Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics [3 ed.] 9781003247265, 9781032161488, 9781032161501

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND POLITICS

This third edition of the successful Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics provides a definitive global survey of the interaction of religion and politics. From the United States to the Middle East, from Asia to Africa, and beyond, religion continues to be an important factor in political activity and organisation. Featuring contributions from an international team of experts, this volume examines the political aspects of the world’s major religions, including crucial contemporary issues such as religion and climate change, religion and migration, and religion and war. Each chapter has been updated to reflect the latest developments and thinking in the field, and the handbook also includes new chapters on topics such as religious freedom, religion and populism, proselytizing, humanism and politics, and religious soft power. The four main themes addressed are: • • • •

World religions and politics Religion and governance Religion and international relations Religion, security and development

References at the end of each chapter guide the reader towards the most up-to-date information on these key topics. This book is an indispensable source of information for students, academics and the wider public interested in the dynamic relationship between politics and religion. Jeffrey Haynes is Emeritus Professor of Politics at London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. His areas of expertise are religion and international relations, religion and politics, democracy and democratisation, development studies, and comparative politics and globalisation. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books. He received the International Studies Association Religion and International Relations Section’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2016. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Democratization, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Religion, and Series Editor of the book series Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND POLITICS THIRD EDITION

Edited by Jeffrey Haynes

Designed cover image: © Getty Images Third edition published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jeffrey Haynes; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jeffrey Haynes to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2009 Second edition published by Routledge 2016 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Haynes, Jeffrey, 1953– editor. Title: Routledge handbook of religion and politics/[edited by] Jeffrey Haynes. Other titles: Handbook of religion and politics Description: Third edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022050872 (print) | LCCN 2022050873 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032161488 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032161501 (paperback) | ISBN9781003247265 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and politics. Classification: LCC BL65.P7 R78 2023 (print) | LCC BL65.P7 (ebook) | DDC 322/.109–dc23/eng/20221020 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050872 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050873 ISBN: 978-1-032-16148-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-16150-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-24726-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Tables List of Figures Notes on Contributors

viii ix x

  1 Introduction: Religion and politics in an era of uncertainty Jeffrey Haynes PART I

1

World religions and politics

11

  2 Buddhism and politics Peter Friedlander

13

  3 Conservative protestant political opinion: A comparative perspective Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

29

  4 The Catholic Church and Catholicism in global politics Allen D. Hertzke

48

  5 Confucianism: Classical, Neo- and “New” Michael D. Barr

66

  6 Hindu nationalism and politics in India Shylashri Shankar

81

  7 Sunni Islam and Islamism Gudrun Krämer

96

v

Contents

  8 Shia Islam and politics Jon Armajani

111

  9 Religion and politics in Israel: Boundaries and values Hayim Katsman and Guy Ben-Porat

125

PART II

Religion and governance

137

10 The politics of international religious freedom Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

139

11 Religion on the battlefield Ron E. Hassner

155

12 Right-wing populism and religion in comparative perspective Jeffrey Haynes

167

13 Religion and political parties Luca Ozzano

182

14 Religion, politics and civil society Jeffrey Haynes

195

15 What is exceptional about religion? Major debates in international relations, Islamism studies and peace and conflict research Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Morten Valbjørn and Dino Krause

209

16 Religion and anti-immigration parties in the West: Identitarian Christianism and exclusivist secularism Tobias Cremer

225

17 The neglected interactions of religion and nation and how they shape politicization of religion Jocelyne Cesari

240

18 The interplay among religion, politics and law in Europe: New challenges and future trajectories Adelaide Madera

254

19 May I have a word with you? Global patterns of restrictions on proselytizing Jonathan Fox

270

vi

Contents

20 (Secular) humanism and politics Stefan Schröder

282

PART III

Religion and international relations

297

21 Postsecularism and international relations Luca Mavelli and Erin K. Wilson

299

22 Integrating religion into international relations theory Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox

317

23 Religion and foreign policy Nukhet Sandal

330

24 Transnational religious actors and international relations Giorgio Shani

343

25 Fighting the fossil-fuel pharaoh: American Jews and climate action David Krantz

357

PART IV

Religion, security and development

373

26 The ambivalence of religious soft power Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

375

27 When political religion is a ‘good thing’?: Feminist storytelling around less-heard understandings of ‘political religion’ Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor

385

28 Faith-based organisations and development Emma Tomalin

396

29 Religious terrorism in global politics Mark Juergensmeyer

411

30 Religious peacebuilding Atalia Omer and Joram Tarusarira

423

Index440

vii

TABLES

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 19.1 25.1

Number of Buddhists by country in 2010 Abortion always wrong Same-sex relations always wrong Right-leaning party vote in last election OK for religious leaders to try to influence how people vote in elections Churches and religious organizations have too little power Rejects someone of different religion as candidate for their party Percentage of countries which restrict proselytizing in 2014 Jewish climate-focused initiatives in the United States

viii

15 38 39 40 41 42 43 273 359

FIGURES

5.1 “Mass incidents” in the Chinese news media (12-month moving average), 2001–2010.71 5.2 Worker protests and strikes in China, 2012–2021. 72 21.1 Love Makes a Way protesters march, wearing signs reading ‘Refugees are People’, from the Perth Court House to the Offices of Julie Bishop, MP, then Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs. 307 21.2 Sign reading ‘Jesus was a Refugee’ from the 2015 Palm Sunday March for Justice for Refugees in Melbourne, Australia. 308 21.3 Sign reading ‘Jesus, Mary + Joseph/The Most Famous Refugees/St David’s Uniting Church/Oakleigh’ from the 2015 Palm Sunday March for Justice for Refugees in Melbourne, Australia. 308 28.1 Who are the faith actors? 406

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Jon Armajani is Professor of Peace Studies at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University in Minnesota, United States. His publications include Shia Islam and Politics: Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon; Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics; and Dynamic Islam: Liberal Muslim Perspectives in a Transnational Age. Michael D. Barr is Associate Professor of International Relations (Academic Status) at Flinders University, Australia. His research focuses on Singaporean and Malaysian politics and history, and the relationship between religion and politics in Asia. He is the author of five books and the editor of two, and in 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently Deputy Editor of Asian Studies Review, having previously been its editor-in-chief for six years. Guy Ben-Porat is a professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author of Between State and Synagogue (2012) and co-author of Policing Citizens (with Fany Yuval, 2019) Jocelyne Cesari holds the chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States. Since 2018, she has been the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School, Massachusetts, United States. Her most recent book is We God’s People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations (2022). Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor is Associate Professor Sociology of Islam at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, United Kingdom. She is Chair (2020–2023) of the Muslims in Britain Research Network and is series editor of the Review of Social and Scientific Study of Religion. Her publications include Islamic Education in Britain: New Pluralist Paradigms, Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion and Islam on Campus: Contested Identities and the Cultures of Higher Education. Tobias Cremer is a junior research fellow at Pembroke College, and an associate member at the Department of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Oxford, United x

Contributors

Kingdom. His research focuses on the relationship between religion, secularisation and the rise of right-wing identity politics. He is the co-author of Faith, Nationalism and the Future of Liberal Democracy (with David M. Elcott, Volker Haarmann and C. Colt Anderson, 2021). Jonathan Fox is the Yehuda Avner Professor of Religion and Politics at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He is the author of over one hundred articles and fifteen books on topics in religion and politics including Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews? (2021). Peter Friedlander is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, Australia. His research focuses on the interaction between religion, society and politics in South and Southeast Asia. His recent publications include ‘Religion and Ideology in Sri Lanka’ (in Jeffrey Haynes, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Politics and Ideology, 2022). Ron E. Hassner is Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science, and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He is the author of War on Sacred Grounds, Religion in the Military Worldwide, Religion on the Battlefield and Anatomy of Torture. Jeffrey Haynes is Emeritus Professor of Politics at London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. His areas of expertise are religion and international relations, religion and politics, democracy and democratisation, development studies and comparative politics and globalisation. He is co-editor-in-chief of Democratization; editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Religion; and series editor of the book series Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics. Allen D. Hertzke is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, United States. He is author of Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights, editor of The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges, and co-editor of Christianity and Freedom: Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Contemporary Perspectives. Dennis R. Hoover is editor of The Review of Faith & International Affairs, an adviser to the Templeton Religion Trust, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, Virginia, United States. He is editor of Exploring Religious Diversity and Covenantal Pluralism in Asia and Religion and American Exceptionalism, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Pluralism, and Global Engagement. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor of Political Science and Religious Studies and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, United States. She studies religion in US foreign and immigration policy, secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and the Middle East and North Africa region in international relations. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015). Mark Juergensmeyer is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, United States, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College, California, United States. He is author or editor of over 30 books, including the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence and When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends. xi

Contributors

Hayim Katsman is an independent researcher of religion and politics in the Middle East. His articles have been published in Israel Studies Review, The International Journal of Religion and Ha’aretz. Gudrun Krämer is Professor Emerita of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She specializes in the history of the Middle East since 1500, and Islamic political thought, reform and secularity in the modern period. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Germany), the Tunisian Academy of Arts and Sciences and the German National Research Council, and an executive editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. David Krantz is a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow and doctoral candidate at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, United States, where he researches the intersection of environmentalism and culture, frequently through the lens of religion. He is also the president of Aytzim: Ecological Judaism and a founding board member of Interfaith Moral Action on Climate. Dino Krause is a research assistant at the Danish Institute for International Studies. His research focuses on armed conflicts with transnational jihadist groups. He is co-author of Confronting the Caliphate: Civil Resistance in Jihadist Proto-States (2022). Adelaide Madera is Full Professor of Canon Law and Law and Religion at the University of Messina, Italy. Her areas of expertise are church-state relationships, religious organizations and the law, and religious and civil marriage. She is a member of the editorial committee of Quaderni di Diritto e Politica Ecclesiastica. Luca Mavelli is a reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His research focuses on neoliberalism, biopolitics, migration and religion. His publications include Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives (2022), Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (2012), and The Refugee Crisis and Religion: Secularism, Security and Hospitality in Question (co-edited with Erin K. Wilson, 2017). Ruth Melkonian-Hoover is Professor of Political Science at Gordon College, Massachusetts, United States. Her scholarly interests include Latin America, immigration and religion and international affairs. She is a co-author of Evangelicals and Immigration: Fault Lines Among the Faithful (with Lyman A. Kellstedt). She has published articles in Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, The Review of Faith  & International Affairs, and Latin American Perspectives. Atalia Omer is a professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. She is also the Dermot T.J. Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peace Building at Harvard University, Massachusetts, United States. Her publications include When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (2019). Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is an associate professor of Politics and International Relations at London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. He is the author of more than 30 peerreviewed journal articles and co-editor of four special issues on religion and politics and xii

Contributors

Turkish politics. He is the winner of the 2021 London Metropolitan University Outstanding Early Career Researcher and the 2022 International Studies Association’s ENMISA Emerging Scholar Award. Luca Ozzano is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy, and Chair of the ‘Religion and Politics’ standing group of the European Consortium for Political Research. His most recent work is The Masks of the Political God: Religion and Political Parties in Contemporary Democracies (2020). Nukhet Sandal is Associate Professor of Political Science, and Associate Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences, at Ohio University, United States. Her areas of expertise are religion and politics, foreign policy analysis, Middle Eastern Politics and political competition. She is the editor-in-chief of Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of International Studies. Stefan Schröder is Senior Researcher and Lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests include secularity and nonreligion, secular humanism, education on religion in public schools and the didactics in the study of religion. Giorgio Shani is a visiting professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, and Professor of Politics and International Studies at the International Christian University, Japan. He works on religion, nationalism and human security, and is currently Chair of RC43 Religion and Politics of the International Political Science Association. Shylashri Shankar is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India. Her books and research tackle the themes of how the law and courts deal with religious identity, civil liberties, social rights and democratic citizenship. Her book, Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes, won the AUTHER Award for best nonfiction. Mona Kanwal Sheikh is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Her areas of expertise are religion and secularism in international relations, jihadism and Islamism. Her publications include Entering Religious Minds: The Social Study of Worldviews (with Mark Juergensmeyer, 2019) and Guardians of God: Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (2016). Joram Tarusarira is an assistant professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His areas of expertise are religion, conflict transformation, peacebuilding and reconciliation. He is the author of Reconciliation and Religio-political Nonconformism in Zimbabwe (2016) and co-editor of Themes in Religion and Human Security in Africa (with Ezra Chitando, 2020). Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. She has published widely on the topic of religion and development. Her recent publications include editing The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society (with Caroline Starkey, 2022). She co-edits the Routledge Research in Religion and Development book series. She is the co-chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Community’s learning hub on Anti-Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. xiii

Contributors

Morten Valbjørn is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. In addition to Shia/Sunni Sectarianism and the transformations of Islamism, his research focuses on the sociology of knowledge concerning the study of Middle East politics and the nexus between area studies and political science. Erin K. Wilson is Professor of Politics and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research examines the intersection of religion with security, development, human rights, forced migration, gender equality and climate change. She is (co-)author and (co-)editor of seven books, including Religion and World Politics: Connecting Theory with Practice (2023).

xiv

1 INTRODUCTION Religion and politics in an era of uncertainty Jeffrey Haynes

The first edition of this handbook was published in 2009, and the second edition in 2016. Now, seven years later, this is the third edition. As editor, I was able to enlist many of the contributors to the second edition to provide updated chapters for the third edition. There are also a few new ones, reflecting recent changes in the subject matter. I asked all contributors to ensure that their chapters reflect updated understanding of how religion impacts on both politics and international relations. Handbooks are inevitably contextualised by what is going on in the ‘real world’. Thus, the first edition appeared a few years after an epochal event: the attack on the USA by al-Qaeda on 11 September 2001 (9/11). For the next decade, the universe of religion, politics and international relations was dominated by the consequences of 9/11. Now, two decades later, topics emanating from 9/11, such as, ‘religious terrorism’ and ‘religious violent extremism’, are still important and topical, but they are not the whole story.1 The 30 chapters comprising the third edition focus on many relevant issues, including democratisation, populism, soft power, development, religious difference, gender, civil society, the state, foreign policy, international relations theory and many more. What stands out, however, is continuity as much as change when comparing the universe of religion, politics and international relations now to 15 years ago when the handbook’s first edition appeared. In 2023, as in 2009, religion’s social and political significance and influence are universal. While religion’s impact varies from country to country and international context, religion is now much more consistently socio-politically significant today compared to 50 or 60  years ago. How and why is religion now so politically ‘significant’? It is largely because religion encourages, or helps resolve, typically interlinked political, social, economic and developmental disagreements and conflicts. Religion has important functions, serving to engender and/or significantly influence individual and group values that, in turn, impact upon common existential issues. Such issues may lead to irresolvable conflict within countries; sometimes they spill over to become serious regional or international concerns. In both cases, they impact on state and people’s security. To comprehend political issues involving religion both within countries and internationally, the handbook’s analyses are within the context of two overlapping, but conceptually distinct, issues: security and governance. Focusing on today and in some cases seeking to extrapolate to the next few decades, the handbook’s chapters identify and examine emerging trends of strategic importance to our DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-1

1

Jeffrey Haynes

understanding of religion, politics and international relations. Centrally informed by the centrality of religion’s influence – affecting individual identity, society and governance – we start from the observation that for billions of people around the world, their religion is the most important signifier of their identity. But religion does not act in isolation, and in recent years, two key developments led to increased religious responses in many parts of the world. On the one hand, the expansion – and in some cases, reversal – of representative government to all global regions, with the important exception of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), provided new political and social space for religion to be assertive. On the other hand, because religion is so fundamental to many people’s identity, opening political and social space often encouraged new or pre-existing tensions to surface or resurface, leading in some cases to intergroup conflicts. In 2023, two world religions – Christianity and Islam – are growing fast. Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, is currently growing annually by around 1.47%, implying 30% expansion in followers by 2035. Christianity’s current growth is particularly swift in South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Progress of Islam between 2010 and 2020 was estimated at 1.7% a year, mainly linked to ‘high’ birth rates among Muslims in Asia, the MENA and Europe (Martel, 2013). A 2010 report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated that, on present trends, the global Muslim population will grow by about 35% by 2030, increasing from 1.6 to 2.2 billion. Given that some countries – such as Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Russia – are already experiencing growing tensions between followers of Christianity and Islam, then it may be that swift expansion of these world religions over the next two decades will exacerbate such tensions, with significant implications for global security and governance (Pew Research Center, 2010). Overall, the chapters of the book underline the following: • • • •

• •

Politically assertive religion impacts upon governance and security outcomes within many countries, as well as internationally. Globalisation and associated technology, including satellite television channels and social media, play an important role in spreading sectarian and interfaith mistrust. Factionalism within religious traditions exacerbates societal tensions, both within countries and internationally. High levels of economic and developmental inequality – linked to religion, ethnicity and/or class – endure as sources of regional and international tension, including in Sub- Saharan Africa, the MENA, Central Asia, South and East Asia, Western Europe and North and South America. Sectarian and other inter-religious tensions reflect long-standing socio-economic disparities which escalate when governments fail adequately to deal with them. Sectarian conflicts deepen pre-existing religious divides which in some cases escalate into serious national, regional or international conflicts, deleteriously affecting governance and political and social stability.

Religion, politics and security The twenty-first century has seen numerous examples of politicised forms of religion, both within countries and internationally. This development affects all the ‘world religions’ (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism). With hindsight, we can see that the ‘resurgence’ of politicised forms of religion started several decades ago, with the Iranian revolution of 1978–1979. This epochal event had national, regional and international impacts, comprising 2

Introduction

a form of revolution regarding our understanding of the political roles of religion. Within Iran it led to a sui generis form of government, which endures to this day, ending an experiment in Westernisation, which, like in Turkey decades earlier, was posited on the apparent strength and desirability of a strongly secular, pro-Western, development model. Regionally, the revolution exacerbated Sunni/Shia tensions and conflicts. Internationally, the revolution highlighted religion’s transnational political significance, whereby Iran’s post-revolution sought to export revolution to further its national interests, leading to extreme rivalry with the regional ‘Sunni’ power, Saudi Arabia, and affecting relations with, inter alia, Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Consequent to Iran’s revolution, the US political scientist, Samuel Huntington (2002; also see Haynes, 2019), claimed to see a ‘clash of civilisations’, centrally involving Christianity and Islam, because of supposedly clashing values and norms. Many critiqued Huntington’s argument, yet it is impossible to deny that over the last two decades his ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and associated rhetoric helped further perceptions of a globalised division between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’, with significant impacts on security and governance issues both within countries and internationally (Haynes, 2019). In addition, recent decades have been especially characterised by growing political assertiveness of several world religions, notably Christianity and Islam. Political assertiveness is manifested both within countries as well as internationally and transnationally. Central to this development is the phenomenon of globalisation and associated developments in communications technology. The latter permits religious entities’ messages to unite or divide real or imagined communities, even when physically separated by international borders and thousands of kilometres. In particular, it enables diaspora populations to feel a closeness otherwise denied them and appeals to a far wider audience than previously possible. Globalisation technology based on the internet is also likely to contribute to diaspora communities being increasingly affected by intra-faith discord in countries of origin, such as Pakistan and India. In addition, some governments may have to address new challenges from religious groups at home. For example, it is posited that over the next two decades, China will be home to some of the world’s largest Muslim and Christian populations. The impact on China’s internal politics and global attitude and focus are likely to be influenced significantly by the manner in which these two faith groups pursue their goals and seek enhanced religious freedoms. A wider point is that as religion is so fundamental to many people’s identity, where tensions between different groups already exist, they may be exacerbated by real or imagined religious differences. Post–Cold War globalisation led to dramatic, continuing increases in interactions between people and communities, no longer dependent on geographical closeness easily to enable such connections. Globalisation encourages religions to adopt new, revised or reformed social, moral and/or political agendas. It stimulates many religious individuals, organisations and movements to look not only at local and national issues and contexts but also to focus on regional and international environments, which, in many countries of the Global South, often link into or exacerbate pre-existing negative perceptions of foreign – including, US and Western – cultural, political and economic hegemonies. Moreover, encounters between different religious traditions, both within faiths and between them, are increasingly common and not always harmonious. Sometimes the result can be extreme hostility, captured in the term ‘culture war’. Culture wars, for example, in countries as diverse as Israel and the United States, occur in relation to pronounced, potentially irreconcilable, differences between secular and religious groups regarding the appropriate positions of religious and secular norms, values and behaviour. Culture wars occur when differing religious worldviews encourage different allegiances and standards in relation to various areas, including the family, law, education and politics. As a result, conflicts involving, inter alia, gender, ethnicity, class and nations are often framed religiously. Such 3

Jeffrey Haynes

conflicts may ‘take on “larger-than-life” proportions, depicted as the struggle of good against evil’ (Kurtz, 1995), impacting on security, sometimes dramatically, both within counties and internationally. This is also the case with some religious minorities who may regard their own existential position – for example, Muslim minority communities in Thailand, the UK, France, the Philippines, and India, and Christian minorities in many countries in MENA – to be unacceptably weakened because of actual or perceived pressure from majority religious communities (such as Buddhists in Thailand; Christians in the UK, France and the Philippines; and Hindus in India) which encourage religious minorities to conform to the hegemonic norms and values of the religious and cultural majority. This issue has recently affected a region long thought to be immune to the public impact of religion and culture: Western Europe. There, governments long ago went down the path of secularisation, with linked ‘downgrading’ of religion from public realm to privatised belief. Today, however, many urban areas across Western Europe contain areas of pronounced social deprivation, often the home to many migrants. Recent extensive migration to Western Europe from the MENA and elsewhere in the global south, coupled with enhanced global mobility, led to increasingly multicultural societies, albeit often within a wider trend towards secularism. Yet, local communities with strong religious beliefs continue to exist and, due to natural expansion, are growing in size. Recent political developments, such as the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), highlight that many, perhaps most, Western Europeans at best tolerate – not actively embrace and welcome – migrants from the global south. Suspicion and hostility are particularly apparent in times of economic stress – for example, since 2008 and the latest international economic collapse – when many Western Europeans appear to revert to older societal affiliations, including reference to cultural models of Christianity, said to exemplify and underline two key components underpinning modern (Western) European culture: liberal and individualistic values. For some, especially on the political right, this sets apart Western European culture from what is regarded as less liberal, more conservative values and norms of Europe’s Muslim immigrants from the global south. The issue is a perceived security threat within Western Europe and internationally (Haynes, 2021a). Future projections are that the population growth of non-Muslims in Europe will be slow, while the Muslim population of Europe is expected to continue to grow, exceeding 58 million by 2030 (that is, approximately 8% of the total population), but with numbers of people claiming to adhere to Christian traditions (primarily Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox) not expanding (Pew Research Center, 2011). Reflecting the impact of globalisation and internet-based communications technologies, diaspora Muslim communities in Western Europe are likely to be increasingly affected by intra-faith and intra-Islamic discord emanating from the MENA. Tensions between Sunni and Shias are likely to spread. For example, in 2012, hard-line locally based Sunnis firebombed Belgium’s largest Shiite mosque. Several countries in the MENA are regional focal points of religious actors’ increased political involvement. On the one hand, religious minorities across the region, including in the region’s largest country by population, Egypt, are squeezed and their security compromised. While ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or ‘Islamism’ attracts much attention, there is also serious sectarian division and conflict across much of MENA, including in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The situation was exacerbated by the 2011 Arab Spring and its aftermath, leading to widespread regional state weakness or failure which, combined with the impact of politically assertive religious actors, led to increasing pressure on religious minorities to convert to the dominant religious tradition or, failing that, to flee for their lives. Extremist actors such as ‘Islamic State’ and al-Qaeda thrive on, and seek to perpetuate and deepen, sectarian divisions. The resumption of power in Afghanistan of the Taliban in 2021, the 4

Introduction

removal of American influence from the country, and the assassination of the al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike in Kabul in mid-2022, highlight that the forces that gave rise to conflict with the West as highlighted by 9/11, are still around, and capable of producing significant impacts on both domestic and international political outcomes. Given the widespread diminution of state capacity in the MENA following the Arab Spring and the linked expansion of aggressive Sunni entities, such as Islamic State, then it is likely that the short and medium term will see significant sectarian conflicts in regional countries, leading to significant friction and, in some cases, conflicts between warring sectarian groups. There is also a notable regional and international dimension to these issues. There are significant tensions between Shia-majority Iran and the (Sunni-dominated) Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). However, not all regional Shia movements are pro-Iranian, and not every Salafist or Wahhabist Sunni movement kowtows to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, there are significant Shiite minorities in GCC countries, as well as a growing (Sunni) Salafi movement in Iran. Sectarian tensions reflect socio-economic disparities and seem destined to escalate if governments continue to address existential economic and development. For example, in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where there is pronounced economic inequality between Sunni and Shia, tensions are likely to rise with unclear consequences. In addition, globalisation, characterised by influential satellite television channels and social media, plays a pivotal role in spreading anti-government rhetoric and sectarian mistrust. Finally, the next few decades are also likely to see growing tensions within Sunni and Shiite communities. Sunni Islam is becoming increasingly factionalised. As Salafist groups grow in prominence, a backlash may emerge from moderate Sunnis. Correspondingly, Shiite Islam contains a number of internal divisions. The countries in the MENA that have suffered most from decades of systematic political, sectarian and racial repression and mass killings – such as Iraq and Syria – made possible the foundation, emergence and development of Islamic State. What makes these countries’ situation even more dire is the failure of the ‘international community’ consistently to condemn this oppression, in effect turning a blind eye to the roots of Islamic State–style radicalisation, and failing, due to political considerations at home, to help meaningfully to deal with the real and present existential threat that Islamic State still poses, despite its recent reversals. Yet, it is no longer about a choice between countering terrorism and respecting human rights. It is impossible to win the fight against terror in the region without addressing the oppression and lack of opportunity that encourage it. Defending human rights and confronting religious extremism, working to end the discrimination against Syrian and Iraqi Sunni populations, as well as against the Bedouins of Sinai, would be the necessary first steps in a long journey to deal with human rights violations in MENA and, as a result, begin to undermine the attraction of Islamic State and similar ideological entities for tens of thousands of alienated young people. Whereas in Western Europe Muslim minority populations question their social and cultural position and in MENA state breakdown encourages sectarian strife and the persecution of religious minorities, in ‘secular’ Central Asia, Islamist movements represent a challenge to the status quo. This is not because they are especially powerful: today they stand almost no chance of overpowering state institutions or gathering substantial support in urban areas. Yet, regional governments have sought to combat what they see as extremism in a heavy-handed manner, which has exacerbated the problem that Islamist movements see themselves fighting against: poor, corrupt and repressive ruling regimes. Many Central Asian governments are Western friendly and, while Islamism is likely to remain a long-term (if low-level) threat to stability, it does highlight to many ordinary Central Asians that the West is a friend to their often highly disliked governments. Continued socio-economic adversity and growing animosity towards an overbearing, monopolistic state is likely to increase the number of instances of instability across 5

Jeffrey Haynes

Central Asia. Social discontent may result in support for underground religious movements rather than opposition parties, while strengthening anti-Western feeling in many Central Asian countries.

Religion, politics, governance and global order In 2023, many people see the world in the midst of serious disorder, consequent to the Covid pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and associated economic travails, including high price inflation and natural resource shortages. Then there is the grotesque spectacle of climate change and its associated environmental catastrophes being treated as a ‘hoax’ by rightwingers around the world. Recent analyses of religion and politics highlight the relevance of such issues, as well as the economic range and social and cultural significance of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Haynes, 2021b). There is a widespread perception that TNCs today have more power than many governments and are largely beyond democratic control. Whether TNCs improve or exacerbate mass impoverishment of already poor people in countries around the world is a contested issue. Numerous religious organisations, including, for example, the 350-member World Council of Churches, now focus on global and domestic economic imbalances and suggest ways to ameliorate them using the power of religious organisation and community. Religious concern is manifested in various ways, including new religious fundamentalisms; support for anti-globalisation activities, such as recent antiglobalisation and anti–World Trade Organisation protests; and North/South economic justice efforts, including the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030). In short, recent religious responses to what are perceived as an unacceptable – yet potentially amendable – result of economic globalisation highlight – yet again – the potential power of religion to be a globally significant public actor with (potential or actual) ability to impact significantly on global issues. This observation draws on a recognition that around the world many religious organisations and (secular) development agencies share similar concerns: (1) how to improve the lot of materially poor people; (2) the societal position of those suffering from social exclusion; and (3) widely unfulfilled human potential in the context of glaring developmental polarisation within and between countries, a position which international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, accept is untenable. Developmental concerns focus upon, but are not confined to, issues linked to poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflict, gender concerns, international trade and global politics. These issues explicitly link all the world’s countries and peoples – rich and poor – into a global community. How to resolve them poses a challenge to governance and global order. In this context, religious authorities and actors increasingly raise their voices, although it is unclear whether decision-makers, both within countries and internationally, take them seriously enough to take their views into account. Challenges to the status quo manifest themselves in the actions of some extremist religious organisations whose impact upon Western interests is explicitly hostile and very difficult to counter. They are likely to get worse over the coming decades – unless coordinated, concerted efforts are made to blunt their impact by ameliorating the conditions that give rise to them. For example, al-Qaeda has a stronghold in Yemen, while Islamic State is still influential in various countries, including Syria and Iraq, and controls the ‘State of Sinai’, an area of Egypt outside the jurisdiction of central government. For a while, Islamic State controlled the city of Derna in Libya but was ousted. In 2023, Islamic State carries out a ‘roving insurgency’ without a territorial base but with a transcontinental alliance with Boko Haram in Nigeria. 6

Introduction

In Nigeria, Boko Haram is a long-running regional threat to security. Premised upon the claim that ‘Western education is forbidden’, in order to deny girls the right to an education, Boko Haram is an apparently indiscriminate killer organisation, making no distinction between followers of different religions. Yet, Boko Haram cannot be understood in isolation. To a significant extent, the organisation is an outcome of decades of the absence of good governance leading to severe social injustices, rampant Islamist and Christian extremism, and sweeping human rights violations. The example of Boko Haram highlights how religion, along with culture, ethnicity and identity, are important components in understanding governance and global order issues, while contextualising post 9/11 Western counterinsurgency efforts. Following 9/11, first al-Qaeda and its affiliates and then Islamic State and its allies sequentially posed serious threats to governance in many countries and by extension global order and Western security. While it is well known that al-Qaeda perpetrated multiple attacks against US and Western targets in the 1990s and early 2000s, these outrages raised questions about the ideological assumptions and goals of al-Qaeda. While Bin Laden was personally committed to the fight against the ‘far enemy’ – that is, the USA – Islamic State seeks to target the ‘near enemy’ – that is, governments and populations in the MENA which Islamic State deems ‘un-Islamic’. However, given that many of the dead in the attacks are not Western Christians or Jews but local Muslims, it raises the question of what exactly the perpetrators are seeking to achieve. What today are the ideological assumptions and goals of what is left of al-Qaeda, Islamic State and their regional affiliates, such as Boko Haram? Al-Qaeda first emerged in the late 1980s to challenge the incumbency and authority of rulers in various Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, with the objective of replacing them with plausibly ‘Islamic’ leaders. Over time, however, a lack of success in achieving these objectives led al-Qaeda strategists to shift attention to regional and global goals, including taking the fight, on 9/11, to the ‘far enemy’ (Gerges, 2005). The result is a continuing ‘anti-Western’ conflict, seeking to utilise various ‘weapons of terror’, a campaign more recently adopted by the down-but-not-out Islamic State. Both al-Qaeda and Islamic State share concerns about spreading the ‘right’ religion by jihad, and the global balance of power currently dominated by the USA and the West. Over time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as more recent – and in some cases continuing – conflicts in Mali, Nigeria and Syria, indicate that religion, culture and identity are continuing concerns in many conflicts. In each case, there are explicit links to long-term and systemic governance shortfalls, which have to be ameliorated before the threat from extremist Islam can be nullified and the threat to the West’s security significantly reduced.

Conclusion The first and second editions of this handbook were contextualised by 9/11 and other examples of ‘religious terrorism’. They significantly affected Western interests while also fundamentally changing perceptions of the role of religion in politics and international relations. The third edition seeks to bring things up to date, to an extent moving on from 9/11 and associated events to pay attention to new developments, including links between religion and soft power and religion and right-wing populism. As with the first two editions, the chapters comprising the third edition are collectively informed by the continuing impact of religion on politics and politics on religion. It seems likely that nothing will fundamentally change in this regard in the coming decades. This is because around the world high and growing levels of inequality, often contextualised by societal differences, including those related to religion, ethnicity and/or class, are almost certain not only to endure but also in many cases to get (even) worse. There will 7

Jeffrey Haynes

continue to be often serious sources of tension in many countries and regions, and these will impact on the overall governance and stability of many countries, while also affecting global governance. It is clear that areas of considerable sectarian tension exist across the world, especially in many of the 20 or more countries that comprise the MENA. If there was a prolonged period of escalation, perhaps underpinned by further deteriorations in political and developmental well-being, then campaigns of terrorist attacks could be carried out on a previously unseen scale, further plunging the MENA region into chaos with knock-on effects experienced in Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. It is possible that attacks on such a level could cause a major power, hitherto relatively stable, such as Egypt, to descend into civil war. In addition, pre-existing religious and sectarian divisions, including intra-Islamic and Islamic-Christian and/ or Islamic-Jewish conflicts, could come together and rapidly escalate into a transnational conflict between several faith-based components of global (civil) society. In such circumstances, it is conceivable that some countries would be drawn into a wider war, as pressure from their populations, existing treaty obligations and allegiances might force them to take sides in the conflict. If the United Nations was, as it was in 2023 over Russia’s war in Ukraine, deadlocked, weak and hamstrung, and regional security organisations were unable to take up the challenge, then widespread killings linked to religious differences could occur across much of the globe. While the scenario sketched out in the previous paragraph represents an extreme outcome, it is clear that both terrorism and sectarian and inter-religious tensions and conflicts have been at the centre of global security concerns since at least 9/11 and, arguably, as far back as the late 1970s and the unexpected success of the Iranian revolution. As we have seen in recent years in relation to the Arab Spring events and political developments in many countries in MENA more generally, governance problems are at the heart of religion’s involvement in regional and transnational conflicts which collectively impact significantly on global security and development. A starting point for our analysis in the third edition of this handbook in this regard is to note the continued impact of globalisation which not only serves both to highlight and boost religious pluralism but also encouraged intra-faith and inter-religious hostility and conflict. Several of the world religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the so-called religions of the book, because in each case their authority emanates principally from particular sacred texts), claim ‘exclusive accounts of the nature of reality’, that is only their religious beliefs are judged to be true by adherents. This is not to expect that the latter outcome is somehow inevitable. On the contrary, religious responses may well aim to be both constructive and ameliorative. There are many examples of religious involvement in recent and current national and international conflicts; many directly affect global security. In this context it becomes imperative to stress that a stable and prosperous MENA is, or should be, a pivotal goal of the ‘international community’, as it is essential in order to achieve widespread political stability, diminution of poverty and undermining of religious extremism. On the other hand, the Middle East region is particularly emblematic in relation to religion – in part because the region was the birthplace of the world’s three great monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism). This brings with it a legacy not only of shared wisdom but also of conflict – a complex relationship that has impacted in recent years on countries as far away as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, the US and Britain. A key to peace in the region may well be achievement of significant collaborative efforts among different religious bodies, which along with external religious and secular organisations, for example from Europe and the US, may through collaborative efforts work towards developing a new model of peace and cooperation to enable the countries of the MENA to escape from what many see as an endless cycle of religious-based conflict. Overall, this emphasises that religion may be intimately connected, not only in the Middle East, both to 8

Introduction

international conflicts and their prolongation and to attempts at reconciliation of such conflicts. In other words, in relation to many international conflicts, religion can play a significant, even a fundamental, role, contributing to conflicts in various ways, including how they are intensified, channelled or reconciled. In addition, religion has a key part to play in resolution of conflicts in other parts of the world, including South Asia (notably India/Pakistan) and sub-Saharan Africa (for example, in relation to the recently ended civil war in Sudan). We can also note continuing involvement of religious actors in rising religious and ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka, principally involving minority (Hindu) Tamils and majority (Buddhist) Sinhalese. Over the last two decades, continuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq served to encourage support for al-Qaeda and other extremist entities, including Islamic State, among disgruntled Sunni Muslims in two key ways: (1) generally to focus discontent against the ‘West’, and the US in particular; and (2) to polarise often sensitive relations between Sunnis and Shias. Both goals are in line with the ideological and strategic objectives of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. It is unfortunate that Western counterinsurgency activities in both Afghanistan and Iraq are seen by many Muslims as a key component of an ‘anti-Islam’ strategy, which some Muslims perceive as part of a wider Western strategy informing a global ‘war’ against ‘Islam’. This makes it very difficult – perhaps, ultimately, impossible – to win the conflict as there is a ready, apparently inexhaustible, supply of both domestic and foreign recruits to the anti-US/Western insurgency. In this context, classical counterinsurgency theory seems of limited relevance in the context of a global struggle against religiously informed terrorism, as it is focused on a domestic conflict, while al-Qaeda and Islamic State’s goal is to fight and win a transnational – ultimately global – battle of, if necessary, long duration. The question remains: to what extent are individual conflict zones – such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia – facets of a wider, transnational and international war that pits a generic ‘Islamic extremism/terrorism’ against the ‘West’ (especially the USA)? If the conflict is indeed a regional or global one, then the likelihood of success of classical counterinsurgency theory, which focuses on winning wars in individual countries, is likely to be partial at best. This is because, as extremist Islamist combatants have shown themselves ready, willing and able to transfer their anti-Western activities to other emerging theatres of war – such as Mali, Libya, Egypt’s Sinai desert and Nigeria – then classical US counter-agency activities will always be playing catchup in a fast-changing situation, and chances of success are by no means ensured.

Note 1 A few days before writing these words, there was an unsuccessful attempt in New York State to murder the controversial author, Salman Rushdie. The government of Iran, responsible for the original fatwa in 1989 against Rushdie for his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, claimed in August 2022 that ‘Salman Rushdie and his supporters are to blame for what happened to him . . . Freedom of speech does not justify Salman Rushdie’s insults upon religion and offence of its sanctities’ www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/crime/salman-rushdie-stabbed-attack-stage-new-york-updates-b2145131.html

References Gerges, Fawaz (2005) The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haynes, Jeffrey (2019) From Huntington to Trump: Thirty Years of the Clash of Civilizations, New York: Lexington Books. Haynes, Jeffrey (ed.) (2021a) ‘Right-Wing Nationalism and Religion: What Are the Connections and Why?’, Religion, State & Society 49 (3): 188–194. Haynes, Jeffrey (ed.) (2021b) Handbook on Religion and International Relations, London, Edward Elgar.

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Jeffrey Haynes Huntington, Samuel (2002) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New edition, New York: Free Press. Kurtz, Lester (1995) Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective, New York: SAGE. Martel, Frances (2013) ‘Christianity Booming in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa’, 19 December, www. breitbart.com/national-security/2013/12/19/christianity-booming-in-asia-and-sub-saharan-africa/. Last accessed 16 August 2022. Pew Research Center (2010) ‘Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa’, 15 April, www.pewforum.org/2010/04/15/executive-summary-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharanafrica/. Last accessed 16 August 2022. Pew Research Center (2011) Forum on Religion & Public Life: ‘The Future of the Global Muslim Population’, 27 January, www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/. Last accessed 16 August 2022.

10

PART I

World religions and politics

2 BUDDHISM AND POLITICS Peter Friedlander

The past Buddhist views on politics are as varied as Buddhist traditions themselves, and over the last three decades there has been a re-evaluation of the relationship between Buddhism and politics. These studies started with works by Paul Harris (1999, 2007, 2013) and were continued in works such as Schonthal (2016) and Long (2021) which all highlighted the existence of long traditions of political thought in Buddhism. Moreover, within the vast diversity of Buddhist traditions over the last two and a half millennia, there has been a consistent thread of discussions about tensions between Buddhism and politics. The tension arises over the question of whether the welfare of the state relies on a ruler following Buddhist principles or that state patronage of Buddhism can protect the state from worldly enemies. The first view is found in early Pali canonical suttas (Moore, 2015), and the second view, often called “State-protection Buddhism”, rose to prominence with the fifth-century translation into Chinese of the Mahayana Golden Light Sutra by Dharmaksema (Lee, 2017). The first source for these debates is found in canonical Buddhism, Buddhism as described in early Pali sacred literature. In this literature the relationship between Buddhism and politics is encapsulated in the tradition that when the Buddha was born, it was prophesied that he could either become a ruler of the world, a ‘Wheel-Turning Monarch’ (cakravartin), or become a Buddha (Khosla, 1989, p. 32; Walshe, 1987, p. 205). This idea that the roles of secular ruler and spiritual leader are distinct paths stands at the heart of Buddhist tradition. Both are leaders, the secular ruler establishes security and prosperity in this world and the Buddha leads the people towards liberation. The notion of the separation of the roles of spiritual and secular rulers of the world has contributed greatly towards the compatibility of Buddhist ideas on governance and modern Western conceptions of the separation between the church and state. It would be unwise though to ignore that modern notions of religion and politics have no direct equivalents in ancient Indian thought. Both are seen as manifestations of one underlying principal: dharma. The word dharma (Pali dhamma) has meanings that relate to the notions of the true nature of things in themselves, or duty, virtue or morality (Rahula, 1974, p. 181). It often occurs in compounds such as Buddha-dharma, which is often translated as the ‘Buddhist religion’ but could be translated as ‘Buddhist morality’ or ‘the nature of things as taught by the Buddha’. However, when dharma is found in another important term Raja-dharma, dharma does DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-3

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not refer to religion but rather to the ‘duties’ of a king or ruler of a state. In both cases, both the Buddha and a ruler of a state uphold an aspect of dharma. Another Sanskrit term which nowadays is translated as ‘politics’ is Raj-niti. It is formed from raja, king, and niti which has a range of meanings that centre on the notion of appropriate conduct and according to context could be translated as ‘morality’ or ‘policy’. So Raj-niti can be understood as meaning ‘the policies/ morality/code of conduct of a king’. What is important to notice here is that neither Rajadharma nor Rajaniti relates to a system of representation of the people but rather to the notion of how a king should conduct himself. In 1999 Ian Harris edited a work on Buddhism and politics in Asia in which he argued that the Western notion that religion and politics are exclusive categories should be set aside when discussing Buddhism as it has always had a political dimension (Harris, 1999, p. vii). A traditional Buddhist description of this relationship as complementary, rather than exclusive, was to speak of there being two wheels of the dhamma, one wheel being the wheel of dhamma turned by the Buddhist monastic community and the other being the wheel of secular rule turned by the king or Cakkavatti (‘Wheel-Turning Monarch’) (Reynolds, 1972). There is also a large body of ancient Indian literature on the duties of the king, which include the protection of the people, the maintenance of social order and the administration of justice (Flood, 1998, p. 71). Buddhist notions of kingship share in this heritage and include as prime duties of the king that he should conquer without violence through maintaining justice and that he maintains law and order within the boundary of the kingdom so that people can be prosperous and free from danger (Walshe, 1987, p. 443). Indications of the relationship between Buddhism and the state are found in the texts of the Pali canon which constitute the earliest Buddhist texts to survive to the present day. Two points need to be considered here. First, they contain descriptions of what constitutes a desirable relationship between a king and the Buddhist community. Second, they contain two distinct models for governance. In one model, found in the Agganna sutta (Walshe, 1987, pp. 407–415), there is a description of how men came to be ruled by elected leaders, called the Maha-samata, the ‘People’s Choice’. In the other model, such as found in the Cakkavati-Sihanada Sutta (Walshe, 1987, pp. 395–405), the rulership of the state is decided on the basis of a person being born with the marks of being a universal monarch. In the second model there is no suggestion that the universal monarch needs the general consensus of the people to rule. Rather his rule is dependent on his upholding the dharma and ensuring the wealth and prosperity of the state. As long as the king rules according to dharma, the heavens revolve according to their proper pattern, but when he deviates from the dharma and rules for his personal benefit, then the heavens no longer follow their proper pattern, and he falls from power. Theravada Buddhist tradition also identifies ten duties of a king, the dasarajadhamma which include liberality, morality, self-sacrifice, honesty and non-violence (Rahula, 1985, pp. 84–85). The role of the sangha is to advise the king and to influence him so that his policies uphold values that further the dhamma. The next critical evolution in these early ideas on the relationship between the Buddhist sangha and the state happened during the rule of the emperor Asoka (269–243 BCE). Buddhist legend has it that he converted to Buddhism and then ruled according to Buddhist teachings. Contemporary scholarship has questioned the degree to which Asoka was actually a Buddhist in the modern sense as he seems to have also continued to patronise all religions (Norman, 1997, pp. 113–130), and it might be safer to say that the historical Asoka took it upon himself as part of his rule to propagate a version of the dharma of a king, which seems heavily influenced by Buddhism. For a general overview of the historical development of the relationship between 14

Buddhism and politics

Buddhism and politics and the colonial interaction between Buddhism and the West, see Friedlander (2006). The end result of the two-millennia-long interaction between Buddhism and politics in Asia was that by the colonial period, Buddhism in Asia was the heir to not only ancient traditions but also modern ideologies developed within interactions with anti-colonialist nationalist political movements.

The present Estimates of the total number of Buddhists in the world today vary widely due in part to differing assumptions about how to determine who is a Buddhist. However, a rough estimate of around five hundred million Buddhists is quite common. An influential source for this figure was a 2010 report by the Pew Research Center which forecast that Buddhist numbers would continue to grow to around 511 million by 2030. However, at the same time, it also pointed out that as a proportion of followers of all religions in the world, the percentage of Buddhists will have fallen from 7.1% in 2010 to 6.2% by 2030. There are major problems with figures like these. For instance, there are problems due to issues such as what constitutes a country. The Tibetan community in exile regards Tibet as being a region that is larger than the Chinese government’s view on what constitutes the Tibetan Autonomous Region, so that whilst some figures would suggest that there are around six million Tibetans, who would virtually all describe themselves as Buddhists, other figures might be lower or higher. I now look at the top ten countries in terms of number of Buddhists and then briefly at Buddhism in the West.

China and Tibet The two main issues that dominate discussions of Buddhism in China are the degree to which there is religious freedom and the treatment of the Tibetans. During the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976), there was a wholesale attack on Buddhist cultures, peoples and monasteries. However, there has been a resurgence of Buddhism since liberalisation began in the late 1970s. By 2003 there were around 13,000 monasteries and around 180,000 monks and nuns; Table 2.1  Number of Buddhists by country in 2010 Country

Number of Buddhists

China Thailand Japan Burma (Myanmar) Sri Lanka Vietnam Cambodia South Korea India Malaysia Rest of world Total

244,110,000 64,420,000 45,820,000 38,410,000 14,450,000 14,380,000 13,690,000 11,050,000 9,250,000 5,010,000 27,150,000 487,760,000

Source: Pew Center Report 2015

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however, in the absence of adequate traditional support from Buddhist laity, Buddhist temples and monasteries have often become focuses for the tourist industry and transformed into money-making enterprises. Chairman Jiang Zemin (held office 1989–2002) advocated the use of Buddhist morality (de) in the political sphere (Yin, 2006). However, the term he used for virtue was ‘de’—not a Buddhist term but a Daoist traditional Chinese term for virtue. The idea of promoting traditional virtues, rather than democratic rights, as ‘Asian values’ is one that shows how Buddhist ideas are used by many politicians in Asia. The current situation for Buddhism in China needs to be seen in the context of a speech to UNESCO made in March 2014 by China’s President Xi Jinping. He outlined how Buddhism had originated in India but once it had reached China it had integrated with Taoism and Confucianism and developed into ‘Buddhism with Chinese characteristics’ (Xi Jinping, 2014). This is a significant development in Chinese state attitudes towards Buddhism as it appears to recognise the importance of Buddhism in China and the contribution of Buddhism to Chinese culture and Chinese culture to Buddhism. However, Buddhism continued to be linked to ongoing commercialization of temples and monasteries and institutions such as the famous Shaolin temple which has run from 1999 as a commercial enterprise, run by its abbot, or CEO monk, Shi Yongxin (Chen, 2015). The Famen temple near Xi’an has also been the focus of commercial activity as the relics of the Buddha’s finger form a focus for Buddhist pilgrimage. Moreover, by 2020 reforms aimed at the Sinicization of Buddhism now stress that the study of the thoughts of Xi Jinping are central to the reform of Buddhism in China. So now at Buddhist temples like the Da Ci’en (Great Wild Goose) Pagoda in Xi’an, established by Xuanzang in 646 CE, Buddhist monks study the doctrines of Xi Jinping as a central aspect of Buddhism (Bandurski, 2020). Xi Jinping has also called for Buddhism in Tibet to be Sinicized (Lewis, 2020), and 2021 reports indicate that a key point in this process is the study of Xi Jinping’s thought as a central feature of current Communist Party of China understanding of what constitutes Buddhism (Pollard, 2021). Chinese government policy in Tibet in the last decade or more has been focused on suppression of Tibetans’ protest campaigns against Chinese control of Tibet and Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism. An important element in Tibetan protests since 2009 has been individuals who committed suicide by self-immolation; this led to crackdowns by the Chinese authorities to make such protests difficult to perform and to prevent them being publicized. In parallel with this, there were ongoing moves by the Chinese state to claim authority in religious matters for itself to the degree that it now claims to be able to identify by itself who the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama will be. The paradox of an atheist state being able to identify a reincarnation is profound but is based in the end on the simple possession of a particular bowl that belonged to the Panchen Lama which was used to draw lots out of indicating who is the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama. Indeed, they used this method when identifying the 14-year-old they chose as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, whom they put forward as an alternative leader for Tibetan Buddhism. In March 2015 the Chinese government went as far as to say that the Dalai Lama is ‘profaning Buddhism’ by saying he may not be reincarnated, as they are now the sole body with the authority to authorise Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations (McDonell, 2015).

