the key word summing up the ideological direction of this period is “democratic participation”. The development of this new arena of participation has profoundly affected the way in which religious actions are perceived in Brazilian society and expanded to the public field in which ethics and political values interact. In a general analysis, it is possible to say that health, education, and public assistance have become new religious skills. In some situations it turns out to be very difficult to distinguish between religious organizations and enterprises or academic fora.

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Some recent examples are the way in which the Brazilian National Evangelical Network of Social Assistance (RENAS) has empowered its staff by providing them with technical education and academic knowledge, such as leadership and human resources, in order to qualify them to face different social problems such as hygiene, government accountability, public assistance, etc. As a consequence, many Christians, who were well-trained as missionaries and had high-level academic educations, were trained to foster civil society networks to develop their agenda in different fields, such as the environment, poverty, health, education, etc. Moreover, their professional experience has frequently allowed them to be incorporated into the government staff at local or state level. It is thus possible to demonstrate that Christian professional institutions have a significant role in the formation of Brazilian public opinion and are able to propose reasonable ways of viewing particular problems, as well as to guide parliamentary activity and submit new laws. Recent studies have demonstrated that evangelical participation in the political sphere is also increasing. Rio de Janeiro, for instance, has had three Protestant governors from 1999 to 2004, and 37 % of its legislative assembly was taken up by evangelical representatives in this period. As for public opinion, one should not forget the importance of mass media instruments (television and radio channels); and although they are state networks, hundreds of TV channels have been distributed to religious institutions in the past two decades. Intellectuals tend to think that there are two major kinds of religion: those which have some characteristics that make it possible for them to play a positive role in the public sphere, and those which are essentially unable to do this. Although I somewhat agree with Talal Asad when he claims that power articulates the public sphere and that many kinds of demands and religious minorities are excluded from its circle of acceptability, I still think that there are many ways of gaining the capacity to speak and be heard. Broadly speaking, it is possible to assert, in terms of a descriptive model, that the Catholic church is more inclined to develop a habitus with the purpose of practically demonstrating how to behave, speak, and think within a particular public culture than are Afro-Brazilian traditions. In fact, Evangelical and Catholic movements have been investing a great deal of effort to train their practitioners in this direction in the past decades. In her doctoral dissertation, for instance, Eva Scheliga shows how certain evangelical movements articulate individual religious experience in terms of a general understanding of the importance of “social responsibility” (Scheliga 2011, p. 100). They advocate that churches should have a more responsible relationship with society and secularism. At the opposite end are Afro-Brazilian traditions. For them, and especially in Candomblé cults, the Judeo-Christian notion of sin does not have any significance. The difference between good and evil depends, in fact, upon the relation-

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ship between the practitioner and his or her personal god. This popular view of an incidental and external evil agency, in a sense conflicts with the Christian idea of sin and personal responsibility. The pervasiveness of this idea in Brazilian society somehow exemplifies its well-known permissiveness and dislike of abiding by the rules. The kind of social cohesion that ensues is not universal enough to bind all members into a single society. The sort of patriarchal authority that supports this kind of social network limits its interest to social allegiances. The classical tension between the universality of the political community of the Catholic church – centered on the general image of the poor – and the communitarian domain of Candomblé houses – centered on the value of household allegiance – becomes evident here. But the characteristics above, ordered into an abstract scheme to be better described and understood, cannot be taken for essential features. In order to grasp their meaning, it is necessary to put them into action, for they might have unpredictable roles in the public sphere under specific political circumstances. This is very true in the case of Afro-Brazilian religious leaders who marched against “religious intolerance” in 1980. In a reaction against the physical and moral violence of neo-Pentecostals, Candomblé and Umbanda priests organized themselves into a political front to promote “religious freedom”. What is very interesting in this case is that if their claim to a relevant space in the public sphere eventually became quite successful, it involved their alliance with the black movement, and was not restricted to the religious field. Their inscription in the discourse of racial political struggle resulted in a capricious mixture of demands connected to race and religion: in fact, the two major aims of the Brazilian National Plan for Racial Equality are the guarantee of secularism and the battle against religious intolerance. Consequently, it is important to stress that religious meanings are always produced in relation to local perceptions. The public sphere is not an empty space; on the contrary, it is constituted by the sensibilities – memories and aspirations, fears and hopes – of speakers and listeners. In Brazil, people tend to be eclectic in terms of religious practice. As has already been mentioned, they may attend the Catholic mass in the morning, a spiritism session in the afternoon, and an African cult meeting in the evening. It is possible to assert that this happens because there is a general understanding that every single religion has its particular kind of sacred/magic strength, and no one knows for sure which path is going to fulfill one’s needs or wishes. From this perspective, popular sensibility does not think it necessary to choose or exclude any form of religion from the public space. Rather, from the individual’s perspective, it is much more suitable to be able to manipulate a whole set of culturally prescribed strategies with which one can respond to a given situation. Thus, in a par-

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ticular setting, one might be a Catholic, and in another one, a devotee of Candomblé: who knows what will work? As Leni Silverstein (1995, p. 138) remarks, “[i]n a constantly changing and insecure world – a world in which adroit manipulation of one’s available social network could mean the difference between having and not having a job, food, or medicine for one’s suffering children – all doors must remain open”. In this sense, in order to better understand the dynamics of the religious field in a particular society, it is crucial to focus on the configurations of its particular public sphere – to search for its autonomy, sensibilities, memories, aspirations, fears, and hopes – rather than to choose the best model, or more adequate cultural pattern or practice in an abstract way, disconnected from the historical context. A single practice or belief can promote either violence or common understanding, depending on the meanings it puts into action in a particular setting. When religious agents have to act in the public sphere, they have to learn, in each specific situation, the particular grammar and semantics according to which public culture is organized. They usually learn this in practice, by exposing themselves and challenging common sense. In the Brazilian public sphere it is acceptable to speak about the common good in terms of the preservation of communitarian links, tradition, solidarity, protection of the poor, natural rights, etc., because some Christian values are still very pervasive. As has been recently stressed elsewhere (Montero 2009), the particularities that characterized the historical formation of the Brazilian public sphere have modeled the civic space according to the Christian city. In this sense, when African religions such as Candomblé, for instance, perform their rites publicly, they can only do so in an acceptable way if they articulate their ambitions of visibility either to the Catholic church or to the state’s hegemonic political interests at the symbolic level. That was the case, for example, with the celebration of the street festival of Our Lord of the Good End (Nosso Senhor do Bonfim) in Salvador, Bahia. As Leni Silverstein demonstrates in her article on this ceremony, “[t]he fulfillment of Candomblé obligations takes place in a setting very much conditioned by religion’s long years of religious persecution”, from 1890 until 1960. “[…] [B]oth the Catholic church and the state had instigated periodic destruction of ritual artifacts and incarceration of some of the more belligerent sacerdotes”, she affirms. As a result, many cult houses were “[…] remov[ed] […] to the underdeveloped outskirts of the city, accessible only to the initiated and the well informed” (all quotes from Silverstein 1995, p. 137). In this case, how can one explain the attendance of government officials, the Cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, and Candomblé priestesses at the annual Candomblé ceremony in 1976, in which people wash the steps of the Cathedral of Our Lord of the Good End?

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In the domain of social norms and values, it is true that Afro-Brazilian religions do not promote any universal model of a common good; and yet, as has been demonstrated, at that very moment a new merging of Catholic popular beliefs, African rites, and a national syncretic identity became possible and desirable due to the shifting relations between the church and the dictatorial regime. The devotion to Our Lord of the Good End is quite widespread in Bahia throughout all social classes. It has Portuguese roots and, in Brazil, goes back to the 18th century, when a naval officer brought the saint’s image to Salvador/Bahia. He also brought the Portuguese devotional tradition of washing the church steps along with the image, and started a brotherhood to propagate the cult upon his arrival. During the 18th and 19th centuries, constant disputes concerning how this ceremonial cleansing of the cathedral should take place occurred between the priests and practitioners. The first ritual washing was recorded in 1889, the year in which slavery was abolished in Brazil. There was a symbolic association between the rite and the abolition, which was added by the priests in order to ban popular devotees from washing the interior of the church. As a consequence, Candomblé ceremonies progressively appropriated the devotion. From then to now, the ritual has been performed in many ways and has finally been restricted to the washing of the steps that lead to the Cathedral of Our Lord of the Good End. In 1976, national identity, popular Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian tradition were mingled by the state officials’ inclusion of the ceremony in the tourist calendar of the city of Salvador. These examples demonstrate that some cultural patterns or practices are able to promote this kind of merging of different religious universes better than others, depending on the context or political scenario. Due to their system of meaningful preferences, African patterns have probably been incorporated into Brazilian national culture less as religious values, and more as cultural and historical traditions. It is impossible to decide in advance which symbolic elements make peaceful conviviality easier, without taking into account the political and historical traditions of a particular society. Some cultural patterns or practices are able to promote the merging of different religious universes better than others. In this sense, one might come to the conclusion that cultural patterns and religions are able to minimize violence whenever they succeed in binding local loyalties through a faithful allegiance to a universal imagined community.

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Bibliography Antunes, Henrique Fernandes (2012): “Droga, Religião e Cultura: um mapeamento da controvérsia pública sobre o uso da ayahuasca no Brasil”. Master’s thesis, University of São Paulo. Asad, Talal (2003): Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Montero, Paula (2009): “Secularização e Espaço Público: a re-invenção do pluralismo religioso no Brasil”. In: Etnográfica 13. No. 1, p. 7–16. Scheliga, Eva L. (2011): “Educando sentidos, orientando uma práxis. Etnografia das práticas assistenciais dos Evangélicos Brasileiros”. PhD diss., University of São Paulo. Silverstein, Leni M. (1995): “The Celebration of Our Lord of the Good End: Changing State, Church, and Afro-Brazilian Relations in Bahia”. In: David J. Hess/Roberto A. DaMatta (Eds.): The Brazilian Puzzle. Culture and the Borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 134–151. Romero Jacob, Cesar/Rodrigues Hees, Dora/Waniez, Philippe/Brustlein, Violette (Eds.) (2003): Atlas da Filiação Religiosa e Indicadores Sociais no Brasil. São Paulo: Loyola.

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The Midwife or the Handmaid? Religion in Political Advertising in Nigeria1 Religion [in Nigeria] is intricately woven into the fabric of politics and provides the compelling touchstone of legitimacy or the love of the ruler by the ruled; the motive for exercising power; reason to be obeyed; the determinant of the moral standards and style of power and the engine that moves governance. (Kalu 2003, p. 1)

1 Introduction The conceptualization of religion as a discrete or separate aspect of social life not having anything to do with political behaviour is increasingly destabilised by contemporary practices in which metaphysical and spiritual beliefs aggressively and unapologetically insert themselves into the conception and practice of politics. The resurgence of religion is transforming the practice of politics in the Middle East, in Asia, North America and Latin America. In post-colonial Africa, religion and ethnicity have never been separated from political participation and contestations. While religious beliefs and practices have traditionally played specific roles in the history of communities which later became Nigeria, never before in the history of post-colonial Nigeria has religion played as pivotal and organising a role as it does in the current dispensation (1999-present). Beginning in 1999 when Olusegun Obasanjo was freed from prison to contest for the office of the president and was consequently framed in the image of a political “messiah”, subsequent political actors have consistently presented themselves as quasi-divine figures on a sacred mission to redeem Nigeria’s citizens from decades of misrule. Nowhere was this image of political redeemer more articulate than during the 2011 general elections and especially the presidential campaign of Goodluck E. Jonathan, the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). On December 17, 2010, the sitting president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, attended the Holy Ghost Congress, an annual religious service organised by the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). In the course of the event, Jonathan knelt down on both knees before the General Overseer of the RCCG, Enoch Adejare Adeboye, for prayers and divine endorsement. Adeboye prayed for him,

1 The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for his/her comments on a draft of this essay. The usual caveats hold.

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blessed him and endorsed him for the office of president in the coming presidential election. The next day the photographs of a kneeling president were flashed on front pages of national newspapers as well as on many online news sites and blogs. Adeboye is unarguably Nigeria’s most popular Pentecostal leader, who had boasted in the past that anyone who wished to be president of Nigeria would need to consult him. In his capacity as “God’s oracle”, and in the nature of the church he superintends, one of the largest Pentecostal churches, or rather, Pentecostal empires in Nigeria, Adeboye attracts politicians and businesspersons to the church’s expansive camp (termed the Redemption Camp) which has become a site frequented by serving state governors, presidents, senators and other national politicians. The event and image of a kneeling president ignited heated debates locally, as well as online, about a sitting president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces kneeling before a private citizen who claims to exercise spiritual and temporal powers supplicating for divine intervention in the affairs of the most important and powerful citizen of the country. A kneeling president before another citizen has no precedence in the history of Nigeria. The image of a kneeling Jonathan before an establishment pastor graphically captures the place of religion in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. This paper describes the role religion was made to play in the political campaigns of 2010–11.There are a number of perspectives on the integration of religion and politics in Nigeria. In the past, scholars have examined the role of independent churches as structures of resistance to colonial imperialism and its economic superstructure of capitalism (Peel 1968). Others have analysed the contribution of religious groups to the formation and structure of civil society and democratic culture (Obadare 2007; Ranger 2008); moreover, the character of indigenous religious beliefs and their place in political behaviour has dominated other forms of inquiry (Ellis/Ter Haar 2004). The present inquiry focuses on the examination of religious ideas, images and motifs in political marketing during the 2011 general electoral campaign in Nigeria. Special attention is given to political posters and billboards, partly because these are visual media and partly because they have more permanence than radio and television advertisements, which are transient or may require some special recording devices to capture and retain. Audry Gadzekpo (2011, p. 105) has recently lamented that “not enough attention has been paid to visual media forms such as posters” and billboards in Africa even in the face of the continent’s prolific production of these materials. Billboards and posters constitute important structures of information; their sheer ubiquity in many African cities recommends them for scholarly attention. Posters and billboards are central to political advertising in Nigeria; they are rhetorical strategies for the management of (mis/dis)information, propaganda, education, publicity, mobilisation and value dissemination. Because visual materials are

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powerful and the visuality of posters and billboards is remarkable in constructing public awareness or consciousness particularly in cities, they deserve critical study, an aim this essay aspires to contribute to. A critical examination of the use of religious motifs and imageries in political advertising blurs the boundaries between the political sphere, the media marketplace and the religious field, illustrating how one sphere of social life overlaps and engages with another. The interaction between these distinct but overlapping fields maps out new ways in which political practice becomes a purveyor for religious transformation. 2

2 Ambiguity of Religion in Nigerian Politics The image of a serving president on his knees reproduced in national dailies as well as on several diaspora Internet sites was the highpoint of the political campaigns for the general elections of April 2011. It was the quintessential political advertisement of the period, which was designed, perhaps, to sell the president as a humble and “virtuous” candidate for governing the country. Utilising the platform of a specific religious institution (a Pentecostal church in the case of Goodluck Jonathan) in a multi-religious society such as Nigeria conveyed a plethora of – sometimes contradictory – messages to different segments of the Nigerian population. In a society in which each religious group is suspicious of, and antagonistic towards, the other (Campbell 2011, p. 43), the use of religion as an advertising platform appeals to some sections while at the same time alienating others. More importantly, it generates a paradox: how does a candidate present himself as chosen by the Christian God while aspiring to head a secular federal government at the centre? Religious institutions primarily produce, organise and disseminate religion; they are “[…] neither designed nor intended to mobilize political action” (Wald/Silverman/Friday 2005, p. 121). However, starting from the 1970s

2 Data presented and discussed in this essay were collected during two phases of fieldwork in Nigeria in February/March and October 2010. This was also the campaign season for parliamentary, governorship, and presidential elections in the country. Campaign materials and political advertisement materials were collected in nine states (Abia, Akwa Ibom, Cross Rivers, Rivers, Imo, Oyo, Lagos and Ogun) in southern Nigeria and Kaduna state in northern Nigeria, and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory. The preponderance of Christian imagery and ideas in the examples to be used in this discussion is due to the fact that many of these states are made up of a majority of Christians with the exception of Oyo State, which is estimated to have equal numbers of Muslims and Christians. – Broadly speaking, there are nineteen northern states and seventeen southern states. States like Kwara, Plateau, Kogi and Benue, which geographically fall within the middle-belt, are frequently grouped with the northern states.

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Fig. 1: Pastor Enoch Adeboye of the RCCG Praying and Blessing President Goodluck Jonathan, Redemption Camp December 17, 2010. Source: Redemption Light magazine; used with permission.

onward, the reinsertion of religion into political discourse and practice in many societies has become a common experience (Hanciles 2008; Micklethwait/Wooldridge 2009). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there has been an increase in the use of religion in political mobilisation in many societies across the world; this is particularly the case in electoral politics where political communication is refined and targeted at a mass audience. Political advertising is a subset of political communication designed to create a public atmosphere predisposed to supporting government generally, or its policies, personalities or institutions. Campaign advertising may be directed at a mass audience whose endorsement of the views expressed may be critical to government or party policy success. Political advertisements are aimed at changing public perception of political actors, actions or personalities, whether or not they are in office. Politics have this-worldly objectives: the distribution of state resources of power and the mobilisation and organisation of legitimacy. When otherworldly discourses and motifs are mobilised in order to secure this-worldly political goals, the aim is to build trust that transcends the empirically verifiable world of things, people and facts. In Nigeria, religion has consistently played a significant and public role in the history and formative stages of nation building. The role of religion in politics has

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increased in recent decades as the nation-state becomes increasingly weak, experiencing an obvious inability to discharge its constitutional obligations to its citizens. As politicians are unable to articulate lasting political ideologies, religion has come to play the role of an organising platform for political action and selfrepresentation. In pre-colonial times, among the different societies that later became Nigeria, the source of political authority rested not with the people, but with the gods and ancestors; political power issued from the sacred realm where the ruler doubled as a ritual representative of his people. This was the case not only in the forest kingdoms of Benin and Oyo but also with the emirates of pre-colonial northern Nigeria, where, after the Othman dan Fodio Jihad of 1804–1810, the area became thoroughly Islamised, with religious and political authority fused in one (quasi) sacred person. In colonial Nigeria, religion was a strong instrument of secular governance, particularly in Lord Fredrick Lugard’s “Indirect Rule” system in northern Nigeria. In this system, political power and authority were vested on Muslim leaders in the emirates as representatives of the colonial administration. State Islam was an amorphous institution started by the colonial authority. Islam in northern Nigeria from 1900 to the 1940s soon became a quasi-established religion, protected by the colonial powers from criticism and competition. Islam, in the calculation of Lord Lugard ([1922] 1965, p. 193f.) was a legitimatising institution for the exercise of political authority (Afolayan 2009, p. 37–66). Colonial administrations promoted and benefited from Islam and Christianity in different ways and to different extents (Kenny 2010, p. 303). During this period, religion was a ready handmaid of political policies and expediency; it was not supposed to radically bring to birth a “new” Nigeria. This was the task of politicians or the founding fathers of the nation. Attempts at modernisation and nation-building after independence from Britain witnessed an inevitable setback when civil war broke out in 1967 (for a recent articulation of the circumstances surrounding the Nigerian-Biafran conflict, see Achebe 2012). Restoration of civilian rule has been frequently punctuated by coup d’états and the imposition of military dictatorships. In order to secure popular legitimacy, military usurpers of political power consistently played the religious card. The surreptitious enrolment of Nigeria as a full member of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) at the Sixteenth Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers on 9 January 1986 in Fez, Morocco, during the regime of Ibrahim Babangida is a clear exemplar. Civilian regimes were thought to be capable of restoring power to the electoral system, such that public office-seekers would mobilise public support based on their individual ability and qualification to render services or carry out the required responsibility, rather than their beliefs or relationship with a religious community or deity. Rapid impoverishment of a large section of the population and the accelerated and steady weakening of political and state

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institutions have expanded the influence of religion as the centre of spiritual and secular conduct. Political advertisement materials produced and distributed during this period illustrate that the religious identity of political contestants and their supposed relationship to God are their primary selling point. A distinctive feature of political practice after May 1999, when the military handed power over to a(n) (s)elected civilian government after 16 years of military dictatorship, has been the expansion and institutionalisation of never before imagined religious structures as instruments for the consolidation and circulation of political power.3 While Nigeria claims to be a secular democracy – even though the word “secular” does not appear in the constitution – there is no separation between religion and politics in practice; each translates into, sustains and reinforces the other. The preamble of the Nigerian Constitution (1999) clearly declares the country “as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God […]”4, while Section 10 specifies that the government shall not adopt any religion as “state religion” and that citizens are free to belong to, or form associations based on, religious beliefs, and publicly exercise their rights and freedoms such as switching faiths. This provision gives the impression – frequently cited and supported by Christians, while vehemently contested and rejected by Muslims – that Nigeria is a secular state (Kenny 1996). However, Section 275 of the Constitution provided for the establishment of a Shari’ah Court of Appeal (subject to the Supreme Court). While Section 10 satisfies Christians and gives the impression that Nigeria is a de jure secular state – where the myth of a liberal democracy that ensures that church and state are separate is upheld (cf. Martin 2010) – Section 275 appeals to Muslims and provides for the supply of religious laws and its enforcement with public money. In practice, however, government policies and practices subvert both of these norms. In twelve northern states, the state governments actively function as suppliers of religion through the reimplementation of expanded versions of the Shari’ah penal code and other forms of active funding and support for Islam (Sanneh 2003; Nmehielle 2004; Suberu 2009; Bolaji 2010).5 Joseph Kenny points out two important concerns regarding this when he writes, “State

3 The 1999 election which foisted Olusegun Obasanjo on the country as president was generally judged as rigged by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and characterised by pro-PDP malpractice which was supported by retired military generals in the party (cf. Ihonvbare 1999). 4 No one has been able to state how a contraption put together by Lord Lugard in 1914 for the convenience of the British Empire became a divine “product” with the attributes of “indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God”. 5 The governor of Zamfara state signed the first of these hastily packaged Shari’ah rules into law on 27 October 1999, precipitating eleven other northern states to follow in its stride.

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establishment of Shari’ah is a means for politicians to make points [of disagreement with the federal government] and for associations of Islamic scholars to gain for their members paid position[s] of social power” (Kenny 2010, p. 307). Another example of government entanglement with religion is in the area of funding pilgrimages. Since 1999, the Nigerian state has spent more money on religious festivals, agencies, institutions and pilgrimages than it does on the provision of social infrastructure. In 2010, a total of 110,000 Nigerians went on pilgrimages: 85,000 were Muslims who went to hajj while 25,000 were Christians who went to Israel and other Christian holy (tourist?) sites in Jerusalem. According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the pilgrimages cost a total sum of 16.44 billion Naira, of which the federal government provided a subsidy of 1.52 billion Naira (Oronsaye 2010). These figures pale in comparison to previous years. In 2008, according to figures released by the CBN, pilgrims to Mecca (84,878) and Jerusalem (17,000) cost the national economy 35 billion Naira or 144 million US dollars (cf. Nguvugher ND; cf. Omoh 2009). The government of Nigeria spent US$ 1,500 and US$ 1,000 for each Muslim and each Christian pilgrim, respectively. The state and federal governments and their officials select more than half of the pilgrims. Funding pilgrimage is a way for the government to cement its patronage system. But the sheer volume of yearly pilgrims – Nigeria supplies more than 5 % of all annual pilgrims to Mecca – and the amount of state resources expended on the production and circulation of pilgrims are indications of government involvement in religion and the place of religion in the politics of patronage (cf. Oronsaye 2010; cf. Osae-Brown 2012). The political role of religion in Nigeria is clearly visible, and it is argued here that there is a deliberate “political revitalization of religion” (Habermas 2006, p. 1) as a means of national self-perception and representation. A similar process is evident in political advertising, even when the laws regulating the practice prohibit the manipulation of religion in political communication.

3 The Regulation of the Nigerian Political Market and Advertising Political advertising is regulated in Nigeria, presupposing the existence of divergent political groups. At the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999, there were only three political parties: People’s Democratic Party (PDP),6 All Nigeria

6 For members of a coalition of opposition parties, the acronym PDP stands for “Poverty Development Party”. They claim that the more than one decade in power of the ruling party at the fed-

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People’s Party (ANPP), and Alliance for Democracy (AD). By the end of 2002, there were twenty-eight registered political parties competing in the 2003 general elections. Thirty-seven political parties contested in the 2007 general elections and sixty-three in the 2011 general elections.7 The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is the statutory body that registers and monitors political parties and conducts elections in Nigeria.8 The proliferation of political parties is justified by the argument that it provides optimal plurality of choices and options, and, consequently, of increased competition which would ensure the provision of better political products: candidates, policies and programmes. However, extreme plurality of parties has neither provided better political products nor informed choices or decisions by the electorates. As it is now, the multiplication of political parties is following in the steps of the proliferation of Pentecostal churches. This similarity between the Pentecostal market and the political market is important in examining how political marketing mobilises religious images and motifs in the rhetoric of self-representation. Because the political market is crowded to the point of suffocation, many political parties are simply unable to muster sufficient resources to field candidates for elections. The large number of parties also generates confusion as the electorates are unable to understand their manifestoes and make informed decisions in siding with one party against another. More significantly, the parties have been incapable of properly articulating political ideologies, consistent and coherent economic and fiscal policies or even social philosophy. Parties have been formed and sustained based on individual desires to capture political office and power and the capacity of a few persons to fund such associations. One ostensible reason for the proliferation of parties is the intention and strategy of the ruling party to fractionalise the opposition, thus making the parties not in power very weak and unable to contest the dominance of the PDP. At the federal level, only one party (PDP) has been in power since 1999. This same party controls more than nineteen of the thirty-six state governments in the country. The large number of parties is an indication of how crowded and intensely competitive the Nigerian

eral level in Nigeria has turned the country into “a political and economic cemetery” (Adams Oshiomole, Governor of Edo state on the platform of Action Congress of Nigeria [ACN]): http:// www.africanoutlookonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=834: nigeria-2011-its-ribadu-for-acn&catid=48:political-news&Itemid=29, visited on April 8, 2013. 7 Many of these never fielded a candidate or won any election in the country. Cf. INEC http://www.inecnigeria.org/index.php?cateid=3&contid=93, visited on April 8, 2013. 8 INEC also has the legal power to de-register a political party that fails to win any elections at the federal or state levels or supplies false or misleading information during its registration exercise.

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political market is. In this market, political power is contested and determined in elections, in which political parties as groups, and politicians with stakes as individuals, compete for public loyalty. Such intense competition for public trust and loyalty often reconfigures the society as a market for public loyalty and allegiance. Political advertising, like advertising generally, is a huge industry in Nigeria. Political competition is a central pillar of multi-party democracy; political advertising is therefore an important aspect of contestation for public offices: it is designed to present parties and candidates to the electorate through the mass media with the purpose of influencing opinions, perceptions and actions of members of the public (Holtz-Bacha/Kaid 2006, p. 3). In political advertising, political actors – parties, individuals, interest groups – decide how to present themselves to the electorate as strategists of winning public trust. Its central objective is to persuade individuals and groups to behave in a specific way desirable to the sponsors of the advertising material, or the political objective of a party, or its candidate, or a politician. Viewed broadly, political advertising sells politicians, abstract ideas or certain intangible values. According to Nicholas O’Shaughnessy and Stephen Henneberg (2002, p. xi), “it embodies a certain level of promise about the future, some kind of attractive life vision, or anything the satisfactions of which are not immediate but long-term, vague, and uncertain”. Political advertising – and advertising in general – usually promises to provide what is lacking in a society, that which is desirable but not readily available (De Mooij 2010; Jhally 1989; O’Barr 2005). In the case of contemporary Nigeria, it is possible to reconstruct the general structures of lack in the society by examining the content, style and form of its political advertisement materials. The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) is the government body that regulates advertising practice in Nigeria. Established by Act 55 of 1988 (and as amended by Act 93 of 1992), APCON has the responsibility to determine who are advertising practitioners, to set the standard of knowledge and skills required of such practitioners, and to regulate and control “the practice of advertising in all its aspects and ramifications” (APCON 2005, p. 1). Although advertising, like religion, is resistant to a generally accepted definition, different scholars, advertising agencies, or advertising associations supply a range of definitions. APCON provides two related definitions, namely that advertising is “a form of communication through the media about products, services or ideas paid for by an identified sponsor” (APCON 2005, p. 5); and, “advertisement” is “a communication in the media, paid for by an identified sponsor and directed at a target audience, with the aim of imparting correct information about a product, service, idea or opinion” (APCON 2005, p. 6). Although not covered by these definitions, advertising is also used in selling a person or personality or a myth and in the construction of brands and brand ap-

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peals. In political advertising, the politician (or his ideas, programmes and policies) become a political commodity that – through the medium of advertising – is brought to interact with the larger social world of humans. As shall be adumbrated shortly, many of the political advertisements that employ religious motifs and texts, although feeding from ongoing religious effervescence, can hardly be described as enlightening or imparting “correct information”. To set the background for a discussion of the use of religion in political advertising, it is important to examine the prescriptions regulating how individuals and groups are to engage in the practice of political advertising. As the regulating body for advertising in Nigeria, APCON has published a seventy-eight-page manual on the rules and regulations guiding the practice of advertising in the country. Section 4.7 of this Code of Advertising Practice (APCON 2005, p. 37–38), made up of eight sub-sections, is devoted entirely to political advertising. All political advertising materials are to be vetted and approved by the Advertising Standards Panel; the advertisements “shall not be deceptive or misleading in word, illustration, photograph, film or sound” (Section § 4.7.2); furthermore, political advertisements “shall be issue-orientated and devoid of abusive statements or references. They shall not employ fake, distorted or unsubstantiated claims, or contain misrepresentations” (Section § 4.7.3). Of central concern to the use of religion in political advertisement, the Code states in Section 4.7.5: “Political advertisements shall not explicitly or implicitly exploit ethnicity, religion or any other sectional interests”.9 Although these prescriptions are clear and properly articulated, the central problem is that all politicians in the country – Christian and Muslim – clearly, openly, and consistently violate them, and APCON appears incapable of enforcing compliance. The provision of Section 4.7.5 suffers the same fate as the non-establishment norm10 of the Nigerian Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion.