Thailand As around 95% of Thais are Buddhists, all sides of the political spectrum claim Buddhist affiliations at times for their ideologies. For instance, in the period when Thaksin Shinawatra was Prime Minister of Thailand (2001–2006), both he and his opponents used Buddhist rhetoric 16

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in support of their positions. Thaksin linked his own free-market reform of the economy to a concept of a ‘social contract’ to Buddhist ideas. In a speech he gave in 1999 on the influence of the Buddhist reformer Buddhadasa (1906–1993), he argued that Buddhadasa had said, ‘Politics is dhamma and dhamma is politics’, and claimed that what Buddhadasa, and by implication all Buddhist reformers, wanted was a government of men of moral integrity, and he was himself such a person (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2004, p. 137). However, opponents of Thaksin, such as the engaged Buddhist campaigner Sulak Sivaraksa, criticized Thaksin for being the embodiment of Mara, a devil-like tempter figure in Buddhism, while also arguing that Thai democracy should be based on ‘good governance, a righteous ruler, and Buddhist Dhammic kingship’ (Kitiarsa, 2006). Thaksin blamed bandits for Islamic separatism in the south of Thailand and denied it had a link to a conflict between Thailand as a Buddhist state and militant Islam. His advocacy of a strong military solution to the separatism in the South and opposition to his economic reforms exacerbated the conflict between Buddhists and Muslims during his period in office (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2004, pp. 234–239). However, by 2022 government suppression of separatism in Southern Thailand (Schonthal, 2016) has all but led to its disappearance from news reports from Thailand. But, there still appears to have been no progress in resolving the basic issues between the Thai Buddhist state and Southern Thai Islamic separatists (Bakhshi, 2021). Buddhist monks took part in the extended period of civil unrest in Thailand that led up to the military coup on 22 May 2014 led by General Prayuth. Buddhist monks, such as Buddha Issara, took a prominent part in the anti-government protests and gave speeches on the stages set up in Bangkok as part of the movement to stop the city and topple the government of Yingluk Shinawatra. Since the coup Prayuth, now Prime Minister Prayuth, has affirmed his support for Buddhism but also affirmed that people’s faith in Buddhism must be strengthened by cracking down on inappropriate behaviour by monks (‘Declining faith in monks must be fixed: Prayuth’, 2014). In the main part he has continued to use a similar strong approach to governing the monastic sangha as he has used in many other aspects of governance. The junta has continued to rule since 2019 when it called a general election under a revised electoral system which once again led to his confirmation as the Prime Minister of Thailand. Recent studies of the situation up to 2017 (Dubus, 2018) suggest that the situation remained fairly consistent up to then. In the run-up to the 2019 election, there were also concerns raised in the press at the rise of a new Buddhist Party, the Pandin Dharma Party, which campaigned on the platform that Thailand was becoming too secular and the regime was giving undue favour to the Muslim minority (Wongcha-um, 2019). In a sign of the changing times in Thailand, the government has now also proposed legislation to prohibit monastics taking part in any form of social activism (Kurzydlowski, 2022).

Japan Buddhism in Japan presents a number of apparent contradictions. Over 80% of Japanese people describe themselves as not following any particular religion, yet at the same time around twothirds of Japanese people say that they follow both Shinto and Buddhism (Iwai, 2017). This reflects how for many Japanese people everyday life is led in ways which are largely secular, but at the same time they observe Shinto traditions and follow Buddhism in matters related to funeral traditions and the celebration of the Bon festivals in honour of the ancestors. Alongside this around 13% of Japanese voters support a party that has Buddhist affiliations, the New Komeito Party, or ‘New Clean Government Party’. This was formed as the Komeito party in 1964 by the lay Buddhist Soka Gakkai organisation, whose teachings are an offshoot of 17

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the Nichiren Buddhist tradition (Hardacre). The party publicly distanced itself from the Soka Gakkai movement in 1999 and was renamed as the ‘New Komeito Party’ (NKP). The NKP’s website asserts that it has had no formal links with the Soka Gakkai since its foundation in 1964 (‘New Komeito’s Views on Politics and Religion in Japan’, 2013). The role of Buddhism in Japanese politics is often underestimated, but it continues to influence politics in Japan as New Komeito is a junior party in the ruling coalition. It was part of the ruling coalition with the LDP from 1999 to 2009 and has been in the ruling coalition again since 2012. The influence of the NKP was highlighted in 2014 when Shinzo Abe’s government sought to revoke Article 9 of the Japanese constitution on the non-use of military forces and tensions over this arose between the pacifist-orientated NKP and the LDP. These were only resolved by a compromise in March 2015 (‘Coalition reaches deal on security laws’, 2015) which led to a watered-down resolution that the NKP was able to support. Following Shinzo Abe’s resignation in September 2021, in the subsequent elections the ruling coalition was re-elected under the leadership of Fumio Kishida, and the number of lower-house NKP representatives increased from 29 to 32 (Hayat and Ashley, 2021). Klein and McLaughlin argue in a recent study that although NKP now functions as a largely secular party, its aims are still shaped by its Buddhist origins, and by its ongoing role in the ruling coalition it exerts a strong influence on contemporary Japanese politics (Klein and McLaughlin, 2022).

Vietnam The Vietnamese government publicly supports religious traditions, including Buddhism, whilst at the same time seeking to stamp out what it regards as superstitions. This means that whenever it dislikes any particular grouping, it labels it a superstition and can ban it (King, 1996; Do, 1999). There is only one official Vietnamese Buddhist organisation that represents some 55,000 Vietnamese monks and nuns. This is the state-sponsored Vietnamese Buddhist Sangha which celebrated its 40th anniversary on 7 November 2021. Reflecting a somewhat similar integration of nationalism into Buddhism as is found in China, the Vietnamese head monk the Venerable Thich Thien Nhon emphasized at the 40th anniversary celebrations that it was led by its motto ‘Dharma, Nation, Socialism’ (Barua, 2021). The issues associated with the degrees of freedom of religion in Vietnam are reflected in the life of its most prominent twentieth-century Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), who is regarded by many as being the founder of engaged Buddhism (Hanh, 1993). He was forced into exile in 1966 and was only able to return after 39 years of exile. He stayed over a three-year period during 2005–2008 before his final return after he was incapacitated by a stroke to spend the last years of his life in Vietnam in 2018–2022 (‘Thich Nhat Hanh: Extended Biography’, n.d.). His visits during 2005–2008 were also a source of considerable controversy as monks in Vietnam argued that the government was using them to show they were liberal in their attitude to Buddhism, whilst at the same increasing repression of Buddhists and the ‘Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam’ which had been banned in 1981. However, that there are possibilities to negotiate these challenges is shown by the way that one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s disciples, the monk Minh Niệm, has become a well-known monk in Vietnam associated with promoting mental well-being through drawing on both Mahayana and Vipassana teachings and reconnecting with the environment (Niem, 2012). He also sought to establish a community in Vietnam in 2016 in some ways akin to Thich Nhat Hanh’s ‘Plum village’ under the name of ‘Cherry Blossom Village’ (Bản Hoa Anh Đào).

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Myanmar In Myanmar (formerly Burma) the relationship between Buddhism and politics has been shaped by governance of the country by military regimes over many years. The only exception to this being the period from 2011 to 2021 during which there was a form of democratic governance. Prior to 1990 large parts of the sangha supported pro-democracy elements and the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi. However, the military ignored a 1990 election victory by the NLD and set out to suppress opposition to it in the state and in the Sangha. This culminated in the police attacking a meeting of 7,000 monks in Mandalay to which 20,000 monks responded by boycotting the regime (Mathews, 1999). The government then set out to drive elements hostile to it from the sangha and sought to appropriate Buddhist rhetoric to legitimate its rule. The mangala sutta was promoted as a basis for government policy, and the generals appeared from time to time on television in white robes, like lay Buddhists observing the eight precepts on special days (Houtman, 1999). The notion of virtue was also contested in Burmese politics with both Aung San Suu Kyi and the regime asserting that what they were doing was acting on Buddhist principles and promoting Buddhist virtues. This situation dramatically changed after the election in 2011 when under the leadership of former general, and now President Thein Sein a liberalizing approach was adopted for the governance of Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, and she and the NLD were allowed to take an active part in politics. As part of the liberalization, many monks who had been imprisoned for their anti-government activities were also released. By 2012 a new problem emerged with the emergence of violent anti-Muslim movements within the Buddhist community with some possible support from elements in the military factions. As a symbol of identity, one group adopted the term ‘969’ which relates to a set of key Buddhist beliefs, the nine attributes of the Buddha, the six attributes of the dharma and the nine attributes of the sangha. This was intended to be a symbol to use in distinction to the common Muslim use of the number 768 as a way to represent a phrase used at the beginning of an activity (Bismillāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm). One of the most prominent leaders of the 969 movement is a monk, Ashin Wirathu, who was periodically detained at various times along with other monks. He describes himself as ‘the Burmese bin Laden’ and has led an active collaboration with the Bodu Bala Sena from Sri Lanka (see the Sri Lanka section next) in opposition to what he sees as the Muslim threat to Buddhist cultures (Sirilal and Aneez, 2014). This led to anti-Muslim riots, often directed at Rohingya Muslim communities, which began in May 2012 and which have continued sporadically since that time (Thompson, 2013). The 1 February  2021 military coup followed a general election in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party had again won a landslide victory. Widespread public protests under the banner of the Campaign for Civil Disobedience (CDM) have been violently suppressed by the ruling military junta under the leadership of Military Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing. The junta has also adopted a policy of fostering support for its actions amongst the Buddhist Sangha and suppressing participation by the Sangha in protests against the military junta. This has included massive donations, at four times pre-coup levels, to the Buddhist sangha; getting leading monks such as the hard-line Sitagu Sayadaw to accompany coup leaders on an armspurchasing mission to Russia in 2021; and releasing Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk who leads the anti-Muslim 969 movement, in September 2021 (Mendelson, 2022). Despite these efforts to get the Buddhist Sangha to support the coup, Buddhist monks have also been prominent in public protests against the coup, which has led to monasteries being occupied by the military and many younger monks being imprisoned or having to flee into exile, whilst at the

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same time Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta, or Tatmadaw, has claimed that it is ‘the country’s ultimate spiritual guardian’ (Beech, 2021). This has led to tension amongst many lay Buddhists about whether by supporting the Buddhist sangha they are supporting Buddhist monastics teaching that Buddhism is about the wellbeing of all people, or Buddhist monastics who support the military junta as the protector of the Buddhist state (Banu and Zhang, 2021).

Sri Lanka Conflict between the Tamils and the Singhalese dominated the relationship of Buddhism to politics in Sri Lanka from 1980 to 2009, and since then tensions between Buddhism and Islam have also become prominent in Sri Lanka. The background to this goes back to Angarika Dhammapala’s nineteenth-century reforms and independence movements figures such as Walpole Rahula. In Rahula’s seminal pre-independence work of 1946 Bhikshuvage Urumaya (‘The Heritage of the Monk’), he rejected the notion that monks could not play an active role in society and in politics, and favoured the development of the role of the ‘political monk’ (Malalgoda, 1977; Bartholomeusz, 1999, 2016). This led by 2001 to conservative nationalist Buddhist monks forming a political party called Baddegama Samitha which then became ‘The National Heritage Party’, or Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU). JHU monks then sat in parliament as elected politicians, and from 2007 to 2014 the JHU formed part of the coalition government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa. However, in January 2015 the JHU shifted their support to the government of Maithripala Sirisena when he won the January  2015 election. This may have led to them losing political influence as the JHU has largely ceased to exist since constitutional changes and elections in 2019 led to a new government under the leadership of Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister. After the defeat of the Tamil Tiger movement in 2009 under the government of Mahinda Rajapaksha, some militant Buddhist groups turned their attention towards Muslim communities and sites. Prominent amongst this is the Bodu Bala Sena, or ‘Buddhist Brigade’ which has been influential in fomenting anti-Muslim violence. The BBS was founded in 2004 as a breakaway from the JHU and actively campaigned from 2012 onwards over issues such as whether Buddhist migrant workers in Arab countries were able to practice their religion freely. By June 2014 the BBS and the anti-Muslim rhetoric it employs appear to have been part of the motivation for anti-Muslim riots in Aluthgama (‘Sri Lanka Muslims killed in Aluthgama clashes with Buddhists’, 2014). Anti-Muslim viewpoints have continued to play a prominent role in Sri Lankan politics since this time and were particularly inflamed by Muslim bombings of Christian churches and high-profile buildings in Columbo on 19 April 2019 which may have contributed to the victory of the hard-line leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president in November 2019. Some commentators now argue that anti-Muslim and pro-Buddhist rhetoric, formally advocated by the JHU and then its offshoot the BBS, has become a mainstay of government rhetoric along with the implementation of measures in order to oppress Muslim minorities, such as an order on 19 March 2021 closing one thousand Islamic schools and banning the wearing of the burqa in public (Haniffa, 2021).

South Korea Buddhism in Korea has been through a number of phases of waxing and waning in influence varying from its dominance during the Koryo dynasty (918–1392) through to anti-Buddhist statutes enacted during the Choson dynasty (1392–1910). Twentieth-century Japanese imperialism 20

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also led to heavy interference by the state in the monastic rules of the sangha. Government control of Buddhist monasteries and temples was further entrenched by the 1961 law on control of Buddhist property in the republic of South Korea. Under the government of Park Chung Hee from 1962 to his assassination in 1979, Buddhism was seen as supporting the regime and was supported by the regime. The next dictator, and then president, Chun Doohwan (1979–1988), was a staunch Christian who withdrew support from Buddhism and tried to attack it wherever possible. Chun turned monasteries and temples into national parks and took control of their lands and began to develop them as tourist resorts. By 1980 this led to open conflict between the sangha and the state. Arrests and repression of Buddhist monks continued and culminated in the popular uprisings of 1986 which led to the first democratic elections in South Korea. The dominant Jogye Order tries to maintain order within the diverse groups of monks in temples, monasteries and renunciate orders that make up its membership. At times this has boiled over into actual fighting, as happened in 1994 at the main Jogyesa Temple in Seoul, for control of the order (Sorensen, 1999). In another incident at Jogyesa Temple in 1998, over a hundred monks barricaded themselves in the temple in protest over the control of funds by another faction of monks and in the end the occupation had to be broken up by riot police (‘Monks charged over temple violence’, 1998). As well as Buddhists fighting with Buddhists in South Korea, there is also a history of Christian attacks on Buddhist monasteries, sites, monuments and individuals which has been going on since 1982. In view of the ways in which the South Korean government has taken an active part in the management of the sangha and its property since 1945, it is also evident that these conflicts cannot be seen in isolation from political struggles in South Korea over wealth, property and the rights of different communities. During the office of President Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013), there was considerable tension in South Korea due to his strong Protestant beliefs causing him to appear to favor Protestant Christianity. This led to major demonstrations by over sixty thousand Buddhists and others in Seoul in 2008. However, from 2013 to 2017 while President Park Geun-hye was in office, religion seems to have played a less divisive role in politics. President Park Geun-hye has been described as an atheist who has been influenced by Buddhism and Catholicism, and her tenure in office marked a period in which the government adopted an even-handed approach to religion (Song and Ko, 2012). However, in 2022 politics in Korea continues to reflect the ongoing political friction between supporters of Christianity and Buddhism in Korea. One indication of this is that in the run-up to the 2022 election, there was a controversy over comments made by a well-known politician, Jung Chung-rae, who is a Christian, from the ruling liberal Democratic Party of Korea. He compared the behavior of Buddhists to a story about a swindler in a traditional Korean folk story, a character called Bongi Kim Seon-dal, and said that Buddhists were also exploiting people by charging them for entry into cultural heritage sacred sites (Da-min, 2022). There were also protests led by the prominent Jogye Buddhist Order at its temple in Seoul against the ruling party and perceived bias against Buddhists by then President Moon Jae-in whose term in office came to an end in the presidential election of 2022 (Park, 2022).

Taiwan Taiwan is home to an extraordinary range of Buddhist movements such as the Fo Guang Shan, Tzu Chi and Dharma Drum Mountain. There are also numerous questions that have been raised about the relationship between traditional Buddhism, business and politics. The Fo Guang Shan movement, also known outside of Taiwan as the ‘Buddha’s Light International Association’, is an exemplar of this. It was founded in 1967 by the Venerable Hsing Yun and has founded many 21

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temples around the world. These include the Nan Tien Temple in Wollongong, Australia, and the Hsi Lai Temple in California, USA. It is extremely wealthy and is actively engaged in educational and charity work and is the largest Buddhist organization in Taiwan. It is not surprising therefore that it should be courted by political leaders, as essentially such a large organization cannot but be seen as a potential vote-bank in any democratic system. Venerable Hsing Yun has also at times been labelled a ‘political monk’ as he has made comments on Chinese reunification and supported the Tibetan cause. There is also considerable overlap in Taiwan between the government and the sangha. In particular a number of religious leaders have played active roles in politics which has led to a blurring of the line between religion and politics (Laliberte, 2004, pp. 42–43). There has been a continued growth in the last decade in socially engaged Buddhism in Taiwan, and groups such as the Tzu Chi Foundation have a membership of around five million in Taiwan and two million overseas. In addition, overseas membership of Taiwanese Buddhist groups is growing rapidly, with Tzu Chi membership in Malaysia growing from 100,000 to one million in 2013 (Sui, 2014). However, it should be noted that groups like Tzu Chi, which was founded by a nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen, could be characterised as charitable groups inspired by Buddhist ideals rather than Buddhist organisations (Schak and Hsiao, 2005). In terms of the impact of Buddhism on politics in Taiwan, Schak (2009) argues that the large scale of involvement in community-building by Buddhist organisations has fostered the growth of engagement with political representation in Taiwan. The general trends evident in Taiwanese Buddhist relations with politics have been maintained over the last decade. Commentators have also argued that influential Taiwanese Buddhist movements were, along with Christian groups and traditional Chinese religion traditions, part of the political landscape in Taiwan that led up to the election of Ms Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential election of 2016 (Xin et al., 2016).

Cambodia After the devastation during the Pol Pot regime era (1975–1979), Cambodia has seen an extraordinary rebirth of Buddhist culture which highlights the way that diaspora community members are able to interact with their own countries of origin. Since 1989 when the People’s Republic of Kampuchea started lifting restrictions on religions, large numbers of monasteries have been rebuilt, and the number of monks and nuns has increased enormously. The sangha is today largely seen as a supporter of the government and its leader Hun Sen. That there were other possibilities for perceptions of Buddhism is shown by the work of Maha Ghosananda (1913–2007) who became an exiled Cambodian monk. He was well known for starting in 1992 a practice of dhammayatra (‘peace walks’) and organising from 1993 meditations by monks and nuns with the aim of influencing the creation of a ‘just constitution’ for Cambodia (Poethig, 2004, p. 204). Buddhism has continued to recover in Cambodia from its nadir during the regime of Pol Pot. However, as Ian Harris (2013) pointed out, there are still profound problems, and the situation of Buddhism has changed from ‘virtual extinction to a simulacrum of normality’ (Harris, 2013, p. 167). In general, during the period from 1998 to the present day, while Cambodia has been governed by Prime Minister Hun Sen Buddhist, monastic organisations have been able to function, but there has been from time to time discontent with government. After an election in September 2013, large crowds including Buddhist monks protested against the results of the election, and a three-day protest demonstration included an attempt by a monk, Venerable Sok Dyna, to self-immolate in protest against the governing regime (Titthara, 2013). 22

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The Cambodian state continues to closely monitor and control Buddhism in Cambodia. An example of this from 2021 was a provincial administration seeking to have the imagery in newly carved public statues of the Buddha altered to ensure that they conformed to government guidelines on Buddha statues in Cambodia released in 2014 (Bunthoeurn, 2021). There has also been recent debate over challenges to Buddhist engagements in public protests in Cambodia. In particular, civil society and opposition groups are opposing a proposal by the Ministry of Cults and Religion to ban all intentional involvement by monks in political protests and to make any sort of participation in social activism subject to 7 to 15 years of imprisonment (Dara, 2021).

India There are around ten million Buddhists in India out of its total population of over 1.25 billion people. The majority of Indian Buddhists come from around nine million dalit Buddhist supporters of B. R. Ambedkar. Due to this, Buddhism is a factor in the politics of some states, such as Uttar Pradesh (UP). Their support helped the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) gain government over four periods in UP between 2007 and 2012. However, support for the BSP all but collapsed by the 2022 UP assembly elections in the face of increased dominance by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government (Tandon, 2022). BJP central and state governments’ policies have marginalised dissenting voices from minority non-Hindu communities and undermined support for opposition parties. This has included opposition to a dalit Buddhist mass movement founded in 2015 called the Bhim Army led by Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, who was repeatedly arrested and detained from 2017 onwards for protesting against anti-dalit atrocities. In 2022 he formed a new political party, called the Azad Samaj Party, and unsuccessfully contested the seat held by the chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, in the 2022 UP assembly elections (Mathur, 2022). Yogi Adityanath’s government in UP has consistently attacked any opposition to its rule and in 2020 passed legislation outlawing mass religious conversions, a characteristic feature of Ambedkarite Buddhist activism (Venugopal, 2022). The other significant Buddhist populations in India are residents of the Himalayan regions of India and Tibetan refugees in India. After the Indo-Chinese war of 1962, the border areas between India and China become militarised zones, and tension and border skirmishes with China continue to this day. Indian governments have normally maintained a balance between hard-line and soft-line approaches to India-China. Since the BJP government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected in May 2014, it followed a policy of reaching out to Indian Buddhists and of supporting Tibetan exiles within India and the Dalai Lama as a guest of India. In a signal of the continuing influence of this approach, in 2021 the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prominently publicized that he had sent birthday greetings to the Dalai Lama at a time when India-China relations were at a low point due to military clashes on the border (Mohan, 2021). Overall, the relationship between Buddhism and politics in India at this time is dominated by BJP policies. The BJP courts dalit votes, while suppressing dalit movements, and incorporates Tibetan Buddhists in exile in India into its Hindu majoritarian politics while marginalizing non-Hindu Indian communities (Bakshi, 2019).

Western Buddhism Despite the prominence of Buddhism in Western countries, the majority of Buddhists in Western countries come from Asian backgrounds and make up only a few percent of the population. For instance, there were 247,743 Buddhists in the 2011 UK census (0.5% of the population), 23

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560,000 Buddhists in the 2016 Australian census (2.4% of the population) and in 2015 around three million Buddhists in the US (1% of the population) according to a Pew Foundation report (‘The Changing Religious Composition of the U.S.’, 2015). Despite the relatively small numbers of Buddhists in Western countries, their influence is substantial as they often represent the visible face of Buddhism for Western cultures. However, Buddhists in western countries often come to be aligned with regional politics in western countries rather than Buddhism per se. For instance, in 2020 the Tibetan government in exile welcomed Donald Trump’s support for the Tibetan cause by his signing of an order reaffirming the right of Tibetans to choose the next Dalai Lama (Gupta, 2020). However, by 2021 the Tibetan Government in Exile had to express its disquiet at the sight of the raising of the Tibetan flag by protestors, possibly of Tibetan origin, during the storming the US Capitol Building in 2020 (Dharpo, 2021).

The future There is a growing disjuncture between perceptions of Buddhism as a force for global wellbeing and Buddhism as a vehicle for nationalist state protection, which is increasingly prominent in Asia at this time. Emblematic of visions of Buddhism as a force for global well-being was the twentiethcentury Engaged Buddhist movement which is often associated with the late Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. One of the striking features of Engaged Buddhism is that it became a form of global Buddhist movement in which Asians living in Asia and in the West, and Westerners in the West and in Asia interacted and campaigned for universal civil rights, environmental protection and democratic governance (King, 1996). However, despite the success of this movement internationally, its influence now seems to be increasingly under challenge in many Asian countries. In China, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and other Asian countries, Buddhist values are often cited as an element in ‘Asian values’ which form part of how non-democratic state governments are protecting Buddhism. Emblematic of this development are programs to construct gigantic public Buddhist monuments to soldiers who were martyred in wars to defend Buddhist states. In Sri Lanka in 2019 the president and prime minister attended the inauguration of a giant state-sponsored stupa in honour of the soldiers who died fighting the Tamil Tiger liberation movement (‘Buddhism, politics and the military’, 2021). Constructing monuments to soldiers who died in protection of Buddhist states does not seem to go back to ancient Buddhist traditions, in which monuments such as stupas were built to house the relics of the Buddha and other highly spiritually realised Buddhists. The construction of a temple honouring Buddhist soldiers who died fighting for the state first came to prominence in Japan during the 1930s and is still part of state-sponsored religion in Japan (Victoria, 2015). More recent Buddhist monuments to war dead include the Tawang Stupa in India which was built in 2000 to honour the memory of the soldiers who died defending Eastern India against the Chinese military in the 1962 Indo-Chinese war (‘Welcome to Tawang’, 2009). Thailand also saw the construction during 1990–2018 of a gigantic 92-metre Buddha statue at Wat Muang Monastery which includes memorial gardens in memory of the eighteenth-century Burmese-Siamese war (‘Thailand’s Biggest Buddha’, n.d.). Alongside these Buddhist war memorial monuments, there is also an emerging trend of constructing gigantic Buddhist monuments. General Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta in Myanmar, is sponsoring the building of the largest carved marble Buddha in the world, which is being described as ‘a place of prayer for national peace and stability’ (‘Myanmar junta goes big on giant Buddha statue in midst of crisis’, 2021). 24

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Another way in which Buddhism can be seen as being refashioned into contemporary ‘Stateprotection Buddhism’ is the extent to which some states argue that Nationalism is an integral part of Buddhism, such as in China and Sri Lanka. Another striking example of this is found in Vietnamese Buddhism where the honouring of those who died as freedom fighters in wars waged against Vietnam has over time been fully integrated into everyday Buddhist practice (Malarney, 2001). My conclusion is that the future of the relationship between Buddhism and politics will be shaped by contemporary developments in East Asian countries. This will reflect a tension between Buddhism as a support to movements for universal well-being and Buddhism as a form of practice aimed at ‘state protection’ in Buddhist states. On the one hand engaged Buddhists in Asia and globally will, as in the twentieth century, identify with Buddhism as a world religion that supports universal well-being amongst all living beings. On the other hand, Buddhism is likely to remain enmeshed in national struggles for identity. In this dimension of Buddhism, it is likely that Buddhists may be involved with conflicts with non-Buddhists, particularly followers of Islam, and the leaders of Buddhist states may assert that protection of Buddhist states justifies Buddhist violence against other states, and against non-Buddhists.

References Aneez S. and Sirila R. (2014, July 12). ‘Sri Lankan Muslim leader warns of radicalization after clashes’. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sri-lanka-muslims-violence/sri-lankan-muslim-leader-warns-ofradicalization-after-clashes-idUSKBN0FG25L20140711 Atlasobscura (n.d.) ‘Thailand’s biggest Buddha’, Atlasobscura. Available at: www.atlasobscura.com/places/ thailands-biggest-buddha (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Bakhshi, U. (2021) ‘The apparent stalemate in Thailand’s deep South’, The Diplomat, 20 December. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2021/12/the-apparent-stalemate-in-thailands-deep-south/ (Accessed: 30 April 2022). Bakshi, A. (2019) ‘An election in exile: Making the Tibetan vote count’, Mint, 22 April. Available at: www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/an-election-in-exile-making-the-tibetan-votecount-1555666350503.html (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Bandurski, D. (2022) ‘Xi Jinping at buddhism’s core’, Chinamediaproject, 9 November. Available at: https:// chinamediaproject.org/2020/11/09/xi-jinping-at-buddhisms-core/ (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Banu, F. and Kevin Z. (2021) ‘Split within the sangha: Divergent responses towards the Myanmar coup’, New Mandala, 28 May. Available at: www.newmandala.org/split-within-the-sangha-divergentresponses-towards-the-myanmar-coup/. (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Bartholomeusz, T. (1999) ‘First amongst equals: Buddhism and the Sri Lankan state, in Harris, I. (ed.) Buddhism and politics in twentieth-century Asia. London and New York: Continuum, pp 173–193. Bartholomeusz, T. (2016) In defense of Dharma, just-war ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Barua, Dipen, (2021) ‘Vietnam Buddhist sangha celebrates 40th anniversary’, Buddhist Door, 12 November. Available at: www.buddhistdoor.net/news/vietnam-buddhist-sangha-celebrates-40th-anniversary/ (Accessed: 13 April 2022). Beech, Hannah. (2021) ‘Myanmar’s monks, leaders of past protests, are divided over the coup’, The New York Times, 18 October. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/world/asia/myanmar-monkscoup.html (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Bunthoeurn, O. (2021) ‘Ministry seeking modifications to statues of Buddha’, The Phnom Penh Post, 13 September. Available at: www.phnompenhpost.com/national/ministry-seeking-modifications-statuesbuddha (Accessed: 13 April 2022). Chen, S. (2015 ‘China’s controversial Buddhist abbot of Shaolin Temple turns his back on title of ‘CEO monk’, South China Morning Post, 10 March. Available at: www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1734156/chinas-controversial-buddhist-abbot-shaolin-temple-turns-his-back-title (Accessed: November 26 2022). ‘Coalition reaches deal on security laws’ (2015) The Yomiuri Shimbun, 19 March. Available at: http://thejapan-news.com/news/article/0002017748 (Accessed: 29 March 2015).

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Peter Friedlander Da-min, J. (2022) ‘Outspoken lawmaker stands ground in party despite Buddhist backlash’, The Korea Times, 19 January. Available at: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/01/356_322557. html (Accessed: 2 January 2023). Dara, V. (2021) ‘Possible jail for monks at political rally events’, The Phnom Penh Post, 8 December. Available at: www.phnompenhpost.com/national/possible-jail-monks-political-rally-events. (Accessed: 13 April 2022). Dharpo, T. (2021) ‘Tibetan flag among Capitol Hill rioters’, Phayul, 8 January. Available at: www.phayul. com/2021/01/08/45080/ (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Do, T. (1999) ‘The quest for enlightenment and cultural identity: Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam’, in Harris, I. (ed.). Buddhism and politics in twentieth-century Asia. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 254–284. Dubus, A. (2018). Buddhism and politics in Thailand. Bangkok: IRASEC. Flood, G. (1998) An introduction to Hinduism. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Friedlander, P. (2006) ‘Buddhism and politics’, in Haynes, J. (ed.), The politics of religion, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 3–12. Gupta, S. (2020), ‘Donald Trump defies Chinese warning, signs off on law on next Dalai Lama’, Hindustan Times, 28 December. Available at: www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/from-donald-trump-tochina-s-xi-a-pinprick-over-us-law-on-next-dalai-lama/story-DrUVbLJgy6mpb8VPgOOwsM.html (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Hanh, T. (1993) ‘Interbeing’: Fourteen guidelines for engaged Buddhism. Berkeley: Parallax Press. Haniffa, F. (2021) ‘What is behind the anti-Muslim measures in Sri Lanka?’, Al Jazeera, 12 April. Available at: www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/12/what-is-behind-the-anti-muslim-measures-in-sri-lanka. (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Harris, I. (ed.) (1999) Buddhism and politics in twentieth-century Asia. London and New York, Continuum. Harris, I. (ed.) (2007) Buddhism, power and political order. London and New York: Routledge. Harris, I. (2013) Buddhism in a dark age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hayat, M. and Ashley, R. (2021) ‘The hidden power of Komeito on Japanese politics’, East Asia Forum, 3 December. Available at: www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/12/03/the-hidden-power-of-komeito-onjapanese-politics/ (Accessed: 12 April 2022). Houtman, G. (1999) Mental culture in Burmese crisis politics. Tokyo: ILCAA Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series, no. 33. Indian Express (2009) ‘Welcome to Tawang’, Indian Express, 8 November. Available at: https:// www-proquest-com.virtual.anu.edu.au/newspapers/welcome-tawang/docview/238309098/se2?accountid=8330 (Accessed: 30 April 2022). Iwai, N. (2017) ‘Measuring religion in Japan’, Pew Research Center, 11 October. Available at: www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/11/Religion20171117.pdf. (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Khosla, S. (1989) The historical evolution of the Buddha legend. Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House. King, S. (1996) ‘Thich Nhat Hanh and the Unified Buddhist Church’, in Queen, C. and King, S. (eds.). Engaged Buddhism, Buddhist liberation movements in Asia. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 321–364. Kitiarsa, P. (2006) In defense of the Thai-style democracy. Available at: www.ari.nus.edu.sg/showfile. asp?eventfileid=188 (Accessed: 7 February 2007). Klein, A. and McLaughlin, L. (2022) ‘Kōmeitō: The party and its place in Japanese politics’, in Pekkanen, R. J. and Pekkanen, S. M. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of Japanese politics, (Accessed: 12 April 2022). Komeito (2013) ‘New Komeito’s views on politics and religion in Japan’, Komeito. Nd. Available at: www. komei.or.jp/en/about/view.html (Accessed: 30 April 2022). Kurzydlowski. C. (2022) ‘Is Thailand’s Buddhist Sangha undergoing a political sea change?’, The Diplomat, 18 February. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2022/02/is-thailands-buddhist-sangha-undergoing-a-political-sea-change/ (Accessed: 2 January 2023). Laliberte, A. (2004) The politics of Buddhist organisations in Taiwan. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Lee, S, (2017) Kingship as ‘Dharma-protector’: A comparative study of Wŏnhyo and Huizhao’s views on the ‘Golden Light Sutra’. Journal of Korean Religions, 8(1), pp. 93–129. Lewis, C. (2020) ‘Xi Jinping calls for “Sinicization” of Tibetan Buddhism’, Buddhistdoor.global, 30 August. Available at: https://www.buddhistdoor.net/news/xi-jinping-calls-for-sinicization-of-tibetan-buddhism/ (Accessed: 2 January 2023).

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Buddhism and politics Long, W. (2021) A Buddhist approach to international relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Malalgoda, K. (1977) ‘Buddhism in post-independence Sri Lanka’, in Oddie, G. (ed.), Religion in South Asia: Religious conversion and revival movements in South Asia in medieval and modern times. London: Curzon Press, pp. 183–189. Malarney, S. K. (2001) ‘ “The fatherland remembers your sacrifice”: Commemorating war dead in North Vietnam’, in Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.) The country of memory: Remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 46–76. Mathews, B. (1999) ‘Buddhism and the nation in Myanmar’, in Harris, I. (ed.) Buddhism and politics in twentieth-century Asia. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 26–53. Mathur, Mudit, (2022) ‘Saffron juggernaut rolls on’, Tehelka, 16 March. Available at: http://tehelka.com/ saffron-juggernaut-rolls-on/ (Accessed: 24 April 2022). McDonell, Stephen. (2015) ‘China accuses Dalai Lama of “profaning” Buddhism by signaling end to reincarnation’, 10 March. Available at: www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-10/china-attacks-dalai-lama-overbid-to-cease-reincarnation/6296420; www.abc.net. (Accessed: November 26 2022). Mendelson, A. (2022) ‘Myanmar’s military turns to Buddhism in bid for legitimacy’, Al Jazeera, 30 January. Available at: www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/30/myanmars-military-turns-to-buddhism-in-bidfor-legitimacy (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Mohan, G. (2021) ‘PM Modi wished Dalai Lama on birthday, first public acknowledgement since 2015’, India Today, 6 July, Available at: www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-modi-tibetian-spiritual-leaderdalai-lama-birthday-wish-1824584-2021–07–06 (Accessed:11 April 2022). ‘Monks charged over temple violence’ (1998) BBC News, 24 December. Available at: http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/241066.stm (Accessed: 30 April 2022). Moore, M. J. (2015) Political theory in canonical Buddhism. Philosophy East and West, 65(1), pp. 36–64. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/43285775 (Accessed 11 April 2022). Niem, M. (2012) Understanding the heart: The art of living in happiness. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouseUK. Nikkei Asia (2021) ‘Myanmar junta goes big on giant Buddha statue in midst of crisis’, Nikkei Asia, May  12, Available at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Myanmar-Crisis/Myanmar-junta-goes-bigon-giant-Buddha-statue-in-midst-of-crisis (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Norman, K. (1997) A philological approach to Buddhism. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. Park, Ga-young, (2022) ‘Thousands of aggrieved monks stage protest against government’s perceived religious bias’, Korea Herald, 21 January. Available at: www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220121000667 (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Pew Research Center (2015) ‘The changing religious composition of the U.S.’, Pew Research Center. Available at: www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-compositionof-the-u-s/ (Accessed: 30 April 2022). Phongpaichit, P. and Baker, C. (2004) Thaksin: The business of politics in Thailand. Chang Mai: Silkworm Books. Plum Village (n.d.) ‘Thich Nhat Hanh: Extended biography’, Plum Village. Available at: https:// plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/thich-nhat-hanh-full-biography. (Accessed: 13 April 2022). Poethig, K. (2004) ‘The transnational in Cambodia’s Dhammayatra’, in Marston, J. and Guthrie, E. (eds.), History, Buddhism, and new religious movements in Cambodia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 197–212. Pollard, M. Q. (2021) ‘Xi Jinping is my spiritual leader: China’s education drive in Tibet’, Reuters.com, 12 June. Available at: www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-jinping-is-my-spiritual-leader-chinaseducation-drive-tibet-2021–06–11/. (Accessed: 11 April 2022). Rahula, W. (1974) ‘Wrong notions of Dhammata (Dharmata)’, in Cousins, L et al. (eds.) Buddhist studies in honour of I.B. Horner. Dordrecht Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 181–191. Rahula, W. (1985) What the Buddha taught. London: Gordon Fraser. Reynolds, F. (1972) ‘The two wheels of dhamma’, in Smith, B. (ed.) The two wheels of dhamma. Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion, pp. 6–30. Schak, D. (2009) Community and the new Buddhism in Taiwan. Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore, 2009(3), pp.  161–192. Available at: https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/handle/10072/29414 (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Schak, D. and Hsin-Huang M. Hasiau. (2005) ‘Taiwan’s socially engaged Buddhist groups’, China Perspectives, Available at: http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/2803#tocto2n6 (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Schonthal, B. (2016) Buddhism, politics and the limits of law: The pyrrhic constitutionalism of Sri Lanka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Peter Friedlander Song Ho-kyun and Ko Na-mu (2012). ‘Park Geun-hye’s past and future’, Hankyoreh, 17 July. Available at: www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/542885.html. (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Sorensen, H. (1999) ‘Buddhism and secular power in twentieth-century Korea’, in Harris, I. (ed.) Buddhism and politics in twentieth-century Asia. London & New York: Continuum, pp. 127–152. ‘Sri Lanka Muslims killed in Aluthgama clashes with Buddhists’ (2014) BBC News, 16 June. Available at: www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27864716 (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Sui, C. (2014) ‘Meeting Taiwan’s new-age Buddhists’, BBC News, 29 January. Available at: www.bbc.com/ news/world-asia-25772194. (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Tamil Guardian (2021) ‘Buddhism, politics and the military in Sri Lanka – ‘Gigantic’ stupa built to honour Sri Lankan troops’, Tamil Guardian, 19 November. Available at: www.tamilguardian.com/content/ buddhism-politics-and-military-sri-lanka-gigantic-stupa-built-honour-sri-lankan-troops (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Tandon, A. (2022) ‘Mayawati and BSP’s free fall’, The Tribune, 17 April. Available at: www.tribuneindia. com/news/features/mayawati-and-bsps-free-fall-387073 (Accessed: 24 April 2022). The Nation (2014) ‘Declining faith in monks must be fixed: Prayuth’, The Nation, 17 June. Available at: www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Declining-faith-in-monks-must-be-fixed-Prayuth-30236408. html (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Thompson, N.G. (2013) ‘The 969 movement and Burmese anti-Muslim nationalism in context’, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 16 July. Available at: www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/the-969-movement-andburmese-anti-muslim-nationalism-in-context/ (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Titthara, M. (2013) ‘Protesting monk may be disrobed’, The Phnom Penh Post, 19 September. Available at: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/protesting-monk-may-be-disrobed. (Accessed: 29 March 2015). Venugopal, V. (2020) ‘Buddhist, Ambedkarite bodies say UP law that penalises mass conversions is a move to quell Dalit resistance’, Economic Times, 3 December. Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/buddhist-ambedkarite-bodies-say-up-law-that-penalises-massconversions-is-a-move-to-quell-dalit-resistance/articleshow/79550748.cms?from=mdr (Accessed: 24 April 2022). Victoria, B. (2015) War remembrance in Japan’s Buddhist cemeteries. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 13(31). Available at: https://apjjf.org/2015/13/31/Brian-Victoria/4353.html. (Accessed: 25 April 2022). Walshe, M. (1987) Thus have I heard: A new translation of the Digha Nikaya. London: Wisdom. Wongcha-um, P. (2019) ‘Buddhism under threat: Thai election gives platform to radicals’, Insider, 7 March. Available at: https://www.insider.com/buddhism-under-threat-thai-election-gives-platformto-radicals-2019-3 (Accessed: 2 January 2023). Xi, J. (2014) ‘Speech by H.E. Xi Jinping President of the People’s Republic of China at UNESCO headquarters’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People’s Republic of China. Available at: www.fmprc.gov.cn/ mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/t1142560.shtml. (Accessed: November 26 2022). Xin, L. M., Weim, L. T. and Yuen, K. T. (2016) ‘The role of religion in the Taiwan presidential election’, Today (Singapore), January  11. Available at: https://www.todayonline.com/chinaindia/china/ role-religion-taiwan-presidential-election (Accessed 2 January 2023). Yin, J. (2006) ‘Buddhism and economic reform in Mainland China’, in Miller, J. (ed.) Chinese religions in contemporary societies. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, pp. 85–99.

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3 CONSERVATIVE PROTESTANT POLITICAL OPINION A comparative perspective Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

For scholars of religion and American politics, theologically conservative Protestants have long been a major focus of research. Devout and doctrinally orthodox Protestants (who are often referred to as “evangelicals”, though this label is increasingly fraught) constitute a large religious demographic in the US – at least one-fifth of the population, or perhaps as much as one-third, depending on the definition used (Kurtzleben, 2015; Pew Research Center, 2015). Moreover, the Religious Right political movement in the US, which first rose to national prominence in the 1980s, emerged largely from the ranks of white conservative Protestants. Today a majority of white conservative Protestants in the US aligns with the ideological and partisan right. Notwithstanding the efforts of a vocal minority of progressive evangelicals (Hoover, 2003; Swartz, 2012), public opinion studies of religion and US politics have found that white conservative Protestants are more likely than average to be politically conservative not only on “traditional morality” issues like abortion and LGBTIQ+ rights but also broader issues like economic policy, Israel policy, and immigration (Guth, 2019; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt, 2019). These religious conservatives have become a core voting block for the Republican Party. Since the early 2000s, approximately eight out of ten white voters who self-identify as “evangelical” have cast their ballot for the Republican Party candidate in presidential elections. And since the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpist populism, there are growing concerns that these same “evangelicals” are embracing Christian nationalism and supporting efforts to lower barriers between religion and state (Burnett, 2022). The political opinions and actions of conservative Protestants have been enormously consequential and have naturally attracted voluminous scholarly inquiry, not to mention impassioned debate on normative grounds. By contrast, the question of conservative Protestant politics beyond US shores has attracted relatively less attention at either the scholarly or popular levels. The field of comparative conservative Protestant politics is less well developed, with fewer highquality multinational data sources. Moreover, the literature focused on the global/comparative level of analysis is divided. One stream of the literature reflects a narrative of American conservative Protestantism as an agent of ideological and cultural imperialism. Because of American conservative Protestantism’s financial and cultural power and its global missionary reach, this perspective often highlights signs that conservative Protestants abroad – especially in the Global South – are emulating the politics of the American Religious Right. By contrast, another stream of the literature reflects a narrative DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-4

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emphasizing the indigenization and autonomous agency of theologically conservative Protestant communities around the world. This perspective is more attuned to signs of variation and localization, including in politics. In this chapter, we contribute empirical clarity to the question of conservative Protestant political opinion globally through analysis of large multinational surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The ISSP has included a religion module in its recurring waves, the most recent of which are 2018 and 2008. This chapter draws primarily from the 2018 wave, although we also present a few findings from the 2008 wave with respect to variables and countries missing in the 2018 wave. The surveys included multiple measures of religious affiliation, belief, and behavior, as well as numerous measures of opinion on traditional morality issues, political parties, and relationships between religion and politics/power.

Background and literature Conservative protestant politics: made in America? The stream of literature that expects to find theologically conservative Protestants around the world emulating the American Religious Right’s overt politicization of religion, Christian nationalism, and right-wing ideology and partisanship has often been framed in terms of neocolonial/neo-imperialistic cultural flows. That is, the flow of cultural power and influence within global conservative Protestantism is seen as moving primarily from the US to developing countries. American conservative Protestant congregations, denominational bodies, and para-church organizations have substantial resources that they can and do apply around the world, supporting myriad forms of leadership training, missionary work and revivalism, humanitarian relief and development, broadcasting, and publishing. The argument that these flows of influence extend to politics is one that has been made for decades. For instance, Brouwer et al. (1996, p. 19) argued that Christian fundamentalists in other countries find common cause with American evangelists because the United States is the wellspring of anticommunism and a host of other cultural ideologies and values that have become transnational. Halfway around the world, religious leaders have managed to link the destinies of their countries to that of the United States. This long-standing narrative of the American Religious Right being replicated around the world frequently takes as its point of departure the transnational activism of organizations defending traditional moral values (“family values”, in movement parlance). Many such organizations are based in the US and have significant sources of support within conservative Protestant communities. Examples include the International Organization for the Family, and its World Congress of Families.1 The forms of activism include multinational networking as well as collaboration in lobbying and legal interventions in multilateral institutions and human rights courts. Battles over LGBTIQ+ rights have been particularly prominent in this space in recent years, though conflicts over abortion and religious education remain common as well. It is important to note as well that left-wing transnational activism on “culture war” issues has increased in tandem with right-wing activism. Social movement competition in the culture war is mutually motivating – that is, the presence of the cultural left in transnational fora motivates the cultural right to be present too, and vice versa. 30

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Some of the works that have drawn attention to the Religious Right’s international advocacy dimensions include titles such as Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics (Buss and Herman, 2003) and Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized (Butler, 2006). A recent example of reporting from a journalistic and critical perspective is a report issued in 2019 by the British news site OpenDemocracy, entitled “Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian ‘Fundamentalists’ Pour Millions of ‘Dark Money’ into Europe, Boosting the Far Right” (Provost and Ramsay, 2019). This report, along with an expanded report issued the following year (Provost et al., 2020), drew particular attention to two legal advocacy organizations, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), both of which have been active supporting conservative positions in abortion and gay marriage cases in various European countries and at the European Court of Human Rights. For instance, OpenDemocracy reports that the ADF was involved in Lee v. Ashers Baking Company, a 2018 case originating in Northern Ireland where the UK high court ruled in favor of conservative Protestant bakers who refused to decorate a cake with the message “Support Gay Marriage” (Gryboski, 2022). More broadly, the made-in-America narrative of international conservative Protestant politics has also been bolstered in recent years by the rise of populism. While “populism” exhibits left-wing economic and progressive-reformist strains, over the last 15 years, conservative cultural populism has been on the rise in many nations. Meyer (2021) aptly defines this sort of populism as follows: Cultural populism claims that the true people are the native members of the nationstate, and outsiders can include immigrants, criminals, ethnic and religious minorities, and cosmopolitan elites. Populists argue that these groups pose a threat to “the people” by not sharing their values. Cultural populists tend to emphasize religious traditionalism, law and order, anti-immigration positions, and national sovereignty. The Populists in Power database shows that the number of populist political leaders worldwide has increased sharply since the early 2000s, as has the proportion of those leaders who are cultural populists.2 Cultural populism often exudes, implicitly if not explicitly, an ethos of religious nationalism (or in some cases a broader religious “civilizationism”, such as in some manifestations of antiMuslim politics in Europe; see Brubaker, 2017 and Kratochvíl, 2019). To be sure, the connection between conservative Protestantism and populist religious nationalism varies tremendously according to national context. While it is largely irrelevant in places where Christianity has never been numerically or culturally dominant (e.g., India, where Prime Minister Modi is often considered a right-wing Hindu populist), in cases where Christianity has been historically dominant, the connection can be obvious. Nowhere has it been more obvious than in the US, especially since the surprise victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. In style and substance, Trump has been a quintessential cultural populist, initially rising to prominence by exploiting conspiracy theories like “birtherism” (the belief that Barack Obama is actually a Muslim born in Kenya) and demonizing immigrants who are not white and Christian. Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 and continued prominence in the GOP today is due in no small part to the steadfast support of white people who consider themselves to be evangelicals. The fact that such ostensibly devout Protestants have stuck with Trump despite his conspicuous record of irreligion, philandering, and vulgarity has struck many observers as mysterious, if not outright scandalous. Most interpret it as a result of a kind of transactional logic, under which 31

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social conservatives, having grown weary of waiting for concrete battle wins in the culture war, no longer much care who fights these battles for them, as long as they win (Gerson, 2020). Supreme Court politics can certainly be interpreted in this light, particularly since the landmark 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade (the 1973 decision granting a right to abortion), which was only possible because of Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court. However, while the appeal of Trump to a wide swath of white conservative Protestants in the US undoubtedly includes a set of transactional calculations, it may go deeper and broader than that, touching on grievances (whether real or imagined) at the level of national/cultural identity. Trump’s populist rhetoric may be crudely expressed, but it nonetheless resonates with a long history of white Protestant nationalism and related sentiments of entitlement to cultural dominance (Whitehead and Perry, 2020; Gorski, 2020; Gorski and Perry, 2022). As for right-wing populism globally, many observers and analysts see developments in other countries that are similar to, and perhaps even directly inspired and encouraged by, the US experience. One of the most common examples cited in support of the thesis of populist contagion is Jair Bolsonaro. Elected president of Brazil in 2018, Bolsonaro actively stoked rightwing cultural populism, and as such is often considered the Brazilian counterpart to Donald Trump. Catholic Bolsonaro received significant support in his electoral victory from Brazil’s fast-growing conservative Protestant (especially Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal) communities. These same communities have transnational ties with the US. Omar G. Encarnación (2017) anticipated this arrival of Bolsonaro-style politics in an article titled, “Amid Crisis in Brazil, the Evangelical Bloc Emerges as a Political Power”. Encarnación argued that In crafting their advocacy against moral decline, Brazilian evangelicals take their cues directly from the American Christian right . . . facilitated by the many transnational ties linking the American and Brazilian evangelical communities . . . . [For example,] Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN), the world’s largest religious broadcaster, reaches 220 Brazilian cities. Encarnación pointed especially to the dramatic increase in the number of conservative Protestants holding seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Known as the Bancada Evangélica (evangelical bloc), they now number over 90, some 15% of the legislature. And according to Encarnación, the evangelical bloc has strongly aligned with other conservative factions within the legislative body: “Together with the law-and-order lobby and the agrarian oligarchs, the evangelicals make up the formidable – and deeply conservative – ‘bullet, beef, and Bible’ ” caucus. Other analysts see analogous dynamics elsewhere in Latin America. Javier Corrales (2018) has argued that evangelicals are transforming politics by giving conservative causes, and especially political parties, new strength and new constituencies . . . . That there is convergence between the United States and Latin America on evangelical politics is no accident. American evangelicals coach their counterparts in Latin America on how to court parties, become lobbyists, and fight gay marriage. Corrales also points to evangelical mobilization to defeat a referendum in Columbia on a peace deal with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia, as well as evangelical backing of the conservative Sebastián Piñera in Chile’s 2017 presidential election. Opposition to LGBTIQ+ rights is a prominent thread running through evangelical mobilizations in other Global South contexts as well. In Africa, for example, numerous linkages have 32

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been documented between American Religious Right activists and anti-LGBTIQ+ agitation in Uganda (Dicklitch-Nelson, 2020). In Asia, opposition to gay marriage in South Korea is likewise often cited as an example of cross-national demonstration effects and learning (Yi et al., 2017). However, opposition to gay marriage has long been higher in these countries than in the US, and there are ways conservative influence may run not only from the US to these countries but also the other way around (McAlister 2019).

Conservative protestant politics: variations on a theme? Standing in contrast to the previous stream of analysis and interpretation, a second stream in the literature emphasizes that conservative Protestant communities vary tremendously around the world. On this view, conservative Protestant communities in each country have their own distinctive histories, contexts, and autonomous agency. They may interact with and even benefit from ties with American co-religionists but without necessarily becoming political carboncopies of the Religious Right. Stephen Offutt (2015, p. 13) argues in New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa that The plurality of political views and methods of engagement among evangelicals bedevils efforts of easy categorization. Evangelicals can be found praying at the presidential inauguration of former leftist guerillas, working behind the scenes to bring together actors across the political spectrum, and vehemently espousing the most conservative ideologies. Case study approaches are common in this stream, as exemplified by Steve Bruce’s (1998) book Conservative Protestant Politics (which discusses the US, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) and Paul Freston’s (2001) edited volume Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (which examines 27 countries across the Global South). Such studies find considerable political variety, not only from one country to another, but also within countries, as conservative Protestants can – like any other social group – exhibit change and inconsistency over time. Brazil’s political dynamics illustrate this latter point. While a majority of conservative Protestant voters supported Bolsonaro in 2018, some scholars believe this may have been more of a transient anti-establishment wave than a stable realignment (Osborn, 2019). In the recent past, many of Brazil’s conservative Protestants supported the left-wing Workers Party (PT), and conservative Protestant leaders were credited with playing a crucial role in helping PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula get elected as president in 2002 (over 500 evangelical leaders endorsed him) and again in 2006 (Pew Research Center, 2006). Polling conducted in early 2022 indicated that evangelical support for Bolsonaro was slipping while support for Lula’s candidacy for the October 2022 presidential election was growing (Lima, 2022). Lula went on to win that election. A common theme in this stream of literature is that conservative Protestantism should not be treated as an undifferentiated mass of fundamentalists. Conservative Protestants share only a few very basic doctrinal attributes and behavioral characteristics (Bebbington, 1989) but otherwise exhibit a high degree of disagreement on theological and ecclesiastical particularities, leading in turn to many schisms and entrepreneurial congregation start-ups. The specific denominational/ theological composition of evangelicalism can vary significantly from country to country and region to region. In the US, the fundamentalist wing of conservative Protestantism is unusually strong. Studies of fundamentalist identity show a strong correlation with thoroughgoing 33

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

ideological conservatism (Hoover et al., 2002). In many other countries, by contrast, conservative Protestantism was only marginally shaped by the fundamentalist movement. In addition to internal theological variation, this stream of the literature is also attuned to national differences in culture and political structure that may lead to political differences between conservative Protestant politics in the US versus elsewhere. Culturally, in most countries around the world, conservative Protestants have no history of socio-political dominance and as such cannot appeal to founding myths and nostalgia for a time when their values were ostensibly key to national identity/success (Hoover and Reimer, 2004; Hoover, 1997). Structurally, most countries around the world regulate religious space more tightly and have fewer access points in their political systems for social movement activism of any kind. Political imaginaries and strategies in these places are inevitably shaped by the more limited political opportunity structures. Scholars taking a comparative historical approach have been apt to highlight examples of conservative Protestant politics that do not conform to contemporary right-wing stereotypes. For example, Paul Rowe (2019, pp. 39–40) highlights a tradition of social reformism within Anglo-American evangelicalism that stretches at least to the mid-nineteenth century: Early missionaries such as William Carey and David Livingstone campaigned to promote social change in overseas colonies. During the 1800s, several evangelicals came to lead whiggish campaigns to effect global change. No doubt the most notable was William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. This group of influential friends was the driving force behind the first efforts to bring an end to the slave trade, succeeding in the passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, signaling an end of slavery in the British Empire. Such evangelical religious influences had a part to play in the public health campaigns spearheaded by Florence Nightingale, the Christian social relief of William Booth’s Salvation Army, and the Transatlantic medical and relief mission of Wilfred Grenfell. . . . Early twentiethcentury populists on both sides of the political spectrum in the US, including both William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, owed much to the efforts of earlier reformists. Connections between conservative Protestantism and economic populism are also evident in Canadian political history. During the Depression era in Canada, for instance, radio preacher William “Bible Bill” Aberhart founded Alberta’s Social Credit Party, which offered a populist economic prescription to the economic woes of the time (Hoover, 2019). Another factor emphasized in this stream of literature is the generally lower socio-economic status of conservative Protestants in the Global South as compared to their Northern peers. Timothy Samuel Shah (2004, pp. 117) argues that Though [Global South] evangelicals are assumed to be agents of the American religious right and purveyors of militant “fundamentalism”, their lower socioeconomic status often leads them to consider economics at least as important as “morality” and consequently to align with left-wing political movements perceived to be pro-poor. Furthermore, their inherent voluntarism, pluralism, and fissiparousness constrict their unity and capacity to promote any coherent political program, whether that of a new Christendom or democratic reformism. As noted previously, comparative scholarship on conservative Protestant politics has often used case studies rather than large-N international data sources amenable to systematic cross-national analysis. Two exceptions to this pattern are studies that examined moral conservatism and economic conservatism in the US as compared to other countries. The first study (Hoover et al., 2002) 34

Conservative protestant political opinion

used a 1996 US-Canada survey of religion and politics. It demonstrated that among conservative Protestants in these two close nations, moral conservatism was a common tendency, but economic conservatism was distinctive to US conservative Protestants. The second study (Melkonian-Hoover and Hoover, 2022) likewise examined whether conservative Protestants embrace both moral conservatism and economic conservatism, this time focusing on Latin America. Using the Pew Research Center’s 2014 survey of 18 Latin American countries, the study found that moral traditionalism was a common characteristic across the region’s conservative Protestant populations, but economic conservatism was not. In fact, in many cases, Latin America’s conservative Protestants were to the left of their respective national averages (see also Kirkpatrick, 2019). The extant comparative literature on comparative Protestant politics therefore confronts us with two starkly contrasting narratives. One suggests that conservative Protestant politics around the world are likely to be shaped strongly by the US Religious Right, which embraces not only moral traditionalism on specific issues such as abortion and LGBTIQ+ rights, but right-wing perspectives generally, including on economics, foreign policy, partisanship, and, increasingly, populist religious nationalism. The other narrative suggests more local variation in conservative Protestant political views and temperaments, at least with respect to issues beyond moral traditionalism. Accordingly, in what follows, we aim to add empirical clarity via analysis of a survey that included many countries beyond the Americas, as well as variables enabling measurement of (1) conservative opinion on traditional morality issues, (2) right-leaning partisan preference, and (3) attitudes about the relationship between religion and politics/power that are characteristic of a cultural populist/religious nationalist mentality.

Data and methods Our analysis is based primarily on the 2018 wave of the International Social Survey Programme’s religion module, supplemented by the 2008 religion module. The 2018 survey included 33 ISSP member countries, plus 14 non-ISSP member countries in Africa and Asia, for a total of 47 countries, with an N of 66,979. The 2008 survey included 41 ISSP member countries, plus 4 non-ISSP member countries in Africa and Asia, for a total of 45 countries, with an N of 66,679. Our independent variable is a dichotomous measure of conservative Protestantism. Conservative Protestantism is a movement within Protestant Christianity stressing a high view of the veracity and authority of the Bible, as well as energetic and frequent participation in worship, Bible reading, witness, and service. While it is concentrated in certain denominational families such as the Pentecostal and Baptist traditions, it is not limited to these. Theologically conservative Protestants can be found in most Protestant denominations, including as a dissenting minority faction within liberal/mainline Protestant denominations. And they are very prevalent in non-denominational churches. Measuring this sector of Protestantism is notoriously difficult. Survey researchers have used a variety of different indicators and strategies (Smidt, 2019a; Smidt, 2019b). One approach is to gather very detailed information about denominational affiliation and then categorize responses into major religious traditions. Another asks respondents if they identify with a broad label such as “evangelical” and/or “born again”. Other approaches focus on respondents’ specific doctrinal beliefs, as well as their level of religious commitment, piety, and practice. Ideally researchers would have all of these indicators available and could use them in combination. Often, however, more minimalist approaches are taken, either by choice or necessity due to data limitations. 35

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

Of the minimalist approaches, one of the most common is also, in our view, increasingly problematic for studies of the relationship between religion qua religion and politics – namely, relying solely on a survey question asking respondents if they consider themselves to be an “evangelical”. The problem is that, at least at the popular level in the US, the religious meaning of the word “evangelical” is eroding, while at the same time it is gaining a specifically rightwing ideological and partisan meaning (Kidd, 2017). Regarding religious coherence, research by Ryan Burge (2021) demonstrates that today over a quarter of self-identified “evangelicals” in the US seldom or never attend church. From a historical and theological point of view, there should be no such thing as a “nominal evangelical”, as evangelicalism is (or at least, was) by definition a matter of doctrine and commitment.3 Regarding politicization, Burge (2020) also finds growing political conservatism among non-attenders who nevertheless call themselves “evangelical”. Findings from a panel study by the Pew Research Center in 2016 and 2020 likewise suggest this politicizing trend, especially in connection with Trump support. Pew found that, “White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020” (Smith, 2021). For studies aiming to measure the independent effect of religion on political attitudes, the problem is obvious. The supposedly independent religious variable of “evangelical” increasingly has the dependent variable – politics – already baked into it. Fortunately, the ISSP’s religion variables enable us to take a different approach, one that combines a robust range of survey items measuring doctrinal beliefs and religious behaviors that are central to “true believers” of theologically conservative Protestantism. Our measurement relies on the following eight items in the 2018 ISSP, each of which we recoded as dichotomous, and then combined into an eightpoint scale: 1 Believes God exists (respondent chose 5 or 6 on a 6-point scale) 2 Believes Hell is real (chose 1 or 2 on a 4-point scale) 3 Believes that God is concerned with every human being personally (chose 1 or 2 on a 5-point scale) 4 Describes himself/herself as a religious person (chose 1–3 on a 7-point scale) 5 Reads or listens to Scripture outside of worship services (responded “yes” to a yes-or-no question) 6 Prays frequently (chose monthly or more) 7 Attends church worship services frequently (chose monthly or more) 8 Participates frequently in activities of a church or church-related organization other than worship services (chose monthly or more) We then classified as conservative Protestants all respondents who self-identified as Protestant and who scored 6–8 on this 8-point scale.4 The items are highly correlated with one another, and the Cronbach’s alpha is a very good 0.862. In our international comparative analysis, we only include countries in which the sample size of conservative Protestants was at least 50.5 To be sure, the eight items available in the ISSP data are not a comprehensive representation of the religious beliefs and behaviors associated with conservative Protestantism. In particular, our measure would have been strengthened if, for all countries surveyed, the ISSP had included questions about biblicism and evangelism. Still, notwithstanding its limitations, our measure yields estimates of the population sizes for conservative Protestantism that are similar to those in the extant literature (see Pew Research Center, 2015). On our measure, the percentage of the US population that is conservative Protestant (regardless of race6) is 32.9%. 36

Conservative protestant political opinion

Our dependent variables are a selection of six survey items: two questions measuring views on traditional morality issues, one question related to partisan preference, and three questions related to attitudes about how politically active or powerful religion should be. For ease of presentation and interpretation, we recoded all variables as dichotomous indictors of a conservative/ right-wing perspective. Regarding traditional moral conservatism, the ISSP survey asked respondents if they personally feel it is “always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all” for (1) “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” to occur, and (2) “a woman to have an abortion if the family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children”. For both these variables, we coded as 1 those selecting “always wrong”.) Regarding party choice, the survey asked respondents to identify which party they voted for in the most recent general election of their country. For some (though not all) countries, ISSP then coded parties on a 5-point ideological scale from left to right: 1 = far left, 2 = left, 3 = center, 4 = right, and 5 = far right. We coded as 1 those who voted (per ISSP’s scale) for either the right or far-right party. Regarding relationships between religion and politics/power, the first question we analyze is, “How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Religious leaders should not try to influence how people vote in elections”. We coded as 1 those who disagreed or strongly disagreed. The second question is, “Do you think that churches and religious organizations in this country have too much power or too little power?: (1) Far too much power, (2) Too much power, (3) About the right amount of power, (4) Too little power, and (5) Far too little power”. We coded as 1 those who responded either “too little power” or “far too little power”. The third question was, “People have different religions and different religious views. Would you accept a person from a different religion or with a very different religious view from yours being a candidate of the political party you prefer?: (1) Definitely accept, (2) Probably accept, (3) Probably not accept, (4) Definitely not accept”. We coded as 1 those who responded either “probably not accept” or “definitely not accept”. (Note that this last question was asked only in 2008.) In what follows, we examine the extent to which conservative Protestants are or are not more right-wing than their fellow citizens on these variables. If the hypothesis of global right-wing conformity is correct, we would expect to find US conservative Protestants to be markedly more conservative and more culturally populist/religious nationalist than other Americans across all these variables, and that this pattern would be mirrored in most if not all other countries. If by contrast the hypothesis of local autonomy and contingency is correct, we would expect to find patterns similar to previous research in this vein, i.e., transnational consistency only with respect to traditional morality questions, but not necessarily on broader questions of partisanship or populist religious nationalism.

Findings and discussion In each of the tables that follow, we report the conservative percentage for (1) the general population of the country, (2) the conservative Protestant population, and (3) all other respondents. Unless otherwise noted on individual country lines, findings are from the 2018 ISSP.7 Table 3.1 reports findings on the abortion question. For the US as a whole, 43.5% of all Americans expressed moral disapproval – less than a majority but higher than all the other Western democracies in this sample. Beyond the West, however, most countries lean conservative on abortion. Indeed, apart from the US, Western democracies are the outliers of this data. In all of the African cases and all but one of the Latin American cases (Uruguay, at 46.0%), large majorities of the general population expressed moral disapproval. The cases in Asia are divided. In Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia, and in Catholic-dominated Philippines, 37

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover Table 3.1  Abortion always wrong Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

43.5

65.4

32.7

United Kingdom Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Germany Switzerland

8.0 6.9 9.8 6.0 10.6 9.5 23.8 18.1

19.4 48.1 58.2 25.6 49.5 34.4 47.4 54.0

7.0 5.5 6.0 5.1 6.8 8.1 22.7 16.5

New Zealand Australia (2008)

20.1 19.1

59.5 53.1

13.8 16.0

South Korea Taiwan Indonesia Philippines Malaysia Singapore

23.8 25.3 88.1 83.9 68.8 33.7

38.6 35.1 94.3 89.4 83.1 42.8

21.7 24.9 87.7 82.9 68.2 33.0

Kenya Malawi Ghana Nigeria South Africa Tanzania (2008)

89.0 87.4 86.5 68.9 57.4 60.8

90.3 88.3 86.7 73.7 64.3 59.3

86.4 86.7 86.2 62.3 53.6 61.2

Chile Suriname Uruguay (2008) Venezuela (2008) Dominican Republic (2008) Mexico (2008)

61.1 55.5 46.0 66.6 73.6 57.2

80.7 70.9 69.4 72.2 80.2 73.8

58.4 51.3 44.2 66.1 72.9 56.5

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2018, supplemented (where noted) by ISSP Religion Module 2008

large majorities are strongly conservative, but only about one-quarter in South Korea and Taiwan and about one-third in Singapore. As for conservative Protestants, in the US they are dramatically more conservative than the rest of the population – 65.4% versus 32.7%. In most other Western democracies, the divide between conservative Protestants and others on abortion is even wider (in Norway, for instance, it is 58.2% vs. 6.0%). Across the rest of the regions, conservative Protestants are also generally more conservative than their national compatriots, although in nations where the general population is already quite conservative on abortion, conservative Protestantism adds only marginally if at all to the likelihood of expressing a conservative stance. Alongside abortion, the other major culture war issue addressed in the ISSP is same-sex relations. As can be seen in Table 3.2, the pattern in the US and around the world is generally 38

Conservative protestant political opinion Table 3.2  Same-sex relations always wrong Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

34.0

62.0

20.2

United Kingdom Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Germany Switzerland

16.6 7.7 9.7 10.5 15.1 11.9 12.2 13.6

31.5 42.6 50.5 29.5 58.7 28.1 36.8 54.0

15.3 6.5 6.5 9.6 10.8 11.0 11.1 11.8

New Zealand Australia (2008)

27.4 32.3

69.2 71.7

20.6 28.7

South Korea Taiwan Indonesia Philippines Malaysia Singapore

50.2 48.3 93.5 75.1 80.9 60.6

74.8 61.0 95.5 81.1 88.1 69.6

46.8 47.7 93.4 74.0 80.6 59.8

Kenya Malawi Ghana Nigeria South Africa Tanzania (2008) Chile Suriname Uruguay (2008) Venezuela (2008) Dominican Republic (2008) Mexico (2008)

95.9 93.1 96.3 73.0 52.0 74.5 46.9 58.2 46.9 66.7 72.3

95.6 94.1 96.7 78.1 57.3 76.1 74.1 73.1 79.2 73.3 82.1

96.3 92.2 95.8 66.1 49.1 74.1 43.3 54.2 44.5 66.1 71.2

55.5

88.5

54.0

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2018, supplemented (where noted) by ISSP Religion Module 2008

similar to that found on the abortion question, but with a few exceptions. For the US as a whole, 34.0% of the population expressed moral disapproval. Western European states were far less conservative across the board, but New Zealand and Australia were similar to the US at 27.4% and 32.3%, respectively. The divide within Asia is again apparent, though South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are notably more conservative on this issue than on abortion. African nations in this sample are generally strongly conservative, with the exception of South Africa which is more divided. In the Latin American cases, just under half in Uruguay and Chile are strongly disapproving, while a majority in all the rest of the Latin American countries are conservative. Conservative Protestantism is again strongly associated with moral traditionalism on this issue. In the US, the contrast between conservative Protestants and all others is 62.0% versus 39

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

20.2%. Elsewhere around the world conservative Protestants are also usually far more conservative than others. The exceptions are mostly those countries that already have substantial majorities of moral traditionalists, e.g., the African cases. The Southeast Asian cases are likewise to the cultural right on this issue, ranging from Singapore at 60.6% to Indonesia at 93.5%. In those cases, conservative Protestants are only modestly more likely to be conservative than the already-conservative national averages. Next, in Table 3.3 we turn to the ISSP’s variable related to partisan preference. For the US as a whole, in 2018 41% of those who said they voted in the most recent general election said they voted for the partisan “right” (in this case, the Republican Party). US conservative Protestants were substantially more right-leaning in partisan vote choice (52.4%) than were others (33.6%). Note that this effect was observed despite the fact that our definition of conservative Protestant is not limited to white people. Many African American Protestants hold doctrinal beliefs that align with evangelicalism, but due to the unique racial history and conditions of the US, they vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. When evangelicalism is defined as a white religious tradition, it inevitably looks more uniformly Republican. With respect to the definition of conservative Protestantism in this chapter, note that if we had limited the category to white people, the percentage voting for the partisan right in 2018 would have been 61.5%. Table 3.3  Right-leaning party vote in last election Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

41.0

52.4

33.6

Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Germany Switzerland United Kingdom (2008)

38.5 37.0 32.4 34.0 31.3 40.1 48.7 38.3

37.8 25.3  7.0 14.9 34.0 46.8 39.7 43.5

38.5 38.0 33.7 36.0 31.1 39.8 49.1 37.8

New Zealand Australia (2008)

40.1 38.7

40.3 61.7

40.1 36.6

South Korea Indonesia (2008) Philippines (2008)

26.4 75.9 16.4

33.3 44.4 12.2

25.4 77.1 16.6

Malawi South Africa (2008)

32.3 4.7

29.8 5.3

34.5 4.3

Chile Uruguay (2008) Venezuela (2008) Dominican Republic (2008) Mexico (2008)

40.5 22.6 14.7 26.3

43.2 34.3 5.1 19.5

40.2 21.7 15.6 27.1

21.2

19.3

21.2

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2018, supplemented (where noted) by ISSP Religion Module 2008

40

Conservative protestant political opinion

As for cross-national comparisons, the pattern for partisanship is remarkably different than we saw for abortion and same-sex relations. With only a couple exceptions (Australia, Uruguay), conservative Protestants outside the US supported the partisan right at levels that were either roughly the same as or lower than their national peers. Sweden, for example, strongly flips the script, as only 7% of conservative Protestant Swedes voted right, while 33.7% of other Swedes did. We next examine a set of questions related to dispositions that populist religious nationalists can be expected to have vis-à-vis religion and politics/power. Table 3.4 reports the percentages of those who disagreed with the statement that religious leaders should not try to influence voter choices. At the national level in the US, support for direct political activism by religious leaders is quite low, only 12.9%. It is likewise low across all the other countries in the table, with the partial Table 3.4  OK for religious leaders to try to influence how people vote in elections Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

12.9

17.1

10.9

United Kingdom Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Germany Switzerland

9.9 6.2 8.9 10.6 7.6 6.4 7.4 9.9

15.3 18.5 17.6 25.6 19.3 18.8 14.5 27.0

9.4 5.8 8.3 9.9 6.4 5.8 7.1 9.1

New Zealand Australia (2008)

8.3 10.5

10.3 22.8

8.0 9.4

South Korea Taiwan Indonesia Philippines Malaysia Singapore

19.9 4.4 22.1 17.4 26.9 4.8

24.4 7.8 14.8 20.0 16.9 9.4

19.2 4.2 22.6 17.0 27.3 4.5

Kenya Malawi Ghana Nigeria South Africa Tanzania (2008)

30.9 21.8 20.6 12.0 15.6 30.7

32.5 19.5 23.0 13.2 17.4 29.5

27.6 23.8 17.9 10.3 14.6 31.1

Chile Suriname Uruguay (2008) Venezuela (2008) Dominican Republic (2008) Mexico (2008)

20.7 14.4 19.6 40.9 23.3

22.9 15.2 20.8 43.3 31.1

20.4 14.1 19.5 40.6 22.4

17.1

31.1

16.5

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2018, supplemented (where noted) by ISSP Religion Module 2008

41

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

exception of Venezuela where in 2008 a large minority (40.9%) supported it. Support ran particularly low in Western democracies, where most country percentages were in the single digits. In the US, conservative Protestants were more likely than others to support it, but only marginally so – 17.1% versus 10.9%. In other Western democracies, conservative Protestantism is somewhat more strongly associated with support for religious leaders influencing voting. In Sweden, for instance, it is 25.6% versus 9.9%. By contrast, in Indonesia and Malaysia, conservative Protestants are somewhat less supportive. In most of the rest of the countries in the table, the percentage of conservative Protestants supportive of religious influence on the vote does not vary much from their national peers. Next in Table 3.5 we examine the extent to which respondents believe churches and religious organizations have too little power. Similar to Table 3.4, across all countries in the sample, Table 3.5  Churches and religious organizations have too little power Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

19.7

33.3

13.1

United Kingdom Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Iceland Germany Switzerland

5.0 3.1 4.9 4.3 5.6 4.0 3.8 4.5

20.2 24.1 27.5 43.6 22.0 17.2 14.5 21.0

3.7 2.4 3.1 2.5 4.0 3.2 3.4 3.8

New Zealand Australia (2008)

10.0 5.5

34.6 30.3

6.0 3.2

South Korea Taiwan Indonesia Philippines Malaysia Singapore

6.9 7.0 7.3 7.2 26.7 17.9

13.4 26.0 5.7 8.9 22.0 22.5

6.0 6.2 7.4 7.0 26.9 17.5

Kenya Malawi Ghana Nigeria South Africa Tanzania (2008)

41.3 39.2 26.4 22.0 25.1 43.7

42.6 42.7 26.8 22.2 30.3 42.0

38.6 36.4 26.0 21.6 22.3 44.2

Chile Suriname Uruguay (2008) Venezuela (2008) Dominican Republic (2008) Mexico (2008)

21.6 34.5 37.4 24.6 7.5 26.2

30.1 46.6 43.1 28.9 11.3 44.3

20.5 31.2 37.0 24.2 7.0 25.5

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2018, supplemented (where noted) by ISSP Religion Module 2008

42

Conservative protestant political opinion

only a minority – usually a very small minority – of respondents expressed this view. As for conservative Protestants, the findings are mixed. In Western democracies and East Asia cases, they are distinctly more likely than other respondents to say churches have too little power, but in the Southeast Asia cases and Africa cases they are not. The Latin America cases are mixed. Note as well that, even in cases where conservative Protestantism makes the strongest relative difference, only a minority of conservative Protestants say churches have too little power. Finally, in Table 3.6 we examine the comparative levels of unwillingness to support a person of a different religion as the candidate of one’s party. National levels of support for this form of religious discrimination in the political sphere were quite low almost everywhere. (Indonesia was an exception, at 50.2%.) In the US only 15.2% harbored this attitude, and similarly around the world most countries were below 20%. The percentages for conservative Protestants are higher only in some countries, and usually only modestly higher. In the US 22.7% of conservative Protestants were unwilling to have their candidate be of another religion, versus 10.6% of other Americans. In seven other countries (all Western democracies), conservative Protestant percentages are similarly about 10% to 15% Table 3.6  Rejects someone of different religion as candidate for their party Country

Total Population (%)

Conservative Protestant (%)

Other (%)

United States

15.2

22.7

10.6

United Kingdom Denmark Norway Sweden Finland Germany Switzerland

13.8 21.2 11.5 23.1 9.2 17.9 10.1

19.6 29.7 22.4 20.0 12.9 22.1 19.2

12.9 20.8 10.6 23.2 8.6 17.7 9.5

Australia New Zealand

18.6 12.7

27.6 27.1

17.7 10.5

South Korea Indonesia Philippines

15.1 50.2 29.3

16.2 26.2 21.9

14.8 51.1 29.7

Kenya Tanzania South Africa

15.8 13.0 20.8

16.4 9.2 22.0

15.3 13.9 19.8

Chile Uruguay Venezuela Dominican Republic Mexico

12.3 12.0 16.2 19.2 23.4

14.4 20.8 16.7 19.8 27.9

12.1 11.3 16.2 19.2 23.2

Total N = 33,737

18.9

19.9

18.7

Source: ISSP Religion Module 2008

43

Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

higher than their national peers. But in all the other countries in this set, the percentages are either roughly similar or, in the cases of Indonesia and the Philippines, lower.

Concluding reflections and future research For over half a century, the cultural left and cultural right in America have been battling over a range of issues – abortion and LGBTIQ+ issues being the most prominent. Most theologically conservative Protestants share the traditionalist views of the cultural right on such issues. In addition, among many white American conservative Protestants, an alignment with the broader partisan right has also occurred. This connection continued into the Trump era, leading many to worry that (white) conservative Protestantism is hard-wired for populist religious nationalism. In comparative conservative Protestant studies, the American case naturally looms large and is often a key point of comparison, if not the primary point of analytical departure. In this chapter, we took advantage of a large international survey to shed some comparative light on conservative Protestant political opinion. Our exploratory analysis presented basic statistics on variables relevant to two contrasting narratives of conservative Protestant politics globally – one expecting right-wing conformity, the other expecting more variance. In keeping with prior studies employing international survey data, our findings in this chapter unambiguously support the latter view. On abortion and homosexuality, a majority of conservative Protestants in most countries is situated to the right. In some countries (primarily in Europe) a minority is conservative but always a larger minority than their respective national averages. By contrast, on our indicators of partisan leaning and of various views consistent with populist religious nationalism, conservative Protestant political opinion globally does not comport with a right-wing stereotype. In most countries, we found conservative Protestants supporting the partisan right at levels that were either roughly the same as or lower than their national peers. With respect to the variables reflective of populist religious nationalism, we found support levels to be generally quite low in absolute terms and not consistently higher or lower relative to national averages around the world. To be sure, these data have limitations, and the findings presented in this handbook chapter are at a broad, largely descriptive level of analysis. Future research would benefit from more theologically specific religious variables and a wider array of variables measuring political ideology and behavior. Still, the tables presented shed considerable original light on the big-picture pattern of where conservative Protestants do, and do not, differ in any consequential way from their fellow citizens. Indeed, in our view it is the relative lack of conservative Protestant distinctiveness on one dimension – populist religious nationalism – that is perhaps the most intriguing (non)finding. In this study, majorities of conservative Protestants in each country, including the US, did not support religious leaders influencing voting, did not believe that churches have too little power, and did not have a problem with their party’s candidate being of a different religion. Given the outsized support for Trump among American conservative Protestants (particularly white conservative Protestants), this non-correlation in the US is surprising.8 Future research should explore this issue further, both in the US and internationally, giving particular attention to whether those who selfidentify with the label “evangelical” are more inclined to populist religious nationalism than those who are “conservative Protestant” strictly by religious belief and behavior.

Notes 1 The World Congress of Families met in Italy in 2019 – see https://wcfverona.org/. 2 See https://institute.global/policy/populists-power-perils-and-prospects-2021.

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Conservative protestant political opinion 3 See the statements of faith of the National Association of Evangelicals and the World Evangelical Alliance. 4 The survey question about reading or listening to Scripture was not included in the 2008 ISSP. Our 2008 measure consists of the other seven items used in the 2018 version, albeit with slightly higher frequency (“2–3 times per month” or more) required for church attendance, prayer, and participation in church activities outside worship services. Respondents scoring from 5 to 7 on this 7-point scale were coded as being conservative Protestant. The scale items are highly correlated, and the Cronbach’s alpha is a very good 0.839. 5 Conservative Protestant Ns are the following: in 2008: Australia 145; Dominican Republic 212; Indonesia 65; Mexico 61; Philippines 64; Tanzania 305; South Africa 1503; UK 423; Uruguay 71; Venezuela 90. And in 2018: Chile 166; Denmark 54; Finland 109; Germany 76; Ghana 761; Iceland 64; Indonesia 88; Kenya 936; Malawi 729; Malaysia 59; New Zealand 185; Nigeria 851; Norway 91; Philippines 180; Singapore 138; South Africa 968; South Korea 127; Suriname 223; Sweden 78; Switzerland 100; Taiwan 77; UK 124; US 387. 6 On our measure, 23.4% of the US population is white conservative Protestant. 7 On the variables about abortion, same-sex relations, churches’ power, and religious leaders influencing voting, data on conservative Protestants in the following countries were only available in the 2008 dataset: Australia, Tanzania, Uruguay, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. On the party vote variable, data on conservative Protestants in the following countries were only available in the 2008 dataset: United Kingdom, Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa, Uruguay, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, and Mexico. The question about willingness to accept a person of a very different religion as the candidate of one’s party was only asked in 2008. 8 In data not shown, across each of the three variables related to populist religious nationalism, we compared all conservative Protestants in the US to white conservative Protestants in the US. Limiting the category to white people did not increase the percentages.

References Bebbington, David W. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. London: Unwin Hyman. Brouwer, Steve, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose. 1996. Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. New York and London: Routledge. Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Between nationalism and civilizationism: The European populist moment in comparative perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (8): 1191–1226, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419 870.2017.1294700. Bruce, Steve. 1998. Conservative Protestant Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, Ryan. 2020. “So, why is evangelicalism not declining? Because non-attenders are taking on the label.” Religion in Public, December  10, https://religioninpublic.blog/2020/12/10/ so-why-is-evangelicalism-not-declining-because-non-attenders-are-taking-on-the-label/. Burge, Ryan. 2021. “Why ‘evangelical’ is becoming another word for ‘Republican’.” New York Times, October 26, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/evangelical-republican.html. Burnett, John. 2022. “Christian nationalism is still thriving – And is a force for returning Trump to power.” WBUR NPR News, January 14, www.wbur.org/npr/1073215412/christian-nationalism-donald-trump Buss, Doris, and Didi Herman. 2003. Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Jennifer. 2006. Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized. London: Pluto Press. Corrales, Javier. 2018. “A perfect marriage: Evangelicals and conservatives in Latin America.” New York Times, January 17, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/opinion/evangelicals-politics-latin-america.html. Dicklitch-Nelson, Susan. 2020. “Are LGBTQ human rights in Uganda a lost cause?” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, February  27, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2020/02/27/are-lgbtq-humanrights-in-uganda-a-lost-cause/. Encarnación, Omar G. 2017. “Amid crisis in Brazil, the evangelical bloc emerges as a political power.”The Nation, August 16. www.thenation.com/article/archive/amid-crisis-in-brazil-the-evangelical-bloc-emerges-asa-political-power/. Freston, Paul. 2001. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Dennis R. Hoover and Ruth Melkonian-Hoover Gerson, Michael. 2020. “This is a massive failure of character among Republicans – With evangelicals out in front.” Washington Post, November 12, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-a-massive-failure-of-character-among-republicans--with-evangelicals-out-in-front/2020/11/12/c7a05396251e-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html. Gorski, Philip. 2020. American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. Oxford: Routledge. Gorski, Philip, and Samuel Perry. 2022. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gryboski, Michael. 2022. “European court rules in favor of Christian bakery that refused to make cake supporting gay marriage.” Christian Post, January  6, www.christianpost.com/news/european-courtrules-in-favor-of-christian-bakery-in-cake-case.html. Guth, James. 2019. “Are white evangelicals populists? The view from the 2016 American National election study.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17 (3): 20–35, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 .1080/15570274.2019.1643991?src=recsys. Hoover, Dennis R. 1997. “The Christian Right Under Old Glory and the Maple Leaf.” In Sojourners in the Wilderness: The Christian Right in Comparative Perspective, edited by Corwin E. Smidt and James M. Penning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hoover, Dennis R. 2003. “Jim Wallis.” In Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics, edited by Paul Djupe and Laura Olson, 464. New York: Facts on File. Hoover, Dennis R. 2019. “Populism and internationalism, evangelical style.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17 (3): 1–6, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15570274.2019.1643998. Hoover, Dennis R., Michael D. Martinez, Samuel H. Reimer, and Kenneth D. Wald. 2002. “Evangelicalism meets the continental divide: Moral and economic conservatism in the United States and Canada.” Political Research Quarterly 55 (2): 351–374. Hoover, Dennis R. and Samuel H. Reimer. 2004. “Things that make for a Peaceable Kingdom: An overview of Christianity and ‘cooperativeness’ across the continental divide.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41 (2): 205–246. Kidd, Thomas. 2017. “Opinion polls and the ‘evangelical’ illusion.” TGC, November  14, www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/evangelical-history/billy-graham-99-a-look-back-at-the-evangelist-andthe-presidents/. Kirkpatrick, David. 2019. “Globally, many evangelicals lean left.” The Washington Post, August 30, www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/30/globally-many-evangelicals-lean-left-what-that-meansamericas-future/. Kratochvíl, Petr. 2019. “Religion as a weapon: Invoking religion in secularized societies.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17 (1): 78–88. Kurtzleben, Danielle. 2015. “Are you an evangelical? Are you sure?” NPR News, December 19, www.npr. org/2015/12/19/458058251/are-you-an-evangelical-are-you-sure. Lima, Eduardo Camps. 2022. “In Brazil, Bolsonaro is losing evangelical support; Catholics overwhelmingly back Lula.”Crux, March  5, https://cruxnow.com/church-in-africa/2022/03/ in-brazil-bolsonaro-is-losing-evangelical-support-catholics-overwhelmingly-back-lula. McAlister, Melani. 2018. The Kingdom Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press. Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth, and Dennis R. Hoover. 2022. “Evangelicals and Ideology – Transnational or Local? Examining the Case of Latin American Evangelicals.” In The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Politics, and Ideology, edited by Jeffrey Haynes, 227–244. Oxford: Routledge. Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth, and Lyman A. Kellstedt. 2019. Evangelicals and Immigration: Fault Lines among the Faithful. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, Brett. 2021. “Populists in power: Perils and prospects in 2021.” Blair Institute for Social Change, January 18, https://institute.global/policy/populists-power-perils-and-prospects-2021. Offutt, Stephen. 2015. New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborn, Catherine. 2019. “Bolsonaro’s Christian coalition remains precarious.” Foreign Policy, January 1, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/01/bolsonaros-christian-coalition-remains-precarious-brazilbrasil-president/. Pew Research Center. 2006. “Historical overview of pentecostalism in Brazil: Spirit and power, a 10 country survey of pentecostals.” Pew Research Center, October 6. www.pewresearch.org/religion/2006/10/05/ historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-brazil/. Pew Research Center. 2015. “The changing religious composition of the U.S.”Pew Research Center, May 12, www. pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/.

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Conservative protestant political opinion Provost, Claire, Lou Ferreira, and Claudia Torrisi. 2020. “Trump’s top lawyer in ‘crusade’ against women’s and LGBT rights across Europe.” OpenDemocracy, October  27, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/ trump-sekulow-war-womens-lgbt-rights-europe/. Provost, Claire, and Adam Ramsay. 2019. “Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ pour millions of ‘Dark Money’ into Europe, boosting the far right.” OpenDemocracy, March 27, www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-trump-linked-us-christian-fundamentalists-pour-millions-of-darkmoney-into-europe-boosting-the-far-right/. Rowe, Paul. 2019. “The global – And globalist – Roots of evangelical action.” The Review of Faith  & International Affairs 17 (3): 36–49, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15570274.2019.1644013. Shah, Timothy Samuel. 2004. “The bible and the ballot box: Evangelicals and democracy in the Global South.” The SAIS Review of International Affairs 24 (2): 117–132. Smidt, Corwin. 2019a. “Measuring religion in terms of belonging, beliefs, and behavior.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smidt, Corwin. 2019b. “Reassessing the concept and measurement of evangelicals: The case for the RELTRAD approach.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58 (4): 833–853. Smith, Gregory. 2021. “More White Americans adopted than shed evangelical label during Trump presidency, especially his supporters.” Pew Research Center, September 15, www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2021/09/15/more-white-americans-adopted-than-shed-evangelical-label-during-trump-presidency-especially-his-supporters/. Swartz, David R. 2012. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. 2020. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yi, Joseph, Gowoon Jung, and Joe Phillips. 2017. “Evangelical Christian discourse in South Korea on the LGBT: The politics of cross-border learning.” Society 54 (1): 29–33.

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4 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CATHOLICISM IN GLOBAL POLITICS Allen D. Hertzke

The oldest institution on earth, the Roman Catholic Church sustains a far-flung flock whose approximately 1.3 billion adherents comprise more than one-sixth of the world’s population and half of all Christians. The tectonic shift of the world’s Catholic population to the ‘Global South’ has transformed the church into a truly global institution. In 1910 two-thirds of Catholics were Europeans; now over two-thirds live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with growth especially rapid in Africa (Pew, 2013; Agenzia Fides, 2022). Leadership of the church reflects this new global reality, not only in the person of Pope Francis but in the many cardinals he has appointed from across the world. Also crucial to understanding the church’s political role is its deep tradition of engagement with worldly affairs – a comfortableness with politics not shared by all religious faiths. These facts, combined with the visibility and popularity of Pope Francis, ensure the impact of the church in world politics. The Catholic Church, however, defies easy political categorization. On the one hand, it remains a quintessentially conservative body with a hierarchical organisation to preserve traditional theological teachings. This impulse produces conservative stances on sexual morality, abortion, and marriage, and puts the church in alliance with other religious traditionalists, including Muslims. On the other hand, Catholic teachings on the dignity of the human person and the authenticity of the common good (Rerum Novarum, 1891) produce concern for the poor in the global economy and, especially in recent decades, advocacy of religious freedom, human rights, and democratic governance. Indeed, when the Church renounced state privilege and embraced religious freedom at Vatican II, it propelled the last great wave of democratization on earth (Huntington, 1991; Toft et al., 2011 Chapter 4). Thus, the church stands in seeming equipoise between contending impulses of tradition and modernity. Despite this strategic position, the church faces challenges that can blunt its political impact. A shortage of priests and women religious (nuns and sisters) stretches church resources thin in some places, while elsewhere the church must sustain itself amidst syncretic influences of local cultures, desperate poverty, or hostile governments. More troubling, scandals involving clerical sex abuse of minors, sometimes going back decades, have undermined the public credibility of the church in a number of nations or drained its patrimony in expensive legal settlements. Because the church’s impact hinges on the vitality and trust it enjoys in societies, Catholic politics varies enormously by region, context, and issue. 48

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-5

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This chapter begins by examining Vatican diplomacy and global initiatives, with emphasis on the papacies of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. This is followed by a discussion of Catholic politics in different regions of the world. The chapter concludes by examining issues that loom large on the horizon. The exploration of Catholicism, consequently, will provide a window into the broader and ever dynamic relationship between religion and politics in the contemporary world.

Vatican diplomacy and Catholic global activism The Catholic Church is a unique multifarious institution. Headquartered at Vatican City, the Holy See retains remnants of state sovereignty, including an elaborate diplomatic structure that sends and receives ambassadors (Allen, 2004). But the church’s myriad institutions also function as interest groups or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that lobby governments or have observer status at the United Nations (Ferrari, 2006). Indeed, the Catholic Church encompasses a vast array of national or regional episcopal conferences, religious orders, relief and development organisations, charities, hospitals, and educational associations enmeshed in politics and government. Finally, as Vatican II declared, the church is also the ‘people of God’ (Philpott, 2005). Thus, to understand Catholicism and civic engagement, one must include the laity who populate Catholic organisations or participate as citizens in nearly 200 nations. This chapter explores the first of these roles, as captured under rubric of Vatican diplomacy, then touches on transnational global activism of other Catholic organisations. As a transnational actor, the ‘Holy See directs a truly global church’ (Ferrari, 2006). Thus, it has both the tangible interests to defend and the religious values to promote at different times and in different settings. A major focus of papal initiatives in the past few decades has been human rights, particularly religious freedom. For John Paul II, this involved championing religious freedom behind the Iron Curtain, and then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to broader authoritarian contexts. In a widely cited speech before the Vatican diplomatic corps in 1996, for example, he sounded the clarion call against communist remnant and militant Islamic regimes that ‘practice discrimination against Jews, Christians, and other religious groups’. The Pope condemned such persecution as an ‘intolerable and unjustifiable’ violation ‘of the most fundamental human freedom, that of practising one’s faith openly, which for human beings is their reason for living’ (Pope John Paul II, 1996, paragraph 9). More recently, the waxing of militant Islamist movements, imperilling the lives of Indigenous Christian communities, has captured the attention of popes and Vatican diplomats. Pope Benedict XVI took a particularly aggressive stance toward the Islamic world. Indeed, ‘as communism was to Pope John Paul II, so radical Islam is to Pope Benedict XVI’ (Bottum, 2006). His Regensburg speech on 12 September 2006 – in which he quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor’s statement that Islam brought ‘things only evil and inhuman’ – created a firestorm in Muslim nations (Pope Benedict, 2006). Massive demonstrations, riots, and violent reprisals stunned the pontiff, who issued an apology and assured Muslims that the quote did not reflect his views. But Benedict did not back down on his demand for ‘reciprocity’ that Christians in Muslim nations be afforded the same rights to religious freedom that Muslims enjoy in the West, including the right ‘to propose and proclaim the Gospel’ to Muslims (Kahn and Meichtry, 2006). This position reflected an agreement among the cardinals of the church, whom Benedict had summoned on 23 March 2006, that persecution of Christians in the Islamic world required a sustained diplomatic push (Allen, 2006). As conditions worsened for Christians and other minorities with the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, responded with both public statements 49

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and dramatic gestures to challenge political leaders and enlist ecumenical allies for besieged Christians. During a visit to Turkey, he joined Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of Orthodox Christianity, in pleading for religious freedom and protection for Christians in their homelands. In a conscious act of humility, the Pope ‘bowed before Bartholomew and asked for a blessing’, a gesture unprecedented in the thousand-year split between the two communions (Beliefnet, 2014). Francis also wrote an open letter to all the Christians in the Middle East, encouraging them in the extreme trials and persecution. Stressing inter-religious unity, he remarked, ‘The more difficult the situation, the more interreligious dialogue becomes necessary. There is no other way. Dialogue, grounded in an attitude of openness, in truth and love, is also the best antidote to the temptation to religious fundamentalism, which is a threat for followers of every religion’ (Pope Francis, 2014). The shocking beheading of the Egyptian Copts in Libya in February 2015 aroused Francis to issue heartfelt prayers for ‘our brother Copts’ and to speak of a new ‘ecumenism of blood’. By this evocative theological language, Francis suggested that the blood of disparate Christians is mixed in modern martyrdom (The Economist, 2015). Human trafficking into sexual exploitation and slave labour has emerged as a major focus of the Vatican. Based on his first-hand work in the slums of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis has invested considerable personal leadership on the issue. Just two months into his papacy, Francis sent a handwritten note to the chancellor of his scholarly academies requesting an examination of ‘human trafficking and modern slavery’. In response the pontifical academies convened scholars, medical professionals, law enforcement experts, and activists to provide detailed recommendations for the church, governments, and global institutions (Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences and the Federation Internationale des Associations De Medecins Catholiques, 2013). Guided by this initiative, Pope Francis joined with the archbishop of Canterbury in launching the Global Freedom Network to fight against ‘new forms of enslavement’ (Winfield, 2014). Francis also convened an unprecedented gathering of religious leaders at the Vatican – representing Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths – who issued a joint declaration to end slavery (Barrett, 2014). These Vatican initiatives link up with a growing network of Catholic NGOs and national church institutions that confront trafficking syndicates and offer succour to victims. Concern about the plight of the world’s destitute has led the Vatican to champion efforts to ameliorate poverty. Agencies like Caritas, Catholic Relief Services, and Jesuit Refugee Services work in some of the harshest places on earth and funnel information and policy recommendations to the Vatican. One example of this cooperation includes debt relief, which is particularly pressing in poor African countries whose debt service payments crowded out expenditures for education, health care, and economic development. Catholic development agencies and advocates joined alliances to press governments and international financial institutions to write off burdensome debts. Pope John Paul II capitalised on the turn of the millennium in 2000 to endorse the biblically evocative ‘Year of Jubilee’ campaign, which achieved considerable success (Hertzke, 2004). Coming from the developing world, Pope Francis has intensified Vatican attention to the poor, signalling that their cause will lie at the centre of his papacy. Indeed, all aspects of his papacy seem to converge to a theology of the poor, to a radical identification with the destitute and exploited and a simultaneous challenge to those with economic resources and political power to do far more than provide alms. Choosing as his namesake St. Francis, he has chided the princes of the church to abandon their privileges and cast their lot with the poor. He has written that the heart of the gospel is radically for the marginalized. In an apostolic exhortation he wrote that ‘God’s heart has a special place for the poor, so much so that he himself became poor’ through an emptying Kenosis, such that the ‘entire history of our redemption is marked 50

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by the presence of the poor’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 2014, p. 197). Francis instantiated this concern by repeatedly remonstrating with political and business leaders to ameliorate inequalities, end exploitation of poor workers or marginalization of castoffs in the global economy, and by appointing bishops in developing nations who reflect this conviction. Concern for the environment has increasingly engaged the Holy See. From the 1970s onward successive popes condemned ecological destruction and called for economic and moral transformations that would enhance care for creation. This concern reached its climax in the papacy of Pope Francis, who drew upon his scholarly academies to produce the landmark encyclical, Laudato Si, a long and detailed analysis of global environmental degradation, with particular attention to climate change as ‘a global problem with grave implications’. In this encyclical, the Pope also linked the state of the global environment to the plight of the poor. He lamented that many ‘poor live in areas particularly affected . . . [and] . . . have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt’. Citing ‘widespread indifference to such suffering’, he charged that ‘those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms’ (Laudato Si, 2015, paragraph 25). Thus, development strategies must simultaneously provide uplift for the poor and care for creation (Rivkin, 2015). Fateful issues of war and peace have led recent Popes to challenge the resort to military force in settling international disputes, while Vatican diplomats and Catholic lay organizations have engaged in mediation initiatives. During the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 Pope John Paul II echoed the American bishops in challenging its justification (Allen, 2004, chapter 7). Pope Francis, in turn, called upon world powers not to intervene militarily in the civil war in Syria (Zavis, 2013). More recently, in 2021 Pope Francis denounced both the American intervention in Afghanistan as ‘irresponsible policy’ and lamented that the chaotic US withdrawal did not take into account all ‘eventualities’ (Povoledo, 2021). Beyond rhetorical denunciations of war, Pope Francis has sought to reconcile people and nations (Yardley, 2014). This manifested itself most dramatically in the key role he played in the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba. Not only did the Pope send letters to both President Obama and President Castro inviting rapprochement, but he also convened a secret meeting between the two countries at the Vatican that facilitated diplomatic openings (Yardley and Pianigiani, 2014). The Holy Father also strove to reconcile relations between Palestine and Israel. In 2014 the pontiff hosted President Shimon Peres of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine at the Vatican for a ‘Prayer Summit’ emphasizing common humanity and forgiveness (Booth, 2014). The shocking Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, produced an agonizing series of contradictory responses by Pope Francis and halting diplomatic forays by the Vatican. Critics inside and outside of the church discerned an ambivalent papal voice in the face of Russia’s blatant aggression and indiscriminate killing of Ukrainian civilians (Weigel, 2022). The Pope condemned the war in general terms but did not call out Putin as the aggressor and demurred on whether Ukrainian military actions represented legitimate defence (Horowitz, 2022). More striking, the Pope suggested that ‘NATO barking at Russia’s gate’ may have provoked Putin, leading to fierce criticism that Francis was blaming the victim and sending a ‘terrible moral signal to dictators’ (Editorial Board, 2022). Even sympathetic observers called upon the pontiff ‘to speak the truth about the murderous assault on Ukraine’ (NRC Staff, 2022). One explanation for the papal equivocation lay in the Vatican’s effort to keep a neutral posture for a potential mediating role (White, 2022). A more profound reason seems to be a longerterm evolution of the Holy See’s posture toward war. From Pacem in Terris (1963) to Fratelli Tutti (2020) the church has moved away from its classic Just War tradition that provided moral 51

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justification for defensive military combat under rigorously limited circumstances. Faced with the threat of nuclear Armageddon in the 1960s, Pope John XXIII offered a sweeping vision of a new era of international relations in which societies and states eradicate the conditions that give rise to war and called into question the church’s traditional teaching that distinguished just from unjust wars (Pacem in Terris, 1963). Pope John Paul II, in turn, questioned whether modern warfare could meet the criteria of just war and erected a high moral threshold for the use of force (Christiansen, 2006). More forcefully, Pope Francis suggested that the church’s teaching on the legitimate use of military force was dated. ‘We can no longer think of war as a solution because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a “just war”. Never again war!’ (Fratelli Tutti, 2020, paragraph 258). Measured against the church’s traditional teaching, however, one could hardly find a starker violation of jus ad bellum (just resort to war) and jus in bello (just means in fighting war) than Russia’s invasion and documented war crimes. In turn, the Ukrainian military response seemed a textbook example of just defensive war and just means in pursuing it. This has led prominent Catholic scholars to call for the church to reclaim its just war theory (Desch, 2022). One of the most striking peacemaking initiatives in the Catholic world involves a Catholic lay organization, the Community of Sant’Egidio, headquartered in Rome but with some 50,000 members spread over 70 countries. Inspired by the gospel mandate to extend radical friendship to the poor and outcast in every land, its members enjoy the trust of diverse actors, from government officials to civil society actors and dissidents. This trust enabled its members, quite unexpectedly, to mediate an end to the civil war in Mozambique in 1992, which then led to subsequent major roles in mediating conflicts in Algeria, Uganda, Kosovo, Guatemala, and Liberia (Toft et al., 2011, Chapter 7). This unusual outcome flows from the ability of the organization to blend local relationships with global Catholic networks. One area of unambiguous Vatican advocacy concerns migrants and refugees. Pope Francis expressed this concern in his 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (‘All brothers’). In it, he refers to migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees more than 30 times, rivalling only his references to the poor. He specifically calls for more humane policies to deal with the migration crisis, which he sees as threatened by ‘myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism’ (Fratelli Tutti, 2020, paragraph 11). If the church has taken ‘progressive’ positions on human rights, poverty, the environment, and war, it remains a traditional body when it comes to the constellation of issues surrounding abortion, human sexuality, AIDS prevention, contraception, marriage, and the family. Because the Vatican and Catholic NGOs have Observer Status at the United Nations – allowing them to speak but not vote at the UN General Assembly – and other international forums, the church remains an active presence in these debates. At population summits, for example, the church has clashed with western nations and feminist organisations over their advocacy of abortion access (Cowell, 1994). With respect to certain forms of sex education and contraceptive services to adolescents, the church has fought against bypassing parents by emphasising rights and responsibilities of families. Church officials fear that the approach of liberal NGOs undermines traditional morality and promotes sexual permissiveness that leads to the abuse of girls and women (Crossette, 1994). During the papacy of Pope Benedict, the church condemned the ‘condom message’ of AIDS activists, pointing to abstinence and fidelity in marriage as the only sure ways to prevent the spread of the disease (BBC News, 2005). Finally, in the face of rapidly changing attitudes on gay rights, the church has fought against same-sex marriage laws, invoking its teaching on the divinely ordained nature of the male-female union and the social benefits of traditional family bonds. 52

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While these positions put the church squarely in opposition to liberalising social trends, it has joined progressive allies in calling for more spending on AIDS medical treatment, promoting access to education for girls and women, and expanding economic opportunity for the poor, which it sees as the most efficacious means of stabilizing populations. Moreover, Pope Francis introduced a dramatic new tone to these debates. In a lengthy interview, he admitted that he intended to talk less about abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, warning the church against becoming ‘obsessed’ with dogmas to the exclusion of love, especially for the poor (Spadaro, 2013). Moreover, in response to a journalist’s question on homosexual priests, Francis responded with a question that shocked Catholic traditionalists: ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?’ (Donadio, 2013). But while Francis has indicated openness to the possibility of civil unions for gay couples, he has not fundamentally changed the church’s opposition to the re-definition of marriage to include same-sex partners. Indeed, a synod of cardinals convened to discuss controversies over the family produced a report which, while ‘welcoming homosexual persons’ nonetheless depicted gay partnerships as ‘imperfect’ and stressed that ‘unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman’ (Wofford, 2014). This position puts Catholic institutions in some countries in jeopardy of running afoul of new anti-discrimination laws that sanction refusal to recognize same-sex marriages. We now turn to the diverse examples of political engagement by the church in different regions of the world.