9 The operative word in this provision is the verb “exploit” which means either, i) to take selfish or unfair advantage of a person or situation, usually for personal gain“, or, ii) ”to use or develop something in order to gain a benefit“ (Bloomsbury English Dictionary 2004, p. 652). 10 Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution states ”[t]he Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion“.

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4 Vox Dei, Vox Populi: Religion in Political Advertisement Nigeria has the largest number of Muslims in any African country; it also has the largest number of Christians in any country in Africa. Although each of these two aggressively proselytising religions (Islam and Christianity) claims to have more adherents, Nigeria is almost equally split between Muslims (42 %) and Christians (40 %). About 8 % is divided unequally among indigenous religious groups and other fringe religions like Eckankar, Grail Message, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, etc. (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2010, p. 19). According to Klaus Hock (2009, p. 274), Nigeria “seems to be thoroughly drenched in religion”. A recent survey by Religion Monitor finds that 92 % of Nigerians surveyed claimed “that they are very religious and 7 percent [claimed] that they are quite religious” (Hock 2009, p. 276). These figures translate to 99 % of Nigerians who claim that religiosity is centrally important to their social, economic and political outlook. Consequently, religious scepticism, public expression of atheism, or secular humanism is the exception and generally frowned upon by many Nigerians. Religion therefore seems to be a default state of social, economic and political praxis. Similarly, a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reports that 67 % of the Nigerian population is in support of religious leaders publicly expressing their views on political issues, or positively influencing the political culture of the society. However – and rather interesting for the ongoing discussions – 83 % indicate that “it is important for their political leaders to have strong religious beliefs” (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life 2010, p. 52). The mobilisation of religion in commercial and political enterprises is found acceptable, and in fact actively supported in this social and cultural context.11 Right before any general election in Nigeria, the entire society is drenched in campaign materials in the form of posters, car stickers, almanacs, banners, handbills, billboards, newspaper and newsmagazine advertisements, radio and tele-

11 John Campbell (2011, p. 43) writes in this respect: “Almost everybody, in what Americans would regard as secular circumstances, uses faith vocabulary. Almost all public events are opened and closed with prayer. Causation events, big and small, public or private, is [sic] routinely ascribed to divine intervention or the wilful lack thereof. Christians and Muslims in Nigeria share a rejection of the Western concept of a separation of the religious and secular spheres of life”. The open use of religious images and motifs in the marketing of goods and services started with producers and marketers of household goods and telecommunications services in Nigeria in the mid-1990s. When their market success was attributed to religion, politicians noticed the pattern and followed their example.

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Fig. 2: “Grant Us Goodluck” Poster (Abuja, January, 2011). Photo: author (Asonzeh Ukah).

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vision advertisements. Produced by a wide range of interest groups, including wealthy patrons or “godfathers”, godsons/daughters, corporate entities, business groups, pressure groups and sycophantic individuals and organisations – campaign materials are ubiquitous. In recent elections, and to reach diaspora Nigerians, the Internet has come to play an important role in creating visibility for contestants; specifically such platforms as blogs, listservs, Twitter and Facebook are recognised as having immense mobilising capacities. One in a series of posters published and posted virtually all over Nigeria in the months preceding the April 2011 elections, in support of the bid of incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan, depicts a child in a solemn position of prayer, palms folded in front, head slightly lowered, with the following boldly inscribed prayer: “Grant us Goodluck Oh Lord!”. Four different passport-size photographs are also clearly visible on the wall-size poster, two belonging to the president, and the other two to his spouse. The text of this poster (figure 2) does not explicitly indicate that it is a Christian prayer; the image, however, clearly does portray a Judeo-Christian iconography. As children do not vote in Nigeria (voting age is 18), it is curious why and how the poster showed a child in earnest supplication to “God” regarding the choice of a president. Since both image and text are Christian in context, it is important to relate them to their scriptural contexts such as the text of Mark 10:14: “Let the little children come to Me […] for of such is the kingdom of God”.12 A more relevant biblical text in understanding this poster is Luke 11:11–12 (also Matthew 7:9): “If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? […] Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” Similarly, the above campaign poster evokes the special character of children as innocent and guiltless, vulnerable and worthy to be hearkened to and protected. This nuance is also explicit in Matthew 18:10: “Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My father who is in heaven”. In both local and international media, Goodluck Jonathan is ostensibly identified as a “Christian southerner”. He frequents Christian gatherings and is known to make pronouncements in churches. Jonathan has made more high-profile visits to worship sites than he has made to educational and healthcare facilities since assuming office as president of Nigeria. Showing his strong self-portrayal as a “Christian president”, churches are sites of his policy enunciation. The poster, therefore, clearly speaks to a Christian audience or electorate, urging, cajoling, and even mildly blackmailing them to consider Goodluck Jonathan as the candidate of choice for even children who are innocent and closer to God. Not to vote for the candidate chosen by innocent

12 Holy Bible (1994); all Bible citations are from this edition, unless otherwise specified.

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children would amount to despising them, giving them stones in place of bread, snakes instead of fish, scorpions rather than eggs. The choice of a qualified candidate to be president of the federal republic is one that is not based on mature adults, but on the “prayer request” of children to God. In a similar vein, post-independence Nigeria has been a nation of “bad luck” and “misfortune” brought upon it and its people by deficient leaders. The iconic Nigerian intellectual Chinua Achebe articulates this position in his The Trouble with Nigeria: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership […] The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmarks of true leadership” (Achebe 1984, p. 1). Achebe locates this crushing “leadership misfortune” in “the seminal absence of intellectual rigour in […] political thought” among Nigerian leaders (Achebe 1984, p.11). The failure of leadership decried by Achebe is intricately interwoven with the structures of the Nigerian state. There is a general feeling, particularly from southern Nigeria (the dominantly Christian part) that the incumbent president is a harbinger of providence, good times and good things for the country. He is, as his first name suggests, a bringer of good luck to the Nigerian nation. There is a parallel between this popular perception and what Americans felt about Barack Obama towards the tail end of the second Bush presidency: hope, optimism and aspiration towards re-founding the American nation devastated by financial collapse and two expensive overseas wars. In figure 2, we sense this in the mimicking of the Obama campaign slogan of “Yes We Can!” The billboard in figure 3 aptly captures the understanding or conceptualisation of political responsibility as a divine initiative. The only qualification of the contestants, who call themselves “The Winning Team”, for the office they seek is their being “God’s chosen people”. This is a group campaign advertisement in the sense that the four individuals whose photographs are on the billboard are competing for different elective offices, at the national, state and senatorial levels; two are Christians (Jonathan and Agboola), two are Muslims (Alao-Akala and Arapaja). The sizes of the photographs are arranged to symbolize the dignity of the respective offices being contested for: from the most elevated office (the presidency) to the least (senatorial seat). Aimed at a multi-religious audience in the southwest of Nigeria (the anchoring text is translated into Yoruba, in smaller print), this advertisement’s explicit Christian imagery and text are moderated and harmonised. Even in the light of this restraint, the caption “God’s Chosen People” is a name of a Pentecostal church, and explicitly related to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Israelites being “God’s elect”. In Pauline and Christian theology, the Christian Church is “God’s Chosen People”: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people he has chosen as his own inheritance” (Ps. 33:12; cf. 1 Peter 2:9–10).

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Fig. 3: God’s Chosen People (Ibadan, October 2010). Photo: author (A. U.).

Significant here, as in the analysis of figure 3, is that the choice is initiated by God, and not by the people. The subtle argument in figure 3 is that the electorate needs to confirm a prior choice made by God for certain individuals, the basis of which need not bother anyone for the moment. As chosen people, these political candidates present their credentials not based on the will of the electorate but of a divine being. “Divine election” comes with special entitlements and privileges; those who are divinely chosen are not accountable to the people but to God alone. More importantly, they command the largest portion of public resources. The incongruity in this campaign material is this: if these people are already divinely selected to govern, why do they need to be voted for by the electorate? From the perspective of politicians and from the history of elections since 1999, the will of the people is irrelevant since election outcomes are consistently rigged by corrupt politicians who compromise election officials. Methods of rigging elections include the stuffing of ballot boxes, both by officials and political thugs, as well as the pervasive “godfather factor” (Olarinmoye 2008; Bello 2011). Chinua Achebe succinctly characterises “political godfatherism” as the “archaic practice [which] allows a relative handful of men – many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs – to sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the de-

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sired political position, bribing, threatening and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process” (Achebe 2011, par. 11). Godfathers sponsor and rig elections; and in the perspective of figure 3, “God’s chosen people” win elections. As De Mooij (2010, p. 1) argues, in order to be effective and attract public attention and interest, advertising generally promises to provide what a society lacks. During the military era, many thought what the Nigerian society needed in order to progress were democracy and the citizens’ ability to determine and actualise their potentials. Since 1999, it has become obvious that what Nigeria lacks are politicians with integrity, or to paraphrase the words of Achebe (2011, par. 22), leaders humbled by the trust placed upon them by the people who use the power given them for the good of the people. This is, in other words, the call for selfless and responsible leadership. At the root of the “leadership misfortune” that plagues Nigeria is corruption. When politicians advertise themselves as “righteous”, they are promising to supply political virtue, the absence of which is responsible for the present predicament of the country. It is in this context that figure 4 is to be read and understood. The text of the billboard (figure 4) is a quotation from Psalm 29:2. The candidates whose photographs are sandwiched between the logotype of the political party (PDP) and the coat of arms of the nation (a symbol of state power and status) are explicitly presenting themselves as righteous candidates. “Righteousness” is a religious virtue and not a political one; probity is, however. The claim of righteousness by these candidates in this campaign material, many observers of the Nigerian political scene would insist, belies their history and performance as governors in their respective states. Every politician for elective office promises to eradicate corruption, but ends up being more corrupt than his or her predecessor is. Goodluck Jonathan is no different. He served as deputy governor and governor of Bayelsa state,13 vice president, and now as president of the nation. Very few politicians ascend to any political position without going through some form of corrupt, client-patron arrangement. It is not, therefore, possible or even advisable for them to dismantle the scaffolding through which they did ascend. One veritable way of obscuring their identity, laundering their corrupt image, and creating a myth around their intentions, is to represent themselves through the advertising medium as “righteous” politicians. By associating the most corrupt politicians with images of “righteousness”, “elects of God”, and ennobling virtues of religion and then repeating these fre-

13 Nigerian state governors appropriate lump sums of money from the federal account as “Security Votes” and simply line their pockets with them (cf. Egbo/Nwakoby/Onwumere/Uche 2010). Even as the amount of money shared by governors grew, insecurity of life and property has become a defining feature of contemporary Nigeria (Omede 2011). Jonathan nearly bankrupted Bayelsa state as governor. As president, he has refused to declare his assets as demanded by law.

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Fig. 4: Righteous Politicians’ Banner (Abuja, January 2011). Photo: author (A. U.).

quently through massive advertising campaigns, the public may begin to buy into the propaganda, and, for example, associate Goodluck Jonathan with good luck for Nigeria (Lynch/McGoldrick 2005, p. 109). The insertion of religious ideas and aspirations into political campaign materials of the type under discussion has its own irony: since Jonathan became president, Nigerians – other than those in the corridors of political power – have lost the sense, meaning and experience of “rejoicing”. Life is now harder for Nigerians than ever before as about 90 % live off of under US$ 2 a day; it is estimated that US$ 412 billion of public money has been stolen by government officials in Nigeria since 1960, hence for many years it has been consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. Yet it is governed by “righteous politicians”. Politicians construct themselves in their campaign materials as “God’s Chosen People”, who would rule or lead the people righteously and so make the society “rejoice”. In figure 5, a massive billboard proclaims a politician as “God’s Will” for governing the state. The pun here is palpable: the politician’s name is Godswill Akpabio; in slightly modifying his first name, he locates the reason for running for governor in the deepest recesses of a metaphysical realm. By turning a proper noun (Godswill) to a phrase (God’s Will), this advertising material shifts

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Fig. 5: “God’s Will” Billboard, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State (October 2010). Photo: author (A. U.).

the focus of the campaign to a site that resists scrutiny. It is not possible to ascertain what the will of God is in political matters; virtually any person can ascribe divine authority to his or her actions. More importantly, by constructing his desire as “God’s Will”, all his opponents are invariably constructed as against God’s will or pursuing the devil’s will, since in popular religious thinking, the devil’s will is antithetical to God’s desires. The subtle blackmail in this advertising material is such that, because his political opponents are constructed as carrying out the will of Satan, they may be persecuted and harmed; Godswill may rig the elections in order to “fulfil God’s will”. A divine will to fix Nigeria may be far-fetched considering that it did not take divine will to couple Nigeria as a nation by Lugard. However, what Nigeria needs to confront the multitude of problems she is facing in the 21st century, is not a “continuation” of “business as usual”, divine or otherwise, but a radical transformation of structures and governance behaviour. According to Wole Soyinka, “[w]e need a complete systemic transformation” (quoted in: Adeniji 2012, par. 5). Almost all the political campaign materials produced by politicians already in the corridors of power appealed for the “continuation” of the present, dysfunctional system. Religion is mobilised to maintain the present structural inequality, a situation in which 90 % of the wealth of the nation is in the hands of 5 % of the population.

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Fig. 6: Power Belongs to God, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria (October 2010). Photo: author (A. U.).

Two related campaign materials from the same politician have sub-texts that read, “Let God’s will be done again”; and “Let God’s will continue”. The first of the texts assumes that the 2007 elections, generally judged to be the worst general elections in the history of Nigeria, were a manifestation of “God’s will”. This revisionist history – reconstructing a rigged election as the “will of God” – is akin to the more pervasive Pentecostal belief that wealth, no matter its source, is a manifestation of divine blessing (Harrison 2005; Onoja 2009; Yong/Attanasi 2012). The importance or connection between Pentecostal upsurge and the production of pentecostalising political campaign materials cannot completely be dismissed. A pertinent example here is from the governor of Rivers State, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, who had a number of billboards mounted along major highways in Port Harcourt proclaiming the words of Psalm 62:11: “God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this: That power belongeth unto God” (figure 6). Since the capture of power – and with it access to public treasury – is the ultimate objective of Nigerian politicians, whichever way this is achieved, it is defined as the will of God. And if it is the will of God, it is futile, or rather ungodly, for opponents to contest it. The second text that says “Let God’s will continue” – builds on the first and aims at restructuring public perception to judge the governor’s stay in office as the will of God and his regime as the reign of God. If his regime is accepted as the

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reign of God, opposition politicians are at a loss in analysing his policies and practices. Of course theocracies are not accountable to the electorate, since the will of the electorate is discounted. In principle, politicians in elective positions are “public servants” with clearly delineated responsibility to manage public affairs such as the provision of public infrastructure (education, health care, utilities) and the guarantee of public safety. In other words, by electing a public officer, the citizens entrust the charge of a state or nation or municipality into his/her hands, meaning s/he takes responsibility for the welfare of the unit of governance. As is shown in figure 7, a governor of a state in the southeast of Nigeria inundated the state capital with billboards proclaiming that the welfare of the state “is in the Hands of God”. In the billboard, the photograph of the bespectacled governor – with his gaze gently turned heavenward as if contemplating the divine origin of his bureaucratic powers, looking unperturbed and serene – is inserted in the map of the state and placed in the half-opened, curved pair of dark-skinned hands. From the image, the governor’s primary gaze – how he sees and wants to be seen by the people he governs14 – and dedication are turned away from the people to an empty space skyward from whence, he believes, his legitimacy is bestowed. In a society where more than 80 % of its citizens are living below poverty level and its chief security and welfare officer – in the person of the governor – is looking robust, well-fed and serene, gazing into the afternoon sky would amount to a clear dereliction of duty and gross irresponsibility. There was no public outrage against this billboard even though it was financed with public money. Local politics is seen by many individuals as divine elevation to economic well-being. A political billboard from Kaduna in northern Nigeria is simply captioned “Divine Elevation” rather than “public service” or “call to duty”. Putting Nigeria in the hands of God is not new. In 2004, former President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999–2007) informed Nigerians that “[i]n my dreams I see a new Nigeria in the hands of God” (Obasanjo 2004, p. iii). The consequences of his placing “Nigeria in the hands of God” were disastrous: among other things, he became the most corrupt president in the history of Nigeria, according to the report of a parliamentary probe into contracts he awarded for electricity supply (cf. Adeniyi 2011). Considering the revelations from the investigation of the national assembly since 2007, Obasango’s regime (mis)appropriated more than US$ 16 billion for the generation of electricity only to produce more darkness; he embarked on an disastrous “third term” project against constitutional provisions on term

14 On the importance of the gaze or the role of images in the context mentioned above, see Morgan (2005).

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Fig. 7: Imo is in the Hands of God, Owerri, Imo state (October 2010). Photo: author (A. U.).

limits; he manipulated state structures and institutions such as the police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), in order to harass and intimidate his political opponents. He morphed into a “super-godfather”, who foisted the grossly incompetent Yaradu’a/Jonathan government on Nigerians, through the worst “elections” ever conducted in Nigeria. Above all, even when he claimed to have been ordained a pastor while in Abacha’s prison and to have fraternized with such popular pastors as Enoch Adeboye (Ukah 2008, p. 200–205), he demonstrated a public disdain for religious authorities who dared to challenge his policies. Politicians placing a political entity in the “hand” of God has never brought about a positive transformation of society (Onumah 2011). Rather, the evocation of “God” either in political advertisements or in state policies, whether in the Shari’ah states of northern Nigeria or by “Christian” politicians in southern Nigeria – as in figure 7 – is a manipulative strategy of masking entrenched corruption and maladministration, a demonstration of an exclusivist political theology where religious sources are deployed in service of personal political interest. It is an indication of extreme individualism, state dysfunction and absence of national ideals or creative political imagination.

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The use of religious stereotypes and imageries in political advertising is found everywhere in Nigeria; it is practiced by both southern and northern politicians. A critical analysis of these campaign materials is carried out in this essay by examining the primary and secondary meanings of messages being conveyed. Nevertheless, there may be secondary or hidden messages contained in the advertisements that may be equally important in understanding how such messages distort reality, uphold the status quo or maintain the dominant views of the powerful in the society (Alozie 2005, p. 202). The advertisements considered here have both political and religious meanings: they sell politicians as religiously upright and virtuous persons, and, therefore, as well-meaning, moral candidates; they also sell “establishment religiosity” as an important political attribute of candidates vying for public office. Many of these materials unambiguously violate the regulations of APCON that campaign materials should only provide “correct information”, and not exploit religion to make “unsubstantiated claims” or “misrepresentations” (APCON 2005, p. 37). That they are condoned illustrates how deeply entrenched religious thinking and perception are even among the officials who are supposed to police advertising and commercial practices. To a majority of Nigerians, religion and politics are intrinsically interwoven; but they also notice the abuse and confusion. This interrelationship does not mean that the nation is the better for it. Contrary to the views of Ogbu Kalu cited at the beginning of this essay, in a liberal democracy and in a multi-religious society, religion does not, and need not, provide the reason for the love of the ruler by the ruled, nor is it the motive to obey the ruler. Religion has not, and does not need to, set the standard and style of power, and neither has it been the engine that moves governance. As present episodes of ethno-religious crises, including the Boko Haram insurrection, irrefutably demonstrate, religion may be the symptom of all that is wrong with, and in, Nigeria (Abimbola 2010; Onuoha 2010); its ubiquity in politics, economics and society may be the sign of the country’s de-development rather than positive transformation. Its inescapable presence and staging in politics simply means that a way must be found – through the rigour of analysis – to harness the best potentials of the system.

5 Conclusion The advertisement materials examined above graphically illustrate the nature of the Nigerian political system built on neo-patrimonialism – meaning, where a state’s chief executive bases his authority on a personal patronage system rather than on law or a political philosophy or imagination. The patronage system may have a religious source. In this system, the right to rule is not vested in an office

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but in a person and his alleged divine connections. In this scheme of things – and in similar systems elsewhere – the conceptualization of religion as a discrete or separate aspect of social life not having anything to do with political behaviour is increasingly destabilised by contemporary practices in which metaphysical and spiritual beliefs aggressively and unapologetically insert themselves in the conception and practice of politics. While religious beliefs and practices have traditionally played certain roles in Nigeria, never before in the history of post-colonial Nigeria had religion played as pivotal and organising a role as it has in the present dispensation (1999-present). With sixty-three registered political parties, political contest is characterised by such intensity, violence and malpractice that the electorate is all but discounted. When elected officials claim a theocratic role in governance, they subvert democracy as they appropriate bureaucratic power while exercising it as a private or religious property. Politicians conceived as “God’s chosen people” do not need to account for their actions and policies to the electorate. This is part of the source or cause of impunity in contemporary Nigeria. The three most lucrative and most corrupt industries in contemporary Nigeria are politics,15 oil and gas (Adebanwi 2012), and religion (Ukah 2011). Common to these domains are their confounding opaqueness, resistance to accountability, and depth of corruption and malfeasance (Adebanwi/Obadare 2011; Achebe 2012, p. 249–250).16 These industries are masked in mysteriousness. Similarly, recent political advertising campaigns demonstrate the increasing mobilisation of religious ideas, texts, motifs and images in creating a myth of the righteous, divinely elected politician who has a sacred mandate to execute the will of a mystifying, metaphysical, inscrutable entity. Recent popular demands for probity and prosecution of corrupt public office holders indicate that the myth-making programme of the political class is not holding up as expected. Capturing political power guarantees access to oil revenues; religious motifs are mobilised to reinforce and sustain

15 One national legislator in Nigeria earns an average of 320 million Naira (€1,531,100.48) per annum, excluding bribes and rents s/he routinely demands and gets, contracts, “constituency projects” and other pecuniary perquisites (cf. El Rufai 2012; cf. Economic Confidential 2011). Concerning the cesspool of corruption in the Nigerian legislature, Wole Soyinka recently remarked: “The Nigerian legislative system is hydro-pus. There is no way you can fight corruption without changing the legislature. Here, the more corrupt a person is, the more chieftaincy he will get. We need a complete systemic transformation. Why should there be full-time legislation. Corruption is right at the top and percolates down” (quoted in: Adeniji 2012, par. 5). 16 According to Moses Ochonu (2010, par. 8), “[Nigerian] ‘Democracy’ has […] democratised corruption”. According to Adebanwi and Obadare (2011, p. 190), “Nigerian leaders have either stolen or mismanaged US$ 412 billion since independence […]”. Chinua Achebe (2012, p. 249) makes a similar claim in his recent book.

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political domination and the cultivation of a lack of transparency and accountability. That politicians make their claims to charismatic authority and power publicly, even while their performance is framed within a legal-rational bureaucracy, illustrates the political character of religion in contemporary Nigeria. Religion in political advertising serves as a process that regulates or controls the perception of the electorate as well as the influence on public opinion (Kuran 1995, p. 2–5). As the cases of high profile political corruption amply demonstrate, Nigerian politicians are not virtuous, as they are very corrupt and demonstrate fiscal irresponsibility. However, the deployment of religion in political campaigning is a case of preference falsification in order to conform to public expectations. In this sense, public display of religion and religiosity is a systematic strategy of concealment of politicians’ private preferences in order to avoid disapproval, protect personal integrity and image, but also to win public approval by manipulating public feelings. How does religion function in Nigeria’s democracy? On the one hand, it may be constructed to play the role of a midwife, creatively bringing about a form of democracy in tune with the local depths of religiosity, a sort of indigenised democracy. On the other hand, it may be construed differently, namely as performing the duties of a handmaid, a social structure that plays a subsidiary role of support but not producing anything new or distinctive, either locally or culturally. The conception of religion as apolitical, something invisible and out of reach of politicians, is indeed an ideological construction that masks some insidious consequences of religion. The ways in which religious images and ideas, the imaginary and motifs are “used” or deployed in the political discourse in emerging democracies such as Nigeria call for a rethinking of the meaning of religion in the 21st century. Religion has an ambivalent relationship to politics, as well as to other spheres of human experience. The performance of religion in political campaigns in Nigeria and the staging of the “righteous politician” destabilise and transgress the Westphalian paradigm regarding the relationship between state and religion. Considering the obvious and subtle ways in which religion is mobilised in political discourses in Nigeria (as demonstrated by foregoing discussion) and elsewhere, there is a need to reconceptualise religion to take into account the general inclination of the electorate and the political character of religion itself. In the life-worlds of many Nigerians – and in the experiences of many societies around the world (Strenski 2010; Martin 2010; Turner 2011; Barbalet/Possamai/ Turner 2011; Blackford 2012) – religion is not conceived as apolitical, that is, consigned to the private activity of individuals. If religion is conceptualised as apolitical, it would result in a great disjuncture with social and political realities and experiences of many societies across the world. This is empirically the case as regards how religion is publicly performed in Nigeria, and particularly as to how it is inserted into political advertising campaigns.

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Nigerian Constitution (1999): http://www.nigeria-law.org/ConstitutionOfTheFederalRepublicOfNigeria.htm. Nmehielle, Vincent O. (2004): “Sharia Law in the Northern States of Nigeria: To Implement or not to Implement, the Constitutionality is the Question”. In: Human Rights Quarterly 26. No. 3, p. 730–759. DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2004.0039 Nguvugher, Chentu Dauda (ND): “Nigerian Religious Pilgrimages: Piety or Economic Waste?” http://www.tcnn.org/index_files/rb54.chentu.htm, visited on August 27, 2011. O’Barr, William M. (2005): “What is Advertising?” In: Advertising & Society Review 6. No. 3, DOI:10.1353/asr.2006.0005 O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas J./Henneberg, Stephen C. M. (Eds.) (2002): The Idea of Political Marketing. Westport: Praeger. Obadare, Ebenezer (2007): “Religious NGOs, Civil Society and the Quest for a Public Sphere in Nigeria”. In: African Identities 5. No. 1, p. 135–153. DOI: 10.1080/14725840701253928 Obasanjo, Olusegun (2004): “Foreword”. In: National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). Abuja: National Planning Commission, p. iii. Ochonu, Moses (2010): “The Failures of Nigerian Democracy”. In: Pambazuka News 474, 18 March 2010, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/63116. Olarinmoye, Omobolaji Ololade (2008): “Godfathers, Political Parties and Electoral Corruption in Nigeria”. In: African Journal of Political Science and International Relations 2. No. 4, p. 66–73. Omede, A. J. (2011): “Nigeria: Analysing the Security Challenges of the Goodluck Jonathan Administration”. In: Canadian Social Science 7. No. 5, p. 90–102. DOI: 10.3968/J.css.1923669720110705.220. Omoh, Gabriel (2009): “Nigerians spend N35bn on Pilgrimages”. In: Vanguard online edition (Lagos), January 09, 2009. Onoja, Adoyi (2009): “The Pentecostal Churches: The Politics of Spiritual Deregulation since the 1980s”. In: Julius O. Adekunle (Ed.): Religion in Politics: Secularism and National Integration in Modern Nigeria. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, p. 263–273. Onumah, Chido (2011): Time to Reclaim Nigeria: Essays 2001 – 2011. Abuja: African Centre for Media & Information Literacy. Onuoha, Freedom C. (2010): “The Islamist Challenge: Nigeria’s Boko Haram Crisis Explained”. In: African Security Review 19. No. 2, p. 54–67. DOI:10.1080/10246029.2010.503061. Oronsaye, Stanley (2010): “Government Spends N1.52b on 2010 Pilgrimages”, Next (Lagos), November 21, 2010. Osae-Brown, Funke (2012): “Pilgrimage on Government Budget”, In: BusinessDay (Lagos), October 17, 2012. http://www.businessdayonline.com/NG/index.php/analysis/features/ 46010-pilgrimage-on-government-budget. Peel, J. D. Y. (1968): Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba. London: Published for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (2010): “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa”. In: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, April 15, 2010, http://www.pewforum.org/executive-summary-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharanafrica.aspx. Ranger, Terence O. (Ed.) (2008): Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Sanneh, Lamin (2003): “Shari’ah Sanctions as Secular Grace?: A Nigerian Islamic Debate and an Intellectual Response”. In: Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 20. No. 4, p. 232–244. DOI: 10.1177/026537880302000409.