Europe: Christian roots and secularisation Europe was once the Catholic heartland, and the church played an influential role in statecraft. That has changed, as church growth has shifted to the developing world of the Global South, and the Catholic percentage of European population has declined. But it is useful to highlight the contributions of Catholicism to the political scene of Europe. One of several key contributions involved the formation of the Christian Democratic parties that played a crucial, even if unheralded, role in building stable democracies in Western Europe after World War II. Inspired by Catholic social teaching on human dignity, lay intellectuals and activists in Europe pressed for democracy and human rights, in some cases pushing the envelope further than the church’s official position. A leading figure was Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who helped lay the intellectual foundations for the Christian Democratic movement. In particular, he developed the doctrine of ‘Thomistic personalism’, a view of the human person as naturally embedded in organic institutions of society, such as family, church, community, or guild (Maritain, 1943). Although not explicitly planned by the church, the emergent Christian Democratic parties drew heavily upon the doctrine of subsidiarity – that the state should support, not supplant, these natural societal institutions. Guided by this vision, Christian Democratic parties enacted family and church-friendly social welfare policies. Thus, while often depicted as the main ‘conservative’ opposition to social democratic parties, the Christian Democratic movement in fact represented a distinct blend of traditional and progressive elements. A genuine international movement, Christian Democratic parties went on to help consolidate democracy in several Latin American nations (Kalyvas, 1996; Papini, 1997). In Eastern Europe, the story of how the church helped undermine communism is well known (Weigel, 2005). Not only in Poland, but in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, congregations became places where people could begin to freely express themselves. This shielded religious and secular dissidents alike, who developed trust and solidarity through religious rituals that took on political significance (Havel, 1990). 53

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With the collapse of communism, the Vatican shifted focus to battling secularising trends. When John Paul II returned to democratic Poland, for example, he chided the people for rising consumerism and materialism. Cardinal Ratzinger, in a homily to the conclave that elected him Pope, denounced ‘the dictatorship of relativism’ (Ratzinger, 2005), and as Pontiff, frequently called upon Europeans to return to their Christian roots. This took tangible form in deliberations over the constitution of the European Union, in which the Vatican backed language that would explicitly acknowledge the Christian heritage of Europe, but only gained watered-down reference to the cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance of Europe. The rise of populist nationalism in Europe has fractured the Christian Democratic consensus and produced competing Catholic responses. Catholic integralists in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere have sought stronger ties between the church and state, while their Catholic constituencies have sometimes backed anti-immigrant policies, especially targeting Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. This directly challenges the Vatican’s support for humane policies toward migrants. The shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, sparked unprecedented European solidarity to defend Ukraine and provide succor to its swelling refugee population. Catholic actors emerged as pivotal players in this drama, as international Catholic NGOs, already stretched by humanitarian crises elsewhere, have responded with millions in aid to refugees. But the most striking role for Catholicism has been Catholic Poland’s welcoming of some 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees, entailing huge initiatives by the government, Catholic charities, and average Polish citizens to provide housing, services, and even employment for the refugees. This hospitable response concords with the sentiments of Pope Francis and seems to have undermined, for the moment, some of the nativist impulses afflicting Eastern Europe in recent years (CNA Staff, 2022). Throughout Europe, the Vatican also fought (largely unsuccessful) battles against socially liberal policies, such as legal abortion, same-sex marriage or civil unions, stem-cell research, and euthanasia. While Pope Francis has not departed fundamentally from his predecessors on these questions, his re-orienting emphasis on the crisis of the marginalized has fostered new goodwill for the church on the continent. His dramatic gestures (such as the tradition of washing the feet of prisoners on Holy Thursday) evoke an approach to evangelization rooted in an ideal of sacrificial service rather than doctrine. Whether his enormous popularity will translate into renewal remains a question.

The United States: robust presence and emerging challenges The Catholic Church represents ‘a distinct voice’ in American politics (Steinfels, 2004). It joins conservatives in defending traditional marriage, opposing abortion, and supporting conscience protections for religious health care providers. But it also unites with liberals in backing humanitarian foreign aid, health care for the poor, social welfare spending, increases in the minimum wage, humane treatment of immigrants, and opposition to the death penalty. Because of this unique ideological blend, Catholics have become the quintessential swing voters in American politics, a strategic voting block assiduously courted by both political parties. Over a fifth of the US electorate, Catholics comprise the median voting group whose movement often provides the decisive margin of victory in national elections, with Hispanic Catholic voters more Democratic and white Catholics more Republican. In the 2020 election, Catholic Joe Biden evenly split the Catholic vote with Donald Trump, a significant improvement over Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton’s share in 2016 (Igielnik, Keeter, and Hartig, 2021). Catholics in America also operate an impressive array of institutions, including the nation’s paramount parochial school system, a large hospital network, extensive charities and adoption 54

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agencies, diverse religious orders, along with national and state Catholic conferences. The shock of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalising abortion spurred an extensive pro-life network in the church, which continues to provide the most vigorous institutional support for limits on abortion. A growing critique of public schools, especially their perceived failure to adequately serve the poor, led to increased attention to the ways parochial schools compensated for family deficits (Colman and Hoffer, 1987), producing alliances with both home-schooling evangelicals and inner-city Black people for various ‘school choice’ initiatives. From the 1980s onward, the devolution of policymaking authority to the states has enhanced the role of state Catholic conferences, which are permanent agencies composed of dioceses often headed by a lay executive director. In most states, these conferences are often the most well-established and influential religious advocacy presence – but in characteristic fashion, blend culturally conservative stands with economically progressive positions (Yamane, 2005). A crucial challenge to this distinct Catholic voice is the growing polarization of American politics, which pushes citizens into mutually hostile partisan camps, reinforced by the ideological echo chambers of cable and social media outlets, not to mention the vitriolic presence of former president Donald Trump. This polarization has divided the laity in congregations and pushed Catholic leaders into seeming alignment with one side or the other, depending on circumstances. An assertive social liberalism during the Obama years, for example, pushed the bishops into the traditionalist camp in defence of church autonomy and conscience rights. Catholic institutions joined other religious traditionalists to resist mandates to include contraceptives and sterilization in their health plans, producing prodigious litigation battles pitting government agencies against Catholic charities, religious orders, and colleges seeking conscience exemption from such mandates (Hertzke, 2015, ‘Introduction’). Moreover, when same-sex marriage was established as a right by the courts, non-discrimination statutes have been applied to church institutions, forcing them to choose between defying the law or violating their teaching on marriage. Long-standing Catholic adoption programs in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, and Illinois shut down because authorities insisted that they place children with same-sex couples. In the face of these converging challenges, the bishops launched national educational campaigns to defend religious freedom and rights of conscience (Hertzke and Pudlo, 2014). During the Trump years, however, American Catholic bishops became visible opponents of the president’s harsh rhetoric and policies toward migrants, in particular condemning the Trump policy of separating immigrant children from parents at the border (Roewe, 2018). Pope Francis endorsed the American bishops’ position, which was widely seen as influencing the Trump administration to reverse its family separation policies (Horowitz, 2018). In the early years of the Biden presidency, the American bishops have generally been supportive of the administration’s international engagement, immigration posture, progressive economic and tax policies, and climate mitigation strategies. The overturn of Roe v. Wade, however, by returning abortion policy-making to the states, pits church leaders and pro-life activists against pro-choice liberals, creating tensions for Catholic progressives in the pews and pressure on Catholic politicians in the Democratic Party. We see hints of what is to come in proclamations by a few conservative bishops that they will refuse communion to prominent pro-choice Catholic politicians, such as President Biden or former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while other bishops continue to invite them to the sacramental table. The decentralization of pastoral authority by local bishops creates the odd situation in which Pelosi, for example, can be denied communion in San Francisco (by her conservative local bishop) but invited to the eucharist in 55

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Washington, DC, where the bishop has taken ‘a more dialogic approach to the abortion dispute’ (Allen, 2022). Such division and confusion do not augur well for sustaining a distinct Catholic leaven in American politics, but a tincture of hope lies in a younger generation of Catholics who seem devout in their orthodoxy but less interested in fighting culture wars.

Latin America: democracy and development The most significant story from Latin America is, of course, the elevation of Argentine Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires to the seat of St. Peter, producing ecstatic responses of cultural pride. As the first Pope from Latin America, Francis brings a distinct focus on poverty, mercy, and a new evangelization in the face of competition, and he has appointed bishops and cardinals in the region who reflect this focus. Latin America contains the largest regional Catholic population, comprising some 39% of all the world’s Catholics (Pew 2013). For nearly five centuries the Catholic Church backed authoritarian regimes and economic oligarchs in Latin America. This makes the transformation of the Church following Vatican II especially noteworthy. Many bishops, priests, and religious women opposed dictatorships, shielded dissidents, and fought for human rights. Papal nuncios in turn provided international legitimacy of such efforts, helping to lead a wave of democratisation in the last few decades. An excellent example is Brazil, by population the largest Catholic country in the world. For centuries, the Church tied itself to wealthy landowners and authoritarian rulers who granted it vast privileges. But by the 1960s, a progressive episcopate embraced the aspirations of the poor and offered the most prominent challenge to despotic military rule. By providing space for civil society and undermining the legitimacy of the regime, the Church helped midwife democratisation (Casanova, 1994; Huntington, 1991). To be sure, democratization in Latin America was uneven, and Church support for authoritarianism endured until recently in a few countries, such as Argentina, Honduras, and Uruguay. One explanation for this variability is that the Church changed the least where it faced little competition, either from Protestant growth or secular movements (Gill, 1998). Linked to its democratic role was the Church’s embrace of justice for rural peasantry and urban poor. Vatican II highlighted the enormous inequalities in the global economy and questioned the justice of destitution amidst unprecedented wealth. This theme emerged at meetings of the Latin American Bishop’s Conference (CELAM) in Medellin, Colombia in 1968 and Pueblo, Mexico in 1979. Church leaders articulated the widely influential idea that public policies should be guided by a ‘preferential option for the poor’. This idea, of course, was bolstered by liberation theology, which applied the analysis of class conflict to press for radical changes in societal structures that would end exploitation of the destitute (Gutierrez, 1973). While many bishops may not have embraced the ‘Marxist methodology of liberation theologians’, as Anthony Gill observes, ‘they could not but help to reflect upon their critiques of Latin American society and perhaps arrive at less radical, but still progressive conclusions’ (Gill, 1998, 45). So, whether influenced by Vatican II, CELAM conferences, or liberation theology, Church leaders in many cases became champions of the dispossessed. Of course, the Marxist dimension of liberation theology troubled the Catholic hierarchy. By the 1980s, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had condemned liberation theology as a ‘fundamental threat’ to the Church and silenced Brazilian friar Leonardo Boff, a leading figure in the movement. Despite this assault, liberation theology lingers among a cadre of priests and lay Catholics, who seek structural changes in confronting desperate poverty (Reel, 2005). 56

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Pope Francis appears to draw from this wellspring in his critique of the global economy, of the inequality that represents a denial of the dignity of all persons. Chastising the ‘new idolatry of money’, he challenges ‘trickle-down theories’ as expressing a ‘naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 2014, para 54–55). His conviction that neoliberal economic trends leave too many in a destitute existence echoes themes of liberation theology, perhaps without the Marxism. But while the Pope may be popular in Latin America, the Church has lost significant portions of its flock to Pentecostalism or secularism. Its diminished influence is also reflected in the fact that ‘countries in the region have been so quick to adopt laws legalizing abortion, gay marriage, and the decriminalization of marijuana’ (Gomez, 2014). In some countries, such as Argentine and Chile, scandals involving sex abuse of minors by prominent clerics have seriously damaged the Church and its political influence. In Chile, this reckoning meant far less capacity to defend its interests and perspectives on marriage, education, abortion, and religious freedom during the process of drafting a new constitution dominated by more secular or left-wing actors (San Martin, 2022).

Africa: Catholic leaven in struggles The Catholic Church has experienced dramatic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, from a tiny presence in 1900 to over 170 million by 2010, or 16% of the globe’s Catholic population (Pew Research Centre, 2013). At least four African nations are at or near majority Catholic population, while another five are at least 40% Catholic (Pew-Templeton Global Futures Project, 2016). Not only is growth accelerating and outstripping other parts of the world, but Africa is producing so many priests that they are being sent to take over churches in the United States and Europe (Nossiter, 2013). As an independent sector of civil society, the church has promoted democratization across the continent, from South Africa to Uganda. Catholic schools and universities often educated democratic reformers, and Catholic leaders sometimes engaged in direct democratization efforts. In Malawi the Catholic bishops distributed a pastoral letter that criticised the one-party rule of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, which was the ‘turning point’ in that nation’s democratization. The church likewise led popular opposition movements against authoritarianism in Kenya, Zambia, and Ghana (Philpott, 2005). In war-torn Congo (with approximately half of its population Roman Catholic), church leaders have striven to provide a forum for reconciliation as a means of promoting peace and democratic transition (Elenga, 2006). The bishops’ conference also deployed observers and condemned as tainted the election that returned President Joseph Kabila to power in 2011 (BBC News, 2012). The church often provides vital educational and health services where governments are either ineffective or corrupt. In Angola, the church transformed itself from a virtual appendage of Portuguese colonizers into a truly independent force. As the nation recovered from civil war, in the new century the church became a ‘surrogate state’, managing a network of schools and charities, operating the country’s premier radio station, and serving as a potent ‘political leader in an independent Angola’ (Heywood, 2006). In Nigeria the church also compensates for state weakness or corruption, particularly in the face of the Boko Haram insurgency in the north. Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto of northwestern Nigeria observed that the ‘entire architecture of governance has collapsed. The church remains the only moral force’ (Nossiter, 2013). Catholic development organisations in Africa have also been drawn into peacemaking initiatives. In 2015, strife in the Central African Republic (CAR) spawned violence by Christian militias against Muslims, resulting in the destruction of numerous mosques and a massive exodus of Muslim refugees. In response, Catholic Relief Services collaborated with Muslim groups in mediating initiatives to quell the violence and promote reconciliation (Bryson, 2015). 57

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In no place has the church’s engagement been deeper than in South Sudan, the world’s newest nation and one of the most fragile. For two decades (1993–2003) the formerly Islamist regime of Sudan waged a scorched earth war against the nation’s ethnic Africans of the south, comprised mostly of Christians and tribal religionists. Indigenous Catholic bishops, working with global church leaders and activist lay Catholics in the US, played an important role in the coalition that induced the US government to pressure Khartoum to sign a peace treaty with the southern rebel movement, which ultimately led to independence for the new nation of South Sudan 2011 (Hertzke, 2004, Chapter  7). International Catholic development agencies, such as Caritas and Catholic Relief Services, invested heavily in the fragile new country. But the country was too fragile to hold. A power struggle between political and tribal rivals, President Salva Kiir (a Dinka), and Vice President Riek Machar (a Nuer), erupted into widespread tribal violence and armed insurrection, sparking massive displacement, disease, and famine. Seeking to mediate the conflict, local Catholic bishops enlisted the personal intervention of Pope Francis, who invited the rivals to a ‘spiritual retreat for peace’ at the Vatican on the eve of Holy Week in 2019. In a dramatic gesture, the Pope knelt and kissed the feet of each of the antagonists, Kiir and Machar, imploring them to end the conflict. This stunning example of papal diplomacy spurred, or shamed, the antagonists to commit to a power-sharing pact in 2020, negotiated under UN auspices (Hertzke, 2020). Failure of rivals to implement the pact, along with continued tribal violence and corruption, spurred the pontiff to travel to South Sudan on a “Pilgrimage of Peace” in February of 2023. During his visit Pope Francis sharply rebuked Sudanese leaders for corruption, called upon militias to disarm, and pleaded for a country-wide process of reconciliation and forgiveness (Pullella and Wudu, 2023; Walsh and Horowitz 2023). Uganda, which is over 40% Catholic (Pew-Templeton Global Futures Project, 2016) suffered through a different crucible. During the reign of terror of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda, the church provided centres of refuge for children threatened with abduction. In turn, the Community of Sant’Egidio helped broker peace talks with the LRA that ended the civil war (Toft et al., 2011, p. 189). In the aftermath of the conflict, the Uganda church established programs of rehabilitation to help former child soldiers to reintegrate into society. This account underscores both the indigenous resources of the church and the benefits of transnational networks. While these illustrations show the church’s influence, elsewhere ‘Catholics proved ineffective as brokers of democracy’, particularly in Rwanda (Philpott, 2005, pp. 110–111). Rwanda, whose population is roughly half Roman Catholic, represents an example of abject failure to overcome tribal conflicts. The roots of this failure lie in the fact that the church colluded with Belgian colonisers, who employed a deliberate policy of playing the Tutsis and Hutus against each other. This had devastating consequences in 1994 when Hutu forces inaugurated a genocidal campaign against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Not only did the church not systematically protest the genocide, but some Catholic priests participated in the atrocities, their sanctuaries becoming killing fields. Even after the killing ended, Rwandan Catholic leaders continued to downplay the massacres and refused to acknowledge their complicity and failure. Though some observers hold out hope that the church can still engage in truth and reconciliation processes, its mission has been seriously discredited, opening the way for evangelical Protestant competitors to move into the social and moral void (Rutagambwa, 2006).

Asia: a quest for civil society With its huge population and geographic reach, Asia presents a multifaceted setting for Catholic political engagement. Despite diverse nationalities and forms of government, the quest to carve spaces for itself in civil society is a consistent thread throughout the region. 58

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For example, with a growing Catholic population in Taiwan and South Korea, the church nurtured dissent against authoritarian regimes and helped to encourage democratisation in the two states. Remarkably in South Korea, Catholic Kim Dae-jung, who fought a life-long democracy campaign, used church settings to arouse the citizenry against South Korea’s military dictatorships. He was twice imprisoned and even sentenced to death in 1980. The intervention of the US led to his release and exile; his subsequent return to South Korea intensified prodemocracy forces (Huntington, 1991). He was elected in 1997 and earned the Nobel peace prize in 2000 for his role in democratising the nation. Similarly, in the Philippines the church fostered the central opposition to the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos. This began in earnest in the early 1980s with a series of pastoral letters from the bishops’ conference critical of the regime, which prepared the ground for the ‘people power’ revolution of 1986. Under pressure from the church, Marcos called a ‘snap election’ designed to ‘throw the opposition off balance’. But Cardinal Jaime Sin and other bishops frustrated Marcos by in effect backing the candidacy of Cory Aquino, wife of the assassinated opposition leader Ninoy Aquino. The bishops then condemned widespread voting fraud that initially gave the election to Marcos. Finally, in one of the most dramatic episodes in Philippine history, the church called out hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to flood the streets and protect with their bodies military officers who joined the Aquino forces. Under pressure from the church and the US government, Marcos resigned, and Aquino assumed the presidency (Wooster, 1994). The church continues to play an active role in the nation, supporting initiatives for the poor and challenging corruption. Another example of where the church became tied up in a people’s cause was East Timor. For centuries the church served colonial power, but the invasion by Indonesia in 1975 severed the church from the government and ironically freed priests to lead the popular struggle against occupation. As the interests of the church and the indigenous population merged, affiliation with Catholicism mushroomed. In 1973 less than a third of the population was Catholic; by 1990 that figure was an astonishing 90%. Under international pressure, Indonesia agreed to a referendum on independence in 1999. Its passage resulted in violent reprisals by Indonesian military troops and militia, in which some priests and nuns were killed. This brought new pressure on the Indonesian government, which withdrew its troops and recognized East Timor independence. The church now focuses on rebuilding community structures shattered by occupation and war (Lyon, 2007). Asia contains most of the world’s remaining communist states: China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. North Korea, which crushes religion with some of the worst persecution on earth, is sui generis, and there the church barely clings to life. Internationally, however, Catholics have taken up the cause of refugees who have fled the totalitarian regime, putting pressure on China to cease deporting or exploiting them. Elsewhere in Asia the church strives for independence from communist authorities, who seek to keep power by controlling nascent civil society. In Vietnam, unified church leaders have adroitly engaged with the communist authorities to carve spaces for independent religious life, winning some concessions to operate churches and societal ministries (Reimer, 2016). Greater repression in China, on the other hand, has produced a persecuted and divided church. Underground Catholics who pledge fealty to Rome risk harassment or arrest by authorities, and they often disdain those who worship in state-sanctioned ‘patriotic’ congregations. Wanting to unite both state-sanctioned and ‘underground’ Catholics, the Vatican signed a controversial protocol with the regime in 2018, establishing a ‘collaboration’ on the appointment of bishops, including a veto by the Pope over candidates proposed by the regime (Holy See Press Office, 2018; McCallister, 2018). This delicate minuet of secret negotiations, however, did not stem 59

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a rising wave of repression and surveillance against the church, including the arrest of a retired cardinal in Hong Kong (Ramzy and May, 2022), leading to recriminations by some Chinese and western Catholic leaders that the Vatican was undercutting Chinese Catholics most loyal to the Holy See (Crux Staff, 2020; Weigel, 2020). Continuing repression and division will likely inhibit church growth in China and hamper the church’s ability to foster independent civil society (Madsen, 1998; Reardon, 2006).

Crisis for Christianity in the Middle East The seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, by Islamic State militants in the summer of 2014 stunned the world. Especially shocking was their brutal efficiency in killing or expelling the entire Christian population from the city and the wider Nineveh plain. This event captured the existential peril facing Christians and other minorities in the region. The chaotic wake of the American-led overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq exposed vulnerable Christian communities to sectarian assaults and systematic Islamist terror. The crisis accelerated with the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Perhaps only a third of the Christian population remains in Iraq, as Christians in the entire region continue to flee their ancient homeland (Barber, 2016). Christianity in the Middle East is composed of distinct communities and traditions, from Orthodox to Eastern Rite to Catholic. Nonetheless, Catholic leaders, drawing upon transnational networks, have emerged as the most visible advocates for the besieged faithful. Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako, head of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic community, is the singular example. Before the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, he sounded the alarm about the perilous situation for Christians in Iraq (Allen, 2013). Since the fall of Mosul, he has become a singular spokesman for Christians and other minorities. In a speech before the UN Security Council, he proclaimed that Islamist extremist groups were ‘erasing all traces’ of non-Muslims in the region, and he pleaded with world leaders to take coordinated action to protect the remnant (Brown, 2015). Illustrating the potent global linkages of the church, Pope Francis personally called Patriarch Sako in 2014 to express his solidarity with Iraqi Christians and endorsed international action to protect them (Vatican Radio, 2014). Four years later the pontiff made Sako a Cardinal, dramatically elevating his voice within the Church (Brockhaus, 2018). Beyond advocacy, the church faces the striking challenge of serving a growing refugee population in Kurdistan, Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, and reconstituting the Assyrian diaspora into functioning communities. This will require both the generosity from the global church and creative indigenous leadership.

Conclusion: to the future As this discussion indicates, the Catholic Church will remain a strategic actor in national and global politics. Its effectiveness, however, will depend on its vitality as a religious institution, and that will vary from region to region, nation to nation. The challenges it confronts, in turn, will vary enormously. The millennia-old challenge of libertas ecclesiae, protecting the freedom of the church from state intrusion, remains an urgent goal in authoritarian contexts but is also re-emerging in the West as aggressive secular policies threaten to undermine the autonomy of religious institutions. Thus, the church and its leaders will continue to be significant voices in promoting religious freedom. With the continued shift of the Catholic population to the Global South, the church will find itself heavily nested among the world’s poor, exploited, and displaced. This demographic reality not only produces a concordance with the emphasis of Pope Francis on being a church of and for 60

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the poor but will profoundly shape the context for future pontiffs. One of the striking trends is the sizeable number of Catholics among the world’s refugees, migrants, and exiles. From Christians expelled in Middle East, to desperate Central American migrants, to refugees displaced by strife in South Sudan, Nigeria, or the Congo, many live in a diaspora church – in refugee camps, as sojourners on the move with few possessions, or as undocumented migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation. Such evocative biblical images pose a serious test of whether affluent and comfortable laity in the West will respond with commensurate compassion and advocacy. Finally, the looming bio-genetic revolution will present new challenges to basic theological understandings of the unique giftedness of persons made in the image and likeness of God. Though hardly on the political radar, genetic engineering poses profound questions about the dignity of human life, even about the definition of human life itself. Cloning, foetus farming, patenting life forms, designer babies engineered with specific traits, even the chimera of animal-hybrid combinations used to harvest organs mark the horizon. If the abortion controversy hinged on when human life begins, the genetic revolution thrusts forward such questions as ‘What is a human being? Who decides? What about new creations?’ The genetic revolution also raises the further question of how society will perceive (or welcome) the imperfect. Finally, modern technologies may widen the gap between the poor and the affluent, who are most likely to engineer advantageous traits in their offspring or, as is already occurring, to exploit the poor in organ trafficking. Although Catholic theologians have begun focusing on these profound questions, it will take a massive educational campaign for the church to provide a moral lead in the debates to come. Again, its capacity to provide moral guidance in this revolutionary era will hinge in part on whether the church remains a vigorous spiritual institution around the globe.

References Agenzia Fides. (2022) Vatican – Catholic Church Statistics – 2021, 21 October. www.fides.org/en/ news/71000-VATICAN_CATHOLIC_CHURCH_STATISTICS_2021 Allen, Jr., J.L. (2004) All the Pope’s Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks. New York: Doubleday. Allen, Jr., J.L. (2006) ‘A Challenge, Not a Crusade’, The New York Times, 19 September. https://www. nytimes.com/2006/09/19/opinion/19allen.html Allen, Jr., J.L. (2013) ‘Iraqi Catholic Leader Asks West: ‘If They Kill Us All, Will You Do Something Then?’’, National Catholic Reporter, 15 December. www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/ iraqi-catholic-leader-asks-west-if-they-k6515ill-us-all-will-you-do-something-then Allen, Jr., J.L. (2022) ‘As Communion Ban Debate Heats Up Anew, Don’t Count on Rome to Settle It’, Cruz, 22 May. https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2022/05/as-communion-ban-debate-heats-up-anew-dontcount-on-rome-to-settle-it Barber, M. (2016) ‘They That Remain: Syrian and Iraqi Christian Communities Amid the Syria Conflict and the Rise of the Islamic State’, in Hertzke, A.D. and Shah, T.S. (eds) Christianity and Freedom Volume II: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Barrett, D.V. (2014) ‘World Faith Leaders Join Pope to Sign Human Trafficking Declaration’, Catholic Herald, 2 December. www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/12/02/ faith-leaders-join-pope-at-vatican-to-sign-human-trafficking-declaration/ BBC News. (2005) ‘Pope Rejects Condoms for Africa’, BBC News, 10 June. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/europe/4081276.stm BBC News. (2012) ‘Catholic Bishops Condemn DR Congo Presidential Election’, BBC News, 13 January. www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-16540780 Beliefnet. (2014) Pope Francis Addresses Christian Persecution in Middle East. www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/ Catholic/Articles/Pope-Francis-and-Mid-East-Persecution.aspx#JFxyWKqDllaxd5L6.99 Booth, W. (2014) ‘Pope Francis Hosts Israeli, Palestinian Leaders at “Prayer Summit” ’, Washington Post, 8 June. www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-francis-hosts-israeli-palestinian-leaders-at-prayer-summit/ 2014/06/08/b9adc57e-ef48-11e3-bf76–447a5df6411f_story.html

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Allen D. Hertzke Bottum, J. (2006) ‘Benedict Meets Bartholomew: The Real Reason for the Pope’s Visit to Turkey’, The Weekly Standard, 11 December. Brockhaus, H. (2018) ‘Patriarch Sako will be Chaldean Catholics; first voting cardinal’, Catholic News Agency, 27 June. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/38748/patriarch-sako-will-be-chaldeancatholics-first-voting-cardinal Brown, L. (2015) ‘Catholic Patriarch in Iraq’, CNS News.com, 30 March. https://cnsnews.com/news/ article/lauretta-brown/catholic-patriarch-iraq-so-called-arab-spring-impacted-negatively-us Bryson, J. (2015) ‘When Christians Kill and Destroy but Also Make Peace, CAR Today’, Arc of the Universe Blog, 20 March. http://arcoftheuniverse.info/when-christians-kill-and-destroy-but-also-make-peace-car-today Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Christiansen, D. (2006) ‘Catholic Peacemaking, 1991–2005: The Legacy of Pope John Paul II’, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 4(2). www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15570274.2006.9523246 CNA Staff. (2022) ‘Poland’s Catholics Dig Deep to Help Ukrainian Refugees’, Catholic News Agency, 22 March. www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250750/ukraine-war-poland-s-catholics-dig-deep-to-helprefugees Coleman, J.S. and Hoffer, T. (1987) Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities. New York: Basic Books. Cowell, A. (1994) ‘How Vatican Views Cairo’, The New York Times, 18 September. www.nytimes. com/1994/09/18/world/how-vatican-views-cairo.html Crossette, B. (1994) ‘Vatican Holds up Abortion Debate at Talks in Cairo’, The New York Times, 7 September. www.nytimes.com/1994/09/08/world/vatican-holds-up-abortion-debate-at-talks-in-cairo.html Crux Staff. (2020) Cardinal Zen Says Pope Francis Being “Manipulated” on China, 2 March. https://cruxnow. com/church-in-asia/2020/03/cardinal-zen-says-pope-francis-being-manipulated-on-china. Desch, M.C. (2022) ‘The Power that Preserves the Peace’, Notre Dame Magazine, 51(1). Donadio, R. (2013) ‘On Gay Priests, Pope Francis Asks, “Who Am I to Judge?” ’, The New York Times, 29 July. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/world/europe/pope-francis-gay-priests.html Editorial Board. (2022) ‘Pope Francis Blame NATO: The Catholic Leader Can’t Seem to Condemn Russia’s Invasion’, The Wall Street Journal, 3. www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russiaukraine-11651598988 Elenga, Y.C. (2006) ‘The Congolese Church: Ecclesial Community with the Political Community’, in Manuel, P.C., Reardon, L.C. and Wilcox, C. (eds) The Catholic Church and the Nation-State: Comparative Perspectives. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Evangelii Gaudium. (2014) ‘Apostolic Exhortation of the Holy Father Francis on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World’, 24 November. www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/ documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html Ferrari, L.L. (2006) ‘The Vatican as a Transnational Actor’, in Manuel, P.C., Reardon, L.C. and Wilcox, C. (eds) The Catholic Church and the Nation-State: Comparative Perspectives. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Fratelli Tutti. (2020) ‘Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Fraternity and Social Friendship’, 3 October. www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_ enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html Gill, A.J. (1998) Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gomez, A. (2014) ‘Report: Catholic Church Losing Ground in Latin America’, USA Today, 13 November. www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/11/13/latin-america-less-religious-study/18946703/ Gutierrez, G. (1973) A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Havel, V. (1990) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Hertzke, A.D. (2004) Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Hertzke, A.D. (2015) Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (Ed). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Hertzke, A.D. (2020) ‘State Failure and International Response: The Lessons of South Sudan’, in Vittorio Hosle. (ed) Nation, State, in Nation-State. Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Hertzke, A.D. and Pudlo, J.M. (2014) ‘Defending Civil Society: Religious Advocacy in America’, in Glendon, M.A. and Alvira, R. (eds) The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.

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Allen D. Hertzke Povoledo, E. (2021) ‘Pope Criticizes Western Intervention in Afghanistan’, The New York Times, 1 September. www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/world/europe/pope-afghanistan-health.html Pullella, P. and Wudu, W.S. (2023) ‘Pope Francis wraps up South Sudan trip, urges end to blind fury of violence’, Reuters News, 5 February. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/pope-francis-wraps-up-southsudan-trip-urging-an-end-violence-2023-02-05/ Ramzy, R. and May, T. (2022). ‘Hong Kong Police Arrest Cardinal in National Security Case’, The New York Times, 11 May. www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/world/asia/hong-kong-arrests-national-security.html Ratzinger, J. (2005) ‘Homily at the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff’, St. Peter’s Basilica, 18 April. http://archive.wf-f.org/Ratzinger_ConclaveMass.html Reardon, L.C. (2006) ‘The Chinese Catholic Church: Obstacles to Reconciliation’, in Manuel, P.C., Reardon, L.C. and Wilcox, C. (eds) The Catholic Church and the Nation-State: Comparative Perspectives. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Reel, M. (2005) ‘An Abiding Faith in Liberation Theology’, Washington Post, 2 May. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/05/02/an-abiding-faith-in-liberation-theology/ d52cf703-0ba6-427b-8c6e-9d18e375e129/ Reimer, R. (2016). ‘Vietnam: Christianity’s Contributions to Freedom and Human Flourishing in Adversity’, in Hertzke, A.D. and Shah, T.S. (eds) Christianity and Freedom Volume II: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rerum Novarum. (1891) ‘Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor’, 15 May. www.vatican.va/ content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html Rivkin, A. (2015) ‘With Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change Done, Now a Vatican Sales Push – and Pushback’, The New York Times, 28 April. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/ spin-substance-and-pope-franciss-environmental-encyclical/ Roewe, B. (2018) ‘US Bishops Condemn Immigration Policies that Separate Families at Border’, National Catholic Reporter, 13 June. www.ncronline.org/news/people/us-bishops-condemn-immigration-policiesseparate-families-border Rutagambwa, E. (2006) ‘The Rwandan Church: The Challenge of Reconciliation’, in Manuel, P.C., Reardon, L.C. and Wilcox, C. (eds) The Catholic Church and the Nation-State: Comparative Perspectives. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. San Martin, I. (2022) ‘Chile’s New Leader Puts Bishops on Notice over Legacy of Abuse Scandals’, Crux, 19 March. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2022/03/ chiles-new-leader-puts-bishops-on-notice-over-legacy-of-abuse-scandals Spadaro, A. (2013) ‘A Big Heart Open to God: An Interview with Pope Francis’, America, 30 September. www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/09/30/big-heart-open-god-interview-pope-francis Steinfels, M.O. (Ed). (2004) American Catholics & Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice. Lanham: Sheed & Ward. The Economist. (2015) Pope Francis and the Copts: Blood and Ecumenism, 17 February. www.economist. com/erasmus/2015/02/17/blood-and-ecumenism Toft, M.D., Philpott, D. and Shah, T.S. (2011) God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Vatican Radio. (2014) Pope Calls Patriarch Sako in Iraq, 26 July, http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2014/07/26/ pope_calls_patriarch_sako_in_iraq/1103457 Walsh, D. and Horowitz, J. (2023) ‘The World’s Newest Country Is Broken and Forgotten. Enter Pope Francis’, The New York Times, 3 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/world/africa/ pope-francis-south-sudan.html Weigel, G. (2005) Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. New York: Harper Perennial. Weigel, G. (2020) ‘The Vatican Should Speak Up on China’s Repression in Hong Kong and beyond’, Washington Post, 31 August. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/31/ vatican-should-speak-up-chinas-repression-hong-kong-beyond/ Weigel, G. (2022) ‘No Just Wars?’, First Things, 30 March. www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/03/ no-just-wars White, C. (2022) ‘Behind the Frontlines of the Vatican’s Ukraine-Russia Strategy’, National Catholic Reporter, 24 March. www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/behind-frontlines-vaticans-ukraine-russia-strategy Winfield, N. (2014) ‘Pope Francis and Archbishop of Canterbury Pledge to Fight Human Trafficking Together’, Huffington Post, 16 June. www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/pope-francis-justin-welbymodern-slavery_n_5499330.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

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The Catholic Church and Catholicism in global politics Wofford, T. (2014) ‘What Did the Vatican Really Say About Gay Marriage Yesterday?’, Newsweek, 14 October. www.newsweek.com/what-did-vatican-really-say-about-gay-marriage-yesterday-catholicsdisagree-277360 Wooster, H. (1994) ‘Faith at the Ramparts: The Philippine Catholic Church and the 1986 Revolution’, in Johnston, D. and Sampson, C. (eds) Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 153–76. Yamane, D. (2005) The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands & Political Realities. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Yardley, J. (2014) ‘Under Francis, a Bolder Vision of Vatican Diplomacy Emerges’, The New York Times, 18 December. www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/world/europe/pope-francis-vatican-diplomaticmediator-cuba.html Yardley, J. and Pianigiani, G. (2014) ‘Pope Francis Is Credited with a Crucial Role in U.S.-Cuba Agreement’, The New York Times, 17 December. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/world/americas/ breakthrough-on-cuba-highlights-popes-role-as-diplomatic-broker.html Zavis, A. (2013) ‘Pope Francis Appeals to World Leaders to Avoid “Futile” Syria Strike’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September. www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pope-francis-syria-20130905-story.html

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5 CONFUCIANISM Classical, Neo- and “New” Michael D. Barr

Confucianism notionally began in the sixth century BC with the teachings of an obscure Chinese scholar and occasional government adviser called Kongfuzi (Confucius). This picture, however, is slightly misleading because Confucius was himself drawing upon traditions, ideals and cosmologies that were already ancient. He was in fact calling for a revitalisation of these traditions in an attempt to bring an end to the chaos that had engulfed China in his own day. He reaffirmed the traditional Chinese notion that virtue, morality, humaneness and harmony are all heavenly realities waiting to be discovered through education and the adoption of “proper” relationships between members of families and members of society. In the hands of his disciples and generations of their successors, his teachings gave rise to an ethical code that assumed a status akin to that of a state religion in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, providing a central basis of regime legitimacy for many generations of imperial dynasties (Turner, 2006, p. 212). In the tenth century a rigid, state-centric version known as Neo-Confucianism was imposed in China as the national ideology and versions of this spread to Japan and Korea. It was in this period that the examination system became the basis of governance in China and the empire entered a new period of conservatism. As both a state religion and as a system of governance Confucianism is now dead, but at the level of the lived experience of ordinary people, it continues to act as a religion, imposing patterns of social cognition that provide a reasonably consistent social underlay across Chinese and other East Asian cultures. The divergent elements separating these Confucian cultures (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Singapore) are legion, but the common elements are also very firmly established. Confucianism makes no claim to absolute or revealed truth, though Neo-Confucianism at its peak guarded its orthodoxies with a keenness reminiscent of a revealed faith (Kim, 2015, pp. 150, 179). Nevertheless, in all its manifestations it begins from the premise that “the way of the sages” brought to light natural and innately known truths rather than revealed faith. It is a philosophy and a praxis that provides a logical and time-honoured method of ordering society for the common good by cultivating virtue in everyone from the highest political authority to the most menial commoner, with the ruler and his advisers setting the highest standard: a “virtuocracy”. Indeed, its classical statecraft was premised on recognition of the absolute power of the emperor but sought to direct that power for the common good by cultivating virtue in the heart of the emperor and by surrounding him with wise, virtuous and scholarly advisers. The ideal Confucian is a “cultured gentleman” (junzi) and a “humane person” (ren) as opposed to a 66

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“mean/small person” (xiao ren). The two central elements that we find in common in societies influenced by Confucianism include • •

A heavily relational, hierarchical and conservatively ordered view of society, whereby society is regarded substantially as an extension of a patriarchal family Respect for scholarship and virtue, with an implicit assumption that the latter is derived from the former

In its pre-modern forms Confucianism also saw virtue as being properly expressed through rites and rituals (li) that ensure everyone in society operates in a proper fashion according to his or her place in the social hierarchy. Although the formal rituals are no longer very common practice, social intercourse still tends to follow somewhat ritualised patterns that can seem obsequious to outsiders. Central to the relational and hierarchical perspective of classical Confucianism are two sets of relationships. The first is the “five relationships” that govern Confucian thought: ruler over minister/subject; father over son; husband over wife; elder brother over younger brother; and friend and friend. Friendships are the only apparently non-hierarchical relationship in the Confucian order, but in practice friends tend to model their behaviour on the older brother/younger brother relationship. The second set of relationships is the traditional hierarchy of occupations, whereby scholars are almost venerated, farmers are accorded considerable respect, workers are held in lower regard, and merchants are at the bottom of the pile. Soldiers are so low that they are not accepted as part of the hierarchy at all, except in Japan, where the Samurai traditionally took the place of scholars in the hierarchy. It is a sign of the flexibility of contemporary Confucianism that the subservient role of women is generally dismissed (at least at levels of official policy), that merchants are held in high regard in many Confucian societies, and every country with a Confucian heritage gives its military a place of honour (except, ironically, in pacifist Japan where the military had earlier held a place of honour). Described in broad terms, Confucianism can appear to be a monolithic social force and an uncompromising force for conservatism, but such an assessment ignores the heterogeneity that is found in Confucian societies. Perhaps the most stark and public point of difference today is in political outcomes, whereby Confucianism has found itself from time to time being conscripted to the side of authoritarian established orders in China and Singapore, even as radical and apparently successful experiments in democracy are taking place in the Confucian societies of South Korea and Taiwan. The conservative claims rest upon Confucianism’s elitism, the high value it places on social order and its promotion of deference towards those in positions of authority. Advocates of democracy do not generally turn to Confucianism to justify their position, but there are some who focus on the ways that a Confucian perspective helps shape and modify the practice of democracy (Shin, 2012), and others who go further and argue the positive advantages that a Confucian perspective brings to democratic processes and cultures (e.g., Bell, 2010 and de Bary, 2013). Rarer among scholars (but more common among ordinary South Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and Singaporeans) are those who articulate an unambiguous case that Confucianism needs liberal democracy to establish its relevance and legitimacy in the twentyfirst century (Chan, 2013). The renewed interest in and thinking about Confucianism has been led by a high-profile and extremely prolific group of scholars who have been engaging in efforts to recast Confucianism to make it newly relevant and important. They are often described by others and themselves as advocates of “New Confucianism”, though there is too much diversity in their thinking to regard New Confucianism as anything more than a convenient label for a complex phenomenon. They can be broadly described as an unstructured group of scholars who emphasise the 67

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humanitarianism and benevolence inherent in an ideal Confucian order (Qing, 2012), though they sometimes engage in intellectual slippage whereby the ideal of a Confucian order is not compared to the ideal of a liberal democratic order but is juxtaposed to the tawdry realities and shortcomings of liberal democratic societies (Bell, 2006). Notable examples of New Confucianists include Daniel A. Bell, who actually titled one of his books China’s New Confucianism (Bell, 2008), Tu Wei-ming and Wm. Theodore de Bary. The advocates of New Confucianism are matched by scholars such as Qing Jiang, who believes New Confucianism has been unduly influenced by Western ideas like democracy, and by others like Joseph Chan, who push for a fuller integration of ancient Chinese political theory with arguments and theories developed in the West.