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Sacrificial Space: The Hebrew Imagination “Comes Home” 1 The akeda in the Jewish Tradition Attached to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem are the four most powerful stories that have driven the Jewish imagination since its inception in the dark mythological past: the creation story, the sacrifice story, the Temple story and the redemption story. In a series of Biblical and post-Biblical redactions and projections, the place where Isaac was brought to be sacrificed came to be identified with the Foundation Stone from which the world was created, and with the Temple of Solomon and its successors – meant to culminate in the building of the “Third Temple” that will usher in the messianic age. Still, it was only in the twentieth century – with the addition of geopolitics to the midrashic and mystical imagination – that the place took on an urgency it had not had since the first century of the Common Era. While all these stories converge on a site that, therefore, exercises an enormous gravitational pull, I want to focus here on the “sacrifice story”, based on the narrative of the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), which is encoded in Hebrew memory as the akeda (lit. “binding”). This literary topos has fed the imagination and behavior of Jews for two millennia. In what might be called its “realized” form, it reflects not only an instance of religious mimicry in the ongoing exchanges with Christendom – fuelled perhaps by crucifixion-envy on the part of Isaac’s Jewish descendants – but also, as we shall see, the most radical reenactment of the archetypes of memory. The larger challenge I wish to address in this essay is the possibility of achieving a defensibly ethical poetic – and political – stance by imagining a non-hermetic model of the akeda and a non-sacrificial, non-exclusive approach to the sacred. To understand the enormity of the challenge, we must briefly recapitulate the ways in which history and story intersect and undermine each other in the shadow of the Temple Mount. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, in his groundbreaking book on Jewish memory (Zakhor 2005 [1982]), defined the recycling of Biblical topoi as characteristic of collective Jewish memory throughout two thousand years of exile. However, if we look closely, we can see that in the case of the akeda, this recycling is an inversion of the usual mimetic process by which artistic representation imitates reality: already in the Talmud, and most egregiously during the time of the Crusades, there

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are abundant recorded instances of life imitating literature, as filicides avowedly patterned their actions after their understanding of Abraham’s “behavior”.1 Yet the “realized form” of the akeda was actually a very early misreading of Gen. 22 that persists to this day. Readers from all three monotheistic traditions, whose memory is invariably inflected by different exegetical approaches and theological appropriations, can benefit from a close rereading of this passage from the Hebrew Bible: And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham. And He said to him, “Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering [olah] on one of the mountains which I shall say to you.” And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took his two lads with him, and Isaac his son, and he split wood for the offering [olah], and rose and went to the place that God had said to him. On the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from afar. And Abraham said to his lads, “Sit you here with the donkey and let me and the lad walk ahead and let us worship and return to you.” And Abraham took the wood for the offering [olah] and put it on Isaac his son and he took in his hand the fire and the cleaver, and the two of them went together. And Isaac said to Abraham his father, “Father!” and he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Here is the fire and the wood but where is the sheep for the offering [olah]?” And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for the offering [olah], my son.” And the two of them went together. And they came to the place that God had said to him, and Abraham built there an altar and laid out the wood and bound [va-ya’akod] Isaac his son and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. And Abraham reached out his hand and took the cleaver to slaughter his son. And the Lord’s messenger called out to him from the heavens and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” And he said, “Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.” And Abraham raised his eyes and saw and, look, a ram was caught in the thicket by its horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up as a burnt offering [olah] instead of his son. (Gen. 22:1–13)2

The Hebrew word olah, which appears six times in this short passage, signifies a burnt offering connected with sacrificial rites. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the crematory chimneys still warm from the ashes of millions of incinerated Jews, the temptation to view the decimation of the Jewish race as

1 In the myriad commentaries and discussions of the akeda, the most influential for modern thinkers and writers has been that of Kierkegaard (1985 [1843]), who argued in 1843 that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was a primordial act of faith that ushered in the dawn of monotheism and not an act to be emulated. The persistence of the story as template for behavior has nevertheless continued unabated, as we will see below. 2 All quotes from the Torah are from the translation of The Five Books of Moses (Alter 2004). Key Hebrew words have been cited in brackets.

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theologically inflected was almost irresistible, and can explain, for example, the widespread use of the term Holocaust, derived from the Latin word for olah in the Vulgate translation of Gen. 22:2: “Tolle filium tuum unigenitum, quem diligis, Isaac, et vade in terram visionis, atque ibi offeres eum in holocaustum super unum montium quem monstravero tibi”3. In 1950, Shalom Spiegel was a lone voice reminding his co-religionists that the Biblical text carries an explicit interdiction against the sacrifice of sons, both in the narrative frame – “And God tested Abraham” – and in the actual resolution of the story, Isaac’s rescue through God’s final intervention (Spiegel 2000). Still, when we talk of the akeda as topos in the Jewish literary imagination, we are referring to the continuous post-Biblical legacy that actually kills off Isaac, embalming him as the prototype of Jewish martyrdom. One could even argue that the term “Sacrifice of Isaac”, as it is called in Christian iconography, would fit most Hebrew retellings, ancient and contemporary, better than “akeda”, which refers only to the binding or aborted sacrifice. But if we take the trouble to trace the evolution of this story within the confines of the Hebrew Bible itself, we will see how a constitutive mythical moment also became territorialized. The language of Gen. 22 is laconic and, when it comes to the place itself, rather imprecise: “Take […] Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you”4. In later Biblical texts, with the addition of geography and power to the mix, the akeda moves from a literary to a geographical topos. The mythical site of the original crucible – “one of the mountains” in the “land of Moriah”, vaguely connected earlier in Genesis to a town called Shalem (Gen. 15:18) – acquires specificity and gravitas as it travels through the books of Samuel and Kings, becoming the center of David’s passion and Solomon’s concrete deeds. Through a conflation of promise, conquest, purchase and consecration, Jerusalem is taken from the Jebusites (II Sam. 5:6–9), the City of David is founded, the ark of the covenant relocated (II Sam. 6), Arauna’s threshing floor acquired (II Sam. 24), and the Temple constructed (I Kgs. 5) – all converging in II Chronicles 3 on a site now designated and fixed as “Mt. Moriah” (II Chr. 3:1).5 This centripetal theo-geo-political process is, nonetheless, reversed after the destruction of the First Temple and again in the long aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple and the millennial dispersion that Jews call Galut [exile]. In

3 My emphasis. 4 My emphasis. 5 For an elaboration of the process by which the story and place of sacrifice congeal in the Hebrew Bible, see Ezrahi (2007).

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exile, that mountain, like everything else in Zion, becomes, once again as in Gen. 22, a mobile projection of the Jewish imagination. Several scholars have traced the unresolved tension in Jewish hermeneutic literature between what Amir Eshel (2003, p. 122) calls “concrete, material places” and the idea of “makom” as portable site of the divine-human encounter (in Talmudic Hebrew, Ha-makom, the place, is also one of the many circumlocutions for God).6 Even the solid rock on which Isaac was “bound”, identified, as we have seen, in rabbinic fantasy with the foundational rock of creation, strains heavenward, requiring David’s – and, in due time, Muhammad’s – physical strength to hold it down.7 The story, however, easily manages to detach itself from the place and to cling to every subsequent act of sacrifice in the lands of Jewish dispersal and persecution. As with so many other floating Jewish myths, this one was re-grounded in the Zionist century, in a way reversing the story once again, and reprising the Biblical acts of consolidation that culminated in II Chronicles. Before 1948 and after 1967, physical access to the Temple Mount added a new/old dimension to the Hebrew negotiation with the sources of holiness. Between 1948 and 1967, with the Old City and the Temple Mount in Jordanian hands, a sense of distant proximity prevailed in Israel, maintaining a kind of exilic praxis and mindset in poetry and politics. In his “Poem for the Sabbath Eve”, published several years before the 1967 war, Yehuda Amichai (2002, p. 111) writes, “Will you come to me tonight? / The laundry has already dried in the courtyard. / The insatiable war / Is now in some other place / […] We know well that the border / is close, and we are forbidden there. / But my father prayed ‘va-yakhulu’ – / the earth and all their hosts”8. The word “vayakhulu” is shorthand for the passage from Genesis 2:1 that begins the recitation of the Kiddush, the blessing over the wine on Friday night, marking the end of the six days of creation and ushering in the Sabbath: “Then the heavens and the earth were completed (va-yakhulu), and all their array [alt. hosts]”. In Amichai’s poem, the connection between the beloved who is beckoned to a tryst, the father who intones the Sabbath liturgy, and the divided city, is clear only to a reader sensitive to the diasporic practice of substitution and distance: prayer that substitutes for the Temple rites of sacrifice and distance from the sacred center that allows holiness (and love) to permeate the entire universe.9

6 For a larger discussion of the place of “place” in the Jewish imagination, see Ezrahi (2000); Eisen (1986); Gurevitch and Aran (1997). In GenR/BerR (68:9) it is stated that God “is the place of the universe though the universe is not His place.” 7 See mYom (5:2); ySan (10:29); for the Muslim reference, see Makiya (2001, p. 182, p. 322–325). 8 My translation. 9 For a more extensive discussion of distance as a critical ingredient in the diasporic imagination, see Ezrahi (2000, especially p. 3–31).

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2 Modern Retellings The three most prominent writers of Jerusalem – Uri Zvi Greenberg, S. Y. Agnon and Yehuda Amichai, whose work, collectively, spans the entire twentieth century – engaged the temptations and the dangers of the akeda as a form of proximity to the sacred. As I will argue, the tensions they exposed between centripetal, exclusive, and centrifugal, inclusive, forms of the religious imagination reflect active forces shaping Israel’s religious life and political profile. Of the three, only Amichai lived to fully articulate a post-’67 poetic response, culminating in his last book, Open Closed Open (2000). And only he embodies, throughout his œuvre, a porous, inclusive idea of holiness through an insistence on mediated and multiple forms of access to the sacred. Why these three? Most modern Hebrew writers, like their predecessors, invoke the akeda in the context of Jewish suffering. The list is endless, stretching from the poems of “national poet” H. N. Bialik at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the work of A. B. Yehoshua at the turn of the twenty-first – and beyond.10 Though the historical referents vary – moving from the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, to the shoah at mid-century, to the wars of modern Israel from 1948 until today – they all allude to suffering in which Jews are either victims or (reluctant) agents – but in which, due to the hermetic nature of the topos, the moral discourse on human agency and the exercise of power is missing or limited to a debate between fathers and sons. In modern Israel, where generations of fathers have been sending generations of sons to kill and be killed, every reworking of the akeda reflects, perforce, the internal discourse between Israel and its God – or its fate, or its state government, or whatever paternal authority is invoked. The major difference between the ancient or medieval writers and the modern ones is that the modern ones hardly accept the akeda as a religious norm; they express their protest through some form of deconstructive irony – usually by removing one piece of the picture (God or the angel is the one commonly missing in modern retellings, but often it is the ram). Nevertheless, what nearly all of these writers do seem to accept is that Isaac (or some stand-in, even Abraham himself) actually dies – and they accept the adequacy of the akeda as literary trope of the Jewish passion. The contemporary Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, who wrote a

10 See among others, poems by the following Hebrew poets: Bialik, “Al ha-shehitah” [On the Slaughter]; Yitzhak Lamdan, “Al ha-mizbeah” [On the Altar], Amir Gilboa, “Yitzhak”; Haim Guri, “Yerusha” [Heritage]; A. B. Yehoshua, “Be-kayitz 1970” [In the Summer of 1970] and Mr. Mani; see also the work of Tuvya Rubner, Avot Yeshurun and T. Carmi.

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novella and a long dynastic novel on the subject, claimed in an essay that in his novel, Mr. Mani, he tried to “rid […] the collective self […] of this terrifying myth [by] actualizing it” (Yehoshua 2001, p. 61, 64). 11 Yet here he seems strangely oblivious to the fact that this is precisely what every post-Biblical evocation of the akeda has done. Each of the writers, from the early centuries of the Common Era to the present, seems, then, to be playing his role in perpetuating the floating signifiers of Jewish memory as they attach themselves to moving historical targets. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, there is hardly a Hebrew writer who has not tried his hand at tweaking this topos.12 So much so, that we are tempted to ask: who has not written an akeda? Well, the women are largely absent, for one. Where their writing does incorporate this story, it is more often as a passing allusion or conceit, or an attempt to distance the poetic self altogether from participating in this passion.13 One of the male poets, Dan Pagis (1930–1986), who might be most expected to invoke this well-worn figure of Jewish suffering, given the death he barely escaped under the sign of the swastika, refuses this option altogether. Rather, through his substitution of the narrative of Cain and Abel for the akeda, he seems to be insisting on a universalist discourse on power and fratricide over the covenantal-sacrificial discourse. The shoah is connected in Pagis’s poetry with the wars of Israel in such a way as to deprive Jews of their special status as victims or martyrs of a higher authority or of a hermetic covenantal lexicon. His poetry is an implicit challenge to the consensus on the centrality of the akeda to Jewish/Israeli consciousness and collective meaning. Here, for example, is “Brothers”:

11 For a more extensive discussion of Mr. Mani and of the repercussions of a culture of sacrifice in modern Israel, see Ezrahi (2012). 12 Numerous poetic and fictional reworkings of the akeda in modern Hebrew literature are considered in Feldman (2010); see also Kartun-Blum (1999). 13 See, for example, the case of the poet Raya Harnik, who wrote, “I will not sacrifice / my first born as a burnt offering. / Not me” – twelve years before her son Guni was killed in the Beaufort Castle just preceding the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000 (quoted in Feldman 2010, p. 277). See also Grossman’s powerful novel (2010). While the story of a woman running away from the anticipated announcement of her soldier-son’s death in many ways calls for the akeda, only briefly and fleetingly does the main character, Ora, consider this topos and its “comforts” before rejecting them. Hanokh Levin and David Avidan also “joined the women” by rejecting the adequacy of the akeda in the 1960s and 1970s.

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1 Abel was blond and wooly and looked as humble as the softest of his little goats and curled like the smoke of the offering that he sent up to the nose of his lord. Cain was straight: like a knife. 2 Cain is dumbstruck. His large hand gropes in the slaughtered throat in front of him: where has this silence burst from? 3 Abel remains in the field. Cain remains Cain. And since it was decreed that he is to be a wanderer, he wanders diligently […] 4 On an evening of mercy he happens upon A convenient haystack. He sinks in, is swallowed, rests. Shhh, Cain is asleep. Smiling, he dreams that he is his brother. 5 Do not be afraid. It has been decreed that whoever kills you Shall be punished sevenfold. Your brother Abel guards you from all harm. (Pagis 1981)14 Cain dreams that he is his brother. In this symbolic universe, where the equality of brothers replaces the hierarchy of fathers and sons, the murderer and his victim are interchangeable and the world a level playing field for human drama. Now we can take up our initial question: is it possible to achieve a similar effect through a non-hermetic model of the akeda and a non-sacrificial, non-exclusive approach to the sacred? I will try to respond to this question by shifting the entire frame of reference from that of war to that of holiness. In a way, this brings us back to the original framing in the Genesis narrative of the story of sacrifice as an act of sanctification independent of the social framework. What I mean by this is not that a specific social or political framework is not factored into the writing – or the read-

14 For an elaboration of this subject and of Pagis’ poetic achievement, see Ezrahi (1990).

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ing – of the text; rather, that the text is not a typological response to a historical event but an expression of value in itself.

3 Greenberg’s and Agnon’s “Aesthetics of the Whole” I will argue that both Uri Zvi Greenberg and S. Y. Agnon represent, in their poetry and prose, respectively, the temptations of what I call the “aesthetics of the whole” – an enactment of total harmony between material and spirit, promise and redemption, word and act, text and territory. And further, that the sacrificial lexicon is crucial to this process. Consider first U. Z. Greenberg’s “Night of Rain in Jerusalem”: The few trees in the yard moan like a forest. The thunderous clouds are heavy with rivers. The Angels of Peace stand at the head of my sleeping children, as the trees moan and the heavy rains pour down. Outside: Jerusalem, city of the Father’s glorious trial, where he bound his son on one of the hills. That fire, kindled at dawn, still burns on the hill, the rains have not put it out: it is the fire between the sacrificial pieces. ‘If God were to command me now, as once He did my ancient Father, I would surely obey‘, sing my heart and my flesh on this night of rain, as the Angels of Peace stand at the head of my sleeping children! What can equal this glory, this wondrous zeal – alive since that ancient dawn to this very moment – for the Mount of Moriah? The blood of the

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covenant sings on in the father’s fervent body. He is prepared to offer his sacrifice on the Temple Mount at dawn. Outside: Jerusalem, and the moaning of the Lord’s trees, cut down by her enemies in every generation; clouds heavy with rain, lightnings in them and thunders which, for me, on this night of rain, are tidings from the mouth of the God of Might to endless generations. (Greenberg 1981)15 The setting of this poem, which dates from 1953, is explicitly resonant with its Biblical prototype; and, unlike virtually every reenactment or representation of the akeda that I am familiar with in modern Hebrew literature, nothing is subtracted from or added to the foundational text – except the presumption that, as I have said, is common to all post-Biblical accounts, that the deed will in fact be performed if, and when, the time is right. What is striking here, and what makes this text singular among the myriad versions of the akeda in modern Hebrew literature, is that it is not only the topos that is presented as adequate and acceptable, but the act itself. There is no way to read this ironically as a poem of protest against the power that sends sons to be slaughtered – quite the contrary. Seen, however, in the context of the poet’s own situation as a father of young children, and of the poetic sequence in which it was first published in one of the Israeli dailies for the High Holidays (when the Biblical narrative of the akeda would have been read as part of the synagogue liturgy), this unyielding nighttime portrait is mitigated by what one young scholar calls Greenberg’s “morning” consciousness. In the next poem in the sequence, “Shir yeled ha-shahar” [Song of the Child of Dawn], the son appears with the dawn to confirm to the poet-father that, like Abraham, he too was offered a substitute and would not have to slaughter his son – not just yet, anyway (Corb 2006). Taken together, both poems nevertheless constitute a statement of absolute faith in the hermetic geographical and theological landscape of Jerusalem.

15 The original,“Be-layl geshem bi-yirushalayim”, appeared in a cycle of poems entitled “Masa va-nevel” [Journey with a Harp], published in the Rosh Hashana issue of Luah ha-aretz, September, 1953. This poem never appeared in any of Greenberg’s published collections. Posthumously it was published in one Greenberg collection (1995).

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Although there are no topical references in this poem, no delimited social or political context, which is, in itself, well within the poetic tradition Greenberg inherited, anyone familiar with his poetic and polemical writing would bring to this text knowledge of the poet’s explicit endorsement of the violence with which the Temple Mount is meant to be retaken – the violence of proximity to the sacred – which is, essentially, isomorphic with the violence of the realized akeda. As early as 1949, Greenberg, referring to the 1948 War, which resulted in the division of Jerusalem, declared in the Knesset: “We could have reclaimed Jerusalem with the Temple Mount and all the holiness that is between its walls – for ourselves and for our children – in one fell swoop: heroically”.16 The mimetic desire17 that drives the father toward the altar of sacrifice is also, clearly, a form of political desire18 – and desire for unification with the sources of the sacred will bring about the inevitable destruction of everything in its wake. As Hebrew scholar Hannan Hever argues persuasively in his book on Greenberg’s politics and aesthetics, it is impossible to distinguish between the two (Hever 2004, p. 154). In the manner of fascist poets in Europe between the two World Wars, Greenberg politicizes the aesthetic and aestheticizes the political. Applying Giorgio Agamben’s definition of politics as “the display of the act of mediation”, the realm in which the means become visible – not as ends in themselves and not as means to an end (quoted in: Hever 2004, p. 15) – Hever shows how, precisely by ridding politics of its mediating status, Greenberg enlists the State as the instrument of redemption.19 But at the same time, one can argue that Greenberg is ridding language itself of its mediating status – specifically the status of metaphor as mediation. Having moved from the radical left to the radical right in Israeli politics, Greenberg came to believe that he had inherited the mantle of Biblical prophecy and even regarded the War of Independence as the “literalization of his own metaphors” (Miron 1992, p. 127). What I call the “aesthetics of the whole”, epitomized in this poem, is the absolute expression of the logic by which access to territory and power and the elimination of all mediating forces – of poetry itself as a realm of mediation – can enable the aestheticization and sacralization of politics and the literalization or reenactment of the tropes of the imagination.

16 “Yakholnu le-hahzir et yerushalayim ’im har ha-bayit ve-kol ha-kodesh she-bein ha-homot lanu u-le-vaneinu – be-mehi ahat: begevurah”. Quoted from Divrei ha-knesset [Protocols of the Knesset], 1949, in Hever (2004, p. 153). 17 See Girard’s work on “mimetic desire” (1965). 18 “Kisuf politi” in Greenberg’s words. Hever (2004, p. 153) glosses this term, which means political yearning, as the more psychoanalytically resonant “teshuka politit” [political desire]. 19 One of the most fascinating sections in this book is Hever’s discussion of the complex relationship between Greenberg and David Ben-Gurion, the leader he invested with messianic status.

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This text collapses the distance between the desiring subject and the object of desire that had characterized diasporic aesthetics at least since the first centuries of the Common Era. Greenberg’s akeda poem was composed, as I have noted, five years after the War of Independence, when the distance that had been a factor in the Jewish imagination of Zion – and within Zion, of Jerusalem, and within Jerusalem, of the Temple Mount – for thousands of years, had been reinstated by the division of the city after 1948. In my interrogation of this subject, Greenberg becomes the signpost of the most extreme submission to the desire for mingling with the dust of the holy shrine since the Middle Ages. But unlike the so-called “avalei Tzion” [mourners of Zion] of the ninth-tenth centuries, whose entire earthly task was to mourn the destruction of the Temple,20 Greenberg was living in a time when an act of heroism could – and, fourteen years later, did – reclaim the Temple Mount and efface the distance that was the formaldehyde in which the Jewish imagination had been both preserved and protected. Menashe Kadishman, one of those contemporary artists who has represented the akeda in different visual media, attests to the power – or aura, if you will – of the place itself. “If I stand on Mount Moriah and look towards the Mount of Olives […] there pass before me scenes from the events of the past – love and sacrifice, Abraham and Isaac […]. The Binding of Isaac occurs in our time, in every place we send our children to wars, but its emblem remains one: Jerusalem – the place where it really happened” (Omer 1988, p. 127; Kartun-Blum 1999, p. 92). Really happened? Events of the past? Such is the way myth and history mingle in the gravitational field of akeda. Such is the way life imitates art. But whereas Greenberg can abide in the place where all the “loose ends” of the Hebrew imagination are tied up, most of his contemporaries approached the subject with some form of mediation (“politics”), of aesthetic or ironic distance (“poetics”). S. Y. Agnon’s dilemma was slightly different from that of Greenberg; although he was writing within that same gravitational field, Agnon’s negotiations with the sacred center did not explicitly revolve around the opportunities presented by Jewish empowerment. One of the major manifestations of what might be called Agnon’s “bipolar” suspension between “tradition” and “the modern” focuses on the persona of the writer himself.21 In the “traditional” mode, he traces his genealogy back to the medieval poets and traditional scribes – and even farther back to the Levites reciting Psalms on the steps of the Temple in Je-

20 See the “avalei tzion” [the mourners of Zion] of the ninth century or the aborted journey of Yehuda Halevi to the Holy Land in the twelfth century (Ezrahi 2000, p. 33–51). 21 In Nostalgia and Nightmare, Band (1968) was among the first to indicate the dialectical swings between the poles I prefer to call “tradition” and “the modern.”

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rusalem; for this persona, poetic fulfillment is within sight, as language, text and territory are reunited in the twentieth century Land of Israel. And, indeed, a number of Agnon’s most canonic stories enact the allure of the aesthetics of Return to the Sacred Center as total, exclusive, and internally coherent. As ultimate object of messianic desire, Jerusalem need admit of no negotiable borders. So in pious folk tales like “Tehila”, this is how that poetic premise works its way into the public rhetoric: the eponymous 104-year-old character chastises the narrator for not really living in the Holy City because he does not live within the walls of the Old City. But never mind, she adds: “May the day come when Jerusalem extends as far as Damascus, and in every direction” (Agnon 1973, p. 70).22 Tehila thus reveals that she herself is still living in the messianic geography of the mind. This story was written in 1949 but set during the Mandate period, around 1925, when the Temple Mount was accessible, though not without obstacles and not under Jewish sovereignty. But what Agnon is really enacting is the poetics of a city still suspended in the imagination. Jerusalem, with her shrines and burial sites, is a protean woman perennially waiting to be redeemed through the ingathering of her exiles. In the redemptive mode, Jerusalem – and Zion – are infinitely expandable. Needless to say, when imported into the political realm, this mindset has, since 1967, proved disastrous. And I believe we can find that knowledge hidden in the deepest recesses of Agnon’s imagination. As the storyteller most associated with Jerusalem, and Hebrew literature’s only Nobel laureate, Agnon may have been more tempted than any other modern Hebrew writer by the promise of proximity to sacred space, and by perfection and wholeness as its aesthetic correlates – while being fully cognizant of its dangers. He explored the seductions of such proximity over a lifetime of writing. But Agnon cannot abide long in the place where Greenberg is comfortable, where, as I have suggested, all the “loose ends” of the Hebrew imagination are tied up. Agnon’s characters do not remain unscathed when they enter utopian or sacred space. The only one who actually enters the Holy of Holies and exits in safety is the character whose lowly, compromised status in Agnon’s pantheon protects him from seeking total harmony between his imagination and the world. It is in Yitzhak (Isaac), l’homme moyen sensuel, the Everyman, the anti-hero of the epic novel Tmol shilshom [Only Yesterday] that I find the answer to the challenge of these messengers of perfection and wholeness. While exploring the terrain of the akeda to its limit, Only Yesterday also presents the possibility of a different resolution to the sacralization of space, the intoxicating merger of text and territory.

22 On this, see Ezrahi (2000, p. 101).

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The novel as a whole exposes the tension between Agnon’s own mimetic desire and the mediating acts that undermine it. Because he is not a “real artist”, Isaac is, I have argued at length elsewhere, the very embodiment of metaphoric – diasporic, if you will – distance from the temptations of the “real” (Ezrahi 2004, p. 105–135).23 In a novel where there are other examples of true artists, Isaac is a craftsman, a housepainter, a “smearer”. He is one who always lives at a distance from the ideal of saintliness or art, or even the agrarian dream of his fellow pioneers. And, as it turns out, he is the only one who can enter the site identified as Mt. Moriah by the Jews and as Haram al Sherif by the Muslims. Maybe this access is because he is the only one in this novel – or for that matter, in Agnon’s oeuvre as a whole – who is not in danger of bringing “strange fire”24, not in danger of realizing the violence attendant upon proximity to the sacred. The novel’s center, is, I believe, Isaac’s entry into the Holy of Holies. Using the materials of his trade, his paints and brushes, he executes an act not of representation – which, in such a space, could border on the idolatrous, or worse – but of decoration. Isaac’s reputation as housepainter has reached the foreign consuls and gone as far as the Pasha himself, who invites this Jewish craftsman to repair “their” house of worship (Dome of the Rock) on “our” Temple Mount. “Isaac may have been the only one to enter the Holy of Holies and to practice his craft in the place of our Temple”, the narrator tells us, and then adds, slyly implying that even he cannot go where Isaac trod: “Too bad our comrade Isaac isn’t much of a storyteller and can’t tell what his eyes saw there” (Agnon 2000, p. 227–228).25 This slight passage that cannot be related underscores the ethics of the nonliteral, the unarticulated, the mediated, a truth brought back to the sites of holiness from two thousand years of negotiating distance: neither shape nor word can give form to the experience of proximity to holiness without endangering the life, the sanity or the moral integrity of the pilgrim. But equally important is the acknowledgment of more than one holy shrine on the same mountain – “their” house of worship on “our” Temple Mount. Particularly in light of the resonances of the akeda in this passage, the potential of realignment with the axis mundi recalls the power invoked in Greenberg’s poem; it is, then, I believe, explicitly replaced by the alternative model of dis-

23 The following discussion contains a brief version of some of the arguments I make in that much longer essay on this novel. 24 The reference here is to Nadav and Avihu, the two sons of Aaron the Priest, who brought their burning censers before the Lord, unauthorized and unbidden, and paid for it with their lives. See Lev. 10:1. 25 My emphasis.

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tance, muteness and mediation – the poetic equivalent of the “act of mediation” that Agamben identifies in the political realm. Although it is as painter of walls that Isaac preserves his distance from iconographic temptations, Agnon cannot leave the story there. Isaac is also a signpainter, and as such he will eventually succumb to the seduction of letters. Ostensibly less dangerous than graven images, letters can be lethal when subjected to certain iconic readings. It is not as “smearer” but as sign-maker that Isaac, in a moment of pique, paints “crazy dog” [kelev meshuga] on the stray dog Balak’s back and enters into the dangerously literal place that will eventuate in his own hideous death by rabies.26 This latter-day Isaac becomes, finally, the victim of a grotesque akeda – “bound” by ropes to keep him from flailing around, and then, like all the Isaacs before him except for the first one, dying as a perverse sacrifice: his death is followed by a kind of cosmic redemption as torrential rains fall on the parched soil of the Holy Land. Through this terrifying conclusion, the narrative serves, again, the apocalyptic misreading of the akeda that we have traced from the most ancient post-Biblical sources. It turns out that at the level of character and moral discourse, Agnon did indeed create an alternative poetics of mediation, and that Isaac was at first protected by his craft and his humility from the dangers of access to the sacred center. And yet, at the level of the plot, the akeda must be enacted, the inexorable Jewish “master narrative” served, the insatiable primitive god who demands the sacrifice of children, fed. Once again we learn that when text and territory are reunited, when word becomes flesh and the paradigm of aesthetic wholeness realized through sacrifice, it spells human disaster. The alternative that Agnon provides is often well camouflaged, though hidden in plain sight, but it can never fully or finally put mimetic desire to rest.

4 Amichai’s Alternative Rewriting The one who keeps that alternative always in full view is Yehuda Amichai. All of his akeda poems – most of them dating from his last volume – are written, like the rest of his poetic œuvre, under the sign of “hesed” or “grace”. The first such

26 Eshel (2003, p. 131) sees in Balak the exilic alternative to a centripetal Zionist vision. I see it in Isaac. But Isaac’s painting on the dog’s back, and Balak’s subsequent sinking his teeth into Isaac’s flesh, both violate the principles that governed their own natures.

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poem, “The Real Hero of the Akedah”27, was originally published, appropriately enough, in a volume called “She’at ha-hesed” (“An Hour of Grace”) in 1983 (Amichai 1983). The date itself is significant, as it coincides with the First Lebanese War that triggered both a breakdown in Israeli consensus on necessary war, and the emergence of a vibrant protest culture led by poets, writers and dramatists as well as politicians and citizens from all walks of life. The real hero of the akeda was the ram Who had no idea about the conspiracy of the others. He apparently volunteered to die in place of Isaac. I want to sing a memorial song about the ram, His curly wool and human eyes, The horns, so calm in his living head. When he was slaughtered, they made shofars of them To sound the blast for their war Or the blast of their coarse joy. I want to remember the last picture Like a beautiful photo in an exquisite fashion magazine: The tanned, spoiled youngster all spiffed up, And beside him the angel, clad in a long silk gown For a formal reception. Both with hollow eyes Observe two hollow places, And behind them, as a colored background, the ram Grasping the thicket before the slaughter. And the thicket was his last friend. The angel went home Isaac went home And Abraham and God left much earlier. But the real hero of the sacrifice Is the ram.

27 “The Real Hero of the Sacrifice of Isaac” (Amichai 1994). I have changed this translation slightly, introducing the Hebrew word “akeda” in the first line instead of the word “sacrifice” in the English translation; and reintroducing the last line in the third verse – “And the thicket was his last friend” – which the translators deleted.

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Here, as in the Greenberg poem, nothing is missing from the story – not the son or the father or the angel or God or the ram. But unlike the earlier poem, by focusing on the poor ram the poet is, I believe, calling into question the very admissibility of the topos of sacrifice itself, which is the principle of “substitution”, the principle that someone must be killed so that someone else can live.28 The poem demonstrates that the culture of sacrifice is a moveable feast: transfer of identity to the ram with his “curly wool and human eyes” ambiguates the status of the other. Is the ram an Israeli soldier? An Arab? Or just a dumb animal who stands for nobody but himself? The process could, in principle, go on forever, but, alas, there is no substitute for the ram – which is what turns him into the ultimate martyr or “hero”. Menashe Kadishman’s many sculptures and drawings of the akeda feature the ram in its many poses.29 Amichai’s final book of poems, Open Closed Open, has a number of akeda poems or “meditations”. One begins with the quote “Take your son […]” continues with a reverie on fatherhood and Abraham’s fitness after the akeda for the role of “Our Father Abraham”, and concludes by revealing the God of Mt. Moriah as a kind of pagan: One more thing, God did not know love for sons but He did have a love of mountains and of all the mountains he loved Mt. Moriah. His only mountain, which he loved, and therefore they enacted on it the akeda and the Temples. (Amichai 2004)30 The Hebrew articulations of the akeda are revealed as the love of place that threatens the place of love in its human dimension. And, it turns out, in another of the akeda poems in his last book, what is sacrificed for love of place is the “third son”, whose very name signals compassion: Three sons had Abraham, not just two. Three sons had Abraham: Yishma-El, Yitzhak and Yifkeh.

28 In this, the Biblical story is one of the earliest evidences in western literature of sacrifice as an act of substitution – elaborated in a comparative framework in the work of Girard (1977) and others, including Giorgio Agamben. But the important thing to note about the Biblical text is that sacrifice itself is valorized, even as human sacrifice is eschewed. 29 On Kadishman and the theme of the akeda, see http://www.kadishman.com/works/ Sacrifice_of_Isaac/. 30 “Tanakh, tanakh, itakh itakh u-midrashim aherim” [The Bible and You, the Bible and You [f.], and Other Midrashim], #20. My translation.

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First came Yishma-El, ‘God will hear,’ next came Yitzhak, ‘he will laugh’, and the last was Yivkeh, ‘he will cry’. No one has ever heard of Yivkeh, for he was the youngest, the son that Father loved best, the son who was offered up on Mount Moriah. Yishma-El was saved by his mother, Hagar, Yitzhak was saved by the angel, but Yivkeh no one saved. When he was just a little boy, his father would call him tenderly, Yivkeh, Yivkeleh, my sweet little Yivkie – but he sacrificed him all the same. The Torah says the ram, but it was Yivkeh. Yishma-El never heard from God again, Yitzhak never laughed again, Sarah laughed only once, then laughed no more. Three sons had Abraham, Yishma, ‘will hear,’ Yitzhak, ‘will laugh,’ Yivkeh, ‘will cry’. Yishma-El, Yitzhak-El, Yivkeh-El, God will hear, God will laugh, God will cry. (Amichai 2000)31 Sara, who “laughed no more”, died immediately thereafter – of a broken heart, say the rabbis. Isaac, who “never laughed again”, is still suffering from a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that is passed on from generation to generation. And the whole story, which started out as a comedy of survival, ends up as a tragedy whose victim is compassion itself.32 Amichai’s legacy is enshrined in this poem. With his usual poetic profligacy, the poet insists on adding to, rather than subtracting from, the foundational subtext. But in so doing, he continues his project of transforming an internal, hermetic discourse between Israel and its God or its fate into a porous, morally and politically accountable discourse that must, in the first instance, embrace the discarded other, Ishmael – and, in the final instance, embrace the principle of compassion that has always been sacrificed to the visions of the uncompromising father and his competing sons.

31 “The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other Midrashim,” #5. 32 On the akeda as comedy, see Ezrahi (2012, p. 305–308).

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Bibliography Agnon, Shmuel Yosef (1973): “Tehila”. Tr. by Walter Lever. In: James A. Michener (Ed.): Firstfruits. A Harvest of 25 Years of Israeli Writing. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Premier Books, p. 56–94. Agnon, Shmuel Yosef (2000): Only Yesterday. Tr. by Barbara Harshav. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Amichai, Yehuda (1983): “The Real Hero of the Akedah”. In: She’at Ha-hesed [The Hour of Grace]. Jerusalem: Schocken, p. 21–22. Amichai, Yehuda (1994): “The Real Hero of the Sacrifice of Isaac”. In: Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948–1994. Tr. by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. New York: Harper Collins, p. 345. Amichai, Yehuda (2000): “The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other Midrashim”, #5. In: Open Closed Open. Tr. by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York: Harcourt, p. 21–22. Amichai, Yehuda (2002): “Shir leyl Shabbat”. In: Shirei Yehuda Amichai [Poems of Yehuda Amichai]. Vol. 1. Jerusalem: Schocken, p. 111. Amichai, Yehuda (2004): “Tanakh, tanakh, itakh itakh u-midrashim aherim”, #20. In: Shirei Yehuda Amichai [Poems of Yehuda Amichai]. Vol. 5. Jerusalem: Schocken, p. 177. Band, Arnold J. (1968): Nostalgia and Nightmare. A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Corb, Aliza (2006): Uri Zvi Greenberg: Mi-Rehovot Ha-nahar ve-ad Sefer ha-amudim (1945–55) [Uri Zvi Greenberg: From the Streets of the River to the Book of Columns]. PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eisen, Arnold M. (1986): Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eshel, Amir (2003): “Cosmopolitanism and Searching for the Sacred Space in Jewish Literature”. In: Jewish Social Studies 9. No. 3, p. 121–138. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (1990): “Dan Pagis – Out of Line: A Poetics of Decomposition”. In: Prooftexts 10. No. 2, p. 335–363. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (2000): Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society. Vol. 12. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (2004): “Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses: Agnon’s Biblical Zoo – or Rereading Tmol shilshom”. In: AJRS 28 [Association of Jewish Studies Review]. No. 1, p. 105–135. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (2007): “‘To What Shall I Compare You?’ Jerusalem as Ground Zero of the Hebrew Imagination”. In: PMLA 122. No. 1, p. 220–234. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven (2012): “From Auschwitz to the Temple Mount: Binding and Unbinding the Israeli Narrative”. In: Jakob Lothe/Susan Rubin Suleiman/James Phelan (Eds.): After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, p. 291–313. Feldman, Yael S. (2010): Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Girard, René (1965): Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Tr. by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, René (1977): Violence and the Sacred. Tr. by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Greenberg, Uri Zvi (1981): “On a Night of Rain in Jerusalem”. In: T. Carmi (Ed.): The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. Tr. by T. Carmi. New York: Penguin, p. 530–531. Greenberg, Uri Zvi (1995): “Be-layl geshem bi-yirushalayim”. In: Dan Miron (Ed.): Kol Ketavav [Complete Works]. Vol. 9. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, p. 214. Grossman, David (2010): Isha borahat mi-besora. [To the End of the Land]. Tr. by Jessica Cohen. New York: Knopf. Gurevitch, Zali (1997): “The Double Site of Israel”. In: Eyal Ben-Ari/Yoram Bilu (Eds.): Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 203–216. Hever, Hannan (2004): Moledet ha-mavet yafa: estetika u-politika be-shirat Uri Zvi Greenberg [The Homeland and Beautiful Death: Esthetics and Politics in the Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. http://www.kadishman.com/works/Sacrifice_of_Isaac/, visited on October 30, 2012. Kartun-Blum, Ruth (1999): Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry. Drawings by Menashe Kadishman. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. Kierkegaard, Søren (1985): Fear and Trembling [1843]. Tr. by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin. Makiya, Kenan (2001): The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem. New York: Pantheon. Miron, Dan (1992): Mul ha-ah ha-shotek: iyunim be-shirat Milhemet ha-atsmaut. [Facing the Silent Brother: Studies in the Poetry of the War of Independence]. Jerusalem: Keter. Omer, Mordechai (1988): Upon One of the Mountains: Jerusalem in Israeli Art. [Exhibition Catalogue]. Bilingual edition. The Genia Schreiber University Art Bilingual edition. Jerusalem: The Genia Schreiber Gallery. Pagis, Dan (1981): “Brothers”. In: Points of Departure. Tr. by Stephen Mitchell, intro. by Robert Alter. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, p. 5. Spiegel, Shalom (2000): The Last Trial: The Akedah. Tr. with a new preface by Judah Goldin. Woodstock: Longhill Partners Inc. The Five Books of Moses (2004): Tr. and comm. by Robert Alter. New York: Norton. Yehoshua, A. B. (2001): “Mr. Mani and the Akedah”. Tr. by Rivka Hadari and Amnon Hadari. Judaism Winter, 2001, p. 61–65. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim (2005): Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [1982]. Foreword by Harold Bloom, with a new preface and postscript by the author. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Religion under Liberal-Secular Governance: Dialoguing with Muslims in Germany1 1 Introduction This article tackles the central threads of this volume from the particular angle of Muslims in Europe. I assume that it is not possible to study a “religion” or a “religious minority” in an isolated way; that is to say independently from the social, political, economic and also cultural contexts. The central question, raised at the Concept Laboratory and also in the present volume, as to how a religion should appear in order to contribute to a peaceful coexistence can therefore not be answered if we do not take into account the partly conflicting worldviews surrounding the modern forms of religions, most notably within a liberal democratic context. More importantly, I suggest that it is not possible to look at Muslims in Europe without addressing questions of the secular realm; and here, more specifically, the question of how secular powers in Europe have contributed to regulating and shaping religious worldviews and embodiments. Being interested in the question as to how liberal democratic orders deal with growing religious plurality, by secular powers I refer not only to the obvious structural inequalities resulting from post-war migration, past encounters between Europe and the Muslim world, in particular colonialism and postcolonial memories; rather, I also have in mind processes of regulation of religious plurality through which Muslims are to be turned into citizens. In the political discourse, such practices are currently labelled with the paradigm of “integration”. And I am thinking here of practices with different, partly divergent rationalities, ranging from juridical, partly disciplining approaches, to more communicative ones, which aim at including, embracing Muslims – while at the same time making sure that their religious practices take the right shape. In this article I would like to focus on one of these practices, which is of a more inclusive and communicative kind. More precisely, I will look at a current

1 This is a modified version of an article which first appeared in Approaching Religion (AmirMoazami 2011a). The German version appeared in Migrationsreport 2010 (Amir-Moazami 2011b). For their valuable comments I would like to thank Werner Schiffauer, Mika Hannula and Heiko Henkel as well as the organizers and participants of the “Concept Laboratory Religion and Society in the 21st Century”. For his English translation I would like to thank Rod Sturdy.

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initiative of the German state to integrate Muslims through a communication platform conceptualized as a dialogical encounter and called the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (hereafter DIK). The DIK was initiated by then minister of the interior Wolfgang Schäuble in 2006 and its goal is to enter into a structured conversation with Muslims in Germany. It brings together state representatives and Muslim representatives, both organized and individual. While plenary meetings are organized on a yearly basis, four different working groups gather to discuss issues of Muslim representation, of Islamic practices, of gender questions, of extremism, and more recently also of Islamophobia.2 Investigating the DIK as a micro-practical case for interfaith or intercultural dialogue under liberal-secular conditions, in this article I argue that the basic understanding of dialogue by the main protagonists favors normalization and consensus, while tending to reject diversity and dissent. This, in turn, appears to block anything that might lead to a serious commitment to the pluralistic character of German society. I will follow this argument by subjecting the DIK to a politicophilosophical appraisal, with the aid of which I would like to reflect on the nature of consensus-orientated dialogue (and/or deliberation3). I argue that consensusorientated dialogue, as also practiced in the DIK, is based on liberal, secular assumptions, whose normative and exclusive component is not made explicit, and which manifests itself in non-conforming utterances above all. As the most significant representative of the idea of consensus-orientated dialogue, particular attention will be paid to Jürgen Habermas (1981; 1991; 1992; 1993; 2008; 2009), and to his later writings on discourse ethics and the role of religious pluralism in secular constitutional orders. The DIK is diametrically opposed to Habermas’ dialogue model, with its emphasis on the consensus of rational, ethnically and ideologically neutralized citizens in non-hegemonic areas of public life. Moreover, as Habermas has frequently stressed, his concept of dialogue cannot simply be applied on a one-to-one basis to political and social reality – since it is inherently “counter-factual” – although this remains a desirable ideal. With its involvement with the state, its hierarchical structure, and its criteria for dialogue being set in advance, the DIK is a far cry from Habermas’ discourse model. We could immediately argue that the DIK essentially does not represent “true” dialogue, but is primarily a means for the government to exercise power and an instrument of state-controlled integration (cf. Peter 2010; Amir-Moazami

2 For detailed information on the structure and development of the DIK see its homepage: http://www.deutsche-islamkonferenz.de. 3 By deliberation I here mean a participatory theoretical arrangement which aims to include as many people as possible in the procedural character of the political dialogue; its most important promoters are Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib and Amy Gutmann.

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2009a). Even so, this specific exercise of state power is billed as dialogue. Rather than dismissing the DIK out of hand, I am interested in the question of how it exercises power and on which premises it does so. In this manner, an analysis of the DIK based on political theory can contribute to a closer investigation of this logic and identify its problematic implications; and, looking at things the other way around, this particular practice reveals that even Habermas’ idealized dialogic model contains a hidden set of basic assumptions with many preconditions, which to some extent reflect the political philosophy of this encounter. I argue, therefore, that Habermas helps us uncover some of the tensions that emerged in the first three years of the DIK, namely that the state gets involved in formulating and managing the Good, instead of confining itself to its role as a neutral protector of contractual arrangements – meaning issues of rights and justice, to put it in liberal terms. At the same time, this particular dialogic practice reveals in an interesting manner the limitations of an idealized model of dialogue, as proposed by Habermas, in that it makes explicit the secular bias of his arguments, which he himself only partially acknowledges: mainly because he presupposes, and leaves unquestioned and untouched, the secularity of the liberal constitutional order. Through this specific focus, I thus wish to raise some broader questions that are relevant for the central themes of this volume relating to religious plurality and the question regarding to what extent liberal secular matrixes can be considered a central component shaping the adequate expressions of the religious in the public realm, alongside particular – often unmarked – presuppositions.

2 Consensus-Orientated Dialogue in Liberal/Secular Terms In this section I will limit myself to filtering out from Habermas’ complex discourse ethics those aspects which refer to consensus orientation and to the secular character of his model, which finds resonance in current dialogue practices with Muslims. Three closely associated argumentative threads running through Habermas’ thinking seem to me to be relevant here: firstly, the basic thought of a certain form of rational argumentation, which is tied closely to the idea of pressure for justification; secondly, the consensus orientation; and, finally, something I would term “secular prejudice”. As do many other philosophers of language, Habermas (1991, p. 111) works from the assumption that speakers never simply describe a state of affairs, but that they, through the act of utterance, invariably expose themselves to the pres-

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sure of explaining and justifying what they say. Communicative behavior only functions for him between individuals who are prepared to hold each other accountable, and who undertake to give reasons for their own statements. That which is articulated in dialogue must therefore be delivered in a language which is understandable for all individuals concerned (see e.g. Habermas 1981a, p. 71). In order to have access to discussions, the acceptance of certain universal forms of communication is thus required. On the other hand, communicative behavior should, according to Habermas (1992, p. 138), aim at consensus. For Habermas (1981a, p. 71) the basic principle is, however, that this consensus must not be pre-structured, but must be freely arrived at using fair conditions for discussion. Only through discussion is it possible to arrive at new insights, which have political relevance at the same time. It must be stated, however, that essential conditions for dialogue are simultaneously pre-structured in Habermas’ work. It is particularly in his theory of communicative action that Habermas highlights the conditions for communication in such a way as renders recognizable a universal structure with normative content. In so doing, Habermas not only starts out with an ideal speech situation – which includes all citizens to an equal degree, and in which the better argument gains acceptance; he also has in mind the ideal of an articulate, reflective and independently thinking citizen who, using rational and universally comprehensible arguments, involves him or herself in political debates, and, in this way, helps to shape their outcomes. Hence all citizens should enjoy the same equal opportunity of participation in public discussion, provided always that they are able to justify their arguments convincingly and in a rational manner. According to Habermas, it must be possible that arguments are articulated regardless of the embedding ideological context, and regardless of conceptions of the Good. Against the background of a liberal-leaning theory of justice he finds a distinction, essential for his discourse model, between the ethical conceptions of the Good Life, for which diversity needs to be preserved, and the moral obligations, which must apply in equal measure to all, and to which obligatory answers must be found in the form of valid norms: The neutrality of the law vis-à-vis ethical differentiations within oneself is explained by the fact that in complex societies the whole of the citizenry can no longer be bound together by a substantive consensus of values, but only by a consensus on the process of legitimate legislation and exercise of power. (Habermas 1993, p. 179)4

4 Translated by Rod Sturdy.

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Thus, the ethical stance of a political integration uniting all citizens would need to “be neutral towards the differences which exist within the state between ethical and cultural notions of individuals as to what constitutes the Good in an integrated community” (Habermas 1993, p. 181). One of Habermas’ core arguments in Faktizität und Geltung asserts that institutions in democratic states justify their existence through such processes. The citizens thereby become both the subjects and the co-formers of the law. The forum in which this inclusive participation of as many citizens as possible takes place, is, according to Habermas, the public sphere, which one should ideally view as liberated from the influence of the state, and in which the citizenry are able nonetheless to pursue the processes of legislation and administration of justice, comment critically and make long-term amendments. This focus on constitutional norms and their dynamic character should also, and primarily, be seen as an examination of German history and the – in this context – inimical ethnic/romantic idea of nationhood. In place of an ethnically and a priori defined concept of nationhood, the ideologically neutral constitutional state needs to step in, according to Habermas. As suggested by the ideal of “constitutional patriotism”, the citizens of a nation-state should not base their loyalty on its ethnic foundations; instead, they should define and identify common constitutional principles agreed on by the nation-state, but that are capable at any time of being re-negotiated through public deliberation, which is conceptualized as being as inclusive as possible. In his response to Charles Taylor’s Politics of Recognition, Habermas spells this out particularly plainly for contexts of cultural plurality. As opposed to a particularistic model of the recognition of cultural minorities, as Taylor attempts to render plausible, Habermas stresses here the diversity-promoting power of universal constitutional norms. True, he does concede that the political culture of a nation-state, as reflected in the foundations of its constitution, is “ethically impregnated” (Habermas 1993, p. 181). As an example he quotes the historically conditioned close relationship between church and state in Germany. Through the ideal of the participating citizen, however, a diversification of the political and ethical culture of a society must inevitably arise, which is ultimately manifested in the pluralization of legal norms. Should there be an alteration of the horizon, within which the citizens have expressed themselves through their ethical and political discourses, then the discourses and results would be altered, Habermas (1993, p. 169) contends. As will be shown later, this model also finds resonance in the social realities of society. Still, Habermas’ ideal of the rational, self-reflecting and mature citizen, who always learns from, and is persuaded by, other, better arguments, has been much criticized from various angles since the beginning of the 1980s. For the sake of my own argument, I would like to mention only one line of thought.

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A frequently voiced criticism therefore leads me to think that asymmetries of power and power techniques, which inevitably pervade liberal and egalitarian societies, are consistently phased out by Habermas’ ideal of non-hegemonic discourse. Particularly in ideologically diverse contexts the structurally disadvantaged (i. e. religious minorities) will inevitably encounter unequal terms by which to shape the discourse. And here I am referring not only to overt and institutionalized power structures, but rather to those which are unspoken, written in and incorporated, and which, as a result of this neutralization, are assumed not to require translation. Chantal Mouffe, for example, criticizes Habermas and other exponents of deliberative approaches as “post-political” or “post-democratic”, particularly as they attempt to circumvent, by means of striving for consensus, the dimensions of power, conflict and antagonism, all of which are central to political struggles. Mouffe raises the objection that consensus invariably operates with mechanisms of exclusion, not least because the starting point is jointly shared background assumptions, which are not made explicit. According to Mouffe (2007, p. 22) recognition of the pluralism which constitutes democracy would be deficient without the recognition of antagonisms.5 In addition the objection must be raised – and a number of Habermas’ critics have done so – that this highly idealized version of argumentative dialogue fails to meet the needs of those involved in dialogue, and actual speaking situations, for that matter. That is to say that the ideal of the constantly striving citizen is often characterized by undisclosed assumptions. Thus normative conflicts frequently do not involve rational arguments, but are rather a matter of “irrational” sensibilities, emotions and passions, which conflict with one another (Mouffe 2007, p. 22). To a great extent, this also applies to the context which interests us here. What, as a rule, marks out religious movements and religiously motivated utterances is that they take precisely those ethical dimensions to the political agenda that Habermas, even if he does not seek to exclude them from public discourse, would wish to see translated into a universally comprehensible language. In this process they challenge the consensus, as defined above, on what is universally comprehensible, absorbed and consumed. While Habermas at first paid no attention to religion, he strives in his later works to credit this “life-worldly” context with high importance, since the latter could potentially cast doubt on the previously unmentioned secular premises of

5 Mouffe proposes transforming antagonisms into agonisms. In so doing “them and us” differences would merely be kept under control, and not kept quiet or be overcome through consensus-forming (Mouffe 2007, p. 22).

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his dialogue model. If his response to Charles Taylor at first aimed to point out the limitations of controlled multiculturalism in general, then Habermas has of late more consistently included religious projects as central components of cultural plurality. Despite the attempt to broaden his model, which was originally established in the context of linguistic theory and subsequently widened to political and/or religious pluralistic contexts, this is precisely where the limitations of the attempt become apparent. For it is exactly at this point that the secular bias of his discourse model comes into play. Habermas’ starting point here is the observation of worldwide religious revivalist movements in the 20th and 21st centuries, which make the assumption of a gradual secularization of religion look shaky. Habermas addresses the implications of the required division in liberal thought and practice between church and state vis-à-vis this development, and asks in what way it must be redefined. Here he discusses a “classically” secular(ist) argument that mainly stems from John Rawls. It states that the democratic constitutional state must be ideologically neutral and, despite or even as a result of (individual or joint) divergences, must be based on the concept of natural reason. Habermas criticizes the all too narrowly expressed secularist, rather than “truly” ideologically neutral determination of the political role of religion, and essentially considers two lines of argument which in the sociology of religion have gained credence over the last two decades: first, the view that religious movements might also have a democracyfurthering influence;6 and second, the assertion that faith is something too comprehensive to simply be excluded from the exercise of public reason.7 He reaches this provisional conclusion: If we accept this objection, which I would term a strong one, then the liberal state, which with its constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion is clearly bound to protect such entities, cannot at the same time expect all of those who are believers to justify their political stances quite independently of their religious or ideological ones. (Habermas 2009, p. 133)8

If this sounds like a revision of his earlier works, then Habermas in the next breath places limitations on it, adding that he only allows religious discourses in dialogue to be subject to a general reservation of translation:

6 This point has been elaborated upon more thoroughly by the sociologist Casanova’s (1994) prominent thesis of a “de-privatisation” of religion. 7 A prominent exponent of this argument, which is also quoted by Habermas, is Wolterstorff (1997). Wolterstorff for example accepts religious arguments even for democratic legislation. 8 Translated by Rod Sturdy; see for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).

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Indeed matters of religious certainty within the sophisticated shell of modern society are exposed to an increasing pressure for reflection. But existential convictions which are rooted in religion escape this through what is in certain circumstances their rationally defended link with dogmatic authority of an inviolate core of infallible revelations of the type of unreserved discursive discussion and scrutiny, to which however other ethical life-orientations and ideologies, that is to say worldly “concepts of the Good” are exposed. (Habermas 2009, p. 135)9

Habermas understands religion here in the classical liberal mode as something which aids the endowment of sense, which nevertheless should not exert any influence without the provision of translation into public discourse, and definitely not in an ideologically neutral state and its legislation. Although it urges those of secularist ideology to keep an open mind to the possibility of religious statements containing truth, and to enter into dialogue, his call for translatability results from an unequivocal hierarchization of secular and religious arguments: Under the normative premises of the constitutional state and an ethos of democratic citizenship the admission of religious statements in a political context in the public domain is only meaningful when all citizens are expected not to exclude the possibility of cognitive content – whilst respecting the principle of precedence of secular reasons and of the institutional translation reservation. (Habermas 2009, p. 145)10

Here we must first of all ask ourselves why worldly concepts of the Good should better stand up to unreserved discursive discussion than do religious ones. Without doubt, Habermas has in mind the dangers of “religious fundamentalism” above all, though he does not define more precisely what he means by this. Thus his attempt to activate certain forms of the religious as a resource of the democratic state indicates that religion as such disturbs him less than do certain illiberal features of monotheistic religions. Yet secularist positions presently springing up indicate that secular repertoires and sensibilities are not as a matter of principle less politicizable than are religious utterances. In addition, the strong contrast that Habermas proposes here between religious and secular language is less convincing, chiefly because he, of his own accord, disputes the outcomes of the translation effort he demands. The secular premises of the discourse, which are particularly reflected in the secular foundation of the liberal, constitutional state, consequently prove to be precisely that ethical impregnation which Habermas, in other contexts, regarded as still being

9 Translated by Rod Sturdy. 10 Translated by Rod Sturdy; my emphasis.

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dynamic and capable of change by virtue of cultural diversity, but which he here views as sacrosanct. Thus Habermas himself draws attention to the asymmetrical conditions of the ostensibly ideologically neutral constitutional state, while justifying this empirically by considering the truly completed secularization processes in the wake of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. “Traditional religions”, as he calls it, would need to catch up on certain points, that is to say, they would need to learn to accept the body of secular epistemes (Habermas 2009, p. 143f.).11 While Habermas would not venture to single out Islam as the chief candidate for this catching-up process, at certain points it is very clear at which religion, in a European context above all, this requirement is aimed. For he simultaneously states that the Catholic Church, following a laborious process, has already successfully met this secular requirement. With reference to Muslims he says: “Many Muslim communities still have this painful learning process before them. Certainly, the insight is also growing in the Islamic world that today an historical-hermeneutic approach to the Koran’s doctrine is required” (Habermas 2008, p. 27f.).12 In constructing a religious norm, against which, among others, Islam must measure itself, Habermas places a heavy burden on religious groups, especially the structurally disadvantaged ones, such as Muslims in Europe. Hence established religious communities, and in particular Christian ones, benefit from a whole range of handed-down religious structures, which Muslims still need to call for. It is questionable how, faced with these unequal points of departure, they would culturally sublimate their own religious convictions in discourse. Although Habermas views consensus as a process in which all citizens – subject always to the above-mentioned conditions – should participate equally, he hesitates to openly articulate something that we could term his own secular background as consensus. The largely unjustified, unqualified acceptance of the secular character of the constitutional state and the precedence of secular, as opposed to religious speech acts, nevertheless involve many pre-conditions and consequences. This is even more the case when we understand secularity in the sense of Talal Asad (2006). Asad reminds us that the secular largely exceeds formal and legal divisions of state and religious institutions, and should, in the first place, be understood as a mechanism in which state institutions – through micro-political power techniques – authorize and/or demarcate normative models of religion and religious ways of life, while guarding the divisions of the religious and the

11 At one point Habermas gives “religious citizens” a whole catalogue of characteristics to catch up on (Habermas 2009, p. 143f.). 12 See for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).

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secular. As I will now attempt to show, at a practical level the mechanisms of the DIK display precisely that secular prejudice I pointed out in Habermas’ System itself, as well as the possible, but by no means inevitable, consequences which this may entail.