A religion? The residual life of Confucianism as a grassroots mode of social cognition should be sufficient to establish a prima facie case that, regardless of any quibbles over whether it is technically a religion, it is worthy of being treated as such for the purposes of understanding its relationship to politics because it has the capacity to exercise social power comparable to that of a religion (Sun, 2013). Indeed, in its pre-modern forms it was, as Turner articulates, primarily a state religion, though one that also conveyed an expression of “a sense of human dependency on the spiritual realm” (Turner, 2006, p. 112). It has now been thoroughly deposed from exercising direct state power, but it still retains elements of both the public and the private dimensions of its original character. It is true that in both spheres it is substantially subservient to other religions and world views (e.g. capitalism, democracy, nationalism and some hollow vestiges of communism), but then this is only a variation of the historical record whereby Confucianism has always found itself in porous relationships with rival religions and ideologies; hence the prevalence of syncretism in East Asia, with variously Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism, Shinto and Shamanism sharing social and political hegemony with Confucianism in different times and places. There are many elements of Confucianism as a religion that are worthy of study, but if we consider it precisely as it articulates with modern politics, we can reasonably restrict ourselves to three elements that are identified by Fox (2001, pp. 61–67) as elements specifically relevant to politics: • •

Religion as a direct influence on policy-makers Religion as an indirect influence on policy-makers because of • •

•

The expectations of their constituents The expectations generated by the “political and cultural mediums” created by the religion Religion as a tool of legitimation for governments and for those who oppose them

Fox’s interest is in religion as a phenomenon rather than Confucianism itself, but the same cannot be said of Tu Wei-ming. Tu was for many years a Harvard-based scholar of Confucianism who became a tireless international advocate of Confucian ethics and philosophy in the early 1980s, being intimately involved in state-sponsored campaigns to revive Confucianism, first in Singapore and then in China. During his advocacy in Singapore, he argued that there are three distinct but related forms of Confucianism at work in the modern world: • • •

Confucianism as an ideology; Confucianism as a mode of scholarship; and Confucianism as a system of personal ethics (Tu, 1984, p. 204). 68

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To study the role of Confucianism in modern politics, I suggest that we need a framework based essentially upon Tu’s, but which is more open to answering the questions raised by Fox. With these parameters in mind, I propose to interrogate the relationship between Confucianism and modern politics through three conceptual prisms: • •

•

Confucianism as a tool for manipulation by political elites Confucianism as a subject of study by scholars of Confucian texts, ethics and philosophy, and any scholars who are wont to become participants in state-sponsored Confucian revivals Confucianism as a generic term for the many traditional East Asian forms of social cognition related to family, education, scholarship, society and governance that – despite significant variations between them – can be loosely described as “social Confucianism”

At all three levels, Confucianism continues to influence the conduct of politics in Chinese and East Asian societies. This can be seen most clearly in the recent history of China and Singapore, where the elite manipulation of Confucianism for political ends and legitimation is most overt, but it is also apparent in the “informal” politics of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam because of the strength of social Confucianism. I postulate that Confucianism at all three levels will continue to influence Chinese and East Asian societies, but its impact on politics will not be constant, uncontested or strong. There are several reasons for this likely future. First, that the degree of political sponsorship provided to Confucianism waxes and wanes according to regimes’ contingent needs, and the need to call upon Confucianism going forward seems to be marginal. Second, that stakeholders (elites, scholars and the various East Asian societies) have differing and to some extent contradictory interests and no one stakeholder has sufficient moral or political force to monopolise a single national agenda, let alone the international discourse.

Political elites The most obvious point of articulation between Confucianism and politics is in the way particular political leaders have attempted to revive something of the spirit, if not the working detail, of Neo-Confucianism, and to harness it for their own ends. Political elites have sometimes been tempted to market Confucianism as a basis of state and political legitimacy. In recent decades this has happened in two places in particular: the largest and the smallest national repositories of Chinese society, China and Singapore. In each case the resurrection of Confucianism was prompted by the collapse of a previously useful basis of legitimation, and – probably not coincidentally – by the emergence of new domestic political threats. In the case of China, the regime found it convenient in the 1980s to encourage and sustain a resurgence of interest in Confucius and Confucianism that had taken root on its own over the previous decade (Dubois, 2010, pp. 354–356). In the case of Singapore, it was part of a broader, even more contrived state effort to instil defences against “Western decadence” (Barr, 2004, pp. 32–39). It was particularly ironic to see this activity taking place in China, where the state set out to purge society of Confucianism both under the Nationalists in the 1920s–1930s and again during Mao’s pathological anti-Confucian campaigns that began in the 1950s and reached their zenith in the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s (Mitter, 2014, pp. 94–98). In the case of Singapore, which had its Confucian heyday in the 1980s, the particular triggers were the forced withdrawal of Singapore from the Socialist International in 1976, and the electoral resurgence of opposition parties (Barr, 2004, pp. 30–31). Yet behind both these immediate causes lay a more remote one: then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s Chinese “turn”, whereby 69

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he apparently discovered his Chinese roots and set out to make “Chineseness” the centrepiece of his personal life, his statecraft and Singapore’s successful pursuit of economic growth (Barr, 2009, pp. 164–174 and Barr and Skrbiš, 2008, chapter 5). Along with speaking Mandarin, and celebrating “Chinese culture” and history, Lee saw the public promotion of Confucianism in schools, in the media and in social welfare, family and housing policy as central to this re-articulation of the Singapore national project (Barr and Skrbiš, 2008, chapters 6–10). A particularly unsavoury aspect of Singapore’s Confucian “turn” in the 1980s was the cover that it provided for the transformation of both Singapore’s national elite and its society more generally from being one based on a thoroughly multicultural ideal (as befits a Chinese-majority society where other ethnic groups make up more than a quarter of the population) to one that is thoroughly Sinocentric (Barr and Skrbiš, 2008, chapters 5 and 11; Barr, 2014, chapter 5). Singapore’s Confucian experiment had slipped to the background of the broader Sinicisation project by the late 1980s, but it continues today at a less intensive level. Overt references to “Confucianism” and kindred concepts (such as “filial piety”, “meritocracy”, deference to those in authority) are now thoroughly integrated into most mainstream public discourses in Singapore.

China The resurgence of officially sponsored Confucianism in China had tentative public beginnings in 1983 with the restoration of Confucius’s tomb, came fully into the open in 1989 (the first year in which Confucius’s birthday was celebrated in the People’s Hall in Beijing), and emerged officially in 1994, which was the year in which the International Confucian Association was launched with a gala international conference in Beijing. During this period Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of capitalism was in full force throughout Eastern China, the widespread unrest of 1989 (culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre) was a fresh memory, and China was facing severe diplomatic-cum-trade pressure from the United Nations and the US over its human rights record (Barr, 2004, pp.  51–63). The subsequent success of China’s economic development programme did much to overcome the regime’s “legitimation deficit”, but the unintended consequences generated a new set of challenges in the form of peasant and worker protests. The Ministry of Public Security reported a massive increase in the number of what it calls “mass incidents” over the decades of China’s capitalist success. It reported over 180,000 “mass incidents” in 2010, up from 32,000 in 1999 (O’Reilly, 2014, “China’s ‘mass incidents’ ”). Most of these “mass incidents” were relatively small in scale, but between 2003 and 2009, there were 248 that involved more than 500 people, with protest causes including industrial issues, land confiscation and forced relocation and official corruption (Tong and Lei, 2010, pp. 24–25). In March 2005 the National People’s Congress (NPC) publicly declared the increase in public protests as a primary reason for the renewed emphasis on the Confucian virtue of “harmony” (Xinhua News Agency, 8 March 2005). This NPC meeting also proved to be something of a turning point in official attitudes to mass incidents, whereby news media were encouraged to display a new level of sympathy towards protesters (Steinhardt, 2015, p. 127). Regardless of the immediate cause, the accumulation of challenges from these disturbances indicated a major crisis of legitimacy for the government because in the Confucian order, peasant satisfaction is a vital sign of legitimacy, and peasant unrest is one of the signs that an emperor has lost the right to rule (i.e., lost the “Mandate of Heaven”) (Chan, 2013, pp. 72, 109; also see Shin, 2012, p. 116). The year 2010 turned out to be the final year in which the government reported the number of disturbances, so we cannot now ascertain from official figures whether the rate of incidents is continuing to rise. Certainly, the number of media reports about mass incidents is superficially suggestive that the numbers stopped rising partway through 2010, and either dropped or began 70

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flattening in about April (see Figure 5.1), but the suddenness of the drop could be just as easily explained by a deliberate change in the rate of reporting rather than a change in the rate of incidents. Unofficial figures of industrial disputes collated by the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin and reproduced in Figure 5.2 indicate that the number of worker protests and strikes approximately doubled each year from 2012 to 2015, before suddenly stabilising at approximately the 2014 levels in 2017 (China Labor Bulletin, 2022, “Strike Map”) – but whether this is due to a reduction in the number of grievances or the increased level of repression in Xi Jinping’s China is moot. It is nevertheless sobering to realise that even if the reduction since 2016 really reflects an improvement in social conditions, it still leaves the number of reported protests and strikes in 2021 at a level that is nearly triple that of 2012, which casts doubt on the apparent downturn in the rate of peasant protests before official tracking was discontinued. Also note the government’s high level of sensitivity about protests – and peasant protests in particular – which is driven by the political reality that they challenge the legitimacy of the government with particular poignancy in a Confucian society. Former President Jiang Zemin responded to the challenges of the 1990s by overtly promoting Confucianism, both as a stabilising factor and as a new rationale for the legitimacy of the regime. His efforts culminated in his 2001 call for the study of Confucian classics in Party

Figure 5.1  “Mass incidents” in the Chinese news media (12-month moving average), 2001–2010. Source: Steinhardt, 2015, p. 127. The author is grateful for H. Christoph Steinhardt’s permission to reuse this chart, which first appeared in his article in Asian Studies Review, Volume 39, Number 1, 2015 Notes: Values represent the monthly frequencies of news media reports containing the term, “mass incident”, in the two daily newspapers, People’s Daily and Nanfang Dushi Bao (left axis), and in a sample of 34 Chinese news outlets (right axis). Two synonymous ways to write “mass incident” in Chinese were used.

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3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0

2012

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Figure 5.2  Worker protests and strikes in China, 2012–2021. Source: China Labor Bulletin 2022, “Strike Map”

schools, and his publicly voiced aspiration to see the imposition of a “rule of virtue” in China to complement the widespread but half-hearted campaign to introduce the rule of law (South China Morning Post, 20 February 2001). A sceptic might interpret this as Jiang calling for the existing ruling elite to be recognised as virtuous, thereby bestowing Confucian-inspired legitimacy on the regime. The response of his successor, Hu Jintao, extended and refined Jiang’s approach: he made a strategic decision even before taking over the full reins of the leadership to make “harmony” the key concept of his rule so that he was able to launch his strategy in his nationally televised acceptance speech immediately after being elected president of the People’s Republic of China (Xinhua News Agency, 17 March 2003; BBC, 18 March 2003). After that, his promotion of “harmony” and a “harmonious society” became ubiquitous, with Hu’s speeches and those of other members of the political elite containing so many references to these concepts that it would be tedious to cite them individually. Suffice to say that the promotion of a “harmonious society” quickly became the officially designated top priority of the Chinese Communist Party (Xinhua News Agency, 20 February 2005). By October 2006 “harmony” had been listed as a direction for the country, on a par with the quest for prosperity, democracy and a civilised society (South China Morning Post, 12 October 2006). In strictly Confucian terms this was perhaps an odd choice of concept because Confucian “harmony” is not so much a virtue to be practised or a state to be imposed, but a good outcome to be applauded. “Harmony” is the social benefit derived from rule by virtue and the proper functioning of society, but here it was being presented as the precondition, not a result, of a good social order (Hu, quoted in Xinhua News Agency, 27 June 2005). The succession of Hu Jintao by Xi Jinping towards the end of 2012 changed the tenor of the official rhetoric drastically. Talk of harmony disappeared overnight as if it had never been, and Xi all but dropped the Confucian imagery, replacing it with a narrative that evoked Chinese pride and nationalism – the “Chinese dream” of the restoration of China’s former glory. This in turn was overlaid by Xi’s restoration of ideology and a cult of personality centred on his own person, each of which sat more comfortably with nationalism and the “Chinese dream” than it did with Confucianism. Confucian roots might be identified in his anti-corruption campaigns, 72

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but they are mostly assumed and unstated, not needing constant and explicit exposition. Xi does still make public gestures towards Confucianism, yet even on such occasions he denies Confucius a full starring role. One such example was his keynote address to the International Confucian Association in September 2014, when he said: Confucianism, along with other philosophies and cultures taking shape and growing within China, are records of spiritual experiences, rational thinking and cultural achievements of the nation during its striving to build its home (CCTV News, 25 September 2014). (Emphasis added.) A perusal of the first volume of Xi’s personal manifesto – The Governance of China – confirms the pattern that is suggested by this extract. Its 497 pages contain only seven explicit references to Confucius or Confucianism and the same number of citations of the Analects, a single reference to the Book of Rites, but not a single explicit reference to key Confucian concepts such as harmony, filial piety or the five relationships. As in his address to the International Confucian Association, Xi’s book consistently diminishes Confucius and Confucianism by presenting them in a much broader, even eclectic context: Confucius and Lao Zi (the founder of Daoism); Confucianism and Buddhism and Daoism; Confucius and a string of other Chinese sages; Confucius, Goethe and Shakespeare (Xi, 2014, pp. 64, 286, 304, 492). In Volumes II and III, Xi cites Analects and other Confucian texts more liberally, but only to reproduce unobjectionable “motherhood” statements that suit the moment, rather than to identify high principles for conduct. Hence, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is lauded using Confucius’ words, “What a great joy to have friends coming from afar” (Xi, 2020, p. 510). At the same time, his practice of relegating Confucius to an extremely conditional and highly contextualised “greatness” continues. According to Xi, Chinese civilisation may have been founded on Confucianism, but its enrichment was dependent on “the introduction of Buddhism, and the confluence of Islam and Confucianism in the old days, and by the introduction of Western learning, the launch of the New Culture Movement, and the introduction of Marxism and socialism in modern times” (Xi, 2020, p. 546–547). In stark contrast to Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Xi has reduced Confucius to an emblematic figurehead; little more than a mascot whose statue fronts Confucius Institutes throughout the world. Most Confucian ethical themes are in the background of his discourse, but a closer read of The Governance of China (Volume I) uncovers just one that is very prominent: upholding the virtue of study and the related Confucian notion that virtue is acquired through study (Xi, 2014, pp. 55, 64, 194, 195, 202). Volume II continues this theme with an essay titled “The Rule of Law and the Rule of Virtue”, which marks the high point of this discourse on virtue and is perhaps the most distinctively Confucian essay in any of the three volumes. Yet it is telling that this essay contains no reference at all to the Confucius, Confucianism, or any piece of classical Chinese scholarship, resting instead on the authority of Xi himself (Xi, 2017, pp. 144–147). The reduction of Confucius to a mascot, while concurrently accepting much of the social cognition provided by Confucianism, is far from ingenuous, but it is still refreshingly honest compared to the preceding decades during which Confucianism was presented in parody by his predecessors.

Singapore Turning to Singapore, we find that its Confucian revival of the 1980s was mapped out in explicit detail in a series of “Confucian Ethics” textbooks designed for use in Singaporean schools and was reinforced by rhetoric from the political elite. The messages were constant and quickly 73

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became predictable: the ideal of the junzi; the importance of education and meritocracy; the virtues of a supposed “Confucian work ethic”; the central role of “filial piety” and the importance of the extended, three-tier family; “family values”; social responsibility; the need for consensus, cooperation and political restraint from sectional and political interests; social harmony; respect for elders; and deference to those in positions of authority. The cynicism with which this rejuvenation of Confucianism was approached was indicated in a research interview that I conducted with Goh Keng Swee, Singapore’s former Deputy Prime Minister and the man who founded the research institute that spearheaded the Confucianism revival of the 1980s. I asked him whether Lee Kuan Yew was really a “Confucian gentleman”. He replied: [Lee Kuan Yew] is not a Confucian. He can’t be a Confucian gentleman. But he did say that societies that were under a Confucian theory have certain attributes – Japan, Korea, China, and overseas Chinese – and these attributes were useful. Like saving money, working hard and education. (Author’s interview with Goh Keng Swee, 1 October 1996) The spirit of the regime’s approach is revealed in an anecdote that this same Goh Keng Swee – then speaking as Deputy Prime Minister – recounted in 1972: Recently I  had an interesting after-dinner discussion with a widely travelled American banker .  . . . He asked what my choice would be if I had to recommend one single prescription to solve the economic problems of a poor country. I  said I  would recommend that the population be converted to some demanding, narrow-minded, intolerant form of the Protestant religion, such as one of the more extreme Calvinist sects. This would bring about the end of easy-going thriftless habits among the populace and the beginning of scrupulous honesty in public administration. This fanciful idea puts, in an extreme way, the view that a firm moral order need be established in a society which seeks economic progress. (Goh, 1977, p. 46) Converting Singapore to Calvinism was never an option, but Confucianism was clearly considered to be a viable substitute. Singapore’s experiment with a Confucian revival reached its most public and official zenith in the country’s five official “Shared Values”, which were adopted by Parliament in 1991. The final version of the values reads: 1 2 3 4 5

Nation before community and society before self Family as the basic unit of society Community support and respect for the individual Consensus, not conflict Racial and religious harmony

The “Shared Values” were consciously designed through the prism of Confucianism, which is indicated by the fact that the Government White Paper that paved the way for their adoption explicitly invoked the Confucian ideal of “government by honourable gentlemen junzi” (Government of Singapore, 1991). Yet the political intent of these “values” is revealed in another episode in their gestation. At one point the government considered, but rejected, a proposal 74

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to amend Shared Value 1 to read “harmony or balance between individual and community interests” (Mauzy and Milne, 2002, p.  63). This change would have weakened the conceptual supremacy of the state over the individual and community, and so was rejected by the government. At this point it is worth noting that Lee Kuan Yew, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are not the only rulers of “Confucian” societies to conscript Confucianism for their own ends. In the 1930s the Kuomintang leadership of Nationalist China overtly invoked Confucianism under the banner of the New Life Movement, and as recently as 2004, South Korean President Roh MoonHyun donned classical Confucian garb (literally) and very publicly withdrew from public life in the style of a Korean emperor of old. This was part of his strategic (and successful) response to impeachment proceedings initiated by the parliamentary opposition parties (The Straits Times, 2 April 2004). These examples of overt political usage of Confucianism demonstrate the latent potential for this type of exploitation across East Asia, but in most countries of the region the role of Confucianism in politics is much more subtle and takes the forms that are more properly explored in the section in this chapter on “Social Confucianism”.

Scholars Scholars play a ubiquitous but uncomfortable role in political Confucianism. Ubiquitous because scholars and scholarship are and always have been intrinsic to Confucianism, to the point where Confucian revivals cannot achieve any level of credibility without the cooperation of scholars. Uncomfortable because modern Confucian scholars are generally well-meaning humanists who believe that Confucianism, properly understood, can be an active agent for humanistic virtue and civility among rulers and ruled alike (and who generally argue that Confucianism is compatible with democracy and human rights), but who routinely find themselves as the handmaidens of authoritarian regimes. Take the case of Tu Wei-ming and the other North American Confucian scholars who were brought to Singapore in the 1980s to facilitate the government’s Confucian revival. They came, they wrote and they delivered scholarly papers. They took part in televised discussions and gave advice to the government, but the crucial task of writing the Confucian Ethics textbooks and workbooks went to a team of Singaporeans, none of whom has any record of scholarship or publication on Confucianism outside the confines of the Singapore “Confucianism” project. The final product of these courses was didactic and conservative, predictably emphasising the social hierarchy of the Confucian world view and projecting society as a conflation of the family (Grosse, 1985a, pp. 101–102; and Grosse, 1985b, p. 124). The Secondary Three Confucian Ethics textbook described the relationship between the ruler and the ruled using Confucius’s analogy: The grass must bend when the wind blows across it . . . . In other words, just as healthy green grass sways naturally and gracefully with the breeze, so good citizens will spontaneously respond to the good policies of virtuous leaders. (Grosse, 1985a, p. 124) The Secondary Four textbook goes further: “Fulfilment begins with the cultivation of the individual self . . . . The leaders must show the way. That is why the virtuous and able are elected to office” (Grosse, 1985b, p. 92). It is no wonder Tu Wei-ming now disassociates himself from the revival movement that he helped to start (Asian Wall Street Journal, 28 May 1993). The scholars of the People’s Republic of China’s revival found themselves in a similar position, with the added complication that many of them had academic positions in China itself, which 75

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meant that they could not question, among other things, the leading role of the Party in China. These academics, whether from Asia, North America or Europe, have played crucial and very direct roles in the Confucian revival in China. Hu Jintao’s strategic decision to use “harmony” as the central conceptual tenet of his regime was itself the result of representations over a long period of time by Confucian scholars and “think tanks” operating within Chinese academic institutions. During Hu’s rule, scholars remained crucial to the development and perceived legitimacy of the Confucian revival, and scholars within China were routinely co-opted into the government’s overtly political Confucian programme. This involved not just scholars of Confucianism and related topics attending conferences on Confucianism and themes related to “harmony” (of which there are many), but the whole academic community. The scope and dimensions of this programme were indicated in March 2005 when the city of Beijing announced that its 11th Five-Year Plan would downplay economic growth for the first time in years and would instead “strive to achieve harmonious development” (China Daily, 31 March 2005). This shift of focus, together with the “preliminary investigations” needed to begin giving distinct shape to this vague new direction involved over 600 researchers from 57 institutions: not just scholars of Confucianism and the humanities, but, according to China Daily (31 March 2005), specialists covering “a wide range of local social and economic development issues, including industrial development, communications network construction, environmental protection, heritage preservation and social security”. This academic involvement is a form of co-option. In saying this, I do not wish to imply passivity or submission on the part of these academics. When “harmony” became the mantra, money and sponsorship were laid on for scholars, and the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences and most universities studied aspects of harmony at length. Even in Hong Kong universities, “harmony” became a major research theme in the social sciences and humanities. I took part in one such exercise sponsored by City University of Hong Kong in June 2006: the discussion was as critical as one could desire, and the research output consisted of a high-quality edited volume published by Routledge (Tao et al., 2010), and yet we all contributed, however indirectly, to Hu’s discourse on harmony. It is important to note that whether they were scholars of philosophy, ethics, politics or civil engineering, the academics that were pro-actively contributing to Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” were generally operating from benign motives, including from a desire to contribute to the common good. They saw themselves in the mode of the classical Confucian scholars who aspired to be trusted advisers to emperors, and insofar as they had an agenda to influence government, it was mostly one that idealises a humane, beneficent administration. The fact that an authoritarian regime was able to cherry-pick its way through this academic discourse to find the bits that suit its own agenda was generally accepted with equanimity. Even today, when Confucianism is no longer at the forefront of political discourse, the top academic institutions in China still abound with departments and institutes hosting proponents of “Confucianism” e.g., the Advanced Institute of Confucian Studies at Shandon University, the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University and the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University. This repository of talent is not going anywhere, and will keep gnawing away at intractable questions of governance, ethics and culture and publishing sophisticated books on political philosophy and hopefully contributing positively to elite thinking on issues of governance, rights and social values.

Social Confucianism The aspects of Confucianism that have been canvassed thus far are easily the most public and quantifiable elements of Confucianism as a factor in politics, but perhaps the most significant in terms of endurance, consistency and profundity is the more mercurial aspect of Confucianism’s 76

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impact on the political cultures of the countries that come under its influence; aspects that are identified by Dittmer et al. (2000) as the “informal politics” of East Asia and described in their volume as “interpersonal activities stemming from a tacitly accepted, but not enunciated, matrix of political attitudes existing outside the framework of legal government, constitutions, bureaucratic constructs and similar institutions (the latter being the domain of formal politics)” (Pike, 2000, p. 281). It is remarkable, for instance, how easily the resonance of Confucianism can be identified in the familial and social actions of generations of nationalist, communist and post-communist Chinese, who have tended to remain locked in Confucian patterns of thought and habit, often despite their conscious intentions. Even in matters of statecraft, the legacy of Confucianism still flourishes just below the surface throughout East Asia. In Vietnam, not only has the politics of the educated Mandarinate been reproduced under the guise of the Leninist bureaucratic state, but centuries-old Vietnamese classics on the art of Confucian statecraft have been re-published and have enjoyed a major resurgence (Woodside, 1998). Even during the worst barbarities of Mao Zedong’s rule, Maoist political rituals and education replaced only the dogma of Confucianism: it retained the template in which the dogma lived. The Confucian emphasis on personal virtue [de] was retained, but it was aligned according to “redness” and revolutionary purity, rather than to the virtues of the Confucian gentleman (Shirk, 1982, pp. 1–23). And when the concept of “good” and “bad” class replaced that of lineage, one’s class was still determined by the traditional method: patrilineal descent (Stockman, 2000, pp. 83–134). A strong, almost tangible tribute to Confucianism’s perseverance is the fact that China’s modern student-dissidents of the 1980s and 1990s, who grew up decades after Confucianism’s supposed eradication, constructed their dissent according to classical Confucian precepts, and operated substantially according to Confucian expectations of how scholarly dissidents should act. This included presenting deferential petitions to the rulers, and holding their worker and merchant allies in contempt (Perry and Fuller, 1991, pp. 667–671). Perhaps it is just as extraordinary that the Communist Party leadership also followed Confucian patterns of action when dealing with these students: receiving students’ petitions relatively graciously, and showing relative leniency towards the scholar-dissidents, but attacking worker-dissidents savagely. On one occasion Jiang Zemin (then Mayor of Shanghai) apologised for police brutality against a student, explaining that police had mistaken the student for a worker (Perry, 1992, p. 155). A survey of the rest of East Asia elicits a similar picture, though without the extremes found in China. In Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, the formal study and practice of Confucianism died during the twentieth century, as it variously faced the challenges of modernity, rising levels of prosperity and education levels, Christianity, capitalism and communism.1 Yet in all these cases the low cultural influence of Confucianism is overt and inescapable at all levels of society and governance – though admittedly it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the influences of Confucianism per se and Confucianism’s various accommodations with local cultures. Many South Korean workplaces, for instance, reproduce new versions of traditional Confucian hierarchies in which factors such as a worker’s age and gender are disproportionately important in workplace, professional and power relationships (Kim and Hamilton-Hart, 2022). It is surely not a coincidence that China, Vietnam, Japan (at least as it operated until 1993) and Singapore are all governed by Mandarinates that are basically distorted versions of the traditional Confucian Mandarinates of old. One of the differences between the old Mandarinate and the new is that today the personnel staffing the Mandarinates and advising governments are generally not junzi, schooled in Confucian humanism as verified in Confucian examinations, but engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, town planners and other professionals. What I am describing here is not an attempt to paint a two-dimensional picture of supposedly “Confucian East Asians” reacting in Pavlovian fashion to stimuli according to an equally 77

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two-dimensional view of “Confucian culture”. Hopefully such distorted pictures died with the “Asian Values” discourses of the early 1990s. I am actually arguing a much more modest case: that popular, grassroots assumptions of “good” that have survived persecution and attacks from a myriad of modern and pre-modern enemies continue to inform constituencies at all levels of these societies. This affects how these constituencies expect members of their societies to behave – including their political leaders, their students, and their academics. Not only are political leaders influenced directly by the same expectations, but they also have an incentive to be seen to be behaving in such a fashion. Most of this chapter has focussed on authoritarian uses of political Confucianism, but at the level of social Confucianism, “Confucian” democracies need also to be considered. Scholarly opinion varies over how social Confucianism is affecting the development and stability of democracies in East Asia, with scholars shifting their opinions over the years as the evidence or their thinking changes. For instance, Doh Chull Shin argued in 2006 that Confucian influence is on balance a negative influence on the operation of democracy but six years later presented a more nuanced argument that citizens in democratic Confucian societies are engaged in an ongoing project of producing a new form of democracy, responding to different expectations to that which operates in liberal societies (see Park and Shin, 2006, pp. 341–361; Shin, 2012; and Wang, 2008). Oknim Chung (1999, pp. 105–106) argued on similar lines when writing about the early years of South Korea’s experiment with democracy, pointing to the continuing prominence of Confucian notions of what is “humane”, “just” and “moral”. L.H.M. Ling and Chih-yu Shih argued the same case, using newly democratic Taiwan as their example: Politicians may hinge their moral leadership on appearance more than fact, rhetoric more than action. But mass and elite alike demand a ritualized demonstration of selflessness for the common good as the critical standard for public office. (Barr, 2004, p. 66) Given the hierarchical, elitist, communitarian and conservative character of Confucianism, it does seem unlikely that on balance it will be a positive force for democratisation. Yet there is every reason to think that democracy will nevertheless accommodate itself to Confucian societies and vice versa, thus producing forms of democracy that are genuinely democratic while still being distinctively “Confucian” in character. The adaptation of democracy into a Confucian culture is neither mysterious nor profound. Just as different Western cultures have developed different democratic cultures that reflect, for instance, a spirit of individualism (such as in the US) or a culture of consensus (such as in Scandinavia) (Pierre, 2010), East Asian democracies are acculturating democracy to suit the proclivities of their societies. This is in the nature of democracies. If constituencies in a democracy expect, for instance, the Confucian virtues of consensus, harmony and deference to those in authority, then of course politicians will be seen to be trying to deliver it (Barr, 2004, pp. 64–71).

Conclusion In this survey we set out to examine the role of Confucianism in politics through the prisms of the political elites, scholars and social Confucianism. Through this tripartite approach, we hoped to find answers to the questions that Fox (2001, pp. 61–67) asked about religions more generally: religion as a direct influence on policy-makers, religion as an indirect influence on policy-makers and religion as a tool of legitimation for governments and for those who oppose them. It is clear that in all three forms, Confucianism has in recent times been deployed in 78

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attempts to influence the conduct of politics in Chinese and East Asian societies. This can be seen most clearly in the recent history of China and Singapore, where the elite manipulation of Confucianism for political ends and legitimation has been very overt. At a different, less utilitarian level, the ongoing and less directed influence is apparent in the “informal” politics of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam because of the strength of social Confucianism. Political rulers of all hues can be expected to continue exploiting Confucianism for their own ends for as long as they see a chance for advantage, though it seems to be authoritarian rulers who have found the most sustenance in Confucianism – reflecting its conservative, elitist roots. Yet despite its anti-democratic tendencies, scholars, democratic politicians and the grassroots of Confucian societies find Confucianism and democracy to be companionable bedfellows, able to live comfortably in the one culture and the one polity.

Note 1 For an intensive quantitative analysis of the severe impact of factors such as rising incomes and education levels on the approaches to democracy and “Confucian” approaches to politics, see Wang, 2008.

References Barr, Michael D. 2004. Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War. London: Routledge. Barr, Michael D. 2009. Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man. (2nd Edition). Kuala Lumpur: New Asian Library. Barr, Michael D. 2014. The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence. London: I.B.Tauris. Barr, Michael D. and Zlatko Skrbiš 2008. Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Bell, Daniel A. 2006. Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A. 2008. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A. ed. 2010. Confucian Political Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chan, Joseph. 2013. Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press. China Labor Bulletin. 2022. “Strike Map.” China Labor Bulletin. Available at: http://maps.clb.org.hk/ strikes/en, accessed 30 March 2022. Chung, Oknim. 1999. “Values, Governance and International Relations: The Case of South Korea.” Chap. 4 in Changing Values in Asia: Their Impact on Government and Development, edited by Sung-Joo Han, 76–111. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Tokyo: Japan Centre for International Exchange. de Bary, Wm. Theodore. 2013. The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Dittmer, L., Haruhiro Fukui and P. Lee. eds. 2000. Informal Politics in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubois, Thomas David. 2010. “Religion and the Chinese State: Three Crises and a Solution.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 64(3): 344–58. Fox, Jonathan. 2001. “Religion as an Overlooked Element of International Relations.” The International Studies Review 3(3): 53–73. Goh, Keng Swee. 1997. The Practice of Economic Growth. Singapore: Federal Publications. Government of Singapore. 1991. White Paper. Shared Values. Singapore: Singapore Government. Grosse, Paula. ed. 1985a. Confucian Ethics: Textbook Secondary Three. Singapore: EPB Publishers. Grosse, Paula. ed. 1985b. Confucian Ethics: Textbook Secondary Four. Singapore: EPB Publishers. Kim, HeeSun and Natasha Hamilton-Hart. 2022. “Negotiating and Contesting Confucian Workplace Culture in South Korea.” Asian Studies Review 46(1): 110–29. Kim, Sungmoon. 2015. “Confucianism, Moral Equality and Human Rights: A  Mencian Perspective.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74(1): 149–85.

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Michael D. Barr Mauzy, Diane K. and R.S. Milne. 2002. Singapore’s Politics Under the People’s Action Party. London: Routledge. Mitter, Rana. 2014. “Mao Zedong and Charismatic Maoism.” Chap. 4 in Makers of Modern Asia, edited by Ramachandra Guha, 92–116. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. O’Reilly, Brendan. 2014. “Diverse Reasons behind Growth in China’s ‘Mass Incidents’.” China Outlook, 13 May  2014. Available at: http://chinaoutlook.com/diverse-reasons-behind-growth-in-massincidents/, accessed 16 March 2015. Park, Chong-Min and Shin, Doh Chull. 2006. “Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy in South Korea?”, Asian Survey 46(3): 341–61. Perry, E. 1992. “Casting a Chinese “Democracy” Movement: The Roles of Students, Workers, and Entrepreneurs.” Chap. 3 in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989, edited by J. Wasserstrom and E. Perry, 146–64. Boulder: Westview Press. Perry, E. and E. Fuller. 1991. “China’s Long March to Democracy.” World Policy Journal 8: 663–85. Pierre, Jon. 2010. “Consensual but Not Confucian: Resolving the Paradox of Consensual Politics in Scandinavia.” Chap. 12 in Governance for Harmony in Asia and beyond, edited by Tao, Julia, Anthony B.L. Cheung, Martin Painter and Chenyang Li, 228–42. London: Routledge. Pike, Douglas. 2000. “Informal politics in Vietnam.” Chap. 11 in Informal Politics in East Asia, edited by Dittmer, L., Haruhiro Fukui and P. Lee, 269–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Qing, Jiang. 2012. A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shin, Doh Chull. 2012. Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shirk, S. 1982. Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steinhardt, H. Christoph. 2015. “From Blind Spot to Media Spotlight: Propaganda Policy, Media Activism and the Emergence of Protest Events in the Chinese Public Sphere.” Asian Studies Review 39(1): 119–37. Stockman, N. 2000. Understanding Chinese Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sun, Anna 2013. Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tao, Julia, Anthony B.L. Cheung, Martin Painter and Chenyang Li. eds. 2010. Governance for Harmony in Asia and beyond. London: Routledge. Tong, Yanqui and Shaohua Lei. 2010. “Large-scale Mass Incidents in China.” East Asian Policy 2(2): 23–33. Tu Wei-ming. 1984. Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge. Singapore: Curriculum Development Centre of Singapore and Federal Publications. Turner, Bryan S. 2006. “Religion and Politics: Nationalism, Globalisation and Empire.” Asian Journal of Social Science 34(2): 209–24. Wang, Zhengxu. 2008. Democratization in Confucian East Asia: Citizen Politics in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Amherst: Cambria Press. Woodside, Alexander. 1998. “Exalting the Latecomer State: Intellectuals and the State during the Chinese and Vietnamese Reforms.” The China Journal 40: 9–36. Xi, Jinping. 2014. The Governance of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, Jinping. 2017. The Governance of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, Jinping. 2020. The Governance of China III. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

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6 HINDU NATIONALISM AND POLITICS IN INDIA Shylashri Shankar

‘Main bhi Godse’. I was sitting in my car at a traffic light in South Delhi and read these three words on a bumper sticker in the rear window of the car in front. Shock jolted me. How was it alright to publicly admire the man responsible for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi? The car turned right at the red light, and so did I, and it stopped next to two policemen. I slowed down and watched a jovial middle-aged man with a red thread on his right wrist and a vermillion tikka on his forehead, get out and speak to the policemen. They laughed as if he had uttered a joke. None of them bothered about the bumper sticker. It was almost as if the policemen didn’t notice it, and the man himself didn’t understand sticker’s grave implications. I  had come across others with these views in Varanasi during the run-up to the national elections in 2014 and 2019. The posters in the offices of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) had heroes of the freedom struggle like Bhagat Singh and Sardar Patel but did not carry the pictures of Mahatma Gandhi or Nehru. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi won the popular mandate in both these elections, leading many scholars to the conclusion that Hindu nationalism had finally triumphed in Indian politics (Jaffrelot, 2021, Nag, 2014). But is there only one type of Hindu nationalism, and is it indeed a phenomenon only associated with institutional Hindu nationalism, the Sangh Parivar?1

* Much of the key scholarship has tended to pit present-day Hindu nationalism of the BJP and RSS and the other members of the Sangh Parivar against the ‘secular nationalism’ of the Congress party. However, Hindu nationalism, in its various meanings and guises, has always been part of politics in India. The political ideas of Hindu nationalism operated within the Congress party too, and many of the subsequent stalwarts of institutional Hindu nationalism (Hindu Mahasabha, Arya Samaj and the RSS) were former congressmen. William Gould (2004, p. 266) highlights the complex and regionally diverse connections between the Congress party members and institutional Hindu nationalism. Concepts of tolerance, diversity, cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, even secularism were associated with Hinduism and a sense of the ‘Hindu’ in Congress discourses.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-7

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From the early nineteenth century onward, we can identify three strands of Hindu nationalism in the political arena: incidental Hindu and inclusionary nationalism, public Hindu and exclusionary nationalism, and public Hindu and inclusionary nationalism. The members of the Brahmo Samaj in the early nineteenth century were nationalists who happened to be Hindu. They thought that the way forward was to shrug off inegalitarian Hindu mores (the caste system, untouchability, ideas of purity and pollution associated with birth in a caste system). Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others advocated equality and social justice for a modern Indian, and their primary enemy was the caste-bound Hindu system with its archaic practices of widow burning and untouchability, which needed to be reformed first before tackling British rule. They urged the British to reform the laws to penalize such practices and worked at the societal level to spread the message. Nabinchandra Sen (1847–1909), Bipin Chandra Pal (1857–1927) and others publicly flouted caste rules and religious taboos. Bipin Chandra Pal narrates an incident involving lemonade. Since lemonade was produced and sold by Muslims, it was taboo for Hindus to drink it because it could ruin their caste status. But Pal did it anyway and was thrashed by his father. A few weeks later, Pal fell seriously ill, and the doctor suggested lemonade as medicine. Now to have revenge on my father, I turned my face and resolved amidst a room full of people not to have water touched by a Muslim. My father said that it was alright. There was no ritual restriction on medicine . . . medicine itself is Narayana. After a lot of pampering like this, making a lot of fuss, at last I had the Muslim made lemonade from my father’s own hand.2 Another Brahmosamaji, Rajnarayan Basu said he drank brandy in his college days as an emblem of progress and civilization. He also ate biscuits and sherry as a protest against casteism because the bread and biscuit industry was run by lower castes and by Muslims in Bengal. Brahmosamaj nationalists wanted to create a ‘modern Indian’ by challenging rules of caste and Hindu ritual purity and had an inclusive definition of an Indian. After the 1857 War of Independence, the scales fell from many Indian eyes, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw two trajectories that combined Hindu-ness with nationalism in different ways. The late nineteenth century saw the second variant of Hindu nationalism – public Hindu and exclusionary nationalism. As Madan (1999) points out, all India Hinduism emerged in the nineteenth century out of a welter of regional religious traditions such as Vaishnavism in the west, Shaivism in the south, and Shaktism in the east. Swami Vivekananda of the Ramakrishna Mutt, Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj and Congressman Bal Gangadhar Tilak, among others, sought to unite Hindus through appeals to their religious motifs. To rally the Hindus, Vivekananda appealed to a taboo – against eating beef – that all Hindus adhered to (Vivekananda, 1964). This is evident in his response to the question of whether eating meat (which he exhorted all Hindus to do) would include beef. No, said Vivekananda. All Hindus were united on one thing – that they did not eat beef. Why? Because the cow is a sacred animal, and here his discourse links being a Hindu with religion, and with inhabiting the land of India. Cows and buffaloes were slaughtered for meat in abattoirs run by Muslims, so this group became the immediate target of rioters led by the gau-rakshaks (cow-protectors) in the late nineteenth century. Cow protection, anti-beef eating and Ganapati festivals were celebrated to forge a warrior race of Hindus who could be rallied to free ‘Mother India’. Secret revolutionary clubs and reading groups sprouted in the libraries and schools of Bengal and spread to other provinces. For this cohort the outsiders-conquerors included the British and the Muslims. This

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strand linked a public display of Hindu-ness with an exclusionary definition of an Indian; Muslims particularly were excluded from the definition. The third type of Hindu nationalism – public Hindu and inclusionary nationalism – also emerged in this period and found a home within the Congress party (set up in 1885). A nonrevolutionary constitutional path advocated by Congress party stalwarts like Ranade and Gokhale urged Hindus and members of other religions to enter politics and government and change the evil practices of their religion through constitutional means while also adopting notions of equality, justice and freedom. They had a sense of Hindu-ness without subscribing to religious superiority or linking only Hindu-ness with a geographic entity, India. Mohandas Gandhi’s relativistic yet engaged pluralism was a variation on this viewpoint. It was another attempt to create an inclusionary pluralism, in Madan’s (1999) words, a participatory pluralism contingent on intercultural communication, judgment and choice. The goal was to forge an Indian nationalist movement that included other religions against British colonial rule. The tension between what constituted Hindu-ness, who the enemy was and how one ought to treat non-Hindu Indians, what ought to be tackled first and what ought to be ignored continued all through the freedom struggle and complicated the definitions of Hindu nationalism and the ways it appeared in pre-independence Indian politics.

* South India had a different response to Hindu-ness as compared to Central and North India, and the link between Hindu-ness and Indian nationalism was reformulated in a different way. The non-Brahmin movement gained traction as it used the racial Dravidian motif to challenge Brahmin-Aryan supremacy and practices. A stalwart of the movement, Periyar (EV Ramasamy Naicker), was an atheist who strongly critiqued Hindu religion. He said Hindu religion justified inequality that rose from birth in a caste, its rules (shastras, itihasa and puranas) were put in place to justify such inequality and control the lower castes, and the rules also persuaded the lowest castes (the shudras) to accept their inferiority. Periyar condemned Hindu religion for valorising the Brahmins at the expense of the other castes. He eschewed the term ‘Hindu’ and urged his fellow south Indians to call themselves Dravidian or humanists. As V Geetha and S V Rajadurai (1998) point out, Periyar consistently identified nationalism with political Brahminism and was fiercely critical of nationalism. Even his campaign for a separate Dravidian nation was because of his opposition to caste, to what he called the Brahmin-Bania Indian nation-state and not because he was committed to a romantic ideology of a resistant Dravidian nationalism. In north India, the Hindu Mahasabha emerged in the form of a Punjab Hindu Sabha in 1909 and an All India Hindu Mahasabha in the United Provinces in 1915, and as a political party in 1939 with V D Savarkar as president. Their goal was to give Hindus a stronger voice in politics and work for electoral representation on the basis of religion (Bapu, 2013).3 The Hindu Mahasabha was a mirror image of the Muslim League, which had similar goals for Muslims, and both followed exclusionary pathways. But simultaneously, an inclusionary pathway continued to be brokered by many leaders of the Congress party who advocated unified religious opposition to British rule. The line between these pathways was fuzzy, and the Congress party functioned as an umbrella for the varying points of view. William Gould (2004) shows how Hindu nationalism had an important effect on the thinking of more radical and influential Congress leaders in the United Provinces. The party members’ ability to espouse contradictory views shows us the ease with which the notion of a ‘Hindu’ could accommodate a range of meanings, strategies and symbols. Purushottam Das Tandon and Sampurnanand were both considered to be in

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the socialist wing in the mid-1930s, but they were supporters of movements which in earlier decades had been associated with Hindu revivalism such as advocacy of sanskritised Hindi. Sampurnanand publicly talked about the consistency between his socialism and a sense of the Hindu nation. Tandon was a patron of the Arya Samaj and based his refutation of ahimsa on a Tilakite Hindu revivalism. After Tilak’s premature death, dominance within the Congress party shifted to Gandhi and an inclusive nationalism. Several congressmen left to form new organizations, and one of them was the founder of the RSS, Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.

* ‘The founder, Dr  Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, was deeply influenced by Tilak whose thoughts, writings and work held way over Vidarbha and the surrounding regions, home to influential Congress committees,’ writes Sunil Ambekar (2019). As a member of the Congress party, Hedgewar popularized several of Tilak’s initiatives such as linking the Ganapati festival with a celebration of patriotism and Hindu identity, taking a revolutionary oath before Hindu icons, Chhatrapati Shivaji and Samartha Ramdas.4 In Nagpur in central India, the RSS was set up in 1925, which adopted a Hindu nationalism that linked racial and religious identity as Hindus with a geography, India. What set the RSS’s founding ideology apart from others that had also emerged in the 1920s was their ideology – ‘for establishing swarajya, it is necessary to acquire the physical strength of the opponent and then speak the language of peace’ (Ambekar, 2019). On 27 September 1925, on Vijayadashmi, an auspicious day for new beginnings, Hedgewar established the RSS with 25 members. He told Gandhiji that it was not possible to house the RSS within the Congress because their foundational philosophies differed. Congress’s philosophy was purely political, every action was driven by politics and powerplay; the RSS philosophy was volunteerism, an instinctive dedication for an all-round national development (Ambekar, 2019, p.  14).5 The RSS was banned for a year after Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse who had joined the RSS in his youth and later became a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. The RSS’s postulates, Ambekar (2019) points out, were to reshape society into a cultural nation (Rashtriyata), spiritual unity (Ekmata), oneness (samuhikta). Their focus on social revival among Hindus to reconnect with their ancient pasts had a societal ethos – they sought to bring back ancient traditions, languages and practices – and revolutionary rather than political imperatives. Though it shunned politics, its members did not, and were in fact, exhorted to participate actively in all arenas. Even though it stays away from politics, its shakha and system has produced swayamsevaks who are now in politics and have attained high positions . . . The Sangh’s general line is the RSS will do nothing other than running shakhas but the Swayamsevak will enter every sphere of activity. The swayamsevaks will work in all domains of society – education, politics, economy, security and culture. (Ambekar, 2019, p. 27) This bland statement disguises the political impact of the RSS through its members, the most powerful being Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was a pracharak of the RSS.6 It also masks the fact that the RSS’s core philosophy of Hindutva is the battle cry of the BJP (perceived as the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement), and that the RSS’s postulates are found in the BJP’s election manifesto promises.

*

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At the dawn of independence on 15 August 1947, the Congress party, which had spearheaded the nationalist movement and had to a large degree absorbed and to some degree, reconciled, divergent political ideas, now carried within it three main intellectual streams with distinct ideas on the shape and form of independent India. Bruce Graham (2007) characterizes these as follows: India as a liberal democratic state with a secular constitution, India as socialist state with collective principles governing social and economic organization, and India as a state that would embody Hindu traditions and values. In this third group, Graham (2007) classifies two types of Hindus: Hindu traditionalists who were essentially backward looking, conservative and justified the hierarchical social order, and Hindu nationalists who were forward looking and wanted to remould Hindu society and the state on corporatist lines. ‘In organized politics, these elements were concentrated in three bodies: . . . a large and influential group of Hindu traditionalists within the Congress party, a mixture of Hindu traditionalists and Hindu nationalists within the Hindu Mahasabha, and a contingent of Hindu nationalists within the RSS’ (Graham, 2007, p. 6). Among those who championed a Hindu India, some left the Congress party and formed new political outfits. Syama Prasad Mookerjee founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) in 1951 as a political alternative to the Congress party. A former congressman from Bengal, Mookerjee had joined the Hindu Mahasabha in the 1940s but quit it after Gandhi’s assassination and joined Nehru’s cabinet. He resigned from the cabinet over differences with Nehru and established the Jana Sangh. Mookerjee sought RSS and Arya Samaj’s support, but the RSS was silent because it had promised Patel it would function as a cultural organization (Nag, 2014). On Mookerjees’s death in 1954, the party came under RSS control, and Pracharak Deen Dayal Upadhyaya was appointed to run the party. The electoral fortunes of these ‘Hindu’ parties were put to the test in 1951. In its election manifesto, the Hindu Mahasabha promised to establish a Hindu rashtra, patronize Hindu culture and annul Partition (Jaffrelot, 2000). The Jana Sangh’s election manifesto called for one nation, one culture and the rule of law; the nation would be built on the basis of ‘Bharatiya sanskriti and maryada’, which in practice meant ancient Hindu values. Secularism it dismissed as Muslim appeasement. Both parties wanted an ‘Akhand Bharat’ (undivided India), both opposed the Hindu Code Bill that sought to reform Hindu religious practices, and both also demanded a ban on cow slaughter. Their single-digit performance in the national and assembly elections came as ‘a rude awakening’, and also established the BJS as the main Hindu party (Mukul, 2022). They had expected the call of Akhand Bharat and their opposition to the Hindu Code Bill to resonate with the country’s majority. Instead, it was the Congress party under Nehru who won the mandate. Nag (2014) points out that the party, influenced by the Arya Samaj, developed a northIndian bias and promoted Hindi as India’s national language at a time when south India (Madras state) was gripped by anti-Hindi agitators led by Dravidian parties. We saw earlier how Periyar characterized Hindu nationalism as a Brahmin-Bania phenomenon. This north-Indian bias of the BJS carried over to its subsequent avatar as the BJP in 1980 and has continued to dog the party’s poor showing in Tamil Nadu until today. After Upadhyay’s tragic death (he was thrown out of a moving train) in 1968, another RSS pracharak, Atal Bihari Vajpayee took over, with L.K. Advani as his lieutenant. In 1977, the BJS merged with several centre and left parties opposed to the Congress party and Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency. They formed the Janata Party, which stormed to power in the national elections in 1978. But by 1980, the coalition had frayed, and the government fell after BJS members were expelled for having dual membership in the RSS. In its three decades of operation, the BJS was unable to build significant support among the Hindu electorate. Bruce Graham (2007) explains this failure in terms of the 85

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restrictive scope of its founding ideology, limitations of its leadership and organization, failure to build a secure base of social and economic interests, and its inability to find issues that would create support for its particular brand of Hindu nationalism. The continuing dominance of the Congress party in the electoral arena was a key factor in keeping the BJS at the margins. The BJP was formed in 1980 under Vajpayee who adopted Gandhian socialism as the credo much to the discomfiture of the RSS. In the 1984 parliamentary elections, after a sympathy wave following Indira Gandhi’s assassination wiped out the chances of the other parties and left the BJP with two parliamentary seats, Vajpayee was sidelined and Advani took over. The party returned to its predecessor BJS’s focus, namely linking Indian nationalism with being a Hindu. The dispute over the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya became the vehicle, and Hindutva became the BJP’s electoral war cry. In 1989, as the Congress party lost the national elections, and its political hegemony began fraying, the Ram temple issue gained traction and helped the BJP carve out electoral gains among Hindu voters in successive elections. How did Hindu nationalism espoused by BJS’s new avatar, the BJP, come to dominate Indian politics and government? It is a story of constitutional ambiguities about Hindu religion, subsequent court rulings that moved between three imaginaries of Hinduism that allowed for a distinction between Hindu religion and Hindu ideology, and the disenchantment with the Congress party.