3 The DIK, “Free and Democratic” Consensus and “Constitution Plus” Although the DIK is a far cry from the inclusive ideal of deliberative models, not least because state actors control the dialogue, this dialogue practice is based on the attempt, by means of conversations between representatives of the state and Muslims, to reach a consensus on the basis of “liberal and democratic principles”.13 Although this consensus is not intended to be of a legally binding nature, it is nevertheless supposed to contribute to the creation of cohesion and conflict harmonization. Above all, organized Muslims are not even required to declare formal allegiance to constitutional principles; rather, in the course of structured conversation the constitution is reduced to an ethical substance on which it is allegedly based, as I will demonstrate in the following. Firstly, the DIK could, in the way Habermas sets out, be interpreted as an overdue political commitment to the religious plurality in Germany. Regarding Muslims as a “section of German society” in this regard could be interpreted as a symbolic gesture of acceptance. Even extracts from the setting of the agenda reflect the well-intentioned stance of the state and its readiness to move forward the areas of demands for recognition, repeatedly put forward by Muslims, such as the training of Imams in higher education, or classes about Islam in state school curricula. At the same time, within the DIK a certain inherent reservation can be detected, particularly with regard to pious Muslims. This very much resembles Habermas’ requirement for a translation of religious utterances, even if the way in which this requirement is articulated runs totally counter to Habermas’s concept of fair dialogue. This reservation is seen principally in the pronounced emphasis on values, something which is to be found in the whole of the previous encounters of the DIK. Thus the state rhetoric and setting of subjects for discussion make it clear, time and time again, that Muslims must first of all fulfil certain conditions in order to be truly recognized. This applies to the area of political Islam, in which Islamic communities are above all meant to appear as “security partners” (Schiffauer

13 Wolfgang Schäuble stated this in his first speech to the DIK.

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2008). It also applies to aspects of embodied life conduct, values and ethics, and it is this feature which I would particularly like to focus on. In outlining his vision of the DIK, Wolfgang Schäuble in particular repeatedly referred to the “free and democratic” premises underlying the consensus between the state and Muslims. In the course of the event it became clear, however, that the underlying values had been much more markedly loaded and idealized, and that these arise from a much thicker texture than had been suggested at first. This shows in the setting of the agenda, the course it has taken to date, but also in the general ethos of the event.14 In addition, it does seem less of a question of an exchange of divergent positions, as would be expected in such an event, and more a case of a conscious process aimed at achieving a more or less pre-determined “consensus of values”. Particularly on the fringes of the DIK, and frequently behind the scenes unofficially, a concretization and idealization of the initially abstract liberal democratic premises can be detected. Thus Schäuble, speaking on the fringes of the DIK, urged Muslims – and Muslims alone – a number of times to be sure to observe the rules and fundamentals of the constitution. In the next breath he led us to suspect that his views went even further: […] political or legal institutions do not [suffice] on their own for integration to succeed. Even the constitution on its own is not enough. It requires other foundations, so that it can be filled with life by the citizens. […] If we want to feel that we are a part of a common body, then something must exist which binds us together at a deeper human level: at precisely that level at which we find religion, culture, values and identity. (Schäuble 2006)15

In Schäuble’s appeal to the emotional and ethical side of citizens’ loyalty we can clearly see what is termed “Constitution Plus” (“Grundgesetz Plus”) behind the scenes at the DIK.16 In the published documentation after three years of practicing dialogue, we simply find reference to a successful consensus on a “German value community”, which hardly goes beyond the constitutional status quo. However, it is very clear from conversations with DIK participants that organized Muslims in particular are often invited to recognize the value substance of the constitution. For example, in the third plenary session of the DIK, Muslim orga-

14 This marked emphasis is obvious from the title and subjects of the workshops, above all in the first round. For this, see Amir-Moazami (2009b). In fact the workshops in DIK II have been renamed. Nevertheless the emphasis on values remains. 15 Translated by Rod Sturdy; my italics; see also Schäuble (2008). 16 On this point I cannot be precise, as we are not dealing with a documented concept. I have however learned in the course of various conversations that this extra loyalty to the constitution has been termed “Constitution Plus” in state circles.

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nizations were urged to agree on a document which goes beyond the mere confirmation of their loyalty to the constitution, and in which they were to pledge their identification with the “German value community” above and beyond bare legal principles.17 Muslims were in this instance asked to endorse what was virtually an inner allegiance to the constitution. This goes far beyond the initially formulated idea of a consensus based on “free democratic” values, and so can be viewed as significantly exceeding the de-linking of ethical notions and moral obligations proposed by Habermas. So how precisely does this ethical content of the common body, which Muslims are supposed to feel themselves a part of, manifest itself? It can be demonstrated especially clearly by the question as to how Islam and gender have hitherto been linked and negotiated. Questions of gender and sexuality, or more precisely that which has been identified as Islamically based gender norms, form a core area which runs through virtually all DIK working groups. The current DIK II goes so far as to devote a whole working group to these questions, entitled “Gender Justice as a Common Value”. There were, during one of the workshops, moments in which the Muslims present were supposed to be prepared to identify suspect passages of the Koran, that is, with reference to the role of women.18 On the fringes of the DIK these passages were rebuked by the commissioner for integration, Maria Böhmer, for not being open to the value of sexual equality. And in this case this would be demonstrated by a willingness to take part in mixed-sex sport and swimming lessons.19 Hence the Muslim participants were urged to take on more than simply the participation in mixed-sex sporting activities in state schools. The negotiations have thus broadened into Muslim behavior, gender norms and ideas about sexuality. This is indicative of a sexual politics tailored to Muslims, who are unilaterally regarded as not conforming, and this policy pursues a logic beyond legal regulation, as it targets the individual’s behavior and attitudes. In all this, it is striking that the event is so designed that it is only Muslims who are questioned about gender equality, and are urged to adopt a proactive position. For example, it remains questionable as to why the topic of gender equality has not been taken as a reason to ask about the state of affairs across the whole social spectrum, and to stimulate a general discussion on the contours and nature of this

17 This information is taken from personal conversations with various people active in the DIK. 18 This is unpublished information that I gathered in personal interviews with participants in the working groups. 19 More comprehensively dealt with in Amir-Moazami (2009b). The Milli Görüs (IGMG) was offered mere “observer status” in the second round of the DIK, as the organization was at the time being investigated by the public prosecutor.

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same value; but instead, with the one-sided concentration on Muslims, a concept that is anything but clear and not always necessarily accepted by non-Muslims, and is simply used as a yardstick to inspect a whole religious community. On closer inspection, there is a kind of logic at work here which attempts to touch on ethical behavior, value concepts and emotions, while seeking to regulate these – hence assets which in the liberal/democratic constitutional state, according to Habermas’ and liberals’ ideals, should not fall within the authority of state regulation. It is particularly noteworthy that the state appears here as the chief actor, regulating religious sensibilities and making judgments on normalcy and deviation. In so doing it uses a particular religious model – tamed, secularized Christianity – as a pattern on the basis of which Muslims are to be shaped and transformed into secular subjects. The forms, which this swearing to a joint value base take, as such run counter to the previously formulated ideal of liberal democratic consensus. It also runs counter to more general forms of deliberative initiatives, according to which such a value consensus should at best be found, through discourse and by taking account of all arguments. And yet at the same time we have here precisely that ethical foundation of constitutional norms which Habermas and other deliberative thinkers refer to as the unmarked pre-assumptions of rational argumentation, and which Habermas would like re-shaped as discourse, on certain elements of which, namely religious utterances, however, he imposes a translation requirement. Seen through the prism of deliberative dialogue models, on the one hand the example of the DIK displays its own weak points, but also the potential of such models, which oblige us to uncover these weak points. On the other hand, however, the DIK highlights the blind spots of liberal dialogue models by bringing to light the ethical – in this case secular – foundation and the power techniques of the liberal constitutional state, which liberal thinkers such as Habermas attempt to neutralize through deliberation. For we are in such cases not dealing with exchanges between egalitarian citizens on an equal footing, who – while translating concepts of the Good and giving each other fair consideration – achieve conclusions in the form of binding normative solutions. On the contrary, asymmetries and techniques of power are not alleviated by deliberation. There remains a sovereignty of interpretation as to what is considered worthwhile, and as to what reflects the adequate use of constitutional norms. And this is, in my opinion, not only a result of the fact that in such cases the state as the sovereign actor controls the manner of dialogue, sets the agenda, and decides who takes part in discourse and who does not; rather, it is an expression of comprehensive power relations and power mechanisms which come to light in the best way during the course of deliberation, but are nevertheless not overcome. Hence I would also not claim that a dialogue which is initiated solely at the level of civil society is immune to such power techniques.

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Of course, in liberal deliberative dialogue models the ethical content of the constitutional principles is not determined a priori, and hence not unilaterally laid down, but it arises ideally in dialogue conducted under fair conditions. However, the condition of universal comprehensibility is based on an ethical pre-judgment, which, one could argue, procedures such as the DIK dismantle. The call for Muslims to translate their utterances into universally understood language is therefore not dissimilar to the call to identify oneself with more than mere constitutional norms. For it is the secular norm, and hence a whole number of secular allegiances into which religious utterances are to be translated. In other words, the act of translation requires identifications that go beyond abstract universal principles, and concern those very particularities which are written into these principles. In an article on the “post-secular” character of contemporary European societies, published in 2008, Habermas indeed hints at something similar when he claims: […] the constitutional state confronts its citizens with the demanding expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must not only superficially adjust to the constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimization of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith. (Habermas 2008, p. 27)20

In this sense the political rationalities of the DIK make explicit what Habermas and other liberal thinkers address, even if they would formulate it in a less overtly particularizing and a more abstract manner: the ones who need to be required to produce translations are “traditional religious projects”, which have not yet achieved the equivalent stage of secularity as other, established religions. At the same time, the first round of the DIK, with its concentration on values, has set in motion an unexpected and probably unintended process, which partly confirms Habermas’ ideal of modified discourses through modified horizons.

4 Non-Conforming Muslim Utterances in Controlled Dialogue What scope is available in such a dialogue context to those Muslim actors who are not prepared to pledge adherence to a prearranged value consensus? The aspect of “talking back” interests me above all with respect to the question of what possi-

20 My italics; see for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).

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bilities of critique are permitted by the mechanisms of subjectification that apply in the DIK. Of particular interest are those actors, who, from the outset, were among the more dubious interlocutors, because they are placed into the category of “political Islam”. For here we are dealing with forms of critique of the dialogue structure and practice that, at the same time, make clear that this critique is itself a product of a liberal reflex, and is by no means operating outside liberal discourse structures. First of all, it should be made clear that organized Muslims, and in particular those who have participated in the DIK, have a totally different concept of dialogue than most of the participants from government, as well as some of the non-organized Muslims, who have been invited to the DIK as representatives of the “silent majority”. While representatives of the government aimed to gain an impression of the (in)compatibility of Muslim views and liberal democratic premises, with a heavy emphasis on values, and so seek to stimulate discourse on the content of constitutional norms, the concern of larger organizations of organized Muslims has been to bring to life rights as enshrined in the constitution. Organized Muslims in particular seem only to have involved themselves in the mechanisms of the DIK because they wished to drive forward the institutionalization of Islam in Germany with state aid. In particular the debate on values appears to have been perceived as an irritating co-component, which has marginalized what are to them vital issues such as the training of Imams, the building of mosques or Islamic theological teaching in state universities. Hence the various starting points reveal not only considerable asymmetries of power, but are also evidence of major divergences as regards the aims, aspirations and demands of the Other. This reveals, once more, the objection that, at the planning stage, there was no opportunity to bring these divergent interests to the table straightaway. Of particular interest to me here are those Muslim organizations that were previously declared as embracing a conservative and political notion of Islam, and as being enemies of the constitution, such as the Islamic Organization Milli Görüs (IGMG), and which were, in the first round of the DIK at least, publicly described as “equal partners”. Let me quote an extract from a conversation I had with the head of IGMG, Oguz Ücüncü, in the aftermath of the first encounters. So I actually find it exciting that the discussion on this type of topic always touches on the fact that there must be something beyond the constitution. So that was an exciting discussion at the German Islam Conference, when they tried to pin us down to values, to an order of values, a German order of values. […] But ultimately when you ask the first concrete question as to what there is beyond this constitution, in other words, beyond what is laid down there and forms joint values, you get from your interlocutor mostly just a quizzical look, something along the lines of: “Well our culture, our achievements …” And then you

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ask: “Well what kind of achievements?” “[…] the fact that we hold open doors for women when we go through them” […] and you can very quickly see that what they are being guided by is the constitutional order … and the values of the constitutional order. Because they are defined and they can be agreed upon and they make a good basis to shape co-existence.21

I find Ücüncü’s remarks interesting from several points of view. First, they make clear the problematic implications of the attempt, as outlined above, to dictate values. Here Ücüncü indicates the fact that the state is essentially going beyond its own remit. In so doing he, to some extent, turns around those accusations, which his own movement has faced for many years: this organization, which, having been under surveillance by the German Security Service, is now reminding the state not to stray beyond the bounds of the constitution. Second, Ücüncü in this way points to the exclusionary mechanisms – implicit in the attempt to fix a jointly shared value base in the sense of an immutable source – which do not allow non-conforming religious (Muslim) citizens to even take part in discourses subject to a translation requirement, but rather seek to exclude them by definition. Last, he reveals the manner in which some representatives of the state construct a particularistic value consensus in the process of the DIK. The emphasis on loyalty to the constitution and the law-abidingness of the IGMG, while at the same time rejecting a uniform model of religiosity in the public domain, seems to me ultimately symptomatic of the younger generation of intellectuals who have risen to management level at the IGMG, and who Werner Schiffauer (2010), in addition to Asef Bayart, terms “post-Islamist”. In particular, the adoption of a liberally characterized legal discourse is a specific trait, which may be seen in other aspects of Islamist and/or post-Islamist movements (cf. Henkel 2005). In so doing, there is a striving for universal rights and not, contrary to the criticism which is often articulated, for particularistic rights. With his confidence in the identification-endowing powers of the constitution, Ücüncü sets out what is essentially Habermas’ ideal of a “constitutional patriot”. There are a number of examples of organized Muslims having recourse to constitutional norms – primarily to the principle of religious freedom, but also to the concept of equality, something which permeates the core of the constitution. All too often they become involved in controversial areas which essentially deal with the legitimization of religious practice in the public domain. It is often gender issues that are on the agenda of the DIK – such as mixed sex swimming and sport lessons at school or the Islamic headscarf. Thus, for example, the deputy (female) head of the IGMG Legal Department Gülizar Keskin, in an interview

21 This quotation is taken from an interview I conducted with the General Secretary of the IGMG Oguz Ücüncü on April 1st, 2008 in Köln-Kerpen.

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concerning mixed sex swimming lessons, insisted on the right to modesty and religious sensibilities. Even in this area the admissibility of religious embodiments are consequently linked to a liberal discourse on rights.22 In the context of this article, there are two interesting aspects to this argumentation. On the one hand, some aspects of it confirm Habermas’ ideal of a consensus to be arrived at on the basis of the best arguments, and the justification that has been thought through in the best way, even if Ücüncü’s argument, querying and ultimately also bringing to light the culturalistic argumentations, might not necessarily even be “heard”. Representatives of the state have, in any case, found themselves having to supply justifications that they themselves have not anticipated, and thereby, in Habermas’ sense, have come under pressure to justify themselves. Moreover, this illustrates clearly the potency of Habermas’ argument of the change in discourse brought about by changed conditions in society. The recourse to valid legal norms does not attack constitutional principles, but essentially reveals their pluralistic and controversial character – in sharp contrast to the attempt to attribute to the constitution a monolithic ethical content. Applying liberal democratic argumentation, one might want to read this in the sense of Seyla Benhabib (2004, chap. 5), as an expression of “democratic reiteration”. Benhabib relies on the concept of iteration (repetition) as used by Jacques Derrida, as well as on his emphasis on the pluralistic structure and on the essential semantic change in concepts: “In the process of repeating a term or a concept, we never simply produce a replica of the first original usage and its intended meaning: rather, every repetition is a form of variation. Every iteration transforms meaning, adds to it, enriches it in ever-so-subtle ways” (Benhabib 2004, p. 179). With regard to the difficulties connected with the headscarf in France, maintains Benhabib, covered Muslim women have, through their recourse to constitutional principles such as equality and religious freedom, brought about one such “enrichment” of the meanings of these norms. By justifying their claims with constitutionally available legal norms, they have introduced religious (i.e. Islamic) components into these very norms. This act of reiteration, according to Benhabib (2004, p. 181), opens up a way for individuals to appropriate these rights, which are firmly established in democratic constitutions, and totally in Habermas’ sense, to become not only the subject, but at the same time the agent of the law. In this sense one might similarly claim that the liberal, constitutionally based legal order in Germany enables Muslims to “reiterate” constitutional rights, with the aim of pluralizing and widening their own sphere of participation. Against the backdrop of these reiterations we can see the form of state intervention, as

22 Interview in Köln-Kerpen, April 1st, 2008.

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expressed in the DIK, as a reaction which indicates that it is primarily organized Muslims who have increasingly sought to prove their ability to secure their religiosity in constitutional terms, and without having recourse to alternative legal forms and norms. Having said that, I would introduce a note of caution at this point, and with that conclude with respect to the potential, and also the limitations, of liberal(-legalist) dialogue models. I would be far less optimistic than Habermas or Benhabib, as to the effects of such democratic reiterations. As writers such as Wendy Brown or Judith Butler remind us, good faith in the pluralistic power of constitutional norms overlooks the thick texture itself, which is written into the contract, and which endures beyond the context of its origin by means of discursive power techniques: “[W]e might conclude that at a basic level, the entitlement to a notion of freedom that is based on contract is limited by those freedoms that might extend the contract too far, that is, to the point of disrupting the cultural preconditions of the contract itself” (Butler 2008, p. 10). On closer inspection, Ücüncü therefore reveals the inbuilt limitations in the liberal project, above all when we examine it in the total context of the DIK and what can be thought, said and heard about it, and what correspondingly cannot be thought, said or heard. Because in liberal democratic constitutional contexts it is by no means a matter of indifference as to who speaks. Neither is it just a question of how argumentation is conducted, but often enough also who is doing the arguing, and on what ethical basis, as well as which assumptions are being made. Thus the arguments of the IGMG leadership could be considered more or less discredited, not least because the IGMG is considered a dubious organization in toto, whose reference to the constitutional basis and constitutional conformity are judged to be devious, because there is presumably no serious constitutional loyalty behind it, but simply goal-orientated tactical maneuvering (cf. Schiffauer 2010; cf. Parekh 2008). In the case of pious Muslims this can be illustrated through the very principle of religious freedom, which Ücüncü is also driving at in the above quotation. Thus, the successful application by Islamic organizations before the Federal Constitutional Court to allow them to carry out Islamic ritual slaughter, for instance, triggered a process which revealed the inscribed ethical foundation of the constitutional state, and not just at this judicial level. Werner Schiffauer (2010, p. 298f.) gives the very clear example of how state authorities have undermined the verdict granting an exemption for ritual slaughter, using the argument of animal welfare to limit it to a minimum.23

23 On this, see also Lavi (2009).

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By having recourse to the principle of religious freedom, Muslims behave in a thoroughly constitutionally correct manner. However, in so doing, they frequently demand things that have not been provided for by the contract.24 Although the demands are rational, legitimate and in conformity with the law, the content is frequently considered offensive. They are not necessarily offensive because they attempt to raise the religious to a sphere which is not permitted – for forms of religious expression, for instance of Christianity, are present and active in the public domain, as well; but they are considered to be an infringement on what is permitted because they challenge an inscribed form of the secular consensus (which Habermas lays down as an unmarked template) and introduce into the public and legal discourse an unknown form of the religious, which is found to be disruptive, and which is considered archaic, traditional and in need of translation.25 Hence it is here not only the religious practices which are allowed or disallowed in law, but rather questions which touch upon embodied secular assumptions and emotions.26 Above all, this applies to those demands that point to a concept of arrangements regarding the sexes, which deviate from the secular norm. This would also support Heiko Henkel’s argument. Henkel indicates that the politico-philosophical idea of constitutional patriotism developed in an age in which ideological pluralization was considered to be of far less significance than it is today, and which was primarily concerned with overcoming the ambivalent potential of an ethnically expressed understanding of nationhood with the offer of a politically expressed common bind. Thinkers like Habermas still need to provide answers to the question regarding to what extent those religious projects, which call into question the secular consensus, can be regarded as a legitimate component of the ideal of constitutional patriotism. A pluralistic, reiterative concept of constitutional norms does not necessarily predominate in societal practice, particularly when it is a question of uncomfortable demands that do not easily fit into the predominating ideal of secularized, and hence more reticent or even publicly invisible religiousness. Contrary to the assumption made by Ücüncü, religious freedom is not per se a Good which is enshrined forever, which any of us – provided always that we present the correct ar-

24 It would be worth looking more carefully into the genealogy of the right to religious freedom in this regard, namely for a case in point for built-in limitations of constitutional principles. José Casanova (1994, chap. 2), for example, reminds us that the very idea of religious freedom emerged in the first place as a right to protect the individual’s religious consciousness from externally prescribed religiosity. Its driving force has therefore been the privatization of belief instead of the claims towards worshipping in public. 25 This is one of the central arguments of Parekh (2008). 26 On this point, see chiefly Asad (2006).

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gument – can make use of, but it varies in interpretation according to context and is permanently linked to certain dispositions. It is for this reason far more ethically charged than is frequently claimed in liberal-judicial discourses. Even if, for example, schoolchildren succeed in excusing themselves in accordance with the law from coeducational sport and swimming lessons at school, this hardly means that they can hope for the recognition of a religiously based sexual morality by society, which cannot immediately be translated into a liberal repertoire. It should be stressed here that the demands which are hidden behind the aimed for principle of religious freedom are equally anything but neutral, as Ücüncü and others with a tendency to constitutional patriotism suggest. Rather, they in all probability rely on a religious foundation which will not easily fit into a secular, liberal repertoire. Although I do not wish to make the accusation of using the liberal constitutional repertoire for illiberal purposes, it does seem clear in this case that even representatives of Islamic organizations frequently do not explain the ethical premises under which they have recourse to constitutional rights. Thus IGMG actors such as Ücüncü, with their assertion that concepts of the Good must immediately be separated from the domain of the law, simply repeat the contradictions inherent in liberal/judicial discourses. They do this, firstly, by suppressing their own value-orientated interpretation of these rights; and secondly, by overlooking the limitations, which in this case result from the secular impregnation of constitutional norms. The call for equal rights for religious groups, as well as their recourse to legal discourse in particular, is hardly able to address moral forms of exclusion – not least because the law is not a neutral authority which exists independently of concepts of the Good, and is thereby isolated within society. Criticism which refers to law, and to codification above all, thus merely indicates the existence of power, but does not undermine it. On this issue I have no conclusive answer, and not even a preliminary one. However, certain questions follow from these justified objections to the backdrop of what have hitherto been the dialogue practices of the DIK; these seem to me to be suspect, and this article has attempted to expose them: what happens when the act of reiteration does not lead to the desired establishment of the formation of democratic will – as Habermas would have it – when the discourses do not pluralize in spite of pluralized horizons, because the contract itself is being tested along with the reiteration? To what extent do making use of the law and the appeal to the courts reify the very forms of exclusion and moral injury that they were intended to cure? The challenge lies in thinking about those forms of recognition of ideological diversity that might exist beyond liberal-judicial initiatives, in order to comprehend the principle of secularity more comprehensively, even in its results, which strive for freedom, as permeated by techniques of

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power. Accordingly, any dialogue that supports this universal permeation of power seems to me ultimately hardly suited for the context of pluralistic (dialogue) contexts.

5 Concluding Remarks In the preceding discussion I have attempted to show how the ideal of consensusorientated dialogue in ideologically pluralistic contexts causes exclusive effects, despite the best intentions to be inclusive. These mechanisms of exclusion are, for one thing, evident in the theoretical premises. On the other hand, they also manifest themselves in concrete dialogue practices such as those exercised at the DIK. How fit for purpose is a dialogue model that urges religious citizens to translate specific matters concerning a religious faith into a universal (i.e. secular) language, and, for the benefit of comprehensibility, to disregard the power implications of this universally binding objective? And how fit for purpose is a dialogue practice that, above all, does not even allow the Other, who is considered as not fitting in, to introduce into the discourse his own concept of the Good in a reflective manner, because it is led by unspoken assumptions and prejudices? The DIK operates with mechanisms that are hard to reconcile with the concept of liberal dialogue. This is chiefly because we are not dealing here with that kind of voluntary assent to a jointly developed value consensus. At the same time it reveals the particularistic content of abstract liberal theories and thereby highlights the non-neutral, ethical character of what are ostensibly neutralized, permanently adaptable constitutional norms. In discussion of “Constitution Plus” the fact is revealed that a real sovereignty of interpretation of the ethical foundations of constitutional norms exists; the ways for non-conforming religious projects to break through this sovereignty of interpretation are limited, even if their stance vis-à-vis the constitutional framework is an affirmative one. With its recourse to constitutional principles of ethical substance the DIK displays the related mechanisms of exclusion for non-conforming utterances, and, at the same time, the contract-specific limitations of constitutional patriotism. For this reason I regard as rather less dubious the understanding, expressed throughout the DIK, of ethically determined interpretations of constitutional norms. On the contrary, this very aspect might give some indication of the nonneutral, ethically based premises of such norms. The spirit of philosophical-hermeneutic ideas for dialogue like this might stimulate the decoding of the assumptions which hamper even dialogue models of the liberal type. Discourse on values, embodied lifestyles and ethics is something I consider to be urgently

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needed in view of the necessarily divergent concepts of the Good in the political and public spheres. On the one hand, it is problematic that the DIK creates the impression that non-Muslims have unanimously absorbed all basic values in a uniform manner, whereas organized and/or devout Muslims are generally accused of having a deficit in the acquisition thereof. In such cases the need to catch up, where religious speech events are concerned, becomes acute. On the other hand, the call for a common ground is somewhat threadbare, when agreement on this common ground does not even arise in the dialogue process, but above all takes shape in people’s minds as a disrupting otherness in the process of construction. In the DIK the production of value material takes place chiefly via demarcating techniques. As may be best demonstrated in the area of Islamic norms of sexuality, the underlying concept of dialogue is mainly based on the expectation that Muslims will adhere to certain rules and norms – in this case a certain religious norm which is based on a productive notion of freedom. Faced with these forms of state-initiated dialogue and its involvement with welfare and provisional power techniques, subjectivities are produced through processes of attribution. Even the constitutional patriotism expressed by some of the Islamic organizations is unable to penetrate these subjective positions. The organizations’ having recourse to a liberal and democratic discursive repertoire should be interpreted as a reaction to these forms of state intervention in Islamic life. They aim to resist this intervention, even if, in using this repertoire, they rely on a number of weak points in liberal theory and practice. However, it must be stressed as a general observation that the effects of such dialogue practices conducted on liberal and secular terms are totally open, even when they operate with overtly exclusionary mechanisms, since these constraints nonetheless also offer possibilities for participation.

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Concepts of Religion and Their Political Implications 1 Introduction Until the 1970s, most of us were quite certain that religion represents a phenomenon of the past. Few expected religion to disappear totally from modern societies, but most were sure that it would retreat to the private sphere and no longer play an important role in politics and public life.1 Thirty years ago, major foundations or political institutions would probably not have sponsored a conference on “Religion and Society in the 21st Century”, and organizers would probably not have asked the participants to explore questions regarding the peaceful coexistence of religions and the significance of religions for global pacification. Now, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, such questions seem very timely, and conferences on religion and politics, religion and violence, or religion and peace abound. The fact that these topics seem reasonable mirrors how the world has changed over recent decades, which witnessed events like the Iranian revolution, the rise of a religious right in the United States and Israel, as well as the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, to mention just a few. However, given our earlier misjudgments we should be cautioned and pause for a moment to reflect on the presuppositions of our questions. Why do we expect “religion(s)” to be interested and able to peacefully coexist with others without giving up its truth claims, and to promote global peace? As we all know, (too) many definitions of religion exist and each of them sees the center of religion somewhere different. Each definition also shapes the assumed relationship between religion and politics, pluralism, tolerance, conflict resolution, and global peace differently. While the expectation of peaceful religious coexistence might be more open to a variety of understandings of religion, the expectation that religions have not only the task, but also the potential to actively contribute to global peace is obviously linked to a rather specific understanding of religion. What understanding of religion is implied in seeing religion(s) as not only interested in,

1 Classical representatives of this position are, among others, Berger (1967) and Luckmann (1967).

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but also capable of acting successfully towards such goals? What kind of institutional structures would be required for such tasks? What are the means employed? Who are the actors representing “religion”? My suspicion is that such expectations derive from a rather state-centered perspective on religion(s), which downplays doctrinal differences and sees the content of religion primarily in ethics. It obviously assumes that religious associations are not competitors in a religious market, but are rather organized as monopolies or oligopolies called “churches”, which are structured in ways similar to the state, and which cooperate with the state for the “greater good”. The one question at hand regards the function of religion for state and society, and how to organize religions in order to make such contributions possible. Of course, this is a legitimate question so long as one assumes that religions primarily serve state and society in general, and not their own members. Otherwise, one might favor a different perspective and ask how the state fulfills its constitutional obligation towards religions, namely to protect their freedom to organize and practice within the limits of the law. According to the German constitution, religions are not required to serve the state; the state is obligated to protect religions. The inversion of this constitutional perspective in the key questions of this conference suggests that they have been informed by a modern, liberal Christian, church-oriented European perspective, which cannot and should not be taken for granted as a valid universal model of and for religion.

2 Western Discourses on Religion Thanks to postmodern criticism2, it has become impossible today to talk about “religion” without clarifying the concept. As we all know, “religion” has been used in various and occasionally diffuse ways, and attempts at defining the term have plagued many academic disciplines for at least two hundred years. This does not need to deter us from using the concept. As Jonathan Z. Smith (1982) argued, the plurality of views does not prove that one cannot define religion, but that one can define it in many ways. Obviously, each definition changes the terms with which the relationship between religion and “society” is constructed. Each definition offers not only different boundaries of the object, but represents a view from a specific position and therefore often has various political implications, if not intentions.

2 Most important, Asad (1993).

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Moreover, what has often been forgotten is the fact that “religion” is not only used by scholars, but belongs to a variety of discourses in which the term is used quite differently, like legal discourses or public journalistic discourses. Especially the latter often work with rather essentializing concepts of religion and religions, ascribing timeless properties to “Christianity”, “Islam”, or “Buddhism”. Let me therefore review some of the more influential understandings of religion, and analyze how they might relate to the task of furthering amicable coexistence and global peace. Let me begin with a brief review of scholarly definitions of religion, which have been popular over the last centuries and decades. Here I will omit all approaches that are based on a secularization paradigm, since they obviously do not expect religion to play a major role in the social life of modern societies.

2.1 Religion as a Divine Gift of Reason The starting point for modern understandings of religion was probably Deism – which Ernst Troeltsch (1925) called the Enlightenment’s philosophy of religion – and the discussions surrounding it. Deism represents a concept of religion that is based on a rationalistic world-view. In its logically consistent form, it rejects as irrational all “positive” religions that claim to be based on special revelations; or, rather, it rejects them insofar as they are regarded as irrational. Deism posited a “reasonable” belief in God and a “reasonable” morality. From the times of Herbert of Cherbury up to the literature of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, this approach became increasingly popular among intellectuals. Herbert of Cherbury ([1624] 1968, p. 29–46) maintained that God had given the gift of reason to all human beings. Reason, according to him, contains a few fundamental truths, such as the existence of a creator-God, the duty to venerate him primarily through moral conduct, the obligation to repent and avoid sins, and the belief that a just punishment for sins would be meted out in this life and in the next. On this view, all revealed religions represented later reproductions, or even falsifications, of this original natural religion. Thus deism interprets religion as essentially a naturally given, universal metaphysics and morality. The world is an ordered cosmos whose laws mirror divine reason. Humans can recognize God in the laws of nature and morality. Kant’s famous formula “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” encapsulates the deistic view. However, even if many proponents of Deism believed that Christianity came closest to natural religion, this view stands in clear opposition to all “positive” religions and their particularistic truth claims. In short, a Deist understanding of religion would be immensely skeptical towards a “posi-

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tive” religion’s ability to promote peaceful coexistence, or even to further global peace, unless they give up their particularistic truth claims that contradict the religion of reason.

2.2 Religion as an Experience of Revelation Among the reactions to Deist rationalism is the Romantic concept of religion. It opposes the rationalistic view of religion as ethics and metaphysics, and makes aesthetics central in their stead. For Romanticism, the same as for its twentieth century heir, phenomenology, religion is primarily an individualized experience of revelation. Religion is seen as an “experience” of “the holy”, the “sacred”, the “unconditional”, the “eternal”, or whichever way it has been named. The kind of experience may vary, taking the form of mystical contemplation, ecstatic possession, or simply a more highly cultivated religious sensibility with regard to the cosmos or the infinite. This approach sees in religiousness a human capability that is given a priori, and that differs from any other kind of experience. It sees the human being as having a disposition toward religion, as homo religiosus. Nonreligiousness is regarded, like being unmusical or unreceptive to art, as a lack of cultivation of the general human potential, as Schleiermacher ([1799] 1996) emphasized long ago. Eliade (1959) later criticizes modern culture for its deficiency in this regard, and contrasts it with a fictive “archaic humanity”, which is supposed to have lived in constant relationship to “hierophanies”, i. e. revelations of the sacred. Representatives of religion understood in this sense are seldom religious officeholders or laypersons; usually they are individuals who have particular religious gifts. Hence Romantic and phenomenological studies have paid far more attention to religious virtuosos than have other approaches. The emphasis on virtuosity suggests, at least implicitly, a cultural criticism of a modernity whose materialism and utilitarianism have suppressed and marginalized this kind of experience. This view of religion is often manifested in authors who see themselves as virtuosos or initiates and present their studies with prophetic or mystical affect. Rudolf Otto’s (1958) statement that anyone who has never had a religious experience himself need read no further is a famous example of such a view. With the rejection of religion as metaphysics, ethics, dogma, and holy scriptures, the early Romantics reject as inauthentic all claims made by the state, orthodoxy, and organized religion. Religion is not supposed to explain the world or provide a foundation for morality; it serves neither church nor state; it is not in competition with science and does not function to produce social discipline.

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Religion is based on human creative potential, which escapes any instrumentalization and serves to promote the individual’s full development. In religion, humans transcend themselves and their species with regard to the experience of a higher order. The Romantic concept rejects the notion that any concrete religion embodies the “truth”. Religion is an individualized, even subjectivized revelation. So, one trend within this understanding of religion is geared towards the religious virtuoso, a universal religious elite sharing deep insights in, and experiences of, the sacred, and cultivating a universalistic ethos. But there is another trend that also stems from the Romantic and phenomenological traditions, the mystification of “archaic man” as homo religiosus. Here individuality is often seen as the specific genius of a “Volk” represented by the peasantry. This view often serves nationalistic purposes by drawing a sharp boundary between the pious “Volk” on the one hand, and all the rest (intellectuals, non-believers, religious and ethnic minorities) on the other. The Romantic understanding of religion was therefore quite unprepared for the promotion of peaceful co-existence, and disinterested in furthering global peace when it understood religion as a marker of ethnic identity.

2.3 Religion as a Function of the Brain In recent decades, neurologists have increasingly concerned themselves with religion. Surprisingly, it is a Romantic/phenomenological understanding of religion that informs many neurological studies. Andrew Newberg and his collaborators associate religion largely with mysticism. Evidence suggests that the deepest origins of religion are based in mystical experience, and that religions persist because the wiring of the human brain continues to provide believers with a range of unitary experiences that are often interpreted as assurances that God exists. (Newberg/D’Aquili/Rause 2001, p. 129)

Or, in another passage: All the great scriptures make the same point: Fundamental truth has been revealed to human beings through a mystical encounter with a higher spiritual reality; mysticism, in other words, is the source of the essential wisdom and truth upon which all religions are founded. But before religions can begin, mystical experiences must be interpreted in rational terms, and the ineffable insights they bestow must be translated into specific beliefs. (Newberg/D’Aquili/Rause 2001, p. 135–136)

The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran (1998) has also studied religion and attempted to localize God in the limbic system. Like Newberg, Ramachandran as-

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sumes that religion is primarily an emotional experience. Hence he mainly examines epileptics. Most remarkable are the cases in which patients are said to have had deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and direct communication with God, everything around them filled with cosmic significance. The central problem of these neurological approaches is that they understand religion one-sidedly as the experience of virtuosos. For Newberg and his colleagues, the model is the mystic, and for Ramachandran, the shaman. Be that as it may – any relationship of religion to ethics and peacemaking seems far-fetched.

2.4 Religion as Projection Theories of projection are generally theories critical of religion. These approaches always imply the assumption of a misunderstanding. Feuerbach’s anthropocentric critique of religion sees religion as a projection of ideals of human perfection onto a metaphysical authority that operates as a superhuman god, dominating and paralyzing its inventors. Freud sees religion as an illusion, as wishful thinking, and as indicating the lack of a strong ego and an insufficient acceptance of reality. For Marx, who further develops Feuerbach’s approach and partially anticipates Freud’s, religion is initially an expression of misunderstood nature and later of distorted social relations. Marx sees religion as an expression of false consciousness. He follows Hegel in assuming that the history of humanity leads from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. But he sees the development of human consciousness not as a relatively independent process, but rather as the manifestation and consequence of the development of the material conditions of human existence. According to Marx, humans create themselves as a species by producing and reproducing their concrete lives. The role of religion as an expression of social consciousness changes in the course of socioeconomic development. In societies that have little control over nature and are organized in a relatively egalitarian way, the material environment is the great riddle. In earlier times, humans mythified nature, which seemed to them to be dominated by invisible powers, and at that stage religion expressed primarily a misunderstanding of nature’s “true” ways of functioning. An increasing mastery over nature resulted from the division of labor, which produced class differences, especially between intellectual and manual labor, and led to the development of private property. In the course of this social development, knowledge was acquired about nature, as well as how to control it through technology. Nature was demystified and seen increasingly as a rationally ordered whole, governed by laws that required no religious ex-

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planation. Whereas this development of the natural sciences and technology led to the demythification of nature, social relations were becoming steadily more complex. Social development created growing social differences, and modern capitalism increasingly reified and depersonalized social relations. It now seemed that society, not nature, was becoming more and more difficult to understand. For one thing, consciousness is falsified by alienation, which manifests itself in the organization of labor and in the resulting social relations among members of different classes, as well as within the same class. In other words, human existence is stunted by being reduced to purely economic relations. Labor as creative, sensuous, meaningful activity is seen as no more than a means of physical survival or of maximizing profits. People come to see themselves primarily as selfcentered actors in the economic process, treating their peers as competitors for jobs or profits. Interpersonal relations take on an instrumental character. The production and exchange of commodities characterizes the social. People encounter each other not as human beings in all their complexity but as “one-dimensional”. In addition, there are the interests of those who benefit from these alienated structures and, in order to justify their privileges, develop a legitimating ideology that alternates between illusion and deliberate deception. With this socioeconomic development, religion also changes from an expression of the failure to understand nature to an expression of alienated social relations and social structures. It can assume a series of different functions and forms. It can serve to justify the existing form of society and domination, urging acceptance of this form, for example, by referring to God’s will or to a better future in the afterlife. Occasionally, religion can also articulate protests against unjust relations, but because of its illusory ideas it is incapable of formulating a realistic proposal for transforming society. Since religion, for Marx, is ultimately little more than an expression of alienated social relations – that is, an illusion and a form of escapism in the Freudian sense on the one hand, and a justifying ideology on the other – religion can hardly contribute to peaceful coexistence; and its promotion of “global peace” must be either an illusion or part of the ideology of a specific class.

2.5 Religion as Sacralized Social Principles For Durkheim and his school, religion and society are inseparable from each other. On the one hand, Durkheim argues that religion is an eminently social phenomenon; on the other, that almost all mental categories and institutions developed out of religion. In other words, neither religion nor society has priority over the other; instead, they mutually produce each other. Likewise, Durkheim ([1912]

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1995) equates religion with the sacred. The social can develop only on the basis of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Without distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, what is commanded and what is forbidden, what is sanctioned and what is not sanctioned, society cannot be formed. Religion refers to the sacralized central cognitive, moral, and aesthetic principles and classifications without which cooperation and coordination would not be possible. For Durkheim, human beings and society have two dimensions: one profane, the other sacred. Man is profane in his bodily needs and desires, in his egotism and self-centeredness. He is sacred as a moral, social being, which is able to transcend these limitations. Society is profane in its everyday economic life, which primarily serves the needs of physical reproduction. Even though Durkheim shows that economic orders are regulated morally, everyday life is still very distant from high religious festivals and rituals, in which the central symbols of social principles and ideals are invoked and people’s hearts are moved. For Durkheim, a society based on utilitarian self-interest – that is, a fully profane society – cannot exist and represents a contradiction in terms. Society always has a sacred dimension and thus a religion. Society constantly creates ideals, and the ideal society is a necessary component of real society – and not some sort of accidental addition. This sacred dimension finds visible expression in non-everyday rituals in which social norms and ideals are periodically reinforced and even renewed. In ecstatic group experience, people overcome their particularist interests and carry out new acts of sacralization. Thus, if Durkheim, in his analysis of religion identifies God with society, he should not be understood as endorsing existing conditions. He is referring here not to society as it actually is, but rather to its moral principles and ideals of order. God symbolizes society’s self-transcendence. At first glance, Durkheim’s version of religion seems to represent the opposite of Marx’. For Durkheim, all religions are true; for Marx, all are false. For Marx, religion becomes superfluous through science and the overcoming of alienation; for Durkheim, religion remains an indispensable component of society, even if partially replaced by science. What we must not overlook in this opposition, however, is that Durkheim’s concept of religion has very little in common with conventional ones. However, his unique understanding of religion, with its fusion of religious and socio-political orders, is problematic, especially historically. For one thing, it ignores historical phases in which religious and political communities are not identical. Wherever religious diversity or religious pluralism predominate, or where orthodoxy and heterodoxy are opposed, this approach encounters difficulties in mediating between subgroups and the society as a whole. Thomas Luckmann was aware of these shortcomings and argued that religion in modern societies has lost its original political function and has become privat-

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ized. However, it does for the individual exactly what it used to do for society. For Luckmann (1967) any form of personal self-transcendence is religion. He regards self-transcendence as an indispensable presupposition for the formation of the person. For him all people are therefore religious in the same sense that societies are for Durkheim.

2.6 Religion as an Interest in Salvation Max Weber’s action-oriented, interpretative sociology examines religion primarily from the point of view of its contribution to the shaping of a specific habitus of typical social actors and its formative influence on culture in general. It has become commonplace to object that, at the beginning of his unfinished manuscript “Religious Communities”, Weber fails to offer a definition of religion – and indeed, that he explicitly refuses to do so. This interpretation seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding. Here, Weber does not reject the possibility of a scholarly definition of the object defined, but rather – as he expressly states – a definition of the “essence” of religion. Clearly referring to such attempts in the literature of his times, he critically notes that an “essential definition” cannot be achieved through a priori definitions. On the contrary, it would require the study of many different religions in the forms in which they appeared historically. In case something like an “essence” of religion exists, it can only be determined empirically through a comparative historical study of religions (Weber 1978). Weber, however, does not seek to define the “essence” of religion; he pursues the sociology of religion by investigating the “conditions and effects” of religiously motivated action. In his view, this can be done only in terms of content, not in terms of form. Only through “subjectively intended meaning” can an analytical unity of the object be created, since religions in their “external course” manifest such diversity that a coherent definition of the object is not possible (Weber 1978, p. 399). And even if one were to discover formal parallels between religions, these same forms could have very different meanings. For Weber, religion concerns the conditions and effects of a specific kind of social action. What changes in the course of social and cultural developments are the definitions of “salvation”, along with ways and means of achieving the goal of salvation. In “primitive” societies, salvation interests are understood as purely immanent, this-worldly. Since the goal – “that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth” (Ephesians 6:3) – often cannot be achieved on one’s own, the aid of extraordinary personal or impersonal powers may be needed. Still, access to these powers is reserved for especially – usually ecstatically – gifted persons, on whose mediation ordinary persons are therefore de-

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pendent. A differentiation between religion and other spheres of action cannot be discerned here on the basis of the goals pursued, but only on the basis of the means used, and the specific actors involved. With the development of “religions of salvation” and their rejection of “the world”, a special religious interest emerges and becomes institutionalized, namely, the goal of being saved from the world. This specifically religious goal may conflict with everyday interests or at least be in a tense relationship with them. The rigorous pursuit of this peculiar religious interest is often an activity for especially qualified individuals. Only in exceptional cases, like ascetic Protestantism, is it extended to all laypersons. Weber is primarily interested in how, and to what degree, religious goals of salvation and paths to salvation have helped shape the behavior of the laity. He starts from the assumption that – depending on the salvation goals and paths to salvation, as well as the corresponding religious demands on various social groups – different tensions, conflicts, and contradictions resulted, which in turn led to different processes of rationalization. His guiding interest here is to explain the unique development in the West of a mass ethics focused on this-worldly, rationalized, and disciplined action. In addition to long-term religious developments and their effects on secular ethics, which Weber ([1904/05] 2002; [1920] 1951; [1920] 1958) discusses in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and in The Economic Ethics of the World Religions, he proposes an analysis of religious institution building with his conception of “charisma”. According to Weber, the “religious experience” of especially gifted persons is the origin of every religion. Still, he is not interested in whether this “experience” is genuine. Neither does he declare it to be the “essence” of religion. Instead, he is concerned with its social effects, and, above all, with whether others believe in this “experience”, as well as what consequences this might have for social action. Thus Weber adopts the Romantic idea of religion while transforming it into a sociological question at the same time. Since religious experience is transitory, it has to be institutionalized. The purely personal, charismatic power relationship between the religiously gifted person and his followers is transformed into a regulated, enduring relationship, and converted into a permanent relationship of authority on traditional or bureaucratic foundations. Hence, in religions of salvation there is an increasing adaptation of salvation interests to secular interests. In other words, in his theory of religion Weber is concerned chiefly with the role of religion in defining and transforming ideal and material interests in their mutual relations, as well as in the elaboration of a specific ethos or habitus. In this respect, he would be open to an analysis of a religiously pacifist or peaceful ethos.

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2.7 Religions as Competing Firms For the past thirty years or so, utilitarianism has undergone a revival in the social sciences, and it has also entered the sociology of religion in the form of “rational choice” theory. This perspective includes many approaches, which differ from one another chiefly in the ways in which they deal with cultural factors. In principle, the theory is based on the assumption of rational actors and stable preferences. Whereas Weber, for example, showed that material and ideal interests are culturally determined and may often be in conflict, rational choice theory, by assuming that preferences are constant, seeks to exclude culture as a variable. Rational choice theory can be applied both to individual action and to religious market research. In relation to individual action, maximization of utility is the key element, with utility in the case of religion described as compensation for goals that cannot be achieved (Stark/Bainbridge 1996). In this respect, the approach shows similarities to Freud’s theory of compensation and projection, but without offering an explanation for the deep psychic level. According to this view, religion holds out the prospect of a satisfaction of needs that are not met in normal life. This implies that the suppliers of religion are in competition with each other. The one with greater demands will outcompete the more lenient ones. In other words, peaceful co-existence between religions can only function if the rules of the game, i.e. competition, mission, etc., are accepted by all religious firms. Otherwise, hostility and tensions between religious associations will be the rule, since the best strategy against competitors is to dramatize group cohesion, identity, and boundaries, while stigmatizing others. The prospect of peace is based on particularistic promises of salvation, not on interreligious dialogue or peaceful coexistence. Only the respectively own truth claims are true. As we can see from this brief overview – depending on which understanding of “religion” one applies, rather diverse relationships to politics and peacemaking will emerge.

2.8 Religions as Religious Traditions In our everyday language we often tend to equate the term religion with what I would prefer to call religious tradition. Of course, we can use the concept of religious tradition colloquially, referring to self-definitions of religious associations and/or key symbols of religions. We teach introductory classes to Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and there is nothing wrong with this terminology as long as we are aware of its pragmatic character. However, in popular perception, concrete religions are often understood as representatives of stereotypical “reli-

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gious traditions” believed to be profoundly different and particular. People talk about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism as if they were monolithic entities based on diverse “ultimate values” imagined as being rather static across history. Such a more heavy-handed understanding represents a big ahistorical abstraction with strong theological implications. It establishes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism in the singular, and in capital letters. Such a notion of religion as a timeless religious tradition homogenizes and essentializes religions. It defines boundaries, establishes authority, creates orthodoxies and heterodoxies, and ignores ubiquitous syncretisms. Seen from this perspective, the history of a religion appears as the unfolding of an original idea or ideal, which is internally consistent and basically never changes, in spite of transformations on the surface. Moreover, it is essentially different from the ideas or ideals on which other religions are based. This understanding of religion emphasizes essential doctrinal and symbolic differences and ascribes to a religion a static attitude towards the world. Ultimately, religions are characterized by unchanging modes of behavior, which are inscribed in whole cultures or civilizations. This perspective creates extremely resilient boundaries between religions and ascribes the greatest importance to religion as a marker of social identity. It produces the clichés according to which one religion is peaceful, the other militant – even if the empirical evidence proves that all religions have been peaceful at times, and militant at others. This is the “clash of civilization” perspective (Huntington 1996).3

2.9 Understanding Religions as Systems of Practices The best antidote to such essentializing views of religious traditions is to define religions as systems of meaningful practices with reference to superhuman powers in time and space (Riesebrodt 2010). The inclusion of superhuman powers, i.e. powers that are believed to control or influence what is beyond normal human control, clearly narrows the object of study to the “normal” – nowadays not only Western – usage of the term “religion”. The understanding of religion as a system of practices steers our attention to the empirical evidence. This perspective does not deny that there are continuities over time and across national and geographical boundaries, but it does not assume that such connections automatically shape similarities and differences, or even social identifications and expectations of solidarity. Of course, religious identifications can be,

3 Critically, Riesebrodt (2001, p. 15–33).

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and have been, important historically; and yet, there are also local, regional, and national identifications or identifications with language, culture, gender, age, and class, which can be more important than religious ones. My point is to not take anything for granted here. This perspective attempts to understand each religion (as a system of practices) or each religious community on its own terms, which means in its own religious, social, and political context. It is not so much the religious tradition writ large and doctrinally defined that helps us understand the religious communities we study, but it is the religion as a system of practices in its concrete religious, social, and political context that might redefine what is meant by “religious tradition” empirically. This perspective rejects the construction of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism in capital letters and instead focuses on Christianities, Judaisms, Islams, and Buddhisms in the plural. It allows for innovations, transformations, and reinterpretations of religions and does not assume that boundaries between religions necessarily represent boundaries of identity or solidarity of greatest importance. To give an example: Pentecostal and charismatic groups in Latin America and Africa have partially redefined what Christianity means. Of course, one could attempt to separate the “truly” Christian elements in doctrine and worship from “pagan” African or “Catholic” Latin American elements, but this would be an exercise in theology in order to distinguish orthodoxy from heterodoxy, orthopraxis from heteropraxis. From my perspective, it is much more interesting and fruitful to study such religions on their own terms, namely as they are practiced. This proposed perspective has an impact on how we see the ability of religions to coexist peacefully with other religions, or to contribute to global pacification. Obviously, this is not a timeless property of any religion. The same religious traditions have produced or contributed to a great variety of religions (as systems of meaningful practices). All religious traditions have therefore known periods of conflict, as well as of peaceful coexistence; of strict demarcation and polemics, as well as of respectful communication, assimilation, or even identification. A brief look at the early history of Buddhism or Christianity teaches us that seemingly peaceful and apolitical religions were transformed into state religions within a couple of centuries. Who would be so naïve to assume that this did not profoundly transform these religions, their structure of authority, and strategies of legitimation, their worship practices, ethics, and doctrines?

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3 Churches, Voluntary Associations, and the State As we have seen so far, the interest and ability of religions to peacefully coexist and promote global peace largely depends on the basic understanding of what religion is primarily about, what its tasks and means are. But, at the same time, it is also profoundly influenced by structures of religious institutions. Of course all religions, however defined, might use purely religious means to achieve peace. They can pray for peace, bless the world, or hope that conversion or enlightenment will lead to universal peace – as indeed various religious teachings proclaim. However, problems arise when religious and political means are not distinguished. For example, when the former German Protestant chief bishop Margot Käßmann stated that it is better to pray with the Taliban than to bomb them, she seemed to make a purely religious statement. But actually, she just demonstrated her unwillingness or inability to distinguish between religious and political means. As a bishop she would have been predestined to visit Afghanistan and pray with the Taliban. Not surprisingly, she never did; because what she really meant was that those who bomb the Taliban, the military and indirectly also the politicians, should pray with the Taliban instead, which is definitely neither their task nor an adequate means to achieve peace. Most people in Western democracies would neither expect nor want politicians to use prayer as a means of politics, nor would they want religious leaders to employ predominantly political means. But there seem to be different perceptions of what the main task of religions is, depending on the ways in which they are organized. Where big churches prevail (such as is the case in Europe) religious organizations seem to define their tasks in a much broader way and tend to permanently engage in interreligious dialogues, socio-moral and human rights issues to a much greater extent. Where religions are organized as voluntary associations (as they are in the United States), they tend to focus primarily on the religious needs of their members, although that may also include their social and moral sensibilities. For religions to be employing means other than purely religious ones to achieve peace on a permanent basis requires bureaucratic organization. Therefore big memoranda and conferences on peace and justice usually come from big churches. They have the means, the intellectuals, and the interest in such agendas since they see themselves as guardians of social morals, human rights, and global ethics. Moreover, through their standing vis-à-vis the state they have an impact on the public framing of such issues. Religious voluntary associations are, in turn, primarily interested in spreading their message, keeping their flock together, and growing it. They may occa-

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sionally use big issues in order to mobilize their members and mission; but their main focus is on serving the needs of their members. In contrast to churches, they also lack the special relationship to the state and address a much smaller audience, thus limiting their impact on framing the public discourse. A major difference also exists between European countries and the United States in the perception of these two types of religious organizations. Europeans in general, even if they dislike churches, tend to deeply distrust religious voluntary associations. They often regard them as superstitious, fanatical, divisive, suspicious, intolerant, and sectarian. Led by charlatans, they are suspected to control the minds of their members in mysterious ways and make them keep apart from mainstream society. Churches, in turn, are believed to represent “good religion” since they focus on ethics, do good work, and are seemingly tolerant and peaceful. They also provide for seasonal ceremonies and rites of passage, like birth and death; and above all, they do not drastically challenge the existing way of life by their religious demands. Moreover, churches in Europe are often understood as being foundations of nations, states, or even civilizations, whereas sects are seen as challengers to national unity and cultural identity. In the United States almost the exact opposite is the case. Here churches are distrusted. The Pilgrim Fathers and many others left Europe because of the persecution by churches and states. The independence of religion from the state, the non-establishment clause, the “wall of separation”, these are all deeply embedded in US-American culture. Whereas religious sects tend to scare Europeans, Americans are much more willing to accept them and protect their right to live according to their religious convictions within the limits of the law. The expectation that religion(s) should contribute to “global peace”, or should peacefully coexist with other religions without giving up their truth claims, therefore seems to carry different meanings in Europe and the United States. In the United States it is understood as a pluralistic model of denominations that focus on the religious needs of their members. In Europe it is seen as a special relationship between the state and privileged churches. Other religious associations can either adopt the church model and cooperate, or stay marginalized and under suspicion. But given the trend towards religious pluralism, voluntarism, and individualism, the European perspective on religion might be somewhat outdated, especially since our democratic constitutions do not promise to protect the state from religions, but religions from the state.

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4 The “Real” Problem: Protecting the Freedom of Religion Where does the European fear of religion come from? Obviously, one can point towards certain events in the recent past across religious traditions: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus, as well as members of various newly formed religions have engaged in acts of violence against themselves, each other, and the state. Often, such acts have been justified religiously. But does this really explain the European attitude? The religious violence of a minority needs to be contrasted with the mostly peaceful behavior of the overwhelming majority of members of the same religious traditions. At the same time all kinds of secular groups have engaged in violent acts, for example fascists, communists, anarchists, and nationalists. Neo-Nazis in Germany have attacked foreigners, and, as regards the anarchist scene in Berlin, the “autonomous”, it has become for them a sport to burn cars, smash windows, and attack the police. Anarchists and neoNazis cultivate violence; however, there is no public debate on “secularism and violence”. In other words, religious violence is regarded as a problem of religion in general, whereas secular violence is not perceived as a problem of secularism in general. Religious actors presumably engage in acts of violence when they interpret it as a divine command. This will occur most likely when religious authority is challenged, when there is competition between religious groups over space, time, privileges, material resources, and, last but not least, public recognition of their institutions and core values. Moreover, confrontations are likely when religious groups successfully appropriate and reinterpret existing conflicts between ethnic groups, social classes, or nations. This (obviously incomplete) list of mobilizing factors suggests that conflicts between religions – or peaceful coexistence between them – is less related to particular properties of religions, but is rather an effect of the relationship between religions and the state. Admittedly, the state is not the only actor that decides whether or not religions act militantly or peacefully, but the state is of central importance for the peaceful coexistence of religions. Therefore it makes sense to invert the initial question and ask: what can the state do in order to prevent conflicts between religious groups? What creates tensions between religious groups and associations is often the result of an actual or perceived unequal treatment of religious associations by the state, of groups that feel discriminated against or groups that are losing their privileges by being “disestablished”. It is especially the symbiosis of the state with a certain religion (coupled with the discrimination of others) that is one

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major source of tensions. Even the often-quoted religious wars in Europe after the Reformation were not simply conflicts between religions, but between emperors and states over the right to determine the religion of their subjects. To expect religions to peacefully coexist and create harmony around the world, is often an imperial, or at least a bureaucratic ideal. How so? Of course, most religions do claim that they promote peace and harmony, but they usually argue that this blissful state will arrive when people follow their path, for example by following the divine law, accepting Jesus as their savior, striving for enlightenment, or reciting the Lotus sutra. In other words, religions, although they might want to peacefully coexist, emphasize their truth claims and the use of religious means to achieve peace and harmony. But here religions are quite often in competition with each other and emphasize differences and boundaries in order to prevent their members from defecting to other religions. In contrast, when bureaucracies and imperial rulers ask religions to peacefully coexist and to contribute to global harmony, they usually want them to downplay their differences, specifically as regards teachings and practices, for the sake of the state. In third century B.C.E. India, King Ashoka calls for religious tolerance among different religious groups: Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, honors both ascetics and the householders of all religions, and he honors them with gifts and honors of various kinds. But Beloved-of-theGods, King Piyadasi, does not value gifts and honors as much as he values this – that there should be growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one’s own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause. And if there is cause for criticism, it should be done in a mild way. But it is better to honor other religions for this reason. By so doing, one’s own religion benefits, and so do other religions, while doing otherwise harms one’s own religion and the religions of others. Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought “Let me glorify my own religion”, only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions. (Dhammika 1993, The Fourteen Rock Edicts, No. 12)

In the third century, during the Roman Empire the “Edict of Milan” argues for tolerance: When I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, happily met at Milan and had under consideration all matters which concerned the public advantage and safety, we thought that, among all the other things that we saw would benefit the majority of men, the arrangements which above all needed to be made were those which ensured reverence for the Divinity, so that we might grant both to Christians and all men freedom to follow whatever religion each one wished, in order that whatever divinity there is in the seat of heaven

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may be appeased and made propitious towards us and towards all who have been set under our power. We thought therefore that in accordance with salutary and most correct reasoning we ought to follow the policy of regarding this opportunity as one not to be denied to anyone at all, whether he wished to give his mind to the observance of the Christians or to that religion which he felt was most fitting to himself, so that the supreme Divinity, whose religion we obey with free minds, may be able to show in all matters His accustomed favour and benevolence towards us. (Lactantius [ca. 313–315] 1984, 48,2–48,3)

Tendencies toward assimilation and synthesis are also manifest in the writings of the Ming emperor Taizu (Hongwu) in fourteenth century China, who emphasizes the compatibility of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. He writes that it “is well known that under the Heaven there is [ultimately] no duality in the Way and that the sages are essentially of one mind. They differ only on the question of personal praxis or participation in public life. In that they deliver real benefits, they are in principle all one. Let it be known to ignorant people that all three teachings are indispensable!” (quoted in: De Bary/Bloom 1999, p. 793). In other words, peaceful religious coexistence and the downplaying of truth claims is primarily a vested political interest of rulers and bureaucracies, and not of religions, unless it provides them with advantages granted by the state. Religions that are privileged by the state will, of course, use the “peace and harmony” agenda, because potential competitors can be stigmatized as disturbers of “peace and harmony”. This agenda best fits relatively highly centralized and potentially authoritarian religions, because compared to states they are similar in structure and have functionaries that can speak for their institution with authority. The bureaucratic transformation of religions often creates religious representatives that lack legitimacy within their own tradition, and it occasionally ascribes a political function to religious representatives who have no political mandate. One might also doubt the effectiveness of the “peace and harmony” agenda. A meeting between the Dalai Lama, Swami Maheswarananda, and Hans Küng does not improve peace in this world more than a meeting between mayors of sister cities. The focus on religion, peace, and violence is at times in danger of distracting us from another topic of, perhaps, greater importance. Instead of emphasizing tasks that the state ascribes to religions or church bureaucrats as appropriate, we might be more in tune with our democratic constitutions by asking what the state owes religions. Whereas the question of religion and violence often focuses on how the state and society can be protected from “bad” religion, modern democratic constitutions promise to protect religious associations and individuals from the state. Accordingly, the appropriate question might not be how to protect the state from the “threat” of religion, or how to reorganize religions so that they fit

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the bureaucratic convenience of the state, but how to actually implement and guarantee the free exercise of religion. Since we are so eager to remind other governments and societies of their shortcomings with regard to human rights and religious freedom, we should apply the same criteria towards our own societies. It is a defining principle of the modern democratic state to treat all religions equally and to protect their freedom independently of their teachings, practices, size, or organizational structure within the limits of the law. Like other Western constitutions, the German constitution (article 4, 2) guarantees the “undisturbed practice of religion”. This requires a neutral position of all state institutions vis-à-vis all religions, even the ones few people like and that therefore are labeled “cults” or “sects”. In a democratic society the central question is not how the ideal religion that produces social integration and global harmony is structured or shaped, but how the state best fulfills its obligation to guarantee the free exercise of religion. A state that defends religious freedom, treats all religions equally, and acts as a fair-minded arbiter between religions, might best provide for the conditions under which peaceful coexistence between religions and global peace are advanced.