* In Secularity and Hinduism’s Imaginaries in India, I highlight three stylized imaginaries of Hinduism as a religion, an ancient order, and as a culture and show how these wove through the Constituent Assembly debates on the role of the new state vis-á-vis religion, and problematize the role of Hinduism in the political and legal arenas. The overlapping and often contradictory pulls of the three imaginaries left their mark on the Indian constitution’s conception of the new state’s relationship with religion. If Hinduism was treated as a religion, how could the state conform to neutrality and separation of state and religion, and still reform unjust social practices within the Hindu caste system? If Hinduism was an ancient order based on the caste hierarchy, how could the state undertake social justice for the lowest castes? And if Hinduism was part of an Indian culture, how could the state bar it from political discourse? The Constituent Assembly members used all three imaginaries to construct the new state’s relationship with religion, and by doing so, peppered the Constitution with many contradictions. Ultimately, the Constitution did not define the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘religion’, ‘secular’ and ‘minorities’, leaving it to the courts and legislative amendments to do so. The contradictions produced by the three imaginaries bedeviled the judiciary’s interpretations of Hinduism, and contrary to the view that apex courts produce moderating effects in the arena of religious freedom, their judgments had unintended and deleterious consequences for religious toleration, and enhanced polarization (Shankar, 2019).

* A vivid picture of how a judgment can have an unintended and polarizing effect is evident in the utilization of the Stainislaus case by the Hindu nationalists. In 1978, a Christian missionary named Reverend Stainislaus challenged the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (passed in 1968) in the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The act prohibited conversion by force, fraud or inducement and prescribed one year’s imprisonment and a fine for those convicted.7 Stanislaus objected to the act on the grounds that the definition of inducement was overly broad. Losing the case in the High Court, Stainislaus appealed to the Supreme Court, where the case 86

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was heard with another case from Orissa on a similar anti-conversion law.8 In its verdict, the Supreme Court of India upheld both acts. The Chief Justice, writing for the court, insisted that there was ‘no fundamental right to convert another person to one’s own religion’ because such a right ‘would impinge on the freedom of conscience guaranteed to all citizens of the country alike’ (Stainislaus v. Madhya Pradesh). Interpreting the judgment as a victory for Hindus (vis-à-vis Christian missionaries), a BJS member (O.P. Tyagi) introduced the Freedom of Religion Bill in the Indian parliament in December 1978 that sought to prohibit conversion from one religion to another by the use of force or inducement or by fraudulent means. This proposal, which was backed not just by the RSS (Jaffrelot 2007, p. 287) but also by the Prime Minister of the ruling coalition, purportedly intended to offer scheduled tribes the ‘protection of the state’ from the missionaries.9 The language of the bill cited the Supreme Court judgement in the Stainislaus case as supporting the constitutionality of the bill.10 The prime minister later withdrew his backing because of an agitation by Christian groups and the Minorities Commission, which was established by the government in January 1978 for the regulation of religious and linguistic minority affairs. Christian leaders highlighted the violence that comparable legislation had given rise to in Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India.11 The Stainislaus judgement continued to cast a long shadow in subsequent years and has given Hindu nationalists new ways to express and legitimize their long-standing opposition to conversion in the language of religious freedom and judicial precedents.

* In 1996, two cases (henceforth Hindutva Case) were heard together by the Supreme Court of India on whether the use of the term ‘Hindutva’ in election speeches by the winning candidates was illegal because it pertained to religion, and contravened a law that forbade the use of religious rhetoric in election speeches.12 The two politicians (Prabhoo and Joshi) argued that the concept of Hindutva was cultural and nationalistic rather than religious; their opponents said the concept pertained to Hindu religion. Citing the difficulty of defining a Hindu, the then Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma concluded that the terms ‘Hindutva’ and ‘Hinduism’ could not be equated with narrow fundamentalist religious bigotry. Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and it is not to be equated with, or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism . . . the word ‘Hindutva’ is used and understood as a synonym of ‘Indianisation’, i.e. the development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all the cultures coexisting in the country . . . . (Prabhoo v. Kunte, 1996, paragraph 40) The answer to whether the use of the word ‘Hindutva’ in an election speech is religious or not depends on the context, said the judgment. The mere word itself ought not to be narrowly construed as a religious term ‘unless the context of a speech indicates a contrary meaning or use’. In the abstract, ‘these terms are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practicing the Hindu religion as a faith’ (Prabhoo v. Kunte, 1996, paragraph 43). In the case of Prabhoo, the court ruled that the speeches amounted to corrupt practices under the act, while in Joshi, it did not. In the Joshi case, the court equated Hinduism (which it saw as ‘Indianisation’ or culture) with Hindutva, which was deemed to be non-religious nationalist rhetoric. 87

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None of the earlier judgments had equated ‘Hindutva’ with ‘Hinduism’, but this one did so and likened both with ‘a way of life’. The judgment was criticised by several scholars for giving legitimacy to Hindu nationalist ideology, with the upshot being Hindutva = Hinduism = way of life and not a religion = Indianisation = development of a uniform culture, even if the judges themselves may not have meant to say so (Nauriya, 1996). Not surprisingly, the Hindu Right viewed the ruling as giving judicial imprimatur to ‘Hindutva’ as an ideology that expressed nationalism and Indianness rather than a religion, and legitimizing its use in politics.13 The irony was that in a previous judgment (Bommai v. Union of India), the Supreme Court recognized the potential of ‘Hindutva’ as a divisive religious mobilizing concept.14 In Bommai, the court reviewed the constitutionality of dismissing BJP-led state (sub-regional) governments for participating in unsecular activities. The dismissal came in the wake of riots between Hindus and Muslims in these states following the destruction of an ancient mosque in Ayodhya in northern India. The court ruled that a state government pursuing an unsecular policy was acting contrary to the constitutional mandate and could be dismissed under Article 356. ‘Unsecular’ activities included a political party’s ideological plank (in this case BJP’s Hindutva) in elections that had the effect of eroding the secular philosophy of the Constitution. The court said: If a political party espousing a particular religion comes to power, that religion tends to become, in practice, the official religion. All other religions come to acquire a secondary status, at any rate, a less favorable position . . . under our Constitution, no party or organization can simultaneously be a political and a religious party. It has to be either. (Bommai v. Union of India, 1994, p. 236) The Hindutva and Bommai judgements resulted in a paradox: the BJP was implicitly granted recognition as a political party (Hindutva judgement) and condemned as a religious party (Bommai judgement), though the court in Bommai maintained that no party could be a religious and a political party. In the court’s notion that in abstract terms Hindutva construed a way of life of Indian people, we see a Hindu nationalism that connected Hindu with a racial and geographic identity mingle with the strand of Hindu-ness that had an inclusive sense of an Indian.

* While the courts were grappling with the concept of Hindutva, other political factors gave electoral impetus to Hindu nationalist rhetoric. The Congress party’s steady decline, which began in earnest with Indira Gandhi’s death, had opened up the electoral space. Indira Gandhi had successfully portrayed herself as a religious Hindu and publicly worshipped in temples and wore a rudraksha, but she also reached out to non-Hindus with her welfare promises of food, shelter and clothing for the poor. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who won a huge mandate after her assassination, spoke of economic resurgence, but his political naivety frittered away the mandate. In this vacuum, the BJP led by L.K. Advani grew its Hindu vote-base with a movement to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya (in northern India) in the precinct of the Babri Masjid mosque. In the 1989 elections, the BJP got 85 seats, up from 2 seats in 1984. Emboldened, the BJP and its fellow Sangh Parivar members matched their rhetoric with action in 1992 when the dome of the Babri Masjid was broken during a rally presided over by Advani and other top leaders. Looking back, it was a watershed moment. The physical destruction of a mosque, the placement of Ram’s idol, the popularity of TV series based on the Ramayana, the use of those TV actors as candidates – all created the aura around the BJP of being the party that would unite Hindus and make them proud Indians (Nag, 2014). The continuing presence of traditionalist or 88

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‘soft’ Hindus in the ruling Congress party, a presence that dates back to the pre-independence era, helped the BJP. In the Babri Masjid demolition, the central government’s inaction was seen as the failure of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who was seen as a soft Hindu by some. Though Rao pointed to the constitutional difficulties of sending in central forces when the BJP-led state government had not formally asked for it, few bought that argument.

* By the late 1990s, the Ayodhya issue had run its course. Vajpayee, who had served as the Prime Minister for 13 days in 1996, and then as the head of the National Democratic Alliance coalition government from 1998 to 2004, had retired. With Advani in his 80s, the question was who would lead the BJP and whether Hindutva would be the centrepiece of its electoral strategy. The party under Advani had lost to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition (led by Sonia Gandhi who appointed Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister) in 2004, and again in 2009.15 In 2014, RSS pracharak Narendra Modi, the three-time Chief Minister of Gujarat, emerged as a strong candidate to challenge Advani. With the RSS’s backing, he became the BJP’s primeministerial candidate. The 2014 election rhetoric of the BJP revolved around development. ‘We will create a Gujarat for you in other parts of India’ – that was the promise in the films shown by BJP electioneers to villagers in north and central India. The stridency of the racial and religious motifs of Hindutva took a back seat to a softer Hindu-ness in its election rhetoric. The antiincumbency factor, and voter distaste with the blatant corruption and poor governance of the Manmohan Singh–led UPA added to the potent discontent. For the first time in its existence, the BJP won 282 seats with 31% of the vote. The Congress party faced its worst-ever defeat, winning just 44 of the parliamentary 543 seats. The BJP’s victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections came from five factors – Modi’s leadership and the absence of a strong candidate among the BJP’s opponents, the BJP’s success in convincing the electorate that it could deliver the so-called Gujarat model of good governance and development, voter dismay with corruption in the previous UPA government, the BJP’s success in attracting new castes and groups, and the deep polarization of the Hindu-Muslim vote (Sardesai et al., 2014). The religious polarization angle is pertinent to our analysis and requires more scrutiny. The National Election Studies survey conducted by CSDS reveals that there was greater convergence in the voting behaviour of groups within the Hindu community, with 36% of all Hindus backing the BJP. Even during the communally charged decade of the 1990s, the BJP had failed to attract so many Hindu voters. ‘While the gap between Hindu support for the BJP and Muslim support for Congress was in double digits in most elections between 1996 and 2009 (except 1998), in 2014 it reduced to just minus two percentage points thus indicating strong polarization’ (Sardesai et al., 2014, p. 29). In central and western India, BJP and its allies got more than 60% of the Hindu vote, and the Congress performed very well with Muslims. Despite the high fragmentation of votes in northern India, the BJP managed to get 45% of the Hindu vote.16 In 2019, the Modi-led BJP improved on its previous electoral performance and won 303 seats with 37.3% of the vote, while the Congress party managed to win only 53 seats, losing its position as the main opposition party. In these elections, the BJP’s rhetoric shifted the focus away from the high unemployment and rural distress to questions of national security. Modi tapped into the 130 million youth voters, who though disappointed with the lack of jobs, still chose Modi because there was no alternative. The Congress party failed to project Rahul Gandhi as a viable opponent to Modi. 89

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Political commentators have pointed out several reasons for the BJP’s rise: the decline of the Congress party and the Left parties, the strategic alliances of the BJP with caste groups, targeting the Congress party as an appeaser of Muslims and playing up Hindu fears of marginalization, and its promise to bring development and economic growth. All agree that one cannot talk about the BJP’s victory without addressing the Modi factor. Jaffrelot (2021) calls Modi’s victory the third age of Indian democracy marked by the rise of populist politics, ‘as promises made to the poor during election campaigns did not translate into policies’. He argues that BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology has ushered in the era of an ethnic democracy informed by the promotion of a Hindu definition of the nation in opposition to the secularism enshrined in the Constitution. ‘The Modi government has promoted a new form of authoritarianism, weakened state institutions, distorted the electoral process and targeted minorities in an official and direct way and is now transitioning from a de facto Hindu Rashtra to an authoritarian Hindu Raj’ (Jaffrelot, 2021, p. 6). Is BJP’s victory in two successive recent elections testimony to the dominance of Hindu nationalist sentiments among the Indian electorate?17 The Hindu CSDS-Lokniti Post-Poll Survey data found that the BJP increased its vote-share from 31% in 2014 to 37.4% in 2019, and this rise is from an increase in the Hindu voters’ support (from all castes) for the party, up from 36% in 2014 to 44% in 2019. The survey also revealed that Hindus who felt close to a party were three times more likely to feel close to BJP rather than the Congress. Muslim respondents who felt close to a party were five times more likely to feel close to the Congress. But did Hindus vote for the BJP because of its brand of Hindu nationalism or because of its welfare policies? That is a trickier question to answer because the survey data are not clear on that issue. The BJP’s manifesto displayed a cafeteria-style set of promises that included its Hindu nationalist agenda, welfare policies and national security, and voters chose the ones they liked and voted for the party. We get a glimpse of the answer in the Lokniti poll’s question: What was the most important issue for you while voting in this (2019) election? Lack of jobs (10%) and development (13.2%) featured most prominently, while Hindutva, Ayodhya, Pulwama attack, national security, nationalism and terrorism received less than 0.6%. What the survey data show is that the BJP under Modi has managed to expand its voteappeal to a larger coalition of castes who include the ‘other backward classes’ (OBCs), and the welfare schemes – houses, toilets and gas connections – of the first Modi government were cited by OBCs (but not scheduled classes [SCs] and scheduled tribes [STs]) as a reason for their vote. Kancha Illiah Shepherd (2021) argues that Modi’s victory came because he declared himself an OBC, appropriated Patel and subtly owned Ambedkar’s legacy, both of whom were neglected by the Congress, which by now, had also alienated the Dalits, Adivasis and OBC. Had he been a Hindutva Brahmin, he would not have won the elections, Illiah says. The point he makes about how Modi upended the hierarchical construct has a basis in the make-up of Modi’s cabinets. They include significant, not token representation of Dalits, Adivasis and OBC in his cabinet, unlike in the previous Congress and BJP coalition governments where the upper castes dominated.

* The Hindu nationalist agenda of the BJP has transformed India’s legal and political map. Within 50 days of coming to power in 2019, the Modi government pushed through some core agendas of its Hindu nationalist sentiments. The Triple Talaq Bill did away with the Muslim male’s religious practice of saying Talaq thrice to divorce a woman. Despite opposition from the 90

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Congress party and some others, the bill sailed through. Emboldened, the Modi government stunned everyone by scrapping Articles 370 and 35A pertaining to Jammu and Kashmir at one stroke and got these measures passed on the same day with the support of some opposition parties. This is a game changer for the conflict-torn state. Simultaneously, the state has been bifurcated into two Union Territories: Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. With the Supreme Court verdict on the Ayodhya case that unanimously gave the disputed site to Hindus and ordered the government to set up a trust to build a Ram temple, and allocated five acres of land to the Sunni Waqf Board to build a mosque elsewhere, the BJP fulfilled a key part of its core agenda (Sidduq v. Das). To understand the type of Hindu nationalism that is operating in public spaces today, we need to return to the complicated relationship between Hinduism and Hindus. Hinduism’s vast corpus contains an eclectic pluralism within (Doniger, 2015; Sen, 1962), and also more cautiously with other religions (Doniger, 2015, Long, 2022). One can agree with scholars that it is more useful to think of Hinduism not as a hotchpotch or a singularity but as a complex variety of sources and the power of the integrations that make up what we call Hinduism (Ghose, 2003). Elaine M. Fisher (2018) argues that the sectarian religious publics of early modern South Asia provide us with the opportunity to rethink the criteria for a non-Western pluralism, founded not on the prescriptive model of Western civil society but on a historically descriptive account of the role of religion in the public sphere. She points out that Saivite (Shankara’s followers) and Vaishnavite (Ramanuja’s followers) adherents in tenth-century South India wore their sectarian identities on their foreheads and moved about in the public sphere. They were marked citizens or subjects. Pluralism in this context was not the absence of conflict but its effective resolution – a process, she says, that in Hindu early modernity was facilitated not by the removal of religion in public but by its active publicization and by the shared performance of plural religiosities.18 This public portrayal of a sectarian or religious affiliation (self-marked citizen) had an insularity. Certitude about the truth of one’s belief could lead to clashes with those with other beliefs, but it could also create an indifference to other religions and sects. Insular pluralism is what T.N. Madan (1999) calls mutual indifference disguised as tolerance. Insular pluralism has continued in India after independence; there are no injunctions against wearing one’s religious identity in public spaces such as universities or in government offices. That’s why the headscarf controversy in France and Turkey did not make sense in the Indian context because of this long tradition of functioning as marked publics. However, this insularity too is fraying as seen in the recent hijab controversy in coastal Karnataka where Muslim students were forbidden to wear a headscarf while attending classes in college on grounds that it was not part of the uniform. The BJP government in the state had made uniforms mandatory for students. Religious clashes erupted between Muslim students and Hindu students wearing saffron scarves and chanting the names of Modi and the BJP. In March 2022, the Karnataka High Court ruled that wearing hijab was not an essential religious practice in Islamic faith and upheld the ban. The Sangh Parivar’s brand of Hindu nationalism – public Hindu and exclusionary nationalism – is eroding the dominance of insular pluralism.

* It is indisputable that there is a larger and more vocal presence of an exclusivist Hindu nationalism now. The Hindu consolidation around Modi’s election victory has come with increased religious polarization. The 2019 post-poll Lokniti survey shows that religious minorities voted in large numbers for the National Democratic Alliance, that is, Congress and other 91

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opposition parties. The polarization of voters on Hindu-Muslim lines was most acute in states with high proportions of Muslims, namely Assam, United Provinces, West Bengal and Bihar. At the same time, in state-elections, the BJP’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed. In April 2022, the BJP is ruling in 42% of India, and about 45% of the population. It has not been able to dislodge the regional parties in several states, and apart from Karnataka, the rest of southern India remains out of BJP’s reach where the party is seen as a Hindi-Hindu-Baniya-North-Indian entity. In conceptual terms, we are seeing in India of the 2020s a breakdown of insular pluralism and a political impetus towards virulent religious polarization. There is a concerted move by a democratically elected government to draw a misleadingly neat circle around Hindu religion and Indian nationality (Jayal, 2021). New amendments to citizenship laws privilege the nonMuslim immigrant, and when applied in conjunction with the government’s stated objective to carry out a compilation of a national register of citizens, carries a grave threat to those Muslims in India who do not possess the documentary evidence of citizenship. Technology may be a disrupter of these old patterns and create online spaces for these discussions, but it also enhances the ability of powerful groups, particularly the cash-rich political parties with their technology cells, to spread misunderstanding. For now, the BJP-fashioned Hindu nationalism looks likely to continue. The fractured opposition parties, the inability of the Congress party to provide a viable alternative, and the fragmentation of vote-banks as smaller and newer parties like Aam Aadmi Party and Trinamool Congress set their sights on winning elections in other states, looks likely to return Modi and the BJP to power in the next parliamentary elections. If the BJP loses a significant number of seats, and its vote-share falls in the next election, there may be some hope for it to be seen as voter disenchantment with the party’s Hindu nationalism. But if the BJP returns with more votes and seats in the 2024 national elections, the Hindu nationalists will see it as approval for its brand of Hindu nationalism and a Hinduisation of Indian politics. The Indian Constitution’s Sarva Dharma Sambhava will become a chimera.

Notes 1 The Sangh Parivar refers to the collection of Hindu nationalist political, social, student, cultural and economic organizations affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). These include the RSS, the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, ABVP and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh. It is also often applied to the Shiv Sena party, which shares RSS’s ideology. 2 Translated in an article on a historical overview of the Bengali platter in Sahapedia. 3 When World War II broke out, the Congress governments resigned in protest at India’s forced involvement. The Hindu Mahasabha saw the war as an opportunity to militarise Hindu youth and serve the nation after freedom, and advocated that Hindu youth enlist in the army. They joined the war committees, which had been boycotted by the Congress party, but individual Mahasabha leaders also joined the Quit India movement subsequently. 4 The RSS uniform – khaki shorts – was designed by Hedgewar originally for the volunteers of the Bharat Sevak Samaj he had created for the 1920 Congress Nagpur session (Ambekar, 2019, p. 30). 5 Hedgewar favoured an organization strong and free from frailty (of infighting), with everyone fully devoted to the cause (Ambekar, 2019, p. 9). According to Ambekar, he abhorred the cult of personality around leaders such as Gandhi and saw that even powerful movements such as the Swadeshi movement of Tilak petered out once he was jailed. It led him to the conclusion that the basis for liberation of the motherland could not be located in any one personality, and that national service should be systematized and a process ought to be created. From Ramdas (a medieval saint who was Shivaji’s spiritual preceptor), he acquired the idea of creating pure body, mind and intellect of a swayamasevak in a place where they could meet and discuss without discrimination and hierarchy. The concept of the shakha was born. 6 Ambekar, however, reiterates that ‘RSS does not engage in party politics; some swaymsevaks belong to a particular political party – BJP and work in politics’ (p. 209).

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Hindu nationalism and politics in India 7 The framers of the Constitution were aware of the potential of conversion as a political time bomb. A review of the Constituent Assembly discussion on Article 25 that extends the right to propagate religion to all persons shows that the framers were divided on whether to extend such a right to citizens. Tajamul Husain urged that religion was a private affair between oneself and one’s creator and it had nothing to do with others; therefore, the right to propagate religion was wholly unnecessary. Another member (Loknath Mishra) held that the aim of propagation of religion was political and hence should be deleted from the fundamental and justiciable rights component of the Constitution. However, those in favour of incorporating the right prevailed; they said the right was not absolute and if any attempts were made to secure mass conversions through undue influence, the State had the right to regulate such activity (Shankar, 2019). 8 The Orissa High Court found the opposite to the Madhya Pradesh High Court. In Orissa, the court held the act ultra vires partly finding with the party who opposed the act, on the grounds that the definition of ‘inducement’ was indeed too vague and, as such, would prohibit too many proselytizing activities. 9 Mother Teresa wrote to the Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai expressing her concerns. In response, the prime minister urged her to support the bill on grounds that the state had to be ‘particularly vigilant about the Scheduled Tribes whose protection is not only guaranteed by the laws of the land but is also enshrined in the Constitution. It is our duty to preserve every aspect of their way of life along with their religion and ways of worship. No group belonging to any creed should interfere with their religion and rituals’. See letter from Prime Minister Morarji Desai to Mother Teresa, 21 April 1979, reported in Goel (1998). 10 See Organizer, 15 April 1979, pages 1–15 for a full text of the bill. 11 See Jaffrelot, 2007, p. 287 for citations from newspapers. 12 The Constituent Assembly’s decision that religion would be delinked from politics, was codified in Section 123(3) of the Representation of People Act (1951), which forbade the use of religious rhetoric in election campaigns. 13 Asserting that Hindutva was synonymous with nationalism and ‘Bharateeyatva’, BJP party leader Vajpayee argued in a public meeting that the concept did not merit further debate as the Supreme Court had defined it in totality in its judgment (Times of India, June 7, 1996). Justice Verma later told the author that he had been misinterpreted. 14 In Bommai, seven justices agreed that ‘secularism’ was a basic feature of the Constitution. Only two, including Justice Verma (who later decided the Hindutva case) refrained from expressing an opinion on the definition of ‘secularism’. For the seven Justices, the meaning of secularism ranged from seeing the role of the state as one of passive neutral religious tolerance to an active protection of all religions. A majority ruling is not obvious in Bommai, since there was no order of the entire court; the nine judges expressed themselves through six opinions. 15 The mandate in the 1996 general election went against Congress. The  BJP emerged as the single largest party and formed the government, but it fell after 13 days because no other party supported it. The saffron party again emerged as the single largest party in the 1998 and 1999 elections. The 2004 elections were a battle between two coalitions: the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Congress-led UPA, with the latter scoring a victory. Manmohan Singh was appointed the prime minister by Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. As political commentator Kalyani Shankar (2019) points out, two parallel streams ran through his regime. One was Singh’s continuation of further liberalization, and the other was Sonia Gandhi’s left-leaning welfare policy. However, the gains were lost as the government suffered a policy paralysis after 2010 and became mired in corruption scandals. 16 The perception of a pro-Muslim shift of the Congress was noted by one of its senior leaders, A  K Anthony, after the election results. He said the party’s proximity towards minority communities created doubts among other communities about its model of secularism and that there was a need to correct the notion that certain groups get special consideration within the Congress (Sardesai et al., 2014, p. 41). 17 The BJP’s growth is indeed notable, as it grew from a mere two seats in the Lok Sabha (lower parliament) in 1984 to 85 in 1989 and then to 120 seats in 1991. In 1996, it went up to 161 and bagged 182 in 1998. It won the same number in 1999. In 2004, there was a slide as the party won 138 seats, and in 2009 it went down further to 116 seats. From 2004 to 2014 it was out of power, but in 2014 the Narendra Modi–led BJP got a majority of its own (282 seats) and formed the government. The BJP improved on its performance in 2019 by winning 303 seats. By 2015, the BJP had the largest membership, 88 million, surpassing even the Chinese Communist Party’s 86 million. The BJP is also

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Shylashri Shankar the richest party today. In April 2022, the BJP and its coalition partners are governing 21 states (Kalyani Shankar, 2019). 18 Fisher (2018, p. 6) argues that Saivite and Vaisnavite were distinct religious communities. To belong to either was also to belong to a socially embedded community and to mark one’s religious identity as a member of a particular religious public. Doniger (2015, p. 512) complicates Fisher’s story by pointing out that in medieval India, people cared about philosophy enough to fight about it, mostly with words but sometimes with weapons. These fights were with other philosophical schools within Hinduism and also with Buddhism and Islam.

References Ambekar, Sunil. (2019). The RSS: Roadmaps for the 21st Century (New Delhi: Rupa Publications). Bapu, Prabhu. (2013). Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915–1930: Constructing Nation and History (London: Routledge). Doniger, Wendy. (2015). The Hindus – An Alternative History (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger). Fisher, Elaine M. (2018). ‘Hindu Pluralism: A Prehistory’, Religious Compass 12: e12257. Geetha, V. and S V Rajadurai. (1998). Towards a Non Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Bhatkal and Sen Publishers) https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12257. Ghose, A.M. (2003). ‘Manu’s Conception of Man and Society’, in Daya Krishna. (ed) India’s Intellectual Traditions: Attempts at Conceptual Reconstructions (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research). Goel, Sita Ram. (1998). Pseudo-Secularism, Christian Missions and Hindu Resistance (New Delhi: Voice of India). Gould, William. (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Graham, Bruce. (2007). Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hansen, Thomas Blom and Christophe Jaffrelot. eds. (1998). The BJP and Compulsions of Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Jaffrelot, Christophe. (2000). The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (New Delhi: Penguin). Jaffrelot, Christophe. (2021). Modi’s India and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (Context) Penguin publishers, New Delhi. Jayal, Niraja Gopal. (2021). Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (New Delhi: Permanent Black). Madan, T.N. (1999). ‘Perspectives on Pluralism’, Seminar. https://www.india-seminar.com/1999/484/ 484%20madan.htm Mukul, Akshaya. (2022). ‘How the Hindu Right Tried-and Failed-to Forge a Common Platform in India’s First Elections’, The Wire, 26 February. (New Delhi: Permanent Black) Nag, Kingshuk. (2014). The Saffron Tide and the Rise of the BJP (New Delhi: Rupa). Nauriya, Anil. (1996). ‘The Hindutva Judgments: A Warning Signal’, Economic and Political Weekly 3(11). Sardesai, Shreyas, Pranav Gupta and Reetika Sayal. (2014). ‘The Religious Fault Line in the 2014 Election’, Research Journal Social Sciences 22(2). Schonthal, Benjamin, Tamir Moustafa, Matt Nelson and Shylashri Shankar. (2016). ‘Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom’, American Behavioral Scientist 60(8): 941–965. Shankar, Kalyani. (2019). The Triumph of the Indian Right: Reasons and Ramifications (Washington DC: The Wilson Centre). Shankar, Shylashri. (2018). ‘Secularism and Hinduism’s Imaginaries in India’, in Mirjam Kunkler, John Madeley and Shylashri Shankar. (eds) A Secular Age beyond the West: Law, Religion and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shankar, Shylashri. (2019). ‘The Polarising Face of Law: Religious Conversion Judgments and Political Discourse in India’, in Gerald Rosenberg, Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Shishir Bail. (eds) A Qualified Hope: The Indian Supreme Court and Progressive Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press). Shankar, Shylashri. (2020). Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger). Shankar, Shylashri. (2021). ‘Hinduism, Insular Pluralism and Religious Literacy in India’, in Chris Seiple and Dennis Hoover. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Pluralism and Global Engagement (London: Routledge).

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Hindu nationalism and politics in India Shepherd, Kancha Illiah. (2021). ‘Rahul Gandhi’s Hinduism Can’t Beat Modi’s Hindutva. Congress’ Neglect of Shudras a Reason’, The Print, 18 December. https://theprint.in/opinion/rahul-gandhis-hinduismcant-beat-modis-hindutva-congress-neglect-of-shudras-a-reason/783207/ Vivekananda. (1964). The Complete Works (Vol.III) (Shri Ramakrishna Math) https://archive.org/details/ completeworksofswamivivekananda_ninevolumes/SWAMI%20VIVEKANANDA%20COMPLETE% 20WORKS%20%28Vol%201%29/.

Supreme Court of India cases Bommai v. Union of India, (1994) SC 1918. Dr. Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar K. Kunte AIR, (1996) SC 1113; Manohar Joshi v Nitin Bhaurao Patil, (1996) 1 SCC 169. M.Sidduq (D) v Mahant Suresh Das and Ors, (2019) 4 SCC 656. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1977) 2 SCR 611.

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7 SUNNI ISLAM AND ISLAMISM Gudrun Krämer

From its emergence, in the first half of the twentieth century, Islamism as a specifically modern conceptualization of Islam as a comprehensive moral, social, and political system based on revelation and the normative example of the prophet Muhammad and the first generations of Muslims, has been critiqued by Sunni Muslims who considered Islamism a deviation from, if not a perversion of, Islam. Many have gone so far as to state that Islamism in general, and jihadist Islamism in particular, had nothing to with Islam. While this statement serves the obvious function of defending Islam against its numerous critics (not only in ‘the West’), it conceals the many ways in which Islamists have drawn on the Islamic tradition to form and authenticate their understanding of correct Islamic thought and conduct. It is in fact difficult to clearly demarcate Islamism (as long as it does not exert violence against others, especially Muslims) from mainstream Sunni Islam: there is considerable common ground epistemologically, albeit significantly less so with regard to practice; neither are unified; and like other Muslims, individual Islamists and entire Islamist groups have revised their assumptions and modified their strategies over time. From an early period, the Muslim community (Ar., umma) has been internally diversified along various lines. Some of them are manifested in ‘sectarian’ affiliation (such as Sunni, Shi‘i, or Alevi) with their specific visual, emotional, and memorial cultures. Others articulate specific understandings of legal thought and method (the so-called schools of law, Ar., madhahib, sing. madhhab), or of theology and piety (Sufi, Salafi), with Sufism cutting across theological, legal, and ‘sectarian’ affiliation. Yet others are tied to culture and region. While many Muslims view this plurality as a source of strength, and evidence of the universal appeal of Islam, others consider it a threat to the unity of the community. Islamists with their drive towards unity based on purity and authenticity stand for the latter position. They make an absolute claim to truth, denying, or at least devaluing, the validity of alternative articulations of Islam.

Islamism Islamism can be defined as a project to transform state, law, culture, and society in light of a particular understanding of Islam that is both textual and focused on sharia as law and that takes the early period as the normative model of an all-encompassing Islamic order. This definition addresses the Islamist agenda rather than the strategies pursued to realize it. Both make for major differences within the Islamic or Islamist trend (Ar., al-tayyar al-islami). From the 96

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-8

Sunni Islam and Islamism

beginning, Islamism has been contested, and contestation is reflected in terminology. The terms ‘integrism’, ‘integralism’, ‘fundamentalism’, and ‘neofundamentalism’, ‘Islamic revivalism’, and ‘political Islam’ have all been used by non-Islamist observers, especially outside the Islamic world as conventionally understood. ‘Fundamentalism’ in particular has been critiqued as inappropriate, being derived from (American) Protestant models and closely identified with literalism (Shepard, 1987; Ruthven, 2007). Irrespective, the Arabic equivalent usuliyyun, which in earlier times had denoted Muslim religious scholars focusing on the ‘fundamental’ sources, has been widely adopted by speakers of Arabic, including Islamists. Since the 1980s, ‘Islamism’ has gradually come to be accepted as the broadest term to describe a wide range of individuals, groups, and parties propagating an Islamist agenda (Seidensticker, 2016). Various taxonomies have been devised to distinguish between different types of Islamists: moderate, pragmatic, or legalist as opposed to radical, militant, extremist, or revolutionary; state- as opposed to society-oriented; integrationist and isolationist; quietist and jihadist; Salafi and Ikhwani (referring to the Muslim Brotherhood); locally rooted and translocal, transnational, or even global; fighting the near enemy (local regimes) or the far one (typically ‘the West’ in general and the US in particular, largely ignoring Russia and China). Islamism is a dynamic phenomenon, and like other socio-political actors, Islamists respond to changing circumstances with the attendant opportunities and challenges. In the process, some have modified their programme and/or strategy over time. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a new phenomenon emerged of individuals ‘converting’ to jihadism largely through social media and the worldwide net without formally associating themselves with existing Islamist groups and networks. At the same time, scholars have discussed the emergence of what has been called post-Islamism (Bayat, 2007). This chapter is not about Islamism and post-Islamism, but about Islamist references to the Islamic tradition as well as Sunni Muslim responses to (Sunni) Islamism, focusing on a number of issues: religious authority and the caliphate; textualism, that is reference to the foundational texts of the Qur’an and Sunna, as well as to the early Islamic period and the ‘pious ancestors’; the conceptualization of Islam as an all-encompassing order structured by sharia; relations with non-Muslims, and ‘excommunication’ (takfir) of self-identifying Muslims; jihad and ‘moderation’ (wasatiyya). Given the enormous scope and variety of responses, Sunni authors living in Muslim-majority contexts and employing what they consider Islamic arguments will be privileged over secular voices, especially those living in the West.

Religious authority Compared to other religious traditions, such as Catholic Christianity and important strands of Buddhism, Sunni Islam has been characterized by weak institutionalization, rather similar to Judaism (Gaborieau and Zeghal, 2004; Krämer and Schmidtke, 2006). The common assertion that under the conditions of modernity, religious authority has been ‘fragmented,’ allowing among other things for the emergence of Islamist claimants to religious authority, is ill-founded, for within Sunni Islam, religious authority had never been unified and uncontested. If up to the twentieth century,1 the caliphate as an institution was widely seen as indispensable for ‘upholding Islam’, the qualifications of its holders were frequently disputed, and by the tenth century, a number of competing Sunni caliphates had arisen in various parts of the Islamic world. When the caliphate was abolished by the Turkish National Assembly in 1924, it had already seen a number of major transformations, including the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate, by the Mongols, in 1258. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the caliph was occasionally described as the spiritual head of the global Umma, evoking the 97

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medieval Latin Christian doctrine of the two swords: a spiritual one held by the church, and a temporal one wielded by lay rulers. The Abbasid caliphs laid claim to genealogical charisma (as defined by Max Weber) through their descent from the house of the prophet Muhammad, and they were perceived by their followers as the head of the entire Muslim community, not just the Sunni one. They were able to use their aura of religious legitimacy to confer legitimacy on other rulers, who were in theory subject to them. The caliph’s function was to ‘uphold Islam’, to expand its boundaries, to secure peace and prosperity at home, and to ward off heresy and disbelief; some transmitted prophetic hadiths, others issued creeds carrying their names. Religious function, however, is not the same as religious authority. High-flying titles, including khalifat Allah, ‘God’s deputy’, and ‘the shadow of God on earth’, notwithstanding, caliphal claims to religious authority were disputed. In the so-called mihna (‘tribulation’, inquisition) of the 830s and 840s, the caliphs failed to impose a specific doctrine on the scholars of theology and law (‘ulama’), despite the latter’s lack of corporate institutionalization and the independent material resources tied to it. The mihna as a lieu de mémoire continues to be evoked by opponents of the powers-that-be, including Islamists. But it did not result in a decisive victory of one side over the other. In their majority, the ‘ulama’ continued to affirm the caliph’s role as guardian of the faith and the Muslim community (Lapidus, 1975; Zaman, 1997, esp. pp. 101–118, 201–213; Crone, 2004). The rulers of Iranian and Turkic origin from the Seldjuks to the Ottomans, who ruled over large stretches of the Islamic ecumene, did not meet most of the criteria Sunni Muslim scholars had set for the caliphate, but they were Sunni Muslims, and they wielded the power (shawka) to maintain social order and correct religion as they understood it. Eleventh-century Sunni scholars and bureaucrats went as far as to assert that what ultimately counted was order and justice, not the Muslim identity of the ruler, reflecting the power of a monarchical tradition, which at least outside Morocco and the Arab Gulf monarchies, present-day Islamists condemn as unIslamic (Dakhlia, 1998, Al-Azmeh, 2001; Moin, 2014). Restoration of the (Ottoman) caliphate was a major issue in the 1920s, with the Indian-based Khilafat Movement especially strong in territories under British control (Minault, 1982; Özcan, 1997; Al-Rasheed, Kersten, and Shterin, eds., 2013). In Cairo, Rashid Rida (1865–1935), leading figure of the Sunni Arab reform movement progressively known as Salafiyya, editor of its mouthpiece al-Manar, and a major influence on emerging Sunni Islamism, advocated for an Arab caliphate. Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brothers supported this demand but did not make it a priority (Krämer, 2022), and neither do the majority of present-day Islamists. The foremost Islamist group propagating the establishment of an elective Arab caliphate is the Hizb al-Tahrir (Hizb-ut-Tahrir), founded in 1953 in Jerusalem by Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1909–1977) and today operating on a global basis, with a strong presence in Western countries (Taji-Farouki, 1996). The self-styled caliph of the Islamic State/Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (1971–2019), was not recognized as legitimate beyond his own group of followers and their allies (for the Islamic State ‘caliphate’, see ‘Abd al-Jabbar, 2017). Following the mihna, the Sunni ‘ulamaʾ presented themselves as the ‘heirs of the prophets’, qualified to rule on religious and legal issues, on the basis of the authoritative textual sources. Yet they were never the sole speakers for Sunni Islam. By the twelfth century, Sufi shaykhs and dervishes, some of them revered as saints, had emerged as important players in the field. As a result, religious authority was dispersed well before the advent of modernity. Since the late nineteenth century, educated Muslim men and women, including ‘Islamic’ writers, Islamists, and their critics, have made a claim to religious authority and often been recognized as religious authorities by certain groups of people (Krämer and Schmidtke, 2006, esp. Introduction). The social media and the worldwide net have greatly increased the numbers of claimants to religious authority. 98

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Islam as text Reference to the normative sources of Islam, the Qur’an, which Muslims consider the unmediated word of God, and the Sunna of the prophet Muhammad (also known as Hadith, from the individual ‘reports’, Ar. sing. hadith, of which it consists), which most Muslims see as the explication and application of God’s word, is basic to Sunni understandings of Islam (for the Qur’an, see McAuliffe, 2006; for the Sunna, see D. Brown, 1996; J. Brown, 2009). The same applies to reference to the exemplary practice of Muhammad in the two decades of his prophetic activity (610–632) and of the first generations of Muslims (Ar., al-salaf al-salih), men as well as women. Differences between Islamist and non-Islamist expressions of textualism lie in detail and degree. Salafi Islamists in particular extend imitation of the prophet Muhammad and the salaf salih to aspects of everyday behaviour, down to eating, drinking, and clothing habits (see the contribution by Sheikh to this volume). The focus on texts is not a modern invention. Yet in many pre-modern contexts, it was not the prevalent mode of living Islam. Muslim religious ideas, images, and practices have never been solely derived from the Qur’an, prophetic Hadith, and the normative tradition at large. Islam is certainly a discursive tradition (W.C. Smith, 1957; Asad, 1993, 2003), but discursive does not necessarily equal textual. In many settings, Islam was (and still is) mediated through people rather than texts, and the men and women involved did not always authenticate their behaviour or legitimize their claims to authority through reference to the Qur’an and prophetic Hadith. Many claimed a non-textual access to Truth, i.e., God. The emphasis on Islamic law (often subsumed under sharia) propagated by today’s Islamists as the only correct way of practising Islam does not adequately reflect how Islam was understood and lived for centuries by Muslims, Sunnis, as well as others (Ahmed, 2016, esp. pp. 80, 117–129). Saints and Sufis presented their paths to truth as valid and indeed superior, defying ‘legalist’ criticism of their teachings, rites, and conduct (de Jong and Radtke, 1999; Knysh, 2017, esp. pp. 4, 40, chapters 3 and 5; Chiabotti et al., 2017). The same holds true for Muslim philosophers (Stroumsa, 2020). As a result of rising literacy combined with mass medialization, access to the Qur’an, Sunna, and the normative tradition at large have multiplied in an unprecedented manner, including for the majority of Muslims who do not read Arabic. For most of them, the Qur’an and Sunna constitute the irrefutable references for ‘constructing’ Islam. Alongside the mandatory devotional acts (Ar., ‘ibadat), they lend coherence and continuity to a global community of believers that has no unifying clerical structures and no communal offices and institutions, such as congregations, parishes, monasteries, and priests, to hold it together.

Islam as a system One of the distinctive features of Islamism is its conception of Islam as an all-encompassing order, or system (Ar., nizam), based on sharia. A totalizing conception of Islam is not entirely alien to prevalent Sunni views of Islam as a faith or belief, a religion, and a way of life, in which the ethical and legal norms of Islam inform everyday behaviour and social rules. It is the weight given to politics, and the modern state, that can make for a difference, especially with those Islamists who see politics as an indispensable part of Islam requiring specific forms of political activism, association, and organization going well beyond the restoration of the caliphate. While totalizing understandings of Islam are not a modern invention, they have been articulated with a special emphasis on law, or sharia, and set up as the antithesis of secularism by twentieth-century Islamic writers and Islamist activists, Sunni as well as Shi‘i. In the 1940s, the Indo-Pakistani journalist and activist Abul A’la Maududi (Abu l-A‘la al-Mawdudi, 1903–1979) 99

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spoke of Islam as a ‘seamless whole’ (Adams, 1983, p. 114; Hartung, 2013), insisting on the wholeness of a pre-modern Islamic socio-moral order. According to Islamist presentations of past and present, the irruption of colonial modernity and the imposition of the modern nationstate cut up the original fabric to produce functional differentiation between religion, law, politics, culture, the economy, and the arts, replacing integrality, integrity, and connectedness with incoherence, moral dissolution, and fragmentation. According to this view, secularization, by reducing Islam to mere ‘religion’, entailed loss and destruction of authentic fullness and identity rather than liberation from restrictions imposed by religion. This view is echoed in an important segment of critical Western scholarship. It has been supplemented by a debate, largely absent from Sunni and Islamist debates, whether the current understanding of religion is a Western invention, whether pre-modern and by the same token, pre-colonial Islam is to be considered a religion at all, and whether pre-modern Muslims thought of Islam as a religion (Masuzawa, 2005). According to the advocates of the inventionof-religion-thesis, the post-Enlightenment Western concept equates religion with interior, individual, private belief as a “distinct mental state” rather than an order in which belief is intimately linked to works, woven into the social fabric, and tied to power relations (Asad, 1993, pp. 45–48). It is indeed true that prior to the late nineteenth century, Muslims did not conceive of Islam as a clearly demarcated sub-system, constituted by, and limited to, faith and worship, and detached from social life. However, this does not mean that prior to the advent of modernity, Muslims did not, or could not, distinguish between religious and non-religious matters. Claims to the contrary disregard a large body of literature written by Muslims for Muslims, in genres ranging from legal texts and philosophical treatises through religious polemics to mirrors for princes, courtly prose, and Sufi poetry (Krämer, 2021). Scholarly enquiry into pre-modern Muslim notions of Islam has focused on the Arabic din, which today is mostly translated as either ‘religion’ or an ‘Islamic way of life’ (Gardet, 1991; Glei and Reichmuth, 2012). A number of Qur’anic references identify din (which in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic is linguistically tied to debt, reckoning, retribution, reward, and punishment) with the fulfilment of the obligations God imposed on his creatures. What emerges from the relevant passages is a concept of din as piety (Ar., birr, taqwa, ihsan), which beyond the observance of specific acts and taboos requires a consistent pattern of conduct inspired by the fear and love of God. An important strand of Sunni exegesis (for religious writings, see Reichmuth, 2016), which gained salience in the context of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century (Sunni) Islamic reform, linked din to piety in general and the ‘ibadat in particular: the ‘acts of worship’ through which the believers express their gratefulness and obedience to their creator. At their core, Muslim religious scholars defined the so-called Five Pillars of Islam: the profession of faith (shahada), the five daily ritual prayers (salat), alms giving (zakat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (sawm), and, if physically and financially possible, the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). All were designed to be public acts that could be seen, heard, and numbered. By the same token, they signalled communal loyalty and affiliation. Significantly, Sunni scholars also declared the ‘ibadat to be immutable and non-negotiable, forming part of what is fixed and stable in Islam and distinguished from ‘social relations’ (Ar., mu‘amalat), which were said to be contingent upon time and place and, for this reason, more flexible and negotiable (Krämer, 1999, pp. 54–58). Pre-modern Sunni Muslims therefore did not identify Islamic din with faith as a ‘distinct mental state’. At the same time, they reflected on the distinction between al-din (suggesting a concept of religion) and al-dunya (‘this world’) and their respective properties. Drawing notably on the scholar and bureaucrat Abu l-Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1048), they took the existence of distinct but interrelated fields as a given without theorizing about this distinction. And while they characterized al-dunya as the sphere of the mundane and ordinary, which was inferior to 100

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the hereafter (Ar., al-akhira), they did not devalue it. Rather, they considered the religious (dini) and worldly (dunyawi) benefits deriving from specific acts and institutions to the individual and the community, including notably their safety and prosperity (Abbasi, 2020). The logic underpinning this approach intersected with legal reasoning, which discussed (and continues to discuss) the benefits (Ar., masalih, manafi‘) of specific acts and institutions for the welfare of the individual and, even more so, the community and society at large (Opwis, 2010). The Sunni tradition, therefore, contains both, the conception of Islam as a web of beliefs, devotional practices, and specified acts of worship, as well as pious conduct and obedience to God (ta‘at Allah) more generally, and a distinction between religious and worldly concerns. The latter did not solidify into secular thought, but in many instances, it informed the political, administrative, and legal structures and policies of Muslim states and societies. The Islamist concept of Islam as an order, or system (Ar. nizam), draws on important strands of the Sunni tradition but gives them a decidedly modern twist: according to the Islamist reading, the ethical and legal rules and norms of Islam do not just guide and inform individual and communal life. They structure individual conduct, public order, and government policies through the comprehensive and exclusive ‘application’ of Islamic law. The concept can be traced back to Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who spoke of Islam as a nizam encompassing religion and state, law and culture, the military and the economy. From the late 1930s onwards, he insisted on politics as an integral part of Islam, which among other things, empowered Muslims to resist colonialism. In the 1940s he openly called for an Islamization of the Egyptian state and society including the implementation of Islamic laws (Isma‘il, 2010; Krämer, 2022, chapter 6). However, it was only several decades after his death that the ‘application of sharia’ developed into the hallmark of Islamists in Egypt and other countries, who portrayed the Islamic order as an antithesis to secularism, building on the tropes of wholeness and integrity versus dissolution at the moral, social, and political levels. Sunni critiques of the Islamist call for an ‘application of sharia’ can be radical or subtly nuanced. There are those who fundamentally critique legalist understandings of Islam to seek the essence of Islam in personal piety, spiritual experience, and close attachment to the community of believers (Ahmed, 2016). They do not necessarily identify themselves as Sufis. Some would call themselves Muslim liberals, or progressive Muslims (examples include the Indonesian association Islam Liberal; see Kersten, 2011). Others problematize the identification of sharia with a given body of law elaborated by (male) Muslim jurists of the early and middle periods (jurists’ law, Ar., fiqh), emphasizing the overarching objectives and values of Islam underlying concrete rules and regulations (Ar., maqasid al-shari‘a, the ‘finality’ of sharia), and privileging what they call the ‘spirit’ of Islam, and the Qur’an, over its ‘letter’. Some explicitly give priority to ethics as opposed to law narrowly understood. Reference to the maqasid is common in reformist Muslim discourse on gender, and the role of women in particular (see, e.g., the group Sisters in Islam, based in Malaysia). It is also part of legal policies in a number of Muslim-majority countries that claim to apply sharia (Lombardi, 2006; Otto, 2010). Established tools of Qur’anic exegesis and legal scholarship, such as abrogation (Ar., naskh), the distinction between generally binding and specific rulings, and historization (placing explicit rulings in what Qur’anic scholars identified as the ‘causes of revelation,’ thereby narrowing their binding power to particular contexts) serve to expand the scope of human discretion without formally abandoning commitment to the sharia as a comprehensive ethical and legal framework. Islamists tend to reject these tools as mere covers for a destruction of the legal and moral edifice of Islam, undermining the collective strength and fibre of the Muslim community to the benefit of its enemies. 101

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Muslims and non-Muslims Reference to the Qur’an, the prophet Muhammad, and the salaf salih implies reference to Mecca and Medina rather than to the territories conquered in the first century after Muhammad’s death. At this point, prevalent Sunni views of Islam and Islamic history, and Islamist views more particularly, sharply diverge from agnostic ‘scientific’ views, irrespective of where they are formulated. According to the latter, the basic structure of Islamic teachings, practices, and institutions was erected by Muslims, many of them first-generation converts, over the course of some three centuries, in the urban centres of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt rather than in Mecca and Medina. What emerged as ‘Islam’ resulted from continued exchange with representatives of other religious, ethical, moral, and philosophical traditions, notably Jews, Christians, Manicheans, and Zoroastrians. The Qur’an placed itself squarely within the monotheistic tradition and declared Islam to be the perfect religion (Sura 5:3). As importantly, Islam, in the dual sense of a community of Muslims and of a religious tradition in the making, established itself as hegemonic very early on. One century after Muhammad’s death in 632, Arab Muslims ruled over a vast geographical expanse between present-day Morocco, Spain, and Afghanistan. Today, the power and glory of the early period and the Islamic conquests are widely remembered as a source of pride and inspiration among Sunni Muslims well beyond Islamist quarters. If religious difference easily converted into hierarchy, it could still translate into different policies. According to Muslim tradition, shortly after the journey (Ar., hijra) of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, soon to be known as Medina (Ar., madinat al-nabi, city of the Prophet), in 622, the Muslim refugees entered into a treaty alliance, headed by Muhammad, with several of Yathrib’s pagan and Jewish clans. The alliance was based on an implicit distinction between religious and political affiliation and was formally laid down in the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’ (Lecker, 2004). Many Muslims, and not only Islamists, believe that in Medina, Muhammad created what resembled a modern state, and that Muslims wrote the first constitution in human history (Faruki, 1971). Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims whom the respective Muslim authorities classified as ‘people of the book’ (Ar., ahl al-kitab, mostly Christians and Jews) were granted protection (Ar., dhimma) in exchange for submission and the payment of a poll tax (Ar., jizya). The so-called Pact of Umar, attributed to the second Sunni caliph Umar b. al-Khattab (r. 634–644) but only fully elaborated several centuries later, was framed as a contractual agreement the Christians of Damascus had sought from their Muslim conquerors. It prohibited non-Muslims from dressing as Muslims did, wearing their hair and beards in a similar fashion, teaching their children the Qur’an, and practising their cult in areas inhabited by Muslims. The principle of rendering religious difference visible could be read as a strategy of conflict prevention. But it also fixed the social ascendency of Muslims over non-Muslims in minute detail (Friedmann, 2003; Emon, 2012). Over the course of history, Muslim authorities (political rather than religious) extended protection to communities that the majority of Muslims did not recognize as ‘people of the book’; Buddhists and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent are the most conspicuous examples. Some Muslim theologians and jurists worked out rules that would enable inter-religious coexistence based on recognition. Others, first and foremost Sufis, simply acknowledged the diversity of humankind, blithely stating the possibility that there was more than one path to truth and the Divine. The ecumenical approach reflected a profoundly religious approach, with no hint of a secular outlook. In the modern period, inherited notions of superiority and submission have not entirely disappeared. Yet the emergence of the modern nation-state also entailed the concept of citizenship, and in most Muslim-majority countries, the poll tax was replaced with other symbols of 102

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patriotism and national belonging, notably military service. Sunni Islamists such as Hasan alBanna endorsed the principle of civic equality with reference to the established formula ‘same rights same duties’ (Ar., la-hum ma lana wa-‘alayhim ma ‘alayna). In contrast, militant Islamist groups from the Egyptian Jama‘at Islamiyya to the Islamic State/Daesh have sought to reintroduce the stipulations of the Pact of Umar including the poll tax in territories under their control (Emon, 2012; Krämer, 2022).