Bibliography Asad, Talal (1993): Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berger, Peter L. (1967): The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City: Doubleday. De Bary, William Theodore/Bloom, Irene (Eds.) (1999): Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Dhammika, Ven. S. (Tr.) (1993): The Edicts of King Asoka: An English Rendering. The Wheel. Publication No. 386/387. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society. Durkheim, Émile (1995): The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1912]. Tr. by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Eliade, Mircea (1959): The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. Tr. by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996): The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lactantius (1984): De Mortibus Persecutorum [ca. 313–15]. Ed. and tr. by J. L. Creed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Edward (1968): “De veritate” [1624]. Ed. and tr. by Meyrick H. Carré (1937). In: Peter Gay (Ed.): Deism. An Anthology. Princeton: Van Nostrand, p. 29–46. Luckmann, Thomas (1967): The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan.

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Newberg, Andrew/D’Aquili, Eugene/Rause, Vince (2001): Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books. Otto, Rudolf (1958): The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational [1917]. Tr. by John W. Harvey [1923]. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramachandran, V. S./Blakeslee, Sandra (1998): Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. New York: William Morrow. Riesebrodt, Martin (2001): Die Rückkehr der Religionen. Fundamentalismus und der “Kampf der Kulturen”. München: C.H. Beck. Riesebrodt, Martin (2010): The Promise of Salvation. A Theory of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1996): On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers [1799]. Tr. by Richard Crouter. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982): Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stark, Rodney/Bainbridge, William S. (1996): A Theory of Religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst (1925): “Der Deismus” [1898]. In: Hans Baron (Ed.): Gesammelte Schriften 4. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, p. 429–487. Weber, Max (1978): Economy and Society [1904/05]. Guenther Roth/Claus Wittich (Eds.), tr. by Ephraim Fischoff et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max (2002): The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism [1904/05]. Tr., ed. and with an introduction by Peter Baehr/Gordon C. Wells. London, New York: Penguin Books. Weber, Max (1951): The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism [1920]. Tr. and ed. by Hans H. Gerth. Glencoe: Free Press. Weber, Max (1958): The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism [1920]. Tr. and ed. by Hans H. Gerth/Don Martindale. Glencoe: Free Press.

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Notes on the Contributors Schirin Amir-Moazami holds a PhD from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Since 2009, she has held the position of Assistant Professor for Islam in Europe at the Department of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She has published a book on headscarf controversies in France and Germany under the title Politisierte Religion. Der Kopftuchstreit in Deutschland und Frankreich, and has also published numerous articles on issues concerning Muslims in secular European countries. In her current research, she focuses on the processes of governmentalization of Islam in Germany. Her research interests include Islamic movements in Europe, political theory, feminist theory and the sociology of religion. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has taught at Dartmouth College, Princeton University, Yale University, Duke University and the University of Michigan. She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980), which was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award; and Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (2000), which was shortlisted for the Koret Book Award. She has written on subjects ranging from representations of the Shoah in postwar American, Israeli and European culture, to the portrayal of exile and homecoming in contemporary Jewish literature. In 2007 she became a Guggenheim Fellow for her current project entitled “Jerusalem and the Poetics of Return”. She divides her time between Jerusalem (Israel) and Wilmot (New Hampshire). Volkhard Krech studied Protestant theology, comparative religion, sociology, and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bielefeld. He currently holds the positions of Professor of Religious Studies, speaker of the Research Department Center for Religious Studies (CERES) and director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions” at Bochum University. His research interests include the theory of religion and history of religions, religious pluralization and globalization, religion and violence, and religion and the arts, as well as the history of Religious Studies. His latest book, Wo bleibt die Religion? Zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft, was published by Transcript (2011). Joachim Küpper is Professor of Romance Philology and Comparative Literature. He is the director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin. He was granted the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2001. In 2009 he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He is a member of Leopoldina/German National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Goettingen Academy of Sciences. His research focus is the theory of literature and arts, as well as intellectual history. His publications in the field include: “Teleologischer Universalismus und kommunitaristische Differenz. Überlegungen zu Calderóns La aurora en Copacabana, zu Voltaires Alzire, ou les Américains, zu Sepúlveda und zu Las Casas” (1996); “The Traditional Cosmos and the New World” (2003); “Philology and Theology in Petrarch” (2007); “Ei(aa)roneia: The Politics of Religion in the Cantar de mío Cid” (2011); “Christentum, Judentum, Islam – Säkulare Welt und Geschichtlichkeit” (2013).

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Paula Montero is Professor at the University of São Paulo/Brazil, as well as the President of the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). After completing a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of São Paulo, she was invited to Columbia University (1984) as Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Latin American Studies, and to the University of Chicago (1996) as a Tinker Visiting Professor. Since 1983, she has been researching popular religions in Brazil. Her anthropological studies have focused on Afro-American traditions, in particular healing practices, witchcraft and possession. In recent years, she has focused on issues of intercultural relations and multiculturalism; her latest work is about Christian missions among the Amazonian Indians. At present she is studying new forms of religious organizations and their activities in the modern public sphere. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad studied history, politics and sociology in India before taking a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University. Prior to joining the faculty at Lancaster University, he held research fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, and also taught at the National University of Singapore. He has written several books on comparative philosophy, including Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought (2001), Eastern Philosophy (2005) and Indian Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge (2007), as well as papers on a variety of topics, including epistemology, ethics, comparative theology, religion and politics, and intercultural relations. He has done research on religion and immigration for the British Home Office, and has also conducted other research projects, including work on religion and cultural values in the Indian IT industry. He was PI on a major research project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council on comparative philosophies of the self. In addition, he is currently involved with the Dalai Lama’s Mind Life Institute on neuroscience and the contemplative traditions, and has recently worked with the Archbishop of Canterbury on Hindu-Christian social relations and comparative theology. Martin Riesebrodt is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he held a joint appointment at the Department of Sociology and the Divinity School. He presently holds the Yves Oltramore Chair on “Religion and Politics in the Contemporary World” at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. His main academic interests are the historical and comparative sociology of religion, and classical social theory, especially the work of Max Weber. His major publications include: The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (2010); Die Rückkehr der Religionen. Fundamentalismus und der ‘Kampf der Kulturen’ (2000); Pious Passion: The Emergence of Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran (1993). Asonzeh Ukah was affiliated with the University of Bayreuth, Germany, from 2000 to 2013, when he joined the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He studied comparative religious studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1994. He obtained an MA in sociology of religion in 1997 and an M.Sc in sociology in 1999 from the same university. He obtained a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Bayreuth, Germany in 2004. He is the author of A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power (2008). His articles, which focus on African pentecostalism, and on religious advertising and popular culture, have been published internationally in English, German and Spanish. Since 2007 his research focus has been migrant religions in South Africa; he was a research member of a University of Bayreuth-based project, funded by the DFG, entitled “Tradition and Innovation: Old and New Churches in the Religious Market of South Africa” (2008–2010), which was an offshoot of an ongoing project on “The Economy of Sacred Space in Durban, South Africa” (2011).

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Index Aaron 127 Abacha, Sani 107 Abdel-Samad, Hamed 5 Abel 120–121 Abimbola, Adesoji 108 Abizadeh, Arash 57 abolition 64, 71, 85 Abraham VII, 9, 11, 116–117, 119, 123, 125, 129–131 academic, academia VI, VII, 1–2, 4, 10–12, 31, 82, 160, 180 – education 4, 65, 81–82, 144 – fora 81 accountability 15, 82, 109–110 Achebe, Chinua 91, 100–102, 109 Adebanwi, Wale 109 Adeboye, Enoch Adejare 87–88, 90, 107 Adeniji, Gbenga 104, 109 Adeniyi, Olusegun 106 administrate, administration, administrative 7, 60, 75, 91, 139 – apparatus 75 – ecclesiastical jurisdiction 75 Afghanistan 172 Afolayan, Funso 91 Africa, African 8, 61, 75–77, 80, 83–85, 87–88, 97, 171, 180 – religions 7–8, 35, 76–81, 84–85, 97, 171, 180 – rituals 75–77, 79 – slaves 75 – sorcery 77 – witchcraft 77, 180 Afro-American (cults, traditions) 7, 180 Afro-Brazilian traditions 79, 82, 83, 85 afterlife 165 Agamben, Giorgio 124, 128, 130 Agboola, Hosea Ayoola 100 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef 119, 122, 125–128 agonism 56, 140 akeda 115–117, 119–121, 123–131 Akpabio, Godswill 103 Alao-Akala, Adebayo 100 alienation, alienated 59, 72, 89, 165–166 All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) 94

Alliance for Democracy (AD) 94 Alozie, Emmanuel C. 108 Al-Qaida 1 Amaechi, Chibuike Rotimi 105 Ambedkar, Bhimrao R. 61 ambivalence, ambivalent 49, 110, 153, 179 Amichai, Yehuda 118–119, 128–131 Amir-Moazami, Schirin IX, 9–10, 72, 135–136, 145–146, 179 anarchists 174 Anglicans, Anglican 37, 39, 43 antagonism, antagonistic 79, 89, 140 anthropology of secularism 13 anti-discrimination legislation 64 anti-immigration 66 Antunes, Henrique Fernandes 77 apolitical 110, 171 Arab 9, 130 Aran, Gideon 118 Arapaja, Taofeek 100 archaic 101, 153, 162–163 Argentina 35, 42 arts, art 48–49, 58, 115, 125, 127, 162, 179–180 Asad, Talal 13, 15–16, 81–82, 143, 153, 160 assimilation, assimilationist 57, 72, 171, 176 asymmetries of power 70, 140, 149 atheism, atheist, atheistic V, 3–4, 23, 42, 78, 97 – disposition 78 – post-secular 3 Attanasi, Katherine 105 Aubrey, Edwin E. 13 authentic, authenticity 7, 30, 70, 77, 80, 162 authoritarian regimes 61 authoritative values 57 authority, authorities V, 9–10, 54–55, 59–60, 62, 83, 91, 104, 107–108, 110, 119–120, 142, 147, 154, 164, 168, 170–171, 174, 176 autonomy, autonomous 55, 57–59, 69–72, 75, 84, 174 Avidan, David 120 ayahuasca 77, 80

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Babangida, Ibrahim 91 Bahia 84–85 Bainbridge, William S. 169 Bajpai, Rochana 62 Bakalar, Nick V, 4 Balak 128 Balkin, Richard V, 4 Band, Arnold J. 125 Bangladesh 11, 35 baptism 29 Barbalet, Jack 110 Bayart, Asef 150 Beaufort Castle 120 beliefs, belief 2–5, 7–8, 15, 18, 21, 28–30, 44, 76, 78–79, 84–85, 87–88, 91–92, 97, 105, 109, 153, 161, 163 – metaphysical 87, 109, – spiritual 87, 109 Bellamy, Richard 54 belligerent 84 Bello, Kamal 101 belongingness 6, 35, 53–54, 57, 60, 63–64, 67, 70, 72, 99 Ben-Gurion, David 124 Benhabib, Seyla 136, 151–152 Berger, Peter L. 159 Berlin VII, 4, 174 Berlin Wall 4 Berlin, Isaiah 55 Berman, Morris 13 Bhargava, Rajeev 62–63, 65 Bialik, Hayim N. 119 bias 17, 137, 141 – spatial or temporal 17 Bible, biblical 8–9, 99, 115–118, 120, 123–124, 128, 130–131 – 1 Kgs (Kings) 117 – 1 Pet (Peter, Petrus) 100 – 2 Chr (Chronicles) 117–118 – 2 Sam (Samuel) 117 – Ephesians 167 – Genesis 9, 117–118, 121 – Lev (Leviticus) 127 – Luke 99 – Mark 99 – Matt (Matthew) 99 – Psalm, Psalms (Ps.) 100, 102, 105, 125

bind, binding 9, 16, 83, 85, 115, 117, 125, 144–145, 147, 153, 155 black movement 83 Blackford, Russell 110 blackmail 99, 104 Bloom, Irene 176 Böhmer, Maria 146 Boko Haram insurrection 108 Bolaji, Mohammed H. A. 92 bonds of reciprocity 78 book production 30–31, 33 boom 11, 31 Brazil, Brazilian IX, 2, 7, 11, 75–85, 180 – religiosity 78 – society 75–77, 79, 81–85 – territory 7, 75 Brazilian National Evangelical Network of Social Assistance (RENAS) 82 Britain 60–61, 91 British Empire 92 British India 61 Brooks, Stephen 54 brotherhood 85 Brown, Wendy 152 Bruce, Steve 14 Buddhism, Buddhist 6, 21, 34, 39, 60, 71, 77, 159, 161, 169–171, 174, 176 bureaucracy, bureaucratic (foundations; functions; organizations; powers) 75, 106, 109–110, 168, 172, 175–177 Bush, George W. 100 Butler, Judith 152 Cain 120–121 Campbell, John 89, 97 Canada 18, 35, 56–57, 69 Candomblé 82–85 capitalism 54, 88, 165, 168 Cardinal (of the Roman Catholic church) 84 Carmi, T. 119 Casanova, José 2, 15, 141, 153 caste 60–61, 64–65, 70–71 – Brahmin 60, 65 – group 61–65, 67, 70–72 – system 60–61, 64 catechesis 76

Index

Catholic VII, 3, 7, 10, 21, 23, 25, 35, 37–43, 45–47, 56, 75–77, 79, 82–85, 143, 171 – church 10, 21, 23, 25, 35, 38–40, 43, 45, 47, 75, 79, 82–85, 139, 143, 172 – hegemony 75, 77 Catholicism 7, 11, 35, 41–42, 75–76, 79, 81, 85 census 77 ceremonies 84–85, 173 charisma, charismatic – authority 110 – movements 35, 38–39, 43, 171 charity 77 charlatanism, charlatans 173 Cherbury, Edward, Lord Herbert of 161 Christendom 115 Christianity, Christian (churches; culture; faith; God; holy sites; iconography; imagery; officials; theology) V–VII, 4, 6, 9, 12, 21, 25, 35, 38–40, 43, 60, 75, 77–78, 87, 89, 91, 93, 97, 99–100, 117, 147, 153, 161, 169–171 church 10, 21, 23, 25, 27–32, 35, 38–40, 43, 45, 47, 75, 79, 82–85, 87–89, 92, 94, 99–100, 139, 141, 143, 160, 162, 172–173, 176, 180 – building 10, 30, 90–91, 115, 149, 168 – exits 31–32, 126 – life 29 – politics 29, 172 – Protestant 21, 23, 25, 29, 32 – Roman Catholic 10, 21, 23, 25, 47, 75, 79, 82–84, 143 citizenship 54, 57, 71, 142, 148 City of David 117 civil 6, 8, 10, 61, 70, 81–82, 88, 91, 147 – life 6 – rights 61 – society 10, 81–82, 88, 147 – war 6, 91 civilian government 92 civilize, civilizational 5–7, 60 civilization 1, 54, 76, 170, 173 clash of civilizations 1, 170 class 61, 65, 77, 85, 109, 144, 164–165, 169, 171, 174, 180

183

Cold War 3 collective 6–8, 54, 56–65, 67, 69–72, 115, 120 – identity 70–71 – rights 64, 67, 70 colonial – administration 91 – imperialism 88 colonialism, colonial 7, 60–61, 75, 87–88, 91, 109, 135 – Nigeria 87, 91, 109 – state 75 Comblin, Joseph 13 common V, 53–54, 57, 60, 68, 75, 78, 81, 84–85, 90, 109, 115, 120, 123, 125, 139, 145–146, 153, 156, 166 – body 145–146 – epistemic systems 60 – good 78, 84–85 – humanity 68 – understanding 84 communication, communicative IX, 5–6, 13, 32, 48–49, 90, 93, 95, 135–136, 138, 164, 171 communion 5, 7, 29–30, 48 communism, communists, communist 3, 41, 174 communitarian 83–84 compensate, compensation 34, 169 compliance 10, 96 comprehensible, comprehensibility 34, 148, 155 concealment 110 concept of iteration 151–152, 154 conceptions of the Good 56, 69, 138 conflicts 1–3, 6, 11, 44, 47–48, 66, 76, 78–80, 83, 91, 140, 144, 159, 168–169, 171, 174–175 – cultural 6, 47–48 – global 47–48 – local 47–48 – national 47 – regional 47–48 conformity 57–58, 64, 69, 152–153 Confucianism 176 Congress 61, 87, 94 consensus 9, 81, 120, 129, 136–138, 140, 143–148, 150–151, 153, 155

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Index

Constituent Assembly 61–62, 64 – Debates 62 constitution V, IX, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 53–54, 60–73, 79–81, 92, 96, 139, 144–146, 149–151, 155, 160, 173, 176–177 – German V, 4, 11, 68, 144–146, 149–151, 160, 177 – Indian IX, 6–7, 53–54, 60–67, 69–73 – Nigerian 92, 96 constitutional IX, 1–2, 4, 6, 9–10, 53–55, 57, 59, 61–64, 66–72, 91, 106, 136–137, 139, 141–145, 147–156, 160 – democracy 2, 54, 57, 62–63, 68–69 – discourse 59, 66 – dispensation 6, 54, 71–72 – patriotism IX, 1, 6, 9–10, 53–54, 68–70, 72, 139, 153–156 – philosophy 59 – provision 59, 64, 67, 70–72, 106 – vision 72–73 contingency, contingent 12, 14, 17, 48, 49 convictions V–VI, 2, 17–18, 21, 25, 28–29, 142–143, 173 Corb, Aliza 123 corrupt, corruption 101–103, 106–107, 109–110 cosmic significance 164 cosmopolitanism 53 cosmos 161–162, 179 Cox, Jeffrey 14 creation 115, 118, 144 creed, creeds V, 76–78, 80 Cronin, Ciaran 69 Crowder, George 54 crusade 79, 115 cuisine 56, 58 cult, cults, cultic 7, 77, 82–85, 177 culture, cultural VI–VII, 1, 3–7, 10–12, 14, 17, 21, 47–48, 53–62, 65, 67, 69–72, 75, 79–85, 88, 97, 110, 120, 129–130, 135–136, 139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 152, 162, 167, 169–171, 173, 179–180 – activity 72 – and educational rights 65 – conditioned 57, 59 – conventions 79 – diversity 56, 58–60, 70

– dynamics of identity 67 – identity 48, 58, 69, 173 – factors 169 – formulation 63 – freedom 58 – hegemonic 58 – hegemony 53 – history 54, 56, 69 – identity 48, 58–59, 69, 173 – inclinations 70 – influences 59 – minorities 58, 139 – norms 58, 72 – roots 56 – space 53 D’Aquili, Eugene 163 Dalai Lama 176, 180 Daoism 176 Darwin, Charles 3 David 117–118 Davie, Grace 26, 32 Dawkins, Richard 3 De Bary, William Theodore 176 De Koven Ezrahi, Sidra IX, 8, 115, 179 De Maizière, Thomas 5 De Mooij, Marieke 95, 102 dechristianization(-isation) 14 deinstitutionalization 14, 26 deism 161 deity 91 deliberate, deliberation, deliberative 62, 68, 70, 81, 136, 139–140, 144, 147–148, 165 democracy (federal; parliamentary), democratic (campaigns and debates; liberalism; participation) 57–58, 61, 72, 81 democratization process 81 demographic situation 66 demythification 165 Dennett, Daniel C. 3 dependency 3, 15 depersonalized 165 Derrida, Jacques 151 de-territorialization 16 Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK)/ German Islam Conference 5, 9–10, 136–137, 144–150, 152, 154–156

Index

devil 79, 104 devotional poetry 60 Dhammika, Ven. S. 175 dialectic, dialectical 8, 55–57, 125 dialects 60 dialogue, dialoguing VI–VII, IX, 1, 5, 9–10, 135–138, 140–142, 144–145, 147–149, 152, 154–156, 169, 172 diaspora 89, 99 diasporic practice 118 dictatorial regime 85 dictatorship 3, 81, 91–92 discrimination, discriminatory 4, 61, 64–65, 71, 174 dissent 7, 62, 136 diverse, diversity 21–22, 25, 34, 56, 58–60, 62, 70, 76–78, 136, 138–140, 143, 154, 166–170 – deep diversity 56 – of creeds 76 – of views 60 divinity, divine 10, 15, 87–88, 92, 97, 100–101, 104–106, 109, 118, 161, 164, 174–176, 180 division of labor 164 doctrine, doctrinal 13–14, 76–78, 80–81, 143, 160, 170–171, 175 dogma, dogmatic 2, 142, 162 Dome of the Rock 127 duality, dualistic 33, 176 Durkheim, Émile 165–167 dynamics 67, 80, 84, 179 East India Company 60 Eastern Europe 47 Eckert, Julia 47 eclectic 83 economic 11–12, 16, 34, 48, 62, 71, 88, 94, 97, 106–109, 135, 164–166, 168 – background 16 – life 166 – relations 165 – superstructure of capitalism 88 – well being 106 Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) 107 economy 81, 93, 180 ecstatic 76, 162, 166–167

185

– dances 76 – group experience 166 – possession 162 Eder, Klaus 14 Edict of Milan 175 education 2–3, 65, 81–82, 88, 106, 144 – religious 3, 144 educational institutions 65 egalitarian 140, 147, 164 Egbo, Obiamaka 102 egotism 166 Egypt 3, 5, 35, 37, 45–46 Eisen, Arnold M. 118 El Rufai, Nasir 109 electoral 61, 88, 90–91, 94 – politics 90 – system 91 Eliade, Mircea 162 Ellis, Stephen 88 emancipation 10, 15 emotional 17, 54, 59, 140, 145, 147, 153, 164 – aspects 17 – bonds 54 Emperor Taizu 176 empower, empowerment 80, 125 enlightenment, enlightening V, VII, 1, 55, 60, 96, 143, 161, 172, 175 Epiphanes, Antiochus 7 equal, equality 53, 55, 63–66, 81, 83, 121, 138, 143, 146–147, 149–151, 154, 177 escapism 165 Eshel, Amir 118, 128 esoteric 5, 32, 77 ethical, ethics 10, 17, 69, 78, 81, 115, 127, 136–140, 142, 144–148, 151–152, 154–155, 160, 162, 164, 168, 171–173, 180 – cultural values 69 – life-orientations 142 – pre-judgment 148 – significance 69, 82 ethnicity, ethnic 21, 47, 56–57, 60, 62, 80, 87, 96, 139, 163, 174 ethnocentricity 68 ethnographic 76, 78 ethnoreligion, ethnoreligionists 37–39, 43

186

Index

Europe, European VI–VII, 1–2, 4, 7, 11, 15, 17, 47, 54–60, 66, 72, 76, 79, 124, 135, 143, 148, 160, 172–175, 179 – conceptions of nation 57, 60 – experience 54–56 – liberalism 53–59, 72 – Muslim societies 4 – Protestant workers 79 evangelical 7, 38–39, 43, 82 – movements 82 – participation 82 evolutionary biology 4 exile, exilian 8, 115, 117–118, 126, 179 extermination 8 extremism 136 Facebook 99 factors 5, 16, 31, 34, 45–47, 101, 125, 169, 174 – ecological 34 – exogenous 5, 34 – geopolitical 47 – religious 31, 34, 45, 46 – social 31, 174 faith, faithful VI, 2–3, 5–6, 17, 30, 35, 54, 75, 78, 85, 92, 97, 116, 123, 141, 148, 152, 155 fanatical 173 fascists, fascist 124, 174 Federal Constitutional Court 152 federal government 89, 93 Feldman, Yael S. 120 Feuerbach, Ludwig 164 First Lebanese War 129 First Temple 117 fiscal policies 94 Fossum, John Erik 69–70 France 2, 56, 61, 76, 151, 179 freedom (free thought and action) V–VII, IX, 1–4, 6, 48, 53–55, 57–59, 63–67, 69–72, 79–81, 83, 92, 141, 150–154, 156, 160, 164, 174–175, 177 – movement 6, 63–64, 78, 179 – of assembly 63 – of religious practice 83, 87, 135, 150, 153 – of speech 63 Freud, Sigmund 164–165, 169

Freudian 165 Friday, Kevin S. 89 fundamental rights (German Constitution) V, 6, 11, 63–65, 67, 160, 177 fundamental truth 161, 163 fundamentalism 4–5, 33–35, 48, 142, 180 – political 5, 33, 35, 48 – religious 5, 33–34, 142 Gadzekpo, Audrey 88 Galilee 7 Galut 117 Gandhi, Mahatma 61 gas chambers 68 Geertz, Clifford 17 gender 16, 64, 70, 136, 146, 150, 171 genealogy 13, 16, 55, 125, 153 general elections 87, 89, 94, 97, 105 general welfare 78 geopolitics 3, 115 German Security Service 150 German, Germany V–VI, IX, 1–2, 4–5, 9, 11, 14, 21, 23–26, 28–33, 47–48, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 68–69, 135–157, 160, 172, 177, 179–180 – East Germany, German Democratic Republic 23–24, 28–30 – West Germany, Federal Republic of Germany, West Germans VI, 24–25, 28–30, 68 Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung 32 Gilboa, Amir 119 Girard, René 124, 130 global VII, 3, 7–8, 10, 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 47–48, 56, 72, 159, 161–163, 165, 171–173, 175, 177 globalization (conceptual) 2, 16, 179 God (creator-God; Godhead; God’s oracle; God’s will) 78, 88, 103–105, 161, 165 govern, governance, government, governor V, IX, 4, 7, 9–10, 37–38, 40–41, 43–47, 71–72, 80–82, 84, 87–96, 101–109, 119, 135–136, 149, 177 governmentality 60, 67 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm 14 Gray, John 58 Greece 61

Index

Greenberg, Uri Zvi 119, 122–127, 130 Grossman, David 120 Gurevitch, Zali 118 Guri, Haim 119 Gutmann, Amy 136 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 9, 14, 68–70, 93, 136–144, 146–148, 150–154 Habermasian 68–69, 71 habitus 82, 167–168 Hagar 131 hajj 93 Ha-makom 118 Hanciles, Jehu J. 90 handmaid IX, 8, 87, 91, 110 Haram al Sherif 127 harmonization, harmony 2, 10, 100, 122, 126, 144, 175–177 Harnik, Raya 120 Harris, Sam 3 Harrison, Milmon F. 105 headscarf (controversy) 2, 179 health 76, 81–82, 99, 106 heaven 99, 106, 116, 118, 161, 175–176 Hebrew (Bible; literature; memory) 115–117, 120, 123, 126 Heelas, Paul 14 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 164 hegemony, hegemonic 9, 53, 56, 58–59, 75, 77, 79, 84, 136, 140 Henkel, Heiko 135, 150, 153 Henneberg, Stephen C. M. 95 Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index 21 Hero, Markus 47 heterodoxy 166, 170–171 heteropraxis 171 Hever, Hannan 124 hierophany 162 High Holidays 123 Hinduism, Hindu (nationalism; religions) 6, 21, 47, 65–67, 159, 170 historical VI, 7, 14, 16, 53–57, 59, 61, 63, 75–80, 84–85, 119–120, 122, 166–167, 180 – code 77 – constructions 78 – developments 14, 75

187

– memory 53 – process 7, 75–76 historical-hermeneutic 143 Hitchens, Christopher 3 Hock, Klaus 97 holistic 1, 33, 63 Holocaust 117, 179 Hölscher, Lucian 15, 29 Holtz-Bacha, Christina 95 Holy Book 11 Holy City 126 Holy Ghost Congress 87 Holy Land 125, 128 Holy of Holies 126–127 holy scriptures 162 holy shrine 125, 127 homogeneity, homogenize, homogenous 61, 67, 70, 170 Huber, Stefan 34 human VII, 2, 9, 11–12, 18, 48, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63, 78, 81–82, 96, 110, 119, 121, 128–130, 145, 161–166, 170, 172, 177 – capability 162 – consciousness 164 – existence 164–165 – individual 55 – resources 82 – rights 2, 12, 48, 81, 172, 177 Human Development Index (HDI) 18, 34 humanities 2–4, 79, 179–180 Huntington, Samuel P. 1, 170 iconographic, iconography 60, 99, 117, 128 identity (politics) 57, 67 ideological, ideology 13, 15, 60, 80–81, 91, 94, 110, 136–143, 153–155, 165 idolatrous 127 Ihonvbere, Julius O. 92 ijtihad 5 Imam 144, 149 immanence, immanent 17, 48, 167 immigration, immigrant, immigrants (see also migrant) 1, 53, 56–57, 59, 71–72, 77, 79, 180 immorality 79

188

Index

imperial 7, 60, 75, 79, 175 – regime 7, 75, 79 – strategy 60 impoverish, impoverishment 7, 91 inclusivity 4, 10, 68, 119, 135, 139, 144, 155 independence 11, 60, 91, 109, 124–125, 173 independent 21, 30, 35, 37–40, 42–43, 45, 61, 88, 94, 121, 164 – Christian churches 21, 35, 38 – Christians 37, 39–40, 42–43, 45 – movements 35 Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) 94 India, Indian IX, 6–7, 11, 21, 35, 47, 53–54, 59–67, 69–73, 75, 77, 80, 159, 175, 180 – Constitution IX, 6–7, 53–54, 60–73 – intellectuals 60 – National Congress 61 – State 62, 67 indigenous (people, religions) 35, 80, 88, 97 individuality, individualization, individual (autonomy; choice; liberty) 3, 6, 26, 54–56, 59, 62–63, 65, 67, 69–71, 101, 163, 169 inequality 62–64, 70, 104, 135 Inglehart, Ronald 27 institutionalization 38, 140, 149, 168 integration 1, 4, 9–10, 69, 88, 135–136, 139, 145–146, 177 intermediary (institutions and organizations) 18 International Society for Krishna Consciousness 97 interpersonal relation 165 interreligious (dialogue, interactions) 1, 78, 169, 172 intolerant 173 Iranian revolution 159 Iraq, Iraqis 5, 35, 37, 46–47 Ireland 18, 35, 56 Isaac 9, 115–119, 125–129, 131 Isenberg, Wolfgang 13 Ishmael 131 Islam, Islamic (country, countries; Islamic Organisation Milli Görüs; ritual slaughter; scholars; sexual norms; theological teaching in state universities;

theology) VI–VII, 1, 4–6, 21, 25, 47, 56, 59–60, 66, 91–93, 97, 143–144, 146, 149, 152, 156, 161, 169–171, 179 Islamophobia, Islamophobic 10, 66, 136 Israel, Israeli 2, 7–9, 93, 118–120, 123–124, 126, 129–131, 159, 179 Israelites 100 Italy 18, 61 Jacobsohn, Gary Jeffrey 65 Jaeschke, Walter 14 Jain 60, 71 Jebusites 117 Jerusalem 93, 115, 117, 119, 122–126, 179 Jesus 175 Jew, Jewish (dispersion and persecution; martyrdom; race; sovereignty) 9, 37, 39, 42, 77, 115–120, 126–127, 174 Jhally, Sut 95 Jihad, 91 Jonathan, Goodluck E. 87–90, 99–100, 102–103, 107 Jordanian 118 Judaism, see also Jew VII, 9, 12, 21, 169–171 Judeo-Christian 82, 99–100 juridical 57, 80, 135 – preservation 80 – requirements 57 justice 61–62, 66, 70, 78, 137–139, 146, 172 justification, justify 137, 151, 154, 174 Kadishman, Menashe 125, 130 Kaduna 89, 106 Kaid, Lynda Lee 95 Kaiserreich 21, 23 Kalu, Ogbu U. 87, 108 Kant, Immanuel 161 Kardec, Allan 77 Kartun-Blum, Ruth 120, 125 Käßmann, Margot 172 Kekes, John 54 Kenny, Joseph 91–93 Keskin, Gülüzar 150 Kiddush 118 Kierkegaard, Søren 116 King Ashoka 175 King Piyadasi 175 Kishinev Pogrom 119

Index

Knesset 124 knowledge 2, 4, 13–14, 17, 82, 95, 124, 126, 164, 180 Koran (Quran; Quran; Qur’an) VII, 143, 146 Krech, Volkhard IX, 5–6, 13, 47, 179 Krüggeler, Michael 26 Küng, Hans 176 Küpper, Joachim IX, 79, 179 Kuran, Timur 110 Kuschel, Karl-Josef VII Kymlicka, Will 58, 71 Lactantius 176 Laeyendecker, Leo 14 Lamdan, Yitzhak 119 language 56, 60, 62, 75, 80, 117, 124, 126, 137–138, 140, 142, 148, 155, 169, 171 Latin America 87, 171, 180 Lavi, Shai 152 law V–VI, 11, 47, 63, 65–66, 76, 82, 92–93, 102, 108, 138–139, 148, 151, 153–154, 160–161, 164, 173, 175, 177 law-abidingness 150 laws of nature 161 Lebanon 120 legal norms 139, 151 Legislative Assembly 82 legitimacy, legitimate, legitimation 10, 68, 78, 87, 90–91, 106, 153, 160, 165, 161, 176 Lehmann, Hartmut 14 Levin, Hanokh 120 Levites 125 liberalism (political), liberal (autonomy; democracy; elites; framework; individualism; individuality; limitation; secular; values) IX, 6, 9–10, 53–54, 56–59, 63–64, 69–72, 81, 92, 108, 135–137, 152, 154 liberty 6, 54–55, 57, 63, 65–67, 70–71 Licinius, Augustus 175 life-worldly 140 literature 2, 31–33, 54–55, 79, 116, 118, 120, 123, 126, 130, 161, 167, 179 – non-academic 31 – on secularization 31 – popular 33 liturgical system 76

189

local 6, 8–9, 35, 47–48, 75, 78, 82–83, 85, 99, 106, 110, 171 – loyalties 68 – perceptions 78, 83 Lotus sutra 175 loyal, loyalty 53–54, 61, 68–72, 78, 85, 95, 139, 145–146, 150, 152 Lübbe, Hermann 14 Luckmann, Thomas 14, 26, 159, 166–167 Lugard, Frederick Lord 91–92, 104 Luhmann, Niklas 17 Lynch, Jake 103 Maghrebi 56 magic, magical 66, 76–77, 83 – cures 76 – forces 76 – perspective 77 Maheswarananda, Swami 176 majority, majorities 7, 37, 40, 42–45, 61, 66–67, 77, 89, 108, 149, 174–175 Makiya, Kenan 118 makom 118 mandate period 126 manifestoes, manifesto 94 marginalization (-isation), marginalized (-ised) 7, 15, 61–62, 149, 162, 173 Martin, Craig 92, 110 Martin, David 14 martyrdom, martyr 9, 117, 120, 130 Marx, Karl 8, 164–166 Marxist ideals 54 mass media instruments, medium, media 82, 89, 95–96, 99, 102 materiality, materialism, materialistic 17, 77, 162 McGoldrick, Annabel 103 McLeod, Hugh 14 Mecca 93 media (marketplace) 89 mediumistic religion 77 messianic age 115 metaphysical, metaphysics 60, 87, 103, 109, 161–162, 164 Micklethwait, John 90 Micksch, Jürgen VII Middle ages 125

190

Index

Middle East 87 Midrashim, midrashic 115, 130–131 midwife IX, 8, 87, 110 migrant, migration 6, 47, 135 Migrationsreport 2010 135 Milan 175 militant 170 military 60, 91–92, 102, 172 – dictatorship 91–92 – usurpers 91 Minkenberg, Michael 27 minority 7, 10, 58, 61, 63, 65–67, 70, 80–82, 135, 139–140, 163, 174 – religions 65 Miron, Dan 124 miscegenation 80 mission, missionaries 30, 82, 87, 169, 173, 180 modernity, modernization (-isation), modern V–VII, 1, 4–7, 13, 15–16, 18, 30, 48–49, 56, 59–61, 76, 79, 81, 91, 116, 119–120, 123, 125–126, 135, 142, 159–162, 165–166, 176–177, 179–180 – modernizing societies 18 – nationalism 61 – society VI, 4,13, 18, 30, 48, 142, 160–161, 166 monarchical 76, 78 – period 25, 60, 76, 81–82, 89, 91–92, 126, 171 – regime 7, 61, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 85, 91, 105–106 monotheism, monotheistic (traditions) 116 Montero, Paula IX, 7, 16, 75, 84, 180 moral, morality VI, 10, 15, 56, 59, 63, 66–67, 76–77, 83, 87, 108, 119, 127–128, 138, 146, 154, 161–162, 166, 172 morality, moral – duty 66 – sense 56 – standards 87 Morgan, David 106 Morocco 91 Moses 3, 116 Mouffe, Chantal 140 Mount Moriah 117, 122, 125, 127, 130–131 Mount of Olives 125

Muhammad 118 Müller, Jan-Werner 68 multiculturalism, multicultural (policy; practice; theory) 7, 53, 56–59, 63, 67, 70–71, 80, 141, 180 multi-party democracy 95 multiple values 55 multi-religious society 89, 108 music 56, 58 Muslim IX, 4–5, 8–11, 21, 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 47, 57–58, 60–61, 66, 77, 79, 89, 91–93, 96–97, 100, 118, 127, 135–137, 143–153, 156, 174, 179 – communities 9, 57, 143 – League 61 mystic, mysticism, mystical (contemplation) 162–164 nation, nation state IX, 6–8, 16, 21, 40–41, 44, 47–48, 53–57, 60, 62, 67–69, 71–72, 75, 79–81, 90–92, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 139, 173–174 national VI, 6, 16, 35–47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 68–69, 79–83, 85, 88–89, 93–94, 100, 106–107, 109, 119, 170–171, 173, 179–180 – education system 81 – identity 35–49,61, 69, 80, 85 – Indian civilization 54 – pride 35, 46, 68 – public policies 81 – self-perception 93 – self-representation 93 – society 59, 63 – specificities 35 – syncretic identity 85 – unity 173 nationalism, nationalistic, nationalists 6, 47, 57, 61–62, 66, 68, 72, 159, 163, 174 nationhood 67, 139, 153 native tribes 56 natural rights 84 Nehru, Jawaharlal 61 Neo-Nazis 174 neo-patrimonialism 108 neo-Pentecostal 77, 79, 83

Index

neoreligionists 39 neurologists, neurological 163–164 neutral, neutrality V, 6, 65, 69–70,137–139, 141–143, 154–155, 177 neutralization, neutralize 9–11, 136, 140, 147 Newberg, Andrew 163–164 Nguvugher, Chentu Dauda 93 Nigeria IX, 5, 8, 35, 43–44, 87–97, 99–100, 102–110, 180 – colonial / post-colonial 87–88, 91, 109 – northern 89, 91, 106–107 – southern 89, 100, 107 Nigerian-Biafran conflict 91 Nipperdey, Thomas 32 Nmehielle, Vincent O. 92 Nobel laureate 126 nonreligiousness, non-religious 6, 9, 34, 39–40, 42, 48, 76, 162 normalcy 147 normalization 136 normativity, normative (political account; political theory; theory) IX, 6, 10, 53, 57, 62–63 norms 5, 12, 55, 58, 63, 68, 72, 85, 92, 96, 119, 138–139, 143, 146–156, 166 North America 55, 87 North Rhine-Westphalia 47 Northern Ireland 56 Nussbaum, Martha C. 63 Nwakoby, Ifeoma 102 O’Barr, William M. 95 O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas J. 95 Obadare, Ebenezer 88, 109 Obama, Barack 100 Obasanjo, Olusegun 87, 92, 106 Ochonu, Moses 109 olah 116–117 Olarinmoye, Omobolaji Ololade 101 Omede, Adedoyin J. 102 Omer, Mordechai 125 Omoh, Gabriel 93 Onoja, Adoyi 105 Onumah, Chido 107 Onuoha, Freedom C. 108 Onwumere, Josaphat 102 opposition 67, 93–94, 102, 106, 161, 166

191

oral narratives 62 order 6, 11, 13, 16, 18, 35, 48, 59, 63–65, 76–85, 90–91, 96, 102, 104, 107, 110, 135–138, 144, 148–151, 154, 160, 163, 165–166, 171, 173–175 organized religion 10, 29, 32, 162, 172 origins 8, 12–13, 56, 106, 152, 163, 168 Oronsaye, Stanley 93 orthodoxy, orthodox (churches; oriental) 9, 39, 40, 45, 49, 162, 166, 170–171 orthopraxis, orthopractic 49, 171 Osae-Brown, Funke 93 Oshiomole, Adams 94 otherworldly 90 Otto, Rudolf 162 pagan 130, 171 Pagis, Dan 120–121 Pakistan 11, 35, 61 Palestine 47 paradox 58, 89 Parekh, Bhikhu 53, 58, 71, 152–153 parliament, parliamentary 47, 61, 82, 89, 106 Parsis, Parsi 65 participate, participation 26, 29–30, 70, 81–82, 87, 138–139, 143, 146, 151, 156, 176 particularistic (rights; value consensus) 150 Pasha 127 patriarchal authority 83 patriot, patriotism IX, 1, 6, 9–10, 53–54, 68–70, 72, 139, 150, 153–156 patronage system 93, 108 peace, peaceful (coexistence; conviviality) VI–VII, 2, 8, 10, 79, 85, 122, 135, 159, 161–163, 165, 169, 171–177 peacemaking 164, 169 Pearson, Karl 18 Peel, John D. Y. 88 Pentecostal (leader; market; charismatic movements) 35, 38, 88, 94 Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) 87, 92–94, 102 Peter, Frank 136 Pickel, Gert 26 Pilgrim Fathers 173 pilgrim, pilgrimage 93, 127, 173

192

Index

pluralism, plurality, pluralization (-isation), pluralize (-ise), pluralizing (-ising) (societies; trends), plural (belonging; senses of belonging) VI, IX, 1–2, 6–7, 9, 11, 53–63, 65–72, 75–76, 94, 135–137, 139–141, 144, 153, 159–160, 166, 173, 179 poetry 9, 60, 118, 120, 122, 124 Poland, Poles 5, 18, 35, 40–42, 81, 125 policies 38, 56, 59, 71, 76, 80–81, 90–92, 94, 96, 106–107, 109 politics, political V, IX, 2, 4–8, 10–14, 29, 33–49, 53–55, 57–62, 65–73, 75–76, 78–85, 87–97, 100–110, 115, 118–119, 121, 124–126, 128, 135–142, 144–146, 148–149, 156, 159–160, 166, 169, 171–172, 176, 179–180 – activity 59 – advertising IX, 8, 87–90, 93, 95–96, 102–104, 108–110 – agenda 140 – boundaries 60 – communication 90, 93 – competition 95 – debates 138 – discourse 8, 90, 110, 136, 139 – doctrine 13, 80–81 – engagement 59 – freedom 70 – ideologies 91, 94 – implications IX, 10, 47, 159–178 – integration 69, 139 – Islam 144, 149 – language 75 – life 54, 59, 67, 69–72 – mainstream 53 – market 88, 93–95 – mobilization (-isation) 90 – negotiation 6–7, 59, 80 – opponents 104, 107 – organisation 61 – parties 93–95, 109 – perspective 57 – philosophy 53, 62, 108, 137 – principles 68 – profile 119 – redeemer 87 – resources 73

– responsibility 81, 100 – solution 47 – sphere 35, 58, 71, 82 – system 37, 73, 76, 108 Pollack, Detlef 14, 26 Pope John Paul II V, VII, 4 popular 1, 3, 5, 31, 33, 48, 75–77, 79–80, 83, 85, 88, 91, 100, 104, 107, 109, 161, 169, 180 – Catholicism 85 – cosmology 77 – magical practices 76 – practices 76, 79 Port Harcourt 105 Portugal, Portuguese (colony) 61, 75 Possamai, Adam 110 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 131 post-biblical 115, 117, 120, 123, 128 post-capitalist 54 post-colonial 87, 109 – Africa 87 – Nigeria 87, 109 post-democratic 140 post-enlightenment 1 post-Islamist 150 post-national, post-nationalist 54, 69 post-political 140 post-war Germany 69 post-war migration 135 power (techniques) 140, 143, 147, 152, 154, 156 pre-colonial 60, 91 pre-Islamic traditions 60 priesthood 3 private existence 67 private property 164 privatization (-isation) 8, 15, 59, 141, 153 privileges 66–67, 75–76, 101, 165, 174 – social and political 76 profane 48, 49, 166 profit 77, 165 progress 4, 8, 15, 102 propaganda 88, 103 protect, protection, protective V–VI, 2, 8, 11, 61, 63, 65–67, 69, 80–81, 84, 91, 99, 110, 125–126, 128, 137, 141, 153, 160, 173–174, 176–177

Index

– of life and personal liberty 63 Protestantism, Protestant VII, 7, 21, 23, 25, 29–30, 32, 37–40, 42–43, 45, 47, 56, 76–77, 79, 82, 168, 172, 179 public VI–VII, IX, 7, 9–10, 16, 30, 35, 56, 58–59, 63–65, 71, 75–78, 80–84, 89–92, 95, 97, 101–103, 105–110, 126, 136–142, 146, 150, 153, 156, 159, 161, 172–176, 180 – agonism 56 – assistance 81–82 – debate 56, 81, 174 – funding 71 – infrastructure 106 – loyalty 95 – opinion 82, 110 – safety 106 – sphere IX, 7, 30, 75–86, 139, 156, 180 – trust 95 Quebecois 56 Quilombola 80 Quran (Qur’an, Qur’an), see also Koran VII, 143 race 56, 64, 80, 83, 116 racial 80, 83 – political struggle 83 – whitening 80 radical democracy 53 radicalization 1, 3 Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. 163–164 Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi IX, 6, 53, 180 Ranger, Terence O. 88 rationality, rationalization (-isation), rational (choice theory; deliberation; modernists) 4, 15, 54, 61, 68, 135, 148, 168–169 Rause, Vince 163 Rawls, John 141 re-christianisation 14 Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) 87, 90 redeem, redemption 87–88, 90, 115, 122, 124, 126, 128 reenchantment 13 reformation 143, 175 religion V–VII, IX, 1–11, 13–18, 20–22, 25–38, 40–41, 43, 44, 47–49, 53, 56, 59–60,

193

62–66, 70, 75–85, 87–93, 95–97, 102, 104, 108–110, 135, 140–143, 145, 148, 159–177, 179–180 – decline of religion 5, 16–18, 48 – diffusion of religion 14 – invisible religion 26 – vagrant 32 – vicarious 32 Religion Monitor 34, 97 religious pluralistic context 141 religiosity 3–5, 8, 18–21, 25–26, 28–30, 35, 37–49, 78, 97, 108, 110, 150, 152–153 – diffuse 49 – emphatic 17, 49 – general (religiosity) 28, 35, 37–48 – mass (religiosity) 30 – personal V–VI, 21, 26, 28, 30, 49, 63, 77, 83, 96, 100, 107–108, 110, 146, 167–168, 176 religious 21 – communication IX, 5–6, 13–52 – conflicts 76, 78–80 – creed 78 – differences 6, 75–76, 78–80 – diversity 21–22, 25, 34, 78, 166 – doctrines 80 – elements 33, 35, 47–48 – embodiments 151 – field 30, 35, 75–78, 83–84, 89 – freedom V–VI, 3, 79, 83, 150–154, 177 – fundamentalism 5, 33–35, 142 – interactions 1, 30, 78 – intolerance 83 – minority 80–82, 135, 140 – motifs 89, 96, 109 – movements 39, 78–79, 140–141 – paradigm 79 – persecution 84 – phenomena 79 – pluralism IX, 7, 9, 76, 136, 166, 173 – reformers 61 – revival 32, 141 – science 77 – skills 81 – socialization 28 – stereotypes 108 – studies VI, 2, 9, 14, 179–180

194

Index

– system 76–78 – tensions 61 – traditions 11–12, 16, 21, 169–171, 174 – transformation 89 – worldviews 135 repression 76 restoration 91 Riesebrodt, Martin IX, 9–10, 17, 159, 170, 180 rights V, 2, 5–7, 10–12, 47–48, 56–57, 61, 63–65, 67, 69–71, 79–81, 84, 92, 108, 124, 137, 149–151, 153–154, 159, 172–173, 175, 177 Rio de Janeiro 77, 82 ritual (counter-cultural; performances; representative), ritualistic (rites of passage) 7, 30, 62, 91, 173 Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholics 21, 23, 25, 35, 37–43, 45–46, 84 Roman Empire 175 romanticism, romantic 139, 162–163, 168 Romero Jacob, Cesar 77 Rubner, Tuvya 119 Ruh, Ulrich 14 Sabbath 118 sacralization, sacralized IX, 5–6, 13, 48–49, 124, 126, 165–166 – immanent 48 – re- 13 sacred (forces; magic strength) 78, 83 sacrifice, sacrificial (space) IX, 8–9, 115–118, 120–121, 123–125, 128–130 Salvador de Bahia 84–85 salvation 10, 167–169, 180 sanctification 121 Sanneh, Lamin 92 Sanskrit 60 Santo Daime 77 Sara (Sarah) 131 Satan 104 Schäuble, Wolfgang 136, 144–145 Schavan, Annette V, VII, IX, 2, 4–5 Scheliga, Eva L. 82 Schiffauer, Werner 135, 144, 150, 152 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 26, 162 Schröder, Richard 3 Second Temple 117

Second World War 31, 116, 124 sectarian, sects 6, 12, 60, 173, 177 secularism, secularization, secularity, secularized (Christianity), secular (democracy; fundamentalism; humanism; prejudice; state) 1, 3–9, 13–18, 26, 30–32, 48–49, 65, 70, 78–79, 81–83, 92, 97, 137, 141, 143–144, 147–148, 154, 161, 174 security votes 102 self V–VI, IX, 4–6, 13, 26, 47–49, 55, 57–63, 67, 71, 91, 93–94, 99, 120, 139, 165–167, 169, 180 – assessment 26 – centeredness 166 – conception V–VI, 57, 59, 67 – contained 55 – definitions 169 – determination V, 61 – expression 58–59, 63, 67 – government 71 – referential religious communication IX, 5–6, 13, 48–49 – reflecting 139 – representation 55, 94 selfhood 55, 62 September 11, 2001 40 sexuality, sexual (morality; politics) 146, 154, 156 shamanism, shaman 77, 164 Shariah, Shari’a, Sharia’ 92–93, 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1 Shi’ite 37, 45–47 shoah 119–120, 179 shofars 129 Sikhism, Sikh 6, 60–61, 66, 71, 174 Silverman, Adam L. 89 Silverstein, Leni M. 84 sin 82–83, 161 Singapore 18, 180 slavery 85 Smith, Jonathan Z. 160 social 2, 5–6, 10, 13–17, 21, 29–31, 47–49, 53, 60–62, 64–65, 71, 76, 80, 82–85, 87, 89, 93–94, 96–97, 109–110, 121, 124, 135–136, 139, 146, 161–162, 164–172, 174, 177, 179–180 – allegiance 83

Index

– consciousness 164 – constructions 14 – development 164–165 – discipline 162 – history 16 – identity 17, 21, 49, 170 – infrastructure 93 – interrelations 80 – morals 172 – movements 80 – network 83–84 – power 93 – practice, practices 16, 62 – problems 82 – realities, reality 136, 139 – responsibility 82 – sciences 14, 30, 169 – solidarity 53 – status 60, 64 – welfare 10, 65 socialism 23 sociology, sociological 2, 5, 26, 29, 141, 167–169, 179–180 solidarity 53, 66–67, 69, 72, 84, 170–171 Solomon 115, 117 South Africa 35, 180 South America 75, 77 sovereign nation 92 Soyinka, Wole 104, 109 Spain 61 Spiegel, Shalom 117 spiritism, spiritists 77, 83 spiritual and temporal powers 88 Sri Lanka 159 Stark, Rodney 169 state (centered perspective; controlled integration; neutrality; religion; structure) 8, 65, 75, 100, 107, 136, 160 statistics, statistical 5, 16, 23, 25, 29–32, 37, 39 stereotypes 8, 108 Strenski, Ivan 110 Sturdy, Rod 135, 138, 141–142, 145 Suberu, Rotimi T. 92 Sunni 37, 43, 45–47 superhuman powers 170 Supreme Court 5, 92

195

swastika 120 Switzerland 61 symbols, symbolic 7, 9, 58–59, 66, 80, 84–85, 102, 121, 144, 166, 169–170 – level 84 – presence 59 – value 58, 66 synchronic 16–17 syncretic, syncretism 7, 11, 60, 77, 80, 85, 170 Taliban 172 Talisse, Robert B. 54 Talmud 115 Tanzania 35 Taylor, Charles 17, 56, 58, 70, 139, 141 Tehila 126 Temple Mount 115, 118, 123–127 Temple of Solomon 115 Temple rites 118 Ter Haar, Gerrie 88 The Five Books of Moses 116 theistic 5, 29 theological, theology VI–VII, 1–2, 4, 9, 26, 29–30, 54, 78, 100, 107, 116–117, 123, 149, 170–171 theoretical 1–2, 6–7, 17, 26, 78, 136, 155 Third Reich (Drittes Reich) 23 Third Temple 115 tolerance V–VII, 4, 7, 11, 159, 173, 175 Torah 116, 131 totalitarianism 3–4 tradition, traditional (tribes) VI, 7–9, 11–12, 16, 21, 55–56, 60, 64, 66, 68–69, 77, 79–80, 82, 84–85, 100, 115–116, 124–125, 143, 148, 153, 163, 168–171, 174, 176, 179–180 transcendence, transcendent (gods) 17, 48, 76, 166–167 Troeltsch, Ernst 32, 161 Turkey 35 Turkish Gastarbeiter 56 Turner, Bryan S. 110 Twitter 99 Uche, Chibuike 102 Ücüncü, Oguz 149–154 Ukah, Asonzeh IX, 8, 87, 98, 107, 109, 180

196

Index

Umbanda 77, 83 United Kingdom 2, 53, 56–57, 64 United States, U.S., USA 2, 5, 9, 18, 35, 38–39, 56–57, 61, 65, 159, 172–173, 180 universal 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 61, 68, 71, 78–80, 83, 85, 138–139, 148, 150, 155, 160–161, 163, 172 – constitutional norms 139 – franchise 61 – imagined community 85 universalistic ethos 163 universality of values 55, 57 untouchability 64, 71 utilitarianism, utilitarian 162, 166, 169 value VI–VII, 1, 4, 9–10, 19–21, 27, 35–37, 40, 53, 55–58, 64, 66, 69, 71, 76, 80–81, 83–85, 88, 95, 122, 138, 144–150, 154–156, 170, 174–175, 180 – dissemination 88 – pluralism 55, 58 – sets 55 Vatican 75 va-ya’akod 116 Vietnam 35 violence, violent 3, 11–12, 79, 83–85, 109, 124, 127, 159, 174, 176, 179 visibility 78, 80, 84, 99 visual (materials; media) 88, 125 Volk 163 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 8, 179 Wald, Kenneth D. 89 wall of separation 173 War of Independence 124–125 Weber, Max 167–169, 180 Weimarer Republik 21, 23

Wertegemeinschaft 1, 7, 9 Western VI, 1–2, 8, 27–28, 30, 49, 54–59, 62, 65, 69, 71–73, 79, 97, 130, 160, 170, 172, 177 – countries 71–73 – Europe 1–2, 55–56, 72 – societies 49, 54 westernization 12 Westphalian paradigm 110 Williams, Sarah 14 Wilson, Bryan 14 Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika 26 Wolfe, Alan 3 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 141 Woodhead, Linda 14 Wooldridge, Adrian 90 World Value Survey 19–21, 35, 40 World War II, WW II 4, 25, 31, 116, 124 world-views 15, 62 Yahwe 9 Yar’Adua, Umaru 107 Yehoshua, Abraham B. 119–120 Yeo, Stephen 14 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 8, 115 Yeshurun, Avot 119 Yifkeh (Yivkeh) 130–131 Yishma-El 130–131 Yitzhak 119, 126, 130–131 Yong, Amos 105 Yoruba 100 Young, Iris Marion 57 Zabel, Hermann 14 Zander, Helmut 47 Zimbabwe 5, 35, 37–38 Zion (mourners of Zion), Zionist 118, 125, 128 Zoroastrian religion 65