Jihad and takfir Violence in the name of Islam against people of different faith, belief, opinion, and lifestyle, both physical and discursive, has been subject to intense inner-Muslim debate for centuries.2 In the modern period, it has brought forth a massive body of literature. ‘Jihad in the path of God’ (Ar., al-jihad fi sabil Allah) is only part of this larger phenomenon. Like the English term ‘crusade’, jihad can cover a broad spectrum of activities, from the peaceful fight against ignorance, hunger, and poverty to the armed struggle against those who have been declared the enemies of God. Muslim scholars have elaborated complex taxonomies, distinguishing among other things between ‘greater’ and ‘smaller’ jihad, or offensive and defensive warfare (Peters, 1996; Bonner, 2006; Afsaruddin, 2013). A major role was given to the religious affiliation of the enemy: Muslims; non-Muslims living permanently in the dar al-islam (territories ruled by Muslims) and recognized as protected people (Dhimmis); non-Muslims/unbelievers living outside the dar al-islam; and individuals and groups who consider themselves Muslims but who are judged to have left Islam of their own accord, under no duress, and who for this reason are classified as infidels or apostates. Most Sunni critics of Islamist violence do not critique the concept of jihad as such but rather the fixation on armed jihad, especially if it poses a threat to Muslim lives. Their argument tends to be primarily based on the Qur’an (see, e.g., al-Qaradawi, 2005; Amin, 2014). Alongside the possibility of inclusion, tolerance, and recognition, Muslims have always had the option of seeking religious sanction for non-recognition, intolerance, and exclusion. The latter could go well beyond discursive othering, and islam in the sense of ‘submission’ to God could entail fighting those who resisted the call to Islam (Ar., da‘wa). Non-Muslims permanently installed on Islamic territory and recognized as Dhimmis were by definition protected against attacks on their bodies, lives, and property. By contrast, jihad against external enemies has been an integral part of Muslim history. It was often offensive (examples include the conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries), but it could also be largely defensive, such as the struggle against colonialism, in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Both are usually uncritically reviewed by Sunni authors well beyond Islamist circles.

Shi‘a and Sufis Inner-Muslim critiques focus on religiously sanctioned violence against men and women who self-identify as Muslims. In the latter case, such action requires that the target first be declared an infidel (Ar., kafir, pl. kuffar) and excluded from the community (Ar., takfir) because of ideas and practices they either espouse or are said to espouse. In many instances, this involved the charge of worshipping people at the expense of worshipping God alone, which was equated with polytheism (Ar., shirk, ‘association’), violating the core tenet of Islam that there is only one God (Ar., tawhid). Frequently this charge was directed against Shi‘is and Sufis for their alleged veneration, if not idolization, of their imams, shaykhs, and saints. Like Sunni Muslims at large, Sunni Islamists have adopted different attitudes vis-à-vis Shi‘i Muslims, ranging from their recognition 103

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as believers (Hasan al-Banna and the early Muslim Brotherhood) to their exclusion from the community and even active jihad against them (examples include Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda/al-Qa‘ida, Daesh, and their respective affiliates) (for a critical approach, see al-Khunayzi, 2012). Similar diversity characterizes Islamist attitudes towards Sufis: many Sunni Islamists view Sufism with extreme suspicion. Militant Sunni Islamists in countries from Mali to Afghanistan have destroyed sites of Sufi congregation and saint veneration. Yet important figures of the Sunni Islamist trend, such as Hasan al-Banna and Abd al-Salam Yasin (1928–2012), who in 1987 founded the Moroccan Jama‘at al-‘Adl wa-l-Ihsan (Association for Justice and Spirituality), held more nuanced positions: they distinguished ‘sober’, sharia-based Sufism from what they called ‘philosophical’ and ‘popular’ Sufism, considering the former a noble expression of Muslim spirituality and condemning the latter as alien to the Islamic faith and tradition (Lauzière, 2005; Krämer, 2022).

Faith and works Looking beyond Shi‘i and Sufi Islam, hostility could also be based on ideas and behaviour that the men and women concerned considered perfectly legitimate within their own understanding of Islam, or that they attributed to culture, custom, and tradition. Sunni Muslim scholars disagreed over whether a particular act constituted a mere misdemeanor (‘minor sin’), which did not challenge the individual’s status as a believer, or a ‘grave sin’, which excluded them from the community and even justified taking up arms against them. Disagreement was related to the debate over the relative weight of faith and its profession, works, and consistent adherence to all obligations, commandments, and interdictions set down by God, the prophet Muhammad, or Muslim scholars of later generations. Religious scholars were not the only Muslims to reflect on this issue, and din was not the only Qur’anic term available to them. There was iman, islam, and ihsan (here: righteousness), milla and umma (both denoting community), none of them unambiguous. In addition, they resorted to post-Qur’anic terms, such as ‘aqida (creed or dogma) and i‘tiqad (creed, belief). Some distinguished between din and islam, in the sense of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ to God. Others placed iman (which is normally translated as faith), ‘aqida, islam, and ‘ibada under the rubric of din. Still others used din and iman synonymously, or subsumed din under iman. Some drew fine distinctions between belief and faith, such as, ‘belief ’ as the confirmation of accepted teachings, or dogma, and ‘faith’ as the individual’s inner feeling and experience. Iman, which is almost as difficult to pin down as din, emerged as crucial to definitions of belief and unbelief (Ar., kufr, literally ungratefulness; Adang, 2001; J. Smith, 2002; Schöck, 2010), and to the question of what determined the religious status of a Muslim, and what excluded them from the community (for the intricacies of the issue, see Modarressi, 2016). Many Sunni scholars of theology and law defined iman and islam as comprising ‘word and acts’ (qawl wa-‘amal), that is to say the profession of faith (shahada and tasdiq, ‘confirming as true’) as well as praxis in the shape of correct ritual performance and habitual pious conduct (Krämer, 2021, pp. 24–29). The issue gained added urgency in the context of takfir, the exclusion of Muslims from the community under the charge of heresy or apostasy, often likened to excommunication as known from the Jewish and Christian traditions (Barakat, 2014; Adang et al., 2016). Prominent representatives of the Sunni Ash‘ari-Hanafi and Maturidi schools confirmed the necessity of both confession and acts but took the confession of faith as the ultimate criterion of belonging as long as it was not clearly contradicted, or invalidated, by speech and other acts that had to be classified as a denial of truth, i.e., Islam. By refusing to equate ‘minor’ sins 104

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with apostasy, this position served the function of maintaining the unity of the community and protecting Muslim life. It was not just established Sunni Muslim scholars up to senior representatives of al-Azhar, based in Cairo, who many of their Islamist critics saw as mere ‘parrots of the ruler(s)’, who insisted that professed belief was decisive in recognizing a person as a Muslim, without denying the importance of praxis. Influential Sunni Islamists such as Hasan al-Banna adopted the same position (Krämer, 2022, pp. 247–250). Modern discourse on takfir and violence directed against self-identifying Muslims refers mainly to three representatives of what has been categorized as militant Islam, two of them preceding the emergence of Sunni Islamism as commonly understood: the Kharijite movement of the seventh and eighth centuries; Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), eponymous founder of the Wahhabi movement, based in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, and Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), Egyptian literary critic, Muslim Brother, and one of the earliest and most influential theorists of militant Islamism. The Kharijites, who arose before Sunni and Shi‘i Islam consolidated into clearly identifiable entities, called for exclusive obedience to ‘God’s judgement’ or ‘decree’ (Ar., hukm Allah) and considered even minor transgressions as a violation of this judgement, one that required Muslims to fight against their perpetrators, who were classed as infidels (Pampus, 1980; Francesca, 2003). As a historical phenomenon, the Kharijites were marginal – tribally organized men and women from the interior of the Arabian Peninsula whom many of their urban opponents saw as uncivilized. As a type they are still referred to today, mostly in order to delegitimize jihadist Islamists as modern-day Kharijites who through their acts of violence, placed themselves outside the consensus of the community and destroyed its unity and power (Kenney, 2006). In certain respects comparable to the Kharijites, with whom they shared the geographical and tribal background, but rooted in the Sunni Hanbali tradition, Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab and his followers regarded even minor infractions of Islamic norms and rules as manifestations of unbelief, classified the majority of their Muslim contemporaries as infidels, and actively pursued jihad against them. Their Sunni critics raised many of the charges still levelled against modern-day jihadist Islamists (Peskes, 1993).

Qutb, Hakimiyya, and Jahiliyya In establishing the criteria of belief and unbelief, Sayyid Qutb drew on certain strands of the Sunni tradition but gave existing terms and concepts a new coloring. In line with the Muslim Brother aversion to speculative, or what they called ‘philosophical’ theology, Qutb shifted the emphasis from issues of theology strictly speaking (God, his essence, and attributes, which Muslims had debated for centuries) to issues of Muslim conduct, piety, and obedience. In doing so, he did not devalue the ethical dimension of Islam but put heavy emphasis on its legal obligations, facilitating a narrow understanding of sharia as law. Researchers with a focus on the modern period have highlighted the importance of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), leading scholars of the Hanbali school of law, for Qutbian and radical Sunni Islamist thought more generally (Sivan, 1985; Calvert, 2011). In contrast, experts on Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim have shown that in contrast to Qutb, both were deeply familiar with theology, philosophy, and Sufism, and modern radical readings are not only selective but often distorting (Krawietz and Tamer, 2013; Rapoport and Ahmed, 2015; Vasalou, 2016). Qutb based his argument on the Qur’anic denunciation of those ‘who do not judge according to what has been sent down’ (Q 5, 44, 45, and 47), identifying it with sharia as law. He is best known for further elaborating the notions of jahiliyya (state of ignorance) and hakimiyya (the sovereignty of God). Qutb changed the established concept of Jahiliyya from a temporal 105

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term denoting the pre-Islamic period, when ignorance did not reflect a personal decision, to a term implying a conscious revolt against revealed truth, amounting to apostasy (Ar., ridda), which was subject to severe punishment under Islamic law. Qutb considered those responsible enemies of God and declared jihad against them legitimate or even obligatory. Similar to the appeal to hukm Allah raised by the Kharijites, hakimiyya oscillated between the fields of law (judgement, decree) and politics (rule). Building on Maududi, who in the 1940s had coined the neologism to contest British rule and legislation, Qutb used it to delegitimize the Nasserist regime as equally un-Islamic. His distinction between societies acknowledging the ‘sovereignty of God’ (hakimiyyat Allah), and those where the ‘sovereignty of humankind over humankind’ (hakimiyyat al-bashar lil-bashar) prevailed because they were following man-made laws, is one of the reasons why Qutbian thought has been read by some as an Islamic theology of liberation (Yunis, 1995; Khatab, 2006). In their response to Qutbian thought, Sunni Muslims and Islamists in particular have disagreed on when Jahiliyya had set in: after the period of the rightly guided caliphs, which ended in 661, and the onset of dynastic rule, or centuries later, after the intrusion of colonialism and the modern nation-state. Of more immediate concern was the question of who was to be classified as an infidel – the rulers who were held responsible for upholding Islam and the sharia, or society as a whole, with every single Muslim who did not openly denounce the existing socio-legal order being considered an infidel. According to Maududi, only parts of Muslim society had slipped back into the state of ignorance. Hasan al-Banna had rejected any kind of takfir except for instances of manifest apostasy (Krämer, 2022). The Muslim Brotherhood under the leadership of Hasan al-Hudaybi (1871–1973) distanced itself from Qutb’s revolutionary ideas in general and takfir in particular. A book published in the name of Hudaybi, Preachers Not Judges (Du‘at la qudat), explicitly rejected the politization of terms derived from the Arabic roots q-d-y and h-k-m, which they saw as being essentially legal (alHudaybi, 1977). Many exegetes, including later generations of militant Islamists, understood Qutb as differentiating between the diagnosis of collective Jahiliyya on the one hand and takfir on the other. Jihadist groups inspired by Qutb and the Azhar-trained radical preacher Umar Abd al-Rahman (b. 1938) (‘Abd al-Rahman, 2006) followed different trajectories. The Jama‘at alIslamiyya (Islamic Associations) and Tanzim al-Jihad (Jihad Organization), which in the 1970s formed at Egyptian schools and universities, restricted takfir to the rulers as representatives of the modern state. By contrast, Jama‘at al-Takfir wa-l-Hijra, headed by former Muslim Brother Shukri Mustafa (1942–1978), extended takfir to the entire Sunni community and called for hijra (withdrawing from jahili society after the precedent of the prophet Muhammad) (Kepel, 1985; al-Fitna al-ghaʾiba, 2012; Lav, 2012). But here, too, positions were not fixed: around 2000, the Jama‘at Islamiyya, which in 1981 had assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat as the ‘pharaoh’ who had led his people astray (Kepel, 1985), renounced takfir and violence, explicitly warning Muslim youth against al-Qa‘ida, and justified their ‘revision of concepts’ in a number of public statements and publications (Silsilat tashih al-mafahim, 2002, 2004; Zuhdi et al., 2004). The fact that they did so in prison, counselled by prominent Sunni scholars such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926–2022), and presumably with the hope of being pardoned by the authorities, aroused suspicion. But the revision was widely discussed (see, e.g., Ahmad, 2002; Habib, 2002; Munib, 2010; Ra’ihat al-barud, 2011), and it fell in line with Islamist self-critique as articulated by members of the Egyptian and Kuwaiti branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, who in the 1980s denounced authoritarian patterns, intellectual rigidity, and unjustified violence within their own organization (al-Nafisi, 1989). 106

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Moderation and ‘centrism’ Yusuf al-Qaradawi is also one of the foremost advocates of wasatiyya, an appeal to moderation and a centrist position (Ar., al-wasat), especially when confronted with violence in the name of Islam. Wasatiyya as an abstract noun can be traced back to the 1960s (Gräf, 2009) and was given a fresh impetus by the jihadist violence of 11 September 2001. The term suggests a balanced mind and position, or the golden mean, as cherished by philosophical, moral, and religious traditions as different as the Aristotelian and Confucian ones. Muslims could refer to Q 2:143, according to which they constitute the ‘community of the centre’ (umma wasat) (al-Talibi, 1996; al-Madani, 2007; al-Sallabi, 2007). In the Sunni tradition, moderation or centrism translated into the maxim to do neither too much nor too little, even in devotion (Ar., la ifrat wa-la tafrit). When pre-modern Sunni authors condemned ‘exaggeration in religion’ (Ar., al-ghuluww fi l-din), they denounced devotional practices such as ‘excessive’ nightly prayer and ascetic self-denial as monkish and hence un-Islamic (for these practices, see Reid, 2013). They also objected to what they regarded as the excessive devotion to, and veneration of, human beings, especially Shi‘i imams and Sufi masters. At the same time, ‘centrism’ could be seen as an attempt to redirect a diversified community towards its core, or centre, as a precondition for regaining the strength, power, and unity projected onto the early period. As such, it is primarily political in character. Moderation and ‘centrism’ have been advocated by leading Sunni Islamists from al-Banna to al-Qaradawi, as well as by political regimes combatting (certain representatives of) militant Islamism, such as Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Given the risks of instrumentalization, wasatiyya has met with a certain amount of distrust, not only on the part of Islamists.

Notes 1 All dates refer to the Common Era (CE) not what today is called the Islamic calendar (hijri), starting with the migration of the prophet Muhammad in 10/622 from Mecca to Yathrib, which later became known as Medina. CE is calculated in solar and hijri in lunar years. 2 The relevant debates are restricted to specific segments of violence. As a rule, they do not extend to domestic violence.

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8 SHIA ISLAM AND POLITICS Jon Armajani

Introduction Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon are among the Middle Eastern countries with the highest proportional Shia Muslim populations. They constitute centers of Shia political, religious, and intellectual life. In this context, since Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, which established a Shia Islamic government in Iran, that country’s religious and political leaders have used Shia Islam to expand Iran’s objectives in the Middle East and beyond. Since 1979, Iran’s leaders have been concerned about its security with respect to the expansionism of the United States and other Western countries, and threats from neighboring Sunni countries. Iran’s government has attempted to align itself with Shia Muslims in various countries, such as Iraq and Lebanon, against American and Sunni expansionism, mobilizing those Shias religiously and politically (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2019).

Iran During World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union divided Iran into zones of influence, with the Soviets controlling much of Iran’s north and the British occupying the south, which includes Iran’s oil assets (Blake, 2009). This was similar to the situation in Iran during the late nineteenth century and World War I. The two powers established a neutral zone (which included Iran’s capital, Tehran) in central Iran, which was ostensibly under the control of Iran. In 1942, the United States stationed soldiers in Iran as part of the allied effort during World War II (Blake, 2009). From the perspective of the allied powers, the occupation of Iran was crucial to their goals in that war since Iran produced oil that was essential to the allies, it was close to other oil-producing nations near the Persian Gulf, and it provided vital transportation corridors for the transport of war materiel from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union. Iran was a geopolitical linchpin for the allies as they attempted to block Nazi Germany’s military and political influence in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The British and Soviet actions in Iran during World War II constituted significant violations of Iran’s sovereignty and national dignity. The negative memories that these events carried for Iranians have persisted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have catalyzed anti-Western and, subsequently,

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anti-American attitudes, which played a substantial role in generating Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 (Buchta, 2006). In 1942, the United States deployed thousands of soldiers to Iran to help maintain the Persian Corridor. In addition, Americans advised Iran’s government and facilitated changes, in such areas as finances, domestic security, and the military. In these ways, the United States established the foundation for its subsequent involvement in Iranian government and society after World War II (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). After that war, the United States continued its relationship with Muhammad Reza Shah, with the goals of assisting Iran in its oil industry, while using Iran as a military and political buffer against Soviet expansion in the Middle East (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). Political instability and foreign interference undermined Iran’s government and economy in the late 1940s. As this turmoil continued, one significant question, with respect to who would govern Iran was the following: Would Iran’s parliament, which was elected, together with that country’s cabinet govern the country or would Iran’s king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, perpetuate his own rule over the country as his father Reza Shah Pahlavi had done? Regarding this question, in the early 1950s, a far-reaching protest movement in Iran contested Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule in view of Britain’s and the United States’ influence in Iran. This movement contributed to Mohammad Mosaddegh, an Iranian politician and lawyer, being elected Iran’s Prime Minister in 1951 (Kinzer, 2006).

Mohammad Mosaddegh Mosaddegh and the National Front political party, which he founded, gained political traction in Iran because during the early half of the twentieth century Iran’s sovereignty was undermined through concessions that Iran granted to foreign countries and, in effect, foreign soldiers in Iran (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016; Hollliday, 2016). A political issue that catalyzed Mosaddegh’s popular support was the control of the oil industry in Iran by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was dominated by Britain, and controlled much of the oil industry in Iran, including its profits. As frustration with the AIOC’s influence increased among Iranians, in 1950 Mosaddegh demanded that the Iranian government cancel that concession, and he expressed his support for the nationalization of Iran’s entire oil industry (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). While Mosaddegh and his supporters organized public demonstrations and delivered speeches in order to gain backing for their cause, a high-level Shia cleric by the name of Ayatollah Sayyed Abol Qasem Kashani, who was a major anti-imperialist figure and a member of the National Front, sought to integrate Islam with Iranian nationalism as he mobilized Iranians for the nationalization of Iran’s oil resources, urging Iranians to fight against the “enemies of Islam and Iran by joining the nationalization struggle” (Abrahamian, 1982, pp. 265–266). Although Ayatollah Kashani and Mosaddegh experienced tensions later in their relationship, Kashani, through his charisma, status as a Shia leader, and persuasive use of Shia religio-political language, played a significant role in galvanizing Iranians’ support of oil nationalization (Mousavian, 2014). In 1951, amid the support for Mosaddegh and the National Front, Iran’s parliament took two steps. First, it passed legislation nationalizing the oil industry in Iran. Second, it elected, by a majority vote, Mosaddegh as Iran’s prime minister (Harrison, 2011). A large-scale dispute between Iran and the AIOC, about the nationalization of Iran’s oil, created a domestic and international crisis (Cleveland and Bunton, 276). Mosaddegh was committed to ending the domination of foreign involvement in Iran while re-establishing the parliamentary and other governmental institutions which had been stipulated in Iran’s 112

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1906 constitution (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016; Abrahamian, 1982). Even though there were Iranians who supported Mosaddegh’s and the National Front’s goals, as prime minster he did not have adequate financial resources, and he experienced difficulties in implementing his policies. As Iran’s governmental revenues decreased because of the foreign boycott of oil directed against Iran, prices and the unemployment rate rose (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). While Mosaddegh had public support for his policies, there was discontentment with the difficulties that Iran was experiencing economically and in other ways. In this environment, with the support of the United States and Britain, and their spies, all of whom opposed Mossadegh’s oil nationalization policies, a small group of disaffected Iranian military officers formed a secret committee to plan Mosaddegh’s overthrow and to reinstate the king’s authority. In addition, the United States sent agents from the Central Intelligence Agency to Tehran to work with Iranian military conspirators to organize a coup d’état (or military overthrow) against Mosaddegh. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi agreed to the coup against Mosaddegh and signed a decree appointing the leader of the secret committee, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as Iran’s prime minister (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). Soon after the first coup attempt failed, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi left Iran for Rome, Italy (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016; Ebrahimi, 2016). However, on 19 August 1953, which was three days after his departure, the Iranian military, which supported the king, in coordination with the Americans and British, attempted a coup again, succeeded, captured Mosaddegh, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to Iran, re-establishing himself as monarch (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). From 1951 until 1953, Mosaddegh had galvanized huge numbers of Iranians in a series of sweeping attempts to recover Iran’s national sovereignty and establish a democracy. The 1953 coup and return of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as king resulted in the United States intensifying its involvement in Iran’s affairs (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). The coup against Mosaddegh remained deeply rooted in Iranians’ memories, as they remembered it as yet another example of Britain’s and the United States’ interference in their affairs and of American and British hypocrisy. From this perspective, the Americans and British manifested hypocrisy by claiming to support democracy, while actively supporting a coup against a democratically elected leader, namely Mosaddegh, which brought to power an autocratic and undemocratic leader, namely Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Indeed, a factor that led to Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 was the resentment that Iranians felt primarily against the American government for its unyielding support of the coup against Mosaddegh, the return of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, and the strong backing of him by the United States during his rule as Iran’s repressive king (Abrahamian, 2013).

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the post-Mosaddegh period After the 1953 coup, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi undertook a variety of measures to combat the recurrence of the circumstances, which led to the opposition to him in the early 1950s. At the same time, those measures were factors that led to Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s final downfall as Iran’s king. In any case, the disagreement over Iran’s oil, which was an important catalyst behind Mohammad Mosaddegh’s popularity and rise to power, was settled by an international oil agreement. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi agreed to the principle of the sharing of oil profits equally, and signed a contract with a consortium formed of British Petroleum, the former owners of AIOC, and eight other European and American oil companies (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016; Abrahamian, 1982). This agreement strengthened Iran’s position in the global oil market and increased the revenues that entered Iran’s governmental coffers. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi also worked to improve Iran’s relationships with 113

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western countries (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). Iran and Britain restored diplomatic relations in 1954, while the king declared his commitment to the Western alliance and against the Soviet Union and its allies. He also oriented Iran to various forms of development that emulated the models of western countries (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). These diplomatic relationships and Iran’s adoption of Western-style economic and cultural models enabled Iran to receive substantial amounts of aid from the United States. For example, between 1953 and 1963, the United States gave Iran five hundred million dollars in military aid, with that government having at least three goals regarding the aid, which it provided Iran: 1

2

3

Americans and other westerners wanted to continue receiving reasonably priced oil from Iran, which benefited American and other western consumers as well as petroleum companies that did business with Iran (Ritter, 2015); The US government wanted to provide Iran with military, economic, and political support that enabled American and western companies to benefit financially from Iran’s lucrative consumer market (Pirzadeh, 2016); and American politicians and members of its military viewed Iran as a crucial military and geopolitical buffer against the possibility of Soviet expansion into the Middle East during the Cold War. (Hunter, 2010)

With strong support from the United States, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi consistently persecuted individuals and groups who opposed him (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). In his attempts to eliminate all forms of opposition, he formed, with the support of the United States and Israel, SAVAK, which was the king’s secret police force that engaged in far-reaching surveillance of Iranians and cruel treatment of political prisoners in Iran’s prisons (Amirahmadi, 1990). A significant aspect of the protest movements against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi involved Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s sermons and speeches against the Iranian government. Khomeini was a high-level religious and political leader, who, based on interpretations of Shia sacred texts, expressed his opposition to the king and his government. Khomeini excoriated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for his greed and corruption, marginalizing the poor and underprivileged, and undercutting Iran’s sovereignty. Khomeini also stated his belief that the king’s government violated crucial tenets of Islam by selling oil to western countries and granting economic concessions to the United States. In 1963, SAVAK arrested Khomeini for his anti-government endeavors. As increasing numbers of Iranians learned of Khomeini’s arrest, they engaged in large protests against it and the Iranian government, in Tehran and other major Iranian cities. Those demonstrations continued for three days before Iran’s military suppressed them with hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Iranians being killed (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). Khomeini was exiled to Turkey in 1964. A year later, he left that country for Iraq, where he continued to write and preach until 1978, when he was forced to leave that country for France. Khomeini returned to Iran, as the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, on 1 February 1979, after Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s departure from that country on 16 January 1979 (Rahnema, 2014). The protests of 1963 were yet another vivid manifestation of the power of Iran’s Shia clergy in mobilizing large numbers of Iranians by showing the relevance of Shia teachings to the religious, political, and economic circumstances that Iranians faced. The protests also exemplified the protestors’ deep-rooted opposition to foreign influence in their country, together with a heartfelt commitment to Shia Islam and its clerical leaders (Keshavarzian, 2007). In the case of these protests, the criticisms were directed against an autocratic king whose interests, in the view of the protestors, were harmful to those of Iran as a whole (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). 114

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Mohammad Reza Pahlavi believed that the protests indicated circumstances in Iran that could have been harmful to his position as king. After the demonstrations ended, he gave increased attention to the institutions that constituted the foundations of his power. These institutions included his expansive system of court patronage and appointments of his allies to high-level positions in Iran’s government and military (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). He placed much emphasis on the military, because he believed that the viability of his political future depended, to a large measure, on strengthening the military, while he worked to reinforce the bonds that existed between him and that institution (Cordesman, 1999). Mohammad Reza Pahlavi aligned his government closely with the United States, from which Iran’s government received enormous financial, political, and military support, while he implemented policies that were intended to westernize, modernize, and secularize Iran, politically and societally (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016). Mohammad Reza Pahlavi also implemented policies that had the goal of weakening Iran’s Shia clergy and religious institutions, in part because the king viewed those institutions as threats to his secularist rule (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016).

Revolutionary prospects In this vein, the following factors led to Iran’s Islamic revolution: 1

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family appropriating large amounts of money for their personal use, at the expense of Iranians; 2 Enormous economic disparities in Iran; 3 SAVAK’s imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and execution of Iranians, who members of Iran’s government believed opposed it; 4 The Iranian government spending billions of dollars on arms (largely purchased from the United States) that exceeded Iran’s needs; 5 The westernization and secularization of Iranian law and culture, including attempts to limit the influence of Iran’s Shia clerics; 6 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s strengthening of secular courts in Iran that required judges to hold secular degrees in law, while establishing a rival center of Islamic Studies at Tehran University, which taught Islam and related topics in such a manner that did not oppose Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government; 7 The Iranian government’s interference in the certification of the Shia clergy, with the intention of blocking potential clergy who would oppose Iran’s government; 8 The Iranian government’s harsh treatment of Shia clergy, who opposed Iran’s government, including restrictions on their religious dress and the celebration of religious rituals that could have been used to protest the government; and 9 The Iranian government’s requirement that Shia seminary students, who were studying Islam in order to become Shia clerics, serve in Iran’s military. (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016) Within this context, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been planning, for many years, an Islamic revolution in Iran, continued, while in exile, to mobilize Iran’s clerics and preach sermons advocating the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the establishment of a Shia Islamic government in Iran. Khomeini’s book entitled Vilayat-i Faqih (which means “Governance of the Islamic Jurist”) was published in 1970 and contains Khomeini’s lectures and other writings, as well as his vision for a Shia Islamic republic (Khomeini, n.d.; Khumayni, 1981). He argues that in the absence of a divinely inspired imam (which in Shia Islam is a saintly and infallible leader 115

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who leads Shias religiously and politically), the Shia clerics (or jurists) should govern a Shia Islamic nation-state, which would be under Islamic law. According to Khomeini, these Shia clerics are entitled by God to govern because they possess the knowledge and spiritual insights to interpret Islam’s sacred texts, the teachings of the 12 Shia imams (who ruled visibly from the seventh through ninth centuries), and Islamic law in such a way that adheres to Shia Islam and is relevant to contemporary Islamic societies, such as Iran (Arjomand, 1988). Khomeini stated that the Shia clerics’ mandate means that they must govern a country and administer it according to Islamic law. Khomeini argued that a monarchy, secular or otherwise, contradicted Islam, while he called for the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government and the establishment of a Shia Islamic government in accordance with Khomeini’s vision. Khomeini’s politically activist position stands in sharp contrast to those of Shia quietists, who believe that Shias should separate themselves from politics, while remaining religiously observant, until the reappearance of the 12th Imam, who will establish peace and justice throughout the world before the Day of Judgment (Knysh, 2017; Marcinkowski, 2004). Khomeini prepared the way for Iran’s Islamic revolution by training hundreds of students and speaking to thousands of people, many of whom participated in Iran’s Islamic revolution and some of whom became leaders in Iran’s Shia government after that revolution succeeded. Khomeini also facilitated Iran’s Islamic revolution by having his message disseminated in Iran through tape recordings and leaflets that contained Islamic, anti-monarchical, and anti-colonialist ideas. The principles contained in these communications informed Iranians of Khomeini’s grievances and his vision for Iran. These communications also inspired them to support Iran’s Islamic revolution, Khomeini’s eventual return to Iran (which took place in 1979), and his leadership of the country until his death in 1989. During 1978 and 1979, millions of Iranian demonstrators of various political and religious perspectives engaged in dozens of peaceful protests against the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and often experienced violent pushback at the hands of Iran’s military (Arjomand, 1988; Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994). By the time that Khomeini had returned, from exile in France, to Iran on 1 February 1979, that country’s government, military, internal security services, and economy had lost much of their strength. In this context, some of the work that led to the establishment of Iran as an Islamic republic continued with a national referendum on 31 March 1979, which approved the replacement of the previous monarchy with an Islamic republic. After the referendum, Iran’s Islamic constitution was written and implemented. Khomeini’s Vilayat-i Faqih and other writings about an Islamic republic formed the template for Iran’s Islamic constitution and government (Cleveland and Bunton, 2016; Spellman, 2006).

Iran’s Shia Islamic constitution According to Iran’s Shia Islamic constitution, the country has a Supreme Leader, an ayatollah, who is elected by the Assembly of Experts, whose candidates are vetted, and then run in popular elections. The supreme leader serves for life, unless he is removed from office, and has broad powers in domestic, foreign, military, and economic policies as well as influence on other areas of Iranian society. Candidates for Iran’s presidency are also vetted before they can run for that office (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, Article 107, 1989). Iran’s president serves a four-year term and may run for a second, and final, four-year term. While Iran’s president has some influence in domestic, economic, foreign, and military policies, his authority is circumscribed by Iran’s supreme leader, parliament, and certain government agencies (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, 113–132, 1989) Iran’s parliament, each of whose members serve four-year terms, 116

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is composed of 290 parliamentarians (Ansari-Pour, 1999–2000). Some parliamentarians represent legislative districts, while others represent minority religious communities such as Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, Article 64, 1989). The Guardian Council is composed of 12 persons, who serve for six-year terms on a phased basis, so that half the membership changes every three years. This council approves or rejects all bills passed by parliament. Thus, it has the power to veto them if it considers them inconsistent with the constitution and Islamic law. This council can also bar candidates from running in elections to parliament, the presidency, and the Assembly of Experts (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, Articles 4, 68, 72, 85, 91–99, 108, 110, 1989). The Expediency Council is an advisory body for the leader with ultimate adjudicating power in disputes over legislation between the parliament and the Guardian Council (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, 110, 111, 112, 177, 1989). Because Iran is under Islamic law, Shia Islam dominates almost every aspect of life including the religious, legal, political, economic, social, and educational spheres (Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of, 1979 with Amendments through 1989, “Preamble”; “The Dawn of the Movement”; “Islamic Government”; “The Form of Government in Islam”; and “The Wilayah of the Just Faqih”. 1989). In this vein, since Iran’s Islamic revolution, Iran’s religious and political leaders have wanted to support Shias throughout the world, including Shias in Iraq and Lebanon, in order to protect them and expand Iran’s influence so as to protect its own security with respect to Iran’s adversaries which include the United States, Israel, and some Sunni Muslim countries (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2019).

Iraq Iraq is a majority-Muslim and majority-Arab country, whose population is approximately 60% Shia, and contains important Shia seminaries and sacred sites, while sharing a long border with Iran. For these and related reasons, Iran has attempted to expand its influence in Iraq, which until the US invasion of Iraq, beginning in 2003, was under a secularist government, many of whose political leaders were Sunni Muslims. In the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, who was an influential Iraqi Shia cleric, announced from Tehran on 17 November 1982 the formation of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that described itself as representing all of Iraq’s Muslims, including Shias and Sunnis, although it was actually a Shia religious and political organization. At the same time, SCIRI recognized the Islamic Republic of Iran as the foundation and primary mover of the world Islamic revolution (The Publicity Unit of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, 1983). In May 2007, SCIRI changed its name to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is also translated as the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (Cordesman, 2008; Isakhan, 2015). SCIRI’s formation was preparation for a Shia Iraqi government that would be formed in Iraq if Iran were to conquer Iraq or parts of it in the context of the Iran-Iraq War, which took place from 1980 until 1988 (Wiley, 1992). In 1983, SCIRI established a military force with Iran’s support; this force, named the Badr Corps, conducted guerilla operations inside Iraq, while also participating in Iranian military operations during the Iran-Iraq War. As that war continued and the Badr force, as well as Iran’s other Shia allies in Iraq, continued the war effort against the Iraqi military and government, in June 1987, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced plans to increase the strength of pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia military forces in Iraq. Consistent with that policy, Kamal Kharazi, a spokesperson for the Iranian government’s 117

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office of war information, told Iran’s media that the war should be continued by the Iraqis themselves (Wiley, 1992). During that time, Iraqis who had been fighting as part of Iranian military units were formed into all-Iraqi units. Ayatollah Khomeini also directed that Hezbollah brigades be established inside Iraq. Iran’s attempts to provide autonomy to Iraqi Shia military units, such as the Iraqi Hezbollah, would carry advantages and disadvantages for Iran during the decades that followed. One advantage of this policy was that the members of the autonomous Iraqi Shia units were composed of Iraqis who knew Arabic as well as the specific aspects of neighborhoods, geographic landscapes, and tribal allegiances in Iraq that could enable them to engage in combat and hold the land that they had conquered. One disadvantage of these units’ autonomy, for Iran, was that there were times when such units could act in ways that could advance their own interests in Iraq, while potentially damaging Iran’s objectives in that country (Wiley, 1992).

Iran in Iraq Although the Iran-Iraq War had a devastating impact on both countries and perpetuated a situation where the boundaries between the two countries at the end of that war were virtually the same as the boundaries at the beginning, that war enabled Iran to increase its influence within Iraq over the long term. Iran used that war to strengthen its position within Iraq through its deployment of its own Shia-based military forces in that country. This Iranian and Shia military mobilization in Iraq was linked with fiery religio-political speeches by Khomeini and other Shia leaders in Iran justifying Iran’s battles against Saddam Hussein (who was religiously Sunni and led a secular government) as battles where the Shias were ardently fighting against a Sunni enemy. At the same time, Khomeini and other Shia leaders in Iran justified that country’s military operations in that war as a war of self-defense for Iran and for the Shias of Iraq, although there were other Iraqi Shias who viewed the situation differently (Marr, 2017). While Iran’s leaders may not have been aware of it at the time, as Iran attempted to strengthen its position among Iraq’s Shias through the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s Shia government and its military were setting the stage to further strengthen Iran’s position in Iraq’s future in the advent of US (1) future attacks against Iraq during the Gulf War in 1990–1991, (2) subsequent bombings of the no-fly zone in southern Iraq from 1991 until 2003, and (3) invasion of Iraq beginning in 2003. Thus, as the United States and its allies attacked Iraq during and after these periods, they were creating situations where Iran increased its influence among Iraqi Shias in such a way that mobilized them religiously and politically, in spite of the fact that some Iraqi Shias resent Iran’s involvement in their country (Marr, 2017). This opposition that those Iraqi Shias have against Iranians is rooted, in part, in those Shias being Arabs and having a feeling of ethnic superiority with respect to the Iranians, who are ethnically Persians. The deep misgivings of some Iraqi Shias against Iranians is also rooted in those Iraqi Shias’ belief that the presence of Iranian soldiers and governmental officials in Iraq is damaging to Iraqi sovereignty, while many of those Iraqis believe that Iran is using its presence in Iraq to serve its own purposes at the expense of Iraqis. In contrast, there are other Iraqi Shias who believe that Iran’s presence in Iraq is benefiting Iraqi Shias in several ways, including economically, religiously, and educationally (Mumtaz, 2005). After the attacks of al-Qaida, a Sunni Islamist group, against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, beginning in October 2001, and Iraq two years after that. With respect to both wars, the US government’s justification involved combatting al-Qaida and similar groups, in order to decrease the probability that any such groups would attack the United States in the 118

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future. The US war in Iraq had the effect of substantially increasing the influence of Iran and Shia Muslims in Iraq, in that the United States (1) captured and executed Iraq’s then President, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim who strongly opposed Iran and Shia influence in Iraq; and (2) implemented a democratic form of government, which resulted in the election of many Shias to Iraq’s parliament and other political offices, because Shias comprise a substantial majority in that country (Mumtaz, 2005). As Shia religious and political power decreased dramatically in Iraq, because of the US invasion and Iran’s support of Iraq’s Shias, Sunni Islamist groups such the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fought against the Shias and ISIS’s other adversaries, with the intention of establishing, in Iraq, Syria, and eventually worldwide, a Sunni Islamic nation-state under strict Sunni Islamic law (Marr, 2017).

ISIS and its Iraqi Shia adversaries By June 2014, ISIS had captured large amounts of territory in Iraq, and the Iraqi military was experiencing difficulties in blocking ISIS’s far-reaching military advances. With ISIS a few miles outside Baghdad and Iraq’s military weakened, Iraq’s government became dependent on several non-governmental militias in Iraq, primarily Shia and Kurdish, in order to defend Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. On 13 June 2014, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an influential Shia leader in Iraq, issued a fatwa (a religious and political decree) calling on Shias to defend Baghdad and Shia holy sites in Iraq. While his decree was not exclusively directed at Shias in Iraq, large numbers of Shias in Iraq responded to this decree by joining several Shia militias for the purpose of defending Shias in Iraq against ISIS’s advances and hostile actions against Shias. Some of these Shia volunteers joined a Shia force named “al-Hashd al-Shaabi”, or the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) (Watling, 2016). The PMF functions as an umbrella organization that coordinates the work of existing Shia militias (Marr, 2017). It is estimated that after Sistani issued his fatwa, the various Shia militias in Iraq, including the ones that operated under the PMF, came to be composed of between 60,000 and 120,000 soldiers, whereas, around the same time, the Iraqi military was composed of only fifty thousand reliable soldiers. The Badr Brigade and Mahdi Army, both of which were Shia and had been renamed the Peace Brigades, constituted significant components of the PMF (Marr, 2017).

ISIS versus Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IGRC) Quds Force played a crucial role in Iraq, and particularly in the battles against ISIS. The Quds Force is a branch of the IGRC, which formed soon after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. The IGRC is intended to protect Iran’s Shia Islamic political system, including its government. The IGRC views itself as having a crucial role in protecting Iran’s Islamic system by preventing foreign interference in Iran and coups in that country by Iran’s regular military. The IGRC’s Quds Force is a special-forces unit, which is responsible for military operations outside Iran. The Quds Force reports directly to its own commander and the Supreme Leader of Iran (Ostovar, 2016). One of the Quds Force’s early victories took place in August 2014 in Amerli, Iraq, which is approximately 110 miles north of Baghdad where Shia and Kurdish forces caused ISIS to retreat (Collard, 2014; Ostovar, 2016). This military campaign benefited from US air support, which was largely coordinated through the Kurds, with Shia and Kurdish militias fighting on the ground (Ostovar, 2016). Shia and Kurdish forces under the Quds Force’s command had similar success in defeating and causing the withdrawal of ISIS from the Iraqi towns of Jalawla and 119

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Saadia, which are 20 miles from Iraq’s border with Iran (Ostovar, 2016). These battles included the first reported use of Iranian F-4 military aircraft, which provided air support for the ground forces. The use of the F-4s was an escalation prompted by the proximity of the fighting to Iran’s borders. It was a bold assertion of Iran’s place in the war, in that Iranian air assets were operating in Iraq in a manner parallel to that of the United States and allied air forces. This was one case, possibly among others, where Iran and the United States cooperated in the fight against ISIS and similar Sunni Islamist organizations (Arango and Erdbrink, 2014). Although both countries denied that such cooperation existed, in December 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry described Iran’s military contributions as having a positive effect in the war against ISIS (al-Ali, 2017; Ostovar, 2016).

ISIS weakened The battles against ISIS continued and by June 2018, ISIS forces within Iraq and Syria were weakened but not fully destroyed. Indeed, large numbers of ISIS soldiers fled from Iraq, under massive military pressure from the militaries of the United States, Iran, and Iraq, to countries such as Syria, Libya, Yemen, the Philippines, and Turkey (Schmitt, 2018). Although ISIS had been weakened in Iraq and Syria, thousands of ISIS soldiers remained in those countries and internationally, all of whom were committed to ISIS’s cause and were ready to fight for it well into the future (Iraq Bombs meeting of Daesh Leaders in Syria – Military, 4 February 2018). The proportionately large number of Shias in Iraq, combined with Iraq’s electoral system, will perpetuate the Shias’ significant influence in Iraqi politics. Yet, within this context, Iraq’s leaders face the challenges of (1) creating long-lasting national cohesion; (2) developing Iraq’s economic resources; (3) establishing proper governance in the face of corruption, kinship allegiances, sectarianism, ethnic divisions, and weak infrastructure; and (4) resisting the involvement of foreign countries in Iraq’s affairs (Armajani, 2020).

Lebanon Musa al-Sadr, a highly influential Shia cleric who was born in Iran in 1928, was a significant figure in Shia political mobilization in Lebanon in the twentieth century. In 1974, he established the Shia Amal movement in Lebanon, which became a major militia and political party. Through his speeches, mobilization, efforts, and founding of several Shia charitable organizations, he began the process of strengthening the religious and political bonds of some of Lebanon’s Shia, as they exerted influence in Lebanon’s political sphere (Norton, 1988). Within this context, Iran’s Islamic Revolution had a profound impact on Lebanon’s Shias. The overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979 served as an important model, demonstrating that committed and well-organized Shia clerics could depose a government in the face of oppression and injustice. Some of Lebanon’s Shias also hoped that Iran’s Shia government would be a source of religious, political, and financial support, which came to be the case. During the course of decades, there had been significant exchanges of ideas between Lebanese and Iranian Shias, who had studied at Shia seminaries in such cities as Najaf, Iraq, and Qom, Iran. These relationships, and the cooperative atmosphere in which they were pursued, enabled certain members of Amal to play roles in Iran’s Islamic Revolution while some members of Amal were influenced by their Iranian counterparts’ ideas and actions. A  number of Iranians including Ayatollah Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, and his brother-in-law, Sadiq Tabatabai, received training in Lebanon, under Amal’s auspices. Musa al-Sadr’s and Amal’s religious and political ideology, its

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political mobilization of Lebanon’s Shias, and Amal’s ties with Iran were factors that created the groundwork for the emergence of Hezbollah, which is one of Lebanon’s largest Shia political parties and military organizations. Hezbollah arose in the early 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war, which took place from 1975 until 1990 (Norton, 1988).

Hezbollah’s origins and ideology The Lebanese, who comprised the first cadre, of what was to become Hezbollah, such as Ragheb Harb, who had a significant leadership role in that organization’s early years; Subhi al-Tufayli, who would become the organization’s first secretary general; Sayyid Abbas alMusawi, who would become its second secretary general; and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, who would become the third person in that position, were all in their twenties or thirties in the mid-1980s, and were originally from Shia areas in southern Lebanon or the Beqaa Valley (Norton, 2018). Iran and Syria supported these Shia revolutionaries, while Iran had the leading role. For Iran, the establishment of Hezbollah constituted the initial attainment of an important objective, in that high-level Iranian officials in the Islamic Republic wanted to spread Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Syrian government officials hoped that Hezbollah would be a means by which Syria could maintain its alliance with Iran and gain leverage to strike at both Israel and the United States, both of which viewed Syria as hostile to Israel’s interests. At the same time, the Syrian government wanted to maintain some influence with respect to Amal (Norton, 2018). Hezbollah’s ideology was similar to that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hezbollah’s “Open Letter Addressed to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and in the World”, which was published on 16 February 1985, expresses some crucial aspects of this Shia revolutionary ideology. The document emphasizes that Iran’s Islamic Revolution was an inspiration to action and evidence that Shias can transform societies when the faithful gather under the banner of Shia Islam and work to break the oppression of tyrannical governments. While affirming the superiority of Shia Islam over all other worldviews, the open letter criticizes Western ideologies, declaring that they cannot respond to humans’ aspirations or rescue them from ignorance. According to the open letter, Shia Islam is the answer, in that it can bring renewal, progress, and creativity to human beings. The open letter excoriates the United States, Israel, and the Soviet Union for their expansionism and their attacks against Muslims (Hezbollah, 1985). In addition, the secularism of Western-style democracies and capitalism, on the one hand, and communism, on the other, pose a grave danger to all Muslims. According to the open letter, Hezbollah was positioning itself as a force that fought against the United States, Israel, and the Soviet Union, all of which have oppressed large numbers of people in their colonialist spheres of influence. One unanswered question in the open letter involves Hezbollah’s political goals for Lebanon. The letter states, somewhat vaguely, that when Lebanon is freed from external and internal domination, the Lebanese will be able to determine their destiny, and if they choose freely, they will choose Islam. The letter does not make clear whether Hezbollah’s religious and political goals involve an Islamic republic similar to that of Iran (Hezbollah, 1985).

Hezbollah, social services, and education While Hezbollah is an influential political party and militia in Lebanon, it operates social service and health organizations as well as educational institutions. For example, Hezbollah operates a vocational school for boys and a vocational institute for women in southern Lebanon (Norton,

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2018). Hezbollah also offers a wide array of services to its constituents, which include medical clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and Islamic financing and loans, in compliance with Islamic law, for establishing businesses (Norton, 2018). Hezbollah also devotes significant amounts of money and other valuable resources to its educational institutions (Le Thomas, 2009; Le Thomas, 2013). Hezbollah’s Mobilization for Education Committee coordinates all of the educational institutions that Hezbollah has founded and operates (Avon and Khatchadourian, 2012). These educational institutions include (1) Shia seminaries, which educate and train future Shia clerics; (2) Shia mosques, which often include schools on their properties; and (3) elementary and high schools, which sit on their own properties. All of those schools have Shia Islam as the foundations for their curricula and have enabled Hezbollah to consolidate and maintain its political influence among many Lebanese Shias (Le Thomas, 2003; Le Thomas, 2012). Hezbollah entered the Lebanese political system in the 1992 elections and has participated in Lebanese elections since that time. The end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990 and a belief among Hezbollah’s political leaders that Hezbollah and its Shia supporters would benefit from its participation in Lebanon’s democratic political process were crucial factors that led Hezbollah to becoming a full-fledged political party in Lebanon (Worrall et al., 2016).

Amal and Hezbollah In addition, Hezbollah’s leaders did not want Amal to become the primary or exclusive political party for Lebanon’s Shias, partly because Hezbollah’s leaders believed that their understandings of Shia Islam were far closer to what Shia Islam actually taught than the beliefs represented by Amal. Some of Hezbollah’s leaders and rank-and-file members believed that many of Amal’s leaders and members were too secular in their beliefs and were not adhering to Shia Islam’s true teachings. Some members of Hezbollah also view Amal as corrupt. Related to these beliefs, members of Hezbollah felt a sense of rivalry with respect to Amal for the religious and political loyalty of Lebanon’s Shias. During the early 1990s, Hezbollah’s religious and political leaders consulted with Iran’s religious and political leaders about the possibility of Hezbollah participating in Lebanon’s political process, and they received approval from Iran’s government to do so. After those consultations, 12 of Hezbollah’s leaders discussed the possibility of that organization entering Lebanon’s political process, and they voted in favor of Hezbollah doing so by a vote of ten to two. Since that time, large numbers of Hezbollah’s members have been elected to Lebanon’s parliament and local political offices and have served in appointed positions (Worrall et al., 2016). Amal and Hezbollah constitute significant religious and political institutions that have embedded themselves deeply into Lebanon’s religious and political life in general and into the lives of Lebanon’s Shia Muslims in particular. While Hezbollah has some of its roots in Amal, both of those parties originated as revolutionary movements, which consolidated Lebanon’s Shias religiously and politically, and provided those Shias with a thoroughgoing sense of communal religious and political identity, while offering them robust opportunities to participate in Lebanon’s political life. Both groups grew from several historical, religious, political, and ideological roots, with most of those roots in Shia intellectual life in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Amal and Hezbollah have been part of a general pattern of religious and political life in the Middle East and other parts of the modern world, which has included the fusion of religion and politics, as well as mobilization under the leadership of one or more charismatic intellectual religious and political leaders (Armajani, 2020). 122

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References Abrahamian, E. (1982) Iran between two revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Abrahamian, E. (2013) The Coup, 1953, the CIA, and the roots of modern U.S.-Iranian relations. New York: The New Press. al-Ali, Z. (2017) ‘Can anyone stop Iran from taking over Iraq?’, The Independent, 17 August. Available at: www.independent.co.uk/voices/mosul-fighting-conflict-isis-iran-taking- over-iraq-a7898576.html (Accessed: 10 May 2022). Amirahmadi, H. (1990) Revolution and economic transition: The Iranian experience. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Ansari-Pour, M.A. (1999–2000) ‘Iran’, Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern law, 6. Arango, T. and Erdbrink T. (2014) ‘U.S. and Iran both attack ISIS, but try not to look like allies’, New York Times, 3 December. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/middleeast/iran-airstrikeshit-islamic-state-in-iraq.html (Accessed: 10 May 2022). Arjomand, S.A. (1988) The turban for the crown: The Islamic revolution in Iran. New York: Oxford University Press. Armajani, J. (2020) Shia Islam and Politics: Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Lanham: Lexington Books. Benjamin, I. (2015) ‘Succeeding and seceding in Iraq: The case for a Shiite state’, in Kingsbury D. and Costas Laoutides, C. (eds.) Territorial separatism in global politics: Causes, outcomes and resolution. Abingdon: Routledge. Blake, K. (2009) The U.S.-Soviet confrontation in Iran, 1945–1962: A case in the annals of the cold war. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group/University Press of America. Buchta, W. (2006) ‘Iran’, in Sigrid F. (ed.) Anti-Americanism in the Islamic world. London: C. Hurst and Company. Cleveland, W.L. and Bunton, M. (2016) A history of the modern Middle East. (6th edition). Boulder: Westview Press. Collard, R. (2014) ‘Liberated Iraqi town vows to carry on struggle against ISIS’, Time, August 31. Available at: http://time.com/3239251/amerli-iraq-shiite-sunni-turkmen-isis/ (Accessed: 10 May 2022). Cordesman, A.H. (1999) Iran’s military forces in transition: Conventional threats and weapons of mass destruction. Westport: Praeger. Cordesman, A.H. with assistance from Davies, E.R. (2008) Iraq’s insurgency and the road to civil conflict. Westport: Praeger Security International. Dominique, A. and Khatchadourian, A.T. (2012) Hezbollah: A  history of the ‘Party of God’. (Translated Todd, J.M). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harrison, T.W. (2011) ‘Islamic nationalism, imperialism, and the Middle East’, in Harrison, T.W. and Draculic, S. (eds.) Against orthodoxy: Studies in nationalism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press [UBC Press]. Hezbollah, “Text of open letter addressed by Hizb Allah [Hezbollah] to the downtrodden in Lebanon and in the world,” February 16, 1985, trans. Augustus Richard Norton, in Norton (1988) Amal and the Shi’a (Struggle for the soul of Lebanon). Austin: University of Texas Press. Holliday, S. (2016) Defining Iran: Politics of resistance. Abingdon: Routledge. Hooshang A. (1990) Revolution and economic transition: The Iranian experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hunter, S.T. (2010) Iran’s foreign policy in the post-Soviet era: Resisting the new international order. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Imam, Khomeini (Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). (n.d.). Governance of the jurist (velayat-e faqeeh): Islamic government. (Translated by Hamid Algar). Tehran, Iran: The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works, Internal Affairs Division. International Institute for Strategic Studies (2019) Iran’s Networks of Influence in the Middle East, 1–84, 121–158. ‘Iraq Bombs Meeting of Daesh Leaders in Syria – Military’. (2018) Daily Star (Lebanon) and Reuters, 23 June. Available at: www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2018/Jun-23/454130-iraq-conducts-airstrike-on-daesh-position-in-syria.ashx (Accessed: 26 June 2018). Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution of 1979 with Amendments through 1989. (1989) Available at: www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989.pdf?lang=en (Accessed: 10 May 2022). Keshavarzian, A. (2007) Bazaar and the state in Iran: Politics of the Tehran marketplace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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9 RELIGION AND POLITICS IN ISRAEL Boundaries and values Hayim Katsman and Guy Ben-Porat Religion and religiosity are common themes in Israeli politics and play a large part in Israel’s social schisms. Scholars of religion and politics in Israel demonstrate that growing secularization occurs alongside religious resurgence and the entrenchment of religious institutional authority. We argue in this chapter that the strength of religion – whether it is political parties, institutions or public opinion – can be explained in its continued and essential role in boundary making. Religion, despite secularization, continues to delineate the boundaries of the Jewish state, and being Jewish remains an important criterion for citizenship and rights. In addition, with the rise of populism religious affiliation has more recently become a reference point separating the “people” from the “elites”. Accordingly, religion helps separate not only Jews from non-Jews, but also “good” (i.e. traditional and committed) from “bad” Jews (i.e. secular and detached). This separation, first, has become an essential tool for political parties claiming to represent the Jewish people. And, second, consequently, places severe limitations on secularization and secularism.

Dilemmas of a Jewish State Zionism, emerging in the late nineteenth century, has stood in opposition to Jewish Orthodoxy. The nationalist ideology, calling upon Jews to take control over their destiny, rebelled against the view that Jewish redemption would come about with the advent of the Messiah. Accordingly, Judaism, a religion identified with the old world, was to be replaced with Jewishness, a modern identity based on culture, ethnicity, a historical sense of belonging to the Jewish people and a proactive approach towards the future. While some of the movement forefathers (most notably B.Z. Herzl) and its leading political movement (MAPAI, later the Labor Party) were essentially secular, religion and religiosity could hardly be dismissed. First, religion provided the national movement with unifying symbols, rituals (some secularized) and history. Second, national boundaries and questions of belonging adhered to religious principles of matrilineality and conversion. And, third, territorial claims were based upon historical continuity, the Bible and a divine promise. In a series of agreements that came to be known as the “status quo” between the dominant MAPAI and the religious parties, the latter not only ensured the rights and privileges of religious people but also the monopoly of important aspects of public life. This included, on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-10

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one hand, deferral (and de facto dismissal) of Ultra-Orthodox students from the mandatory military service and the autonomy of a religious education system. On the other hand, the provision and regulation of marriage, divorce and burial were under Orthodox monopoly. As a result, among other things, civil marriage (and any other non-Orthodox marriage) was not an option for non-religious Jews. The status quo is often attributed to a letter sent by David BenGurion, then Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive to Agudat Israel, the ultra-Orthodox religious party, requesting its support vis-à-vis the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947. The commission was to make recommendations for Palestine after Britain announced it would end its mandate, and the Zionist movement wanted a united Jewish front. In the letter, which became a cornerstone of religious-secular arrangements, Ben-Gurion laid down a basic agreement on the Jewish character of the state of Israel that enabled secular and religious political elites to formulate compromises and avoid conflicts (Don-Yehia, 2000). After independence, the status quo was formalized and developed, included also the national-religious party, and operated as a guideline for religious-secular negotiations and governing coalition agreements during the first decades of statehood (Susser and Cohen, 2000). The decision of Ben-Gurion and MAPAI to compromise, despite their dominance, is often explained by the approach known as mamlahtiyut. The approach placed the state at the center of collective life of the Jewish nation and upheld the functionality of the status quo for reinforcement of consensus with respect to the state. It also had a pragmatic aspect, a focus on the challenge of state building and the concern with external security threats that marginalized secular-religious differences. Politically, the consensus was secured by political interests and cooperation between the dominant Labor Party and the major religious national party (the Mizrahi). This cooperation allowed the Labor Party to dominate foreign policy and security policy in return for Orthodox monopoly over significant aspects of public life. For the Ultra-Orthodox party, reluctant to take part in the Zionist project, exemptions from military service, autonomy for their education system and gradually also funding for their institutions was enough to ensure their implicit support. Beyond pragmatism, the status quo was accepted by the majority of non-religious Israelis who were generally supportive of the compromises as they continued to relate to codes, values, symbols, and a collective memory that could hardly be separated from Jewish religion (Kimmerling, 2004, p. 354). Also, and central to our argument here, religion was instrumental if not indispensable for boundary making and maintenance. The Bible and Jewish religious tradition, after selection and re-interpretation, provided for Zionism a narrative of continuity of nationhood, connection to the land, culture and a calendar for national life. The gap between religious groups and a large proportion of the secular population was narrowed not only by common symbols but also by the widespread loyalty shared to the idea of a “Jewish state” and the instrumentality of religion for maintaining boundaries (Ben-Porat, 2013). Consequently, religion was called up as the gatekeeper to provide the criteria for inclusion and exclusion (Ben-Porat, 2000; Ram, 2008).

Secularization The agreements that sustained the status quo gradually eroded in face of three major changes that undermined its foundations: globalization and consumer culture, the immigration from the former Soviet Union and more assertive non-religious groups that offered new interpretations to Jewish identity. The modest collectivist ethos and the limited material resources available in early statehood provided a protective shield for the status quo. Conversely, globalization and economic growth that took off in the 1990s introduced new incentives and preferences. New 126

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lifestyles rendered the restrictive arrangements of the status quo difficult to maintain. Individualism, hedonism and consumerism began to organize Israeli middle-class daily life (Carmeli and Applebaum, 2004), and the desire for new experiences and the new leisure patterns – shopping on the Sabbath, or non-kosher food – were often incompatible with the religious restrictions of the status quo. For religious people, also influenced by consumer culture, the religious rules held firm, although some challenges to religious authority have emerged in relation to the use of internet or mobile phones, for example. The million immigrants who arrived in Israel from the former Soviet Union between 1989 and 2000 were not only more secular than their Israeli peers (Ben-Rafael, 2007; Leshem, 2001), many of them, due to intermarriage in the former Soviet Union did not meet the Orthodox criteria of Jewishness (Ben-Rafael, 2007). Consequently, immigrants were granted citizenship under the Law of Return (1970)1 but were not considered Jewish by the Orthodox establishment2 unless they would go through an Orthodox conversion process. The sheer scale of this immigration produced a critical mass of demand for Russian culture and imported products, including pork. Russian food stores selling non-kosher and other imported food products were established across the country. The status quo agreements and the Orthodox monopoly caused considerable difficulties for the immigrants, especially for those not recognized as Jews who, among other difficulties they experienced, could not marry in Israel, strengthening the demand for change. Ideational developments also took a new turn of challenging the Orthodox monopoly, demanding that alternative Jewish identities be recognized by the state and receive an equal stance to Jewish Orthodoxy. This included Reform and Conservative Judaism, initially small and based mainly on immigrants from English-speaking countries, but with substantial backing from their related communities in the United States. This backing not only enabled them to function without government funding but also to expand and reach out also to native Israelis. An additional set of alternatives known as secular or cultural Judaism developed in the 1990s. The open and critical reading of texts and, more important, the re-interpretation of rituals and commandments directly challenged religious orthodoxy and the status quo (Ben-Porat, 2013).

Being Jewish Despite secularization, the majority of Israelis, including those who defined themselves as nonreligious, remained attached to religion. Israelis accepted restrictions on marriage and burial choices, activities on the Sabbath, and the sale of non-kosher meat. All perceived constitutive to the Jewish character of the state or their own Jewish identity, part of a necessary compromise between religious and secular, or simply an issue of minor importance that did not affect their everyday lives enough to justify its politicization. They took part in religious rituals during holidays (Passover) and preferred religious ceremonies. Jewish Orthodoxy, therefore, acted as what Grace Davie (2007) described as a vicarious religion: “performed by an active minority but on the behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing”. The role religion played in private lives and its role as a gatekeeper of the national boundaries has rendered the possibility of separating state and religion unlikely, even for those who described themselves as “non-religious”. Religion and religious institutions have not remained passive. Rather, a new word “HADATA”, meaning an attempt to de-secularize and make religious presence and authority stronger, was introduced to describe its return. Secular, or non-religious Israelis, and political parties representing them, claimed that religious parties are attempting to change the status quo and impose religion and religious dictums upon them. Hadata, or “religionalization”, implies 127

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the growing presence of religion in public life and possibly dominance or even hegemony (Peled and Peled, 2019) of religious-Zionism. This includes not only the political system but also the growing presence of religious commanders in the military, more religious content in school systems and growing perceptions that Israel is becoming more religious (Peled and Peled, 2019, pp. 19). The return to religion was most evident among Mizrahim (Jews who immigrated from Muslim countries and their descendants) with the rise of Shas, a political party that gained prominence from the 1980s onward. Combining ethnicity and religiosity, Shas advocated a return to tradition against the secularization forced on Mizrahi immigrants. Shas organized its activities using an extensive network of educational and welfare institutions, constituting a substitute for the receding welfare state and thereby reinforcing the party’s standing with both the state, which used it as an intermediary, and with its voters, who became more dependent on this party network (Levi and Amreich, 2001). Through its extensive educational and welfare network, Shas became an important player in promoting religious (and anti-secular) Jewish identity. The party’s constituency was not necessarily haredi, as its voters often identified with its social and ethnic message, but the vote for Shas was a vote for a more religious state (Susser and Cohen, 2000, p. 120). Shas’s electoral power, enhanced by its education and social network, enabled it to promote different proposals to curb the secularizing trends. The party’s two central goals are ‘Restoring the Crown – of the Torah – to its Ancient Glory’ and advancing social justice (Shas home page). Restoring the Crown to its Ancient Glory’ is first and foremost an ethnic matter, raising the status and stature of the Mizrahi identity and culture in Israel’ (Yadgar, 2003). Shas’ populism is built around three Manichean oppositions between ‘us and them’ – Sephardic religious versus secular Jews, Mizrahim versus Ashkenazim, and Jews versus non-Jews. For Shas, Jewish religious and national belonging conflate; there is no national existence outside religion. Shlomo Benizri (a former Shas leading politician) has said, ‘Israel is a nation only through the Torah’ (Benizri, Shas home page). Shas’ vision of the political, of democracy, and of politics is profoundly anti-liberal. In accordance with traditional religious views, its leaders do not believe in the separation of spheres – personal and political, state and civil society, state and church. Religion is an inseparable part of the public sphere, and state institutions should be subordinated to religious authority. Three more developments we explore in this chapter explain the power of religion and religious institutions vis-à-vis their role in boundary setting. First, the attempt of religiousZionism to assume a leading role or hegemony and in so doing placing religion at center stage. Second, the rise of conservatism, providing another linkage between religion and boundary setting. And, third, the emergence of populism and religion serving as a market separating both “people” from “non-people” and “real people” from “elites”.

Religious-Zionism Religious-Zionists are approximately 12% of the Israeli Jewish population, though politically they are an extremely influential movement in Israeli politics. Religious-Zionists are the driving force behind the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank, as these settlements were established in order to prevent a peace agreement with the Palestinians, strengthening and tightening Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and people. Religious-Zionism attempted to establish itself since the 1970s as the heir to the largely secular-Zionist movement, insisting that the latter has lost its ability to lead. Since its inception, the Zionist movement has been carrying the burden of an internal contradiction between the universal and the particular – “a state like all others” versus “a light unto 128

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the nations” (Scham, 2018). On the one hand, the Zionist movement aimed to create a national Jewish identity that is not based on religion and establish a modern secular nation-state. On the other hand, the Zionist movement had to rely on certain aspects of the Jewish religion – i.e. reviving the Hebrew language, biblical symbolism, and even the word “Zion” itself – in order to create a shared identity that could mobilize Jews around the world to support the movement and immigrate to Palestine. Notwithstanding several controversies, the status quo arrangements kept this internal contradiction relatively latent under the Labor-Zionist secular hegemony. Yet this equilibrium began to change during the 1960s and 1970s, when some religious-Zionists started to challenge the secular hegemony and demanded a greater presence to religion in the Israeli public sphere and government policy (Kimmerling, 2004; Peled and Herman Peled, 2019). Some researchers understand religious-Zionism as a unique ideology, bringing together observance of the Orthodox religious code (Halacha) and political commitment to the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. However, while it indeed began as a distinct political movement, today it is impossible to find an ideological common denominator among the social group referred to as “religious-Zionism” (Katsman, 2020). At first, the term “religiousZionism” was used to refer to a specific political faction within the Zionist movement, which represented Jewish-Orthodox supporters of the Zionist movement, in contrary to most Orthodox Jews who were opposed to the Zionist movement. In 1902, the Orthodox Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Reines organized a conference for the religious-Zionist movement, in which the ‘HaMizrahi’3 movement was founded, and Rabbi Reines was declared as the movement’s leader. ‘HaMizrahi’s’ slogan was ‘The Land of Israel, for the People of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel’.4 In response to the aforementioned Orthodox opposition, Rabbi Reines stated that his support of the Zionist movement was practical and carried no theological significance. It was merely a necessity to find a safe haven for the Jews from European antisemitism (Ravitzky, 1996). ‘HaMizrahi’ was known for its pragmatic approach and supported the secular-Zionist movement in exchange for pedagogical autonomy in a sectorial religious-Zionist education system. This arrangement, which was formed in the 1930s and lasted until 1977, was known as ‘The historical alliance’. In 1977, the “historical alliance” with Labor-Zionist party MAPAI was abandoned, and the religious-Zionist movement began supporting Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud party. This transition was largely a result of the growing influence of the “Gush Emunim” movement within religious-Zionism. Gideon Aran’s groundbreaking research on the origins and ideology of Gush Emunim described the theological, political, and cultural revolution this movement generated within religious-Zionism. According to Aran, Gush Emunim’s theology transformed the movement “from religious-Zionism to a Zionist religion” (Aran, 1987). In other words, instead of being a religious subculture within the secular-Zionist movement, the commitment to Zionism was now perceived as stemming from, and therefore subjected to, their religious worldview. Following the teachings of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook, these religiousZionists viewed the triumphal results of the 1967 war – the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights – as an important stage towards the actualisation of a divine redemption process. Therefore, they began to settle these lands (sometimes illegally) in order to prevent their future evacuation in any peace agreement that would include returning the land in exchange for peace (Barzel, 2017). Religious-Zionists came to believe that secular Zionism has “fulfilled its mission and finished its role” (Karpel, 2003, p. 15), and it was now their turn to assume leadership and settle the new territories occupied in the war to ensure they would become part of a larger Israel. Gush Emunim’s ideologists associated the reluctance and hesitation of secular Israelis to settle 129

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the territories with a general weakening of mainstream Zionism, as the movement’s platform explained: [W]e are unfortunately witnessing a series of events indicating a process of degeneration and retreat from realizing the Zionist idea . . . a trend that is a shoddy imitation of the western culture . . . a mood featuring a quest for the “easy and comfortable life, high standard of living and after luxury items” (Shafat, 1995, appendix 1). The settlement of the territories – areas with historical and religious significance – was for religious-Zionists the fulfilment of religious commandments and national duty. The national revival that Gush Emunim offered replicated many of the symbols and practices of secular Zionism but instilled them with religious meaning. Hiking the land, community life, Hebrew culture, and, especially, pioneering became the markers of the new movement (Ben-Porat, 2000). This settlement project, led by the movement in the occupied territories, often bending the rules and ignoring restrictions in order to create “facts on the ground”, received (at least in its early stages) sympathy and support from secular Zionists who identified with the renewal of Zionism and the pioneering collectivist spirit behind the movement. Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook’s position regarding the settlements was based on the theological teachings of his father, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, regarding the relationship between Judaism and modernity, specifically Jewish nationalism. According to this interpretation, the entire modern world, including its secularism, is a manifestation of the divinity. Thus, due to their important role in promoting divine redemption, the Zionist movement and the Israeli state must be sanctified. This position, named Mamlachtiyut (statism) entailed some important consequences, most notably that the state and its institutions must be regarded as holy, and that serving the state and abiding by its laws are a religious obligation. This does not mean that one cannot oppose state policy, as was manifested in the several occasions that the Israeli state acted against Jewish settlements. However, in most cases the statist approach brought religious-Zionists to carefully maintain a “theological-normative balance”, in which “the state’s religious aura acts to undermine calls for civil, political, and military disobedience because reverence for the state is conceived of as a religious imperative. Consequently, the religious-Zionist discourse of loyalty was primary and paradigmatic while the discourse of disobedience faced serious intellectual obstacles” (Hellinger et al., 2018, p. 24). In this respect, the evacuation of Gaza settlements in 2005 (“The Disengagement Plan”) served as a watershed moment for the religious-Zionist “statist” approach, and it is hard to overestimate its impact on religious-Zionist theology, politics and culture. This event was traumatic for the religious-Zionist community for several reasons (Inbari, 2012). First, the overwhelming majority of Gaza settlers were religious-Zionists.5 Even those who were not personally affected by the decision had friends and families that lived in the settlements. Second, religious-Zionists interpreted the disengagement as a political failure. They led the political struggle but failed to gain active support from the broader Israeli society. Most importantly, though, the literature describes the disengagement as a theological crisis. Due to the “Kookist” interpretation of the state as endowed with a divine significance, the uprooting of Jewish settlements, which were perceived as a redemptive fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham, seemed incomprehensible. In the aftermath of these events, religious-Zionists began to increasingly reexamine the “theological-normative balance”, i.e. their religious identity vis-á-vis their commitment to the Israeli Jewish state. During the struggle against the evacuation, the settlers’ leadership sought to prevent violence and keep the protests within legitimate boundaries. Following the “statist” approach, they obeyed the military’s orders in most cases, and violence was rare and limited (Roth, 2014). Retrospectively, many religious-Zionists blamed these peaceful tactics as the root of the struggle’s failure. As a response, some adopted a “post-statist” worldview. The state is not 130

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intrinsically holy, they maintain, but rather holds only an instrumental importance so long as it advances religious goals. Therefore, there is no religious imperative to abide by state laws, and further evacuation of settlements must be fought at all costs (Harel, 2017; Hellinger et al., 2018). This notion fuelled violence against police officers during the evacuation of Amona in 2006, and more recently by the phenomenon of the “hilltop youth” and “price tag” violent incidents.6 Religious-Zionism, despite its growing power, has not assumed leadership, and political attempts to reach wider constituencies did not materialize. However, the success of the settlement project has made territorial compromise (a “two-state” solution) almost impossible. Also, the growing number of religious-Zionist men serving in the military combat units and in the top command of the military has led to what has been described as “theocratization” of the military. The critical mass of religious soldiers in many combat units restricts the military command’s intraorganizational autonomy vis-á-vis the religious sector, and the Israel Defense Forces autonomy in deploying forces in politically disputable missions (Levy, 2014), including potential future redeployments.

The rise of conservatism Another important consequence of the 2005 evacuation is the rise of the Israeli “conservative movement”.7 Since the early 2010s, religious-Zionists, and more specifically religious-Zionist settlers, became active in several political organizations – the Tikvah Fund, the Kohelet Policy, and the Jewish Statesmanship Center. The conservative movement was fuelled by American immigrants who imported neoconservative values, political culture, and (perhaps most importantly) capital from overseas. This movement promotes three ideological themes: liberal economics and deregulation, judicial restraint (formalism) and fierce Jewish nationalism. Historically, the religious-Zionist community tended to criticize the Supreme Court’s judicial activism and support right-wing hawkish politics, but other elements of the conservative movement – particularly, the support of neoliberal economics, seem foreign to traditional religious-Zionist thought. During the religious-Zionist movement’s first stages, some religious-Zionists have expressed collectivist views towards social justice. The Labor-oriented HaPoel HaMizrachi was established already in 1922 and had its own kibbutz movement, in which Orthodox Jews lived within egalitarian communities centred on labour and social justice (Peled and Herman-Peled, 2019). Moreover, the National-Religious Party platform for the 1992 elections explicitly stated their support for worker unions and the need to guarantee collective contracts. Therefore, these ideas are perceived by some as a foreign influence on religious-Zionist ideology (Hominer, 2016). As opposed to the “Kookist” religious-Zionists who viewed the disengagement as a crisis of faith, the conservatives were more rational and pragmatic. Their main takeaway from the disengagement was that the state of Israeli does not have a theological problem but a political one. Therefore, it is important to understand their perspective of the 2004–2005 political events that led up to the Gaza evacuation. In order to carry out the disengagement plan, Sharon used questionable political tactics. When it was time to bring the plan for vote in the government meeting, Sharon fired two ministers from the Hawkish HaIhud Haleumi party just 48 hours before the vote, in order to secure a majority. Later, in order to demonstrate public support for the plan, Sharon carried out a plebiscite among Likud party members. Religious-Zionists undertook an impressive doorknocking operation, visiting homes of Likud voters and convincing them to vote against the plan. This campaign had tremendous success: 59.5% voted against the disengagement plan, while only 39.7% supported it. However, despite these results, Sharon decided to move on with the execution of the plan, arguing that the results were not binding. 131

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Sharon’s moves generated a great outcry among religious-Zionists, and they began to protest the evacuation. Religious-Zionists organized mass demonstrations, sit-ins and even roadblocks, demanding to stop the evacuation. During these protests, many religious-Zionists, 688 of them minors, were arrested.8 The fact that Sharon was able to carry out the disengagement plan led some religiousZionists to the conclusion that something in the Israeli democratic system was not working. How can a politician so blatantly disregard the will of his people? If within the democratic system carrying out such an undemocratic process is legal – there is a problem with the system itself. For others, the disengagement plan was a wakeup call from mystical theology. They concluded that the religious-Zionist “Kookist” idea of the Israeli state as “the foundation of God’s throne in the world” no longer fits reality. This understanding brought them to adopt a liberal perception of the state as value-neutral, an idea that is easily compatible with neoliberal or even libertarian economic politics. Another takeaway from the disengagement plan was that the struggle against the evacuation was perceived by the Israeli public as a religious-Zionist struggle. The secular and Haredi Jews who opposed the evacuation did not take active part in the struggles, which were led by the religious-Zionist community and had a strong religious messianic tone. Religious-Zionists understood that in order to prevent future evacuations, they must create alliances with the other sectors of the Jewish-Israeli society: The Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) and secular Israelis. As previously described, the conservative movement provides a non-religious ideological framework to support Jewish nationalism. This way, religious-Zionists, Haredim and secular individuals gain a sense of belonging to the same intellectual community. The emergence of the Israeli conservative movement cannot be solely attributed to the events of 2005. Not all activists in the conservative movement interpreted the Gaza disengagement in this way. Seeing themselves as rational non-mystical individuals, the political opposition to the plan did not lead to a personal, religious or national crisis among activists in the conservative movement. Moreover, the movement’s intellectual roots and first institutions preceded the disengagement plan by more than a decade. However, the emerging conservative movement in Israel provided a coherent worldview, and more importantly, money and institutions, for the religious-Zionist individuals who were motivated to take political action after the disengagement.

Populism Populism is central in Israel (and in contemporary politics) since populist movements emerge in societies where conflicts concerning the inclusion/exclusion of subordinate social groups are salient, and the signifier people becomes a major reference point for the constitution of political identities. Populism can be “inclusive”, promoting the political integration of excluded social groups, or “exclusive”, claiming to preserve collective subjects that feel their identity threatened (Ben-Porat and Filc, 2021). “The people” is often an empty signifier that needs content for the establishment of an identity that is more than just being anti-elite or anti-foreigner (Arato and Cohen, 2018, p. 102). Accordingly, “populist politics also needs a convincing moral claim to trigger the self-righteous indignation necessary to construct, define and mobilize the authentic ‘good’ people against the alien other” (Cohen and Arato, 2012, p. 102). Populism can be “inclusive”, promoting the political integration of excluded social groups, or “exclusive”, claiming to preserve collective subjects that feel their identity threatened. Religion can be a way to demarcate boundaries of the “people” and separate them both from “others” (foreigners) and (secular) elites. In 1997, during an election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to Rabbi Yitzhak Kadury, an important Sepharadic religious and spiritual leader. Netanyahu was caught on tape whispering to the elder Rabbi’s ear, “the left has forgotten what it is to be a Jew”. The 132

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comment, directed at Israel’s left/liberal parties who supported a territorial compromise, was considered inflammatory and offensive and evoked outrage. Religion can perform an important role in populist ideology and strategy in delineating the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion and adding content and justification. As Arato and Cohen explain: “Religious identity politics provide unifying content for the chain of equivalents in populist logic, helps moralize the friend and demonize the enemy, and to frame the elites and ‘others’ as immoral and corrupt, and thus part of a deeper threat to ‘our’ tradition that must be warded off, while providing a needed moral aura for populist politics” (2012, p. 108). Religious tropes are often used to delineate boundaries and strengthen the us-them dichotomy, even by leaders who are not religious. The use of religion might be instrumental and the religious identities are actually ethnic, serving a political cause, largely symbolic and having no religious content (Gans, 1994). But, religion and ethnicity, as Mitchell (2006) suggests, often have a two-way relation. Thus, even if ethnic identities that employ religious symbols appear largely secular, they may have latent religious content that can be re-activated. Religion evokes a sense of the sacred, provides specific ideological concepts, is accompanied by powerful institutions, serves as an effective facilitator of community and provides substantive content for social boundaries. Once rekindled, the religious aspects of identification can become dominant, challenging hegemonies and institutional orders. The Likud party’s victory in the elections of 1977 signalled the end of the Labor hegemony. The party’s origins were in the opposition revisionist party (Herut) and its military wing, the Irgun, who challenged the pre-state Labor hegemony. In 1973, several opposition parties joined to form the Likud, under the leadership of Menachem Begin. Ideologically, the Likud presented a nationalistic worldview, in line with its founders’ worldview but that also appealed to Mizrahim, Jews who emigrated from Muslim countries and their descendants, excluded and marginalized by Labor’s hegemony. Likud’s demand for the inclusion of Mizrahim, materially and symbolically, enabled it not only to defeat Labor but also to remain in power (Filc, 2006, pp. 100–101). The rhetoric of “Jewish people” used by the Likud enabled the symbolic inclusion of Mizrachim, most of them excluded by the pre-state Labor-led pioneering ethos and marginalized by the Labor elite. Menachem Begin, “located the ways in which the discourse of the Labor party formed a collective subject that did not include Mizrahim” (Filc, 2006, p. 104), deconstructed the pioneering ethos and the privileges it entailed, and created a space for Mizrahim in a new national ethos. Begin’s rhetoric was anti-elitist, repeatedly attacking the Labor elites for excluding both the Revisionists and Mizrahim, an exclusion that secured Labor’s elite status and privileges. This anti-elitism made a significant contribution in the Likud’s rise to power, able to appeal to new constituencies and take advantage of resentment. Begin often used religion and religious discourse, among other things, to distinguish the Likud from the secular Labor elite. In the speech presenting his new government, defeating Labor after 29 years in power, he stated: “We shall follow the name of our Lord forever . . . I announce that the government of Israel will not ask any nation . . . to acknowledge our right to exist . . . we have received that right from God” (quoted in Filc, 2006, p. 118). This religious rhetoric and the use of religious symbols underscored not only the new partnership between the Likud and religious nationalist parties, but also echoed the traditionalist elements with the Likud and the rejection of Labor’s secularism. However, while Begin believed that in Judaism religion and national belonging are inseparable (in this he resembled the view of Orthodox Jews); he combined this view with liberal conceptions of democracy and commitment for equality. The Likud gradually withdrew from its liberal roots and commitments. In recent years, under Netanyahu’s leadership, it transformed into an exclusionary populist party similar 133

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(albeit in many ways more extremist) to European radical right populist parties. Exclusionary populism was expressed both symbolically and politically, Netanyahu’s nativist definition of the people advocated a closed ethno-national unity, threatened by foreign enemies, non-Jewish citizens and Jewish-Israeli opposition advocating equal citizenship and depicted as detached elites not committed to Jewish nationality. In his discourse, the identity of the people is crystal clear: “us”, implies the Jewish people, defined by descent, against the anti-people marked by antisemitism. When commenting on the Security Council’s 2334 decision reaffirming that the settlements in the West Bank are illegitimate, Netanyahu stated, “Left parties’ politicians and TV journalists were extremely pleased with the Security Council’s decision; almost as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas [. . .]” (Netanyahu’s Facebook Wall 24 December 2016). Netanyahu uses religion in his rhetoric both to demarcate boundaries of nationhood, excluding non-Jewish citizens, and to establish hierarchies of loyalty within the Jewish nation. In 1997, during an election campaign, his words “the left has forgotten what it is to be a Jew”, de-legitimized the Israeli left, equating the demand for territorial compromise with disloyalty. Later, religion became more instrumental and explicit than before. First, religiosity or attachment to religion becomes a litmus test for loyalty, separating authentic members of the nation from cosmopolitan and disloyal elites. Second, religious language and symbols accentuate fears and shape demands for action, to protect the nation and its borders. Third, consequently, more and more leaders, not only in the Likud, adopt religious tropes and symbols to demonstrate loyalty and garner support. The last two decades in Israel can be described as fixated on Jewish religious-based ethnicity. This period has seen the state’s sanctification of Jewish ethnic identity and its political use as never before (Ghanem and Khatib, 2017). Different legislation initiatives attempted to broaden the Jewish character of the state, limiting commitments to inclusive democracy. The “Nationality Law” legislated by the Israeli Parliament in June 2018 (62 against 55) consolidated the definition of Israel as the state of Jewish people, enshrined the (Jewish) symbols of the state, and affirmed the state’s commitment to Jewish immigration and settlement. The law has not made similar commitments to equality and democracy, nor has it taken into account the Arab Palestinian narrative of national belonging, hereby marginalizing Israel’s Arab (and other non-Jewish) citizens. Supporters of the law explained it was a necessary measure to counteract Israel’s declining commitment to its Jewish character, blaming, among others, the liberal and elitist Supreme Court for the decline. Exclusionary and anti-elitist sentiments are supported by broad sectors among Israeli Jews. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute showed that many Jews object including Arabs in Israeli decision-making, support discrimination towards Arabs and even object to Arabs living in their vicinity. Many (61%) even support conditioning Arabs’ right to vote to pleading allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, and to its symbols (Ghanem and Khatib, 2017). A poll by the Pew Research Center (2016)9 has shown that 48% of Israelis support the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and that Jewish citizens of different political and social backgrounds remain united in the view that Israel is the country of the Jewish people (Ghanem and Khatib, 2017). Twenty years after Netanyahu’s comment on the left forgetting what it is to be Jewish, Avi Gabai, then leader of the Labor Party, part of the liberal pro-peace camp, echoed Netanyahu’s remark, demonstrating the importance of Jewish identity. If the left were to return to power, he argued, it would have to demonstrate loyalty to Jewish identity and values: People feel I am getting closer to Jewish values. We are Jewish, we live in a Jewish state. I think one of the problems of the Labor Party, seriously, is that it withdrew from it. Netanyahu told Rabbi Kadury that “the Left forgot what it is to be Jewish”. And what 134

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the left has done in response? It forgot what it is to be Jewish. It is as if we are now only liberals. That is not true, we are Jewish and we need to talk about our Jewish values. (Ynet, 2017)10

Conclusions Despite its secular roots and rebellion against religious Orthodoxy, Zionism remained indebted to religion. Religion underscored Zionist claims for a territorial “promised land”, helped demarcate the boundaries of the “Jewish people” and provided cultural content to the nation-building project. Accordingly, a series of agreements, arrangements and compromises provided religion with authority and standing in the Jewish state formed in 1948. In recent decades, secularization has undermined religious authority, but at the same time religion was able to withhold its ground and even advances in some realms. In this chapter, we suggest that the continued strength of religion can be attributed to its role in boundary making. First, the rise of religious-Zionism attempted to replace secular Zionism in leading the Zionism movement. Second, conservatism added another dimension of politics, where religion combined with hawkish and neoliberal stances. Finally, populism, wider in appeal than the two other trends, also brought religion to the fore. Religion not only strengthened the exclusionary demands against non-Jews but also created a hierarchy of loyalty and an anti-elite stance.

Notes 1 The law grants Israeli citizenship to “the child or grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, and the spouse of a Jewish child or grandchild”. 2 According to Jewish Orthodoxy, a Jew is “someone who was born to a Jewish mother, and who does not belong to another religion, or someone who converted to Judaism”. 3 Hebrew acronym for “Spiritual Center” [Mekaz Ruchani]. 4 Gadi Taub interestingly notes the exclusion of the state of Israel from this trinity (Taub, 2010). 5 Out of 21 settlements, only 5 permitted driving on the Sabbath within the settlement. 6 “Hilltop youth” is a name referring to youngsters who establish illegal outposts in the West Bank. “Price tag” attacks are incidents in which Jewish settlers attack Palestinians and vandalize their property, sometimes as a response to Palestinian terror attacks. See Hellinger et al. (2018). 7 “Conservative” in this article does not refer to the Jewish religious movement. In Hebrew, the Jewish religious movement translates as “Masorti” (traditional) while the political movement described in this article translates as “Shamrani”. 8 www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3124997,00.html 9 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/ 10 https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5042427,00.html

References Aran, G. 1987. “From Religious Zionism to a Zionist Religion: The Origin and Culture of GushEmunim Messianic Movement,” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University. Arato, Andrew, and  Jean L. Cohen. 2018.  “Civil Society, Populism, and Religion,” in  Carlos de la Torre (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. pp. 98–112. Abingdon: Routledge. Arato, Andrew, and Jean L. Cohen. 2018. “Civil society, populism, and religion.” In Routledge handbook of global populism, pp. 98–112. Abingdon: Routledge. Barzel, Neima. 2017. “Redemption Now”: The Beliefs and Activities of the Jewish Settlers in the West Bank and Israeli Society. Bnei Brak: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew). Ben-Porat, Guy. 2000. “In a State of Holiness; Rethinking Israeli Secularism,” Alternatives 25(2): 223–246. Ben-Porat, Guy. 2013. Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hayim Katsman and Guy Ben-Porat Ben-Porat, Guy, and Dani Filc. 2021. “Remember to Be Jewish, Religious Populism in Israel,” Religion and Politics 15(1): 61–64. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. 2007. “Mizrahi and Russian Challenges to Israel’s Dominant Culture: Divergences and Convergences,” Israel Studies 12(3): 68–91. Caplan, Kimmy. 2007. Internal Popular Discourse in Israeli Haredi Society. Jerusalem: Shazar Center (Hebrew). Carmeli, Yoram, and Kalman Appelbaum. 2004. “Introduction,” in Y. Carmeli and K. Appelbaum (eds.), Consumption and Market Society in Israel. New York: Oxford University Press. Davie, Grace. 2007. “Vicarious Religion: A  Methodological Challenge,” in Amerman (ed.), Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Don-Yehia, E. 2000. “Conflict Management of Religious Issues: The Israeli Case in a Comparative Perspective,” in R. Hazan and M. Maor (eds.), Parties, Elections and Cleavages. London: Frank Cass, pp. 85–108. Filc, Dani. 2006. Hegemony and Populism in Israel. Tel Aviv: Resling (Hebrew). Gans, Herbert, J. 1994. “Symbolic Ethnicity and Symbolic Religiosity: Towards a Comparison of Ethnic and Religious Generation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17(4): 577–592. Ghanem, As’ ad, and Ibrahim Khatib. 2017. “The Nationalisation of the Israeli Ethnocratic Regime and the Palestinian Minority’s Shrinking Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 21(8): 889–902. Hellinger, Moshe, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser. 2018. Religious Zionism and the Settlement Project: Ideology, Politics, and Civil Disobedience. Albany: SUNY Press. Hominer, Aviad. 2016. “Religious-Zionism: From Equality and Social Justice to Ultra-Capitalism,” Deot 77: 1–4. Inbari, Motti. 2012. Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karpel, Motti. 2003. The Revolution of Faith: The Decline of Zionism and the Religious Alternative. Alon Shvut: Lechatchila (Hebrew). Katsman, Hayim. 2020. “The Hyphen Cannot Hold: Contemporary Trends in Religious-Zionism,” Israel Studies Review 35(2): 154–174. Katsman, Hayim, and Guy Ben-Porat. 2019. “Israel: Religion and Political Parties,” in Jeff Haynes (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Religion and Political Parties. Abingdon: Routledge. Kimmerling, Baruch. 2004. Immigrants, Settlers, Natives: The Israeli State and Society between Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Wars. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). Kuriel, Ilana. 2017. “Gabai: The Left has Forgotten about Being Jewish” YNET, 14.11.2017 (Hebrew). Leshem, Elazar. 2001. “The Immigration from the Former USSR and the Religious-Secular Schism in Israel,” in Moshe Lissak and Elazar Leshem (eds.), From Russia to Israel: Identity and Culture in Transition. Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad Press (Hebrew). Levy, Yagil. 2014. “The Theocratization of the Israeli Military,” Armed Forces & Society 40(2): 269–294. Mitchell, Claire. §2006§. “§The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities,§” Sociology 40(6): §1135–1152§. Peled, Yoav, and Horit, Herman-Peled. 2019. The Religionization of Israeli Society. London: Routledge. Pew Research Center. 2016. Israel’s Religiously Divided Society. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/ wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/03/Israel-Survey-Full-Report.pdf Ram, Uri. 2008. “Why Secularism Fails? Secular Nationalism and Religious Revivalism in Israel,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 21: 57–73. Ravitzky, Aviezer. 1996. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roth, Anat. 2014. Not at Any Cost: From Gush Katif to Amona: The Story Behind the Struggle Over the Land of Israel, Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot. (Hebrew). Scham, Paul. 2018. “’A Nation that Dwells Alone’: Israeli Religious Nationalism in the 21st Century,” Israel Studies 23(3): 207–215. Shafat, Gershon. §1995§. Gush Emunim: The Story Behind. Beit-El Library (Hebrew). Susser, Bernard, and Asher, Cohen. 2000. Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity: The Secular-Religious Impasse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taub, Gadi. 2010. The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism. Yale University Press. New Haven, CT. Yadgar, Y., 2003. Between ‘the Arab’and ‘the Religious Rightist’: ‘Significant others’ in the construction of Jewish-Israeli national identity. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 9(1), pp. 52–74.

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PART II

Religion and governance

10 THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM1 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

‘Ah, my friend, my friend’, he said, drawing back and thumping his chest, ‘I have a heavy feeling in here. I feel as if I have a stone in my heart. I wonder what’ll become of us all’. ‘I think we’ll be divided’, said Mehmetçik sadly. ‘Suddenly it matters that I am a Christian, where it mattered only a little before’. —–Louis de Bernières (2004, p. 265)

This conversation is from Birds Without Wings, a novel set in an Anatolian village during the transition from Ottoman to Turkish governance amidst the upheaval of the First World War and the Greek-Turkish population exchange. It documents the staggering costs imposed on the local inhabitants of the village as the state assigned religious identities and relied on them to determine civil and military status. This exchange between two childhood friends, one Muslim and the other Christian, took place on the eve of the former’s departure to fight with Atatürk’s forces. Only Muslims were enlisted; Christians were not trusted as soldiers. How much does religious identity matter in public, legal, and political contexts? Is religion always, or ever, solely a matter of individual choice? What happens when religious affiliations become the basis of public administration, legal decisions, and government conduct? Do legal guarantees for religious freedom offer a solution? This chapter explores these questions through a discussion of the promise and perils of one of most celebrated ideals of our time: international religious freedom. To join the community of civilized nations, governments today are encouraged to guarantee religious freedom. Efforts to promote it globally have gathered steam, with the United States at the helm. The US International Religious Freedom Act, 1998 (IRFA) established an Office on International Religious Freedom in the State Department headed by an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. The office prepares an annual report on the status of religious freedom in every country in the world except the United States and advises the president on which countries should be designated as “Countries of Particular Concern”. IRFA also created a watchdog agency, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The United Nations, Canada, several European states, and the European Union also have supported external religious freedom promotion. The UN Office of the Special Rapporteur for DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-12

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Freedom of Religion or Belief has promoted religious freedom for decades, focusing on state compliance with international and regional human rights conventions. The British and the European Union promote religious freedom through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and European External Action Service, respectively. The FCO’s 2018 Human Rights and Democracy report states that denial of the right to freedom of religion or belief was a “matter of increasing international concern”, and in 2019 the UK government created a special envoy for religious freedom (UK Human Rights and Democracy Report, 2018). Italy and Germany have made advocacy for faith communities integral to their foreign policy agendas. Religious freedom enjoys support across the political spectrum. Proponents include liberal internationalists, human rights advocates, advocacy groups for whom some form of Christianity serves as the foundation of democracy and freedom, American nationalists for whom the “city on a hill” narrative resonates with ideals of American exceptionalism, European rights advocates concerned with the fate of persecuted Christians, and missionaries for whom religious liberalization signals a newfound openness to their calling. Religious freedom is celebrated as a fundamental human right and legal standard that can be measured and achieved by all political collectivities. It is a matter of persuading citizens and governments to comply with a universal norm. States and societies are perched on a spectrum of progress, inclined either toward the achievement of religious freedom as a social fact, or slipping backwards into persecution and violence. The US IRFA legislation attributes the failure to achieve religious freedom to a lack of social and cultural maturity: “In many nations where severe violations of religious freedom occur . . . there is not sufficient cultural and social understanding of international norms of religious freedom” (International Religious Freedom Act, Sec. 501)”. This chapter steps back from the celebration of religious freedom as an unalloyed good to assess its promise and perils as a global political project. Rather than ask what is religious freedom and how can it be promoted, it asks: what kind of world does religious freedom create? I suggest that religious freedom is a particular mode of governing social difference that implicates religion in complex and variable ways. Guarantees of religious freedom neither magically instantiate a stable and universal norm, nor do they realize the promise of any single religious tradition in a secular world. Rather, “governmentalizing” religion – making it an object of state regulation and reform – shapes how people live out their religion (Slotte, 2010, p. 54). When religious identity becomes a matter of political concern, as it did for the Turkish boys in the epigraph, it increases the odds of conflict and violence along religious lines. Religion is politicized. This chapter makes three arguments. First, governing through religious rights singles out individuals and groups for legal protection as religious individuals and groups. It defines them in religious or sectarian terms rather than on the basis of other affinities and relations – for example, as groups based on social class, political leanings, historical and geographical ties, neighborhood affiliations, kinship networks, or socio-economic status. In positioning religion as prior to other identities, religious rights heighten the political salience of whatever the authorities designate as “religion”. This deepens religious-religious and religious-secular divides, leading to an “ecology of affiliation” (Shields, 2009, p. 218) grounded in religious difference. Second, governing through religious rights shapes how states distinguish citizens from each other, often via the law. It identifies groups as “religions” and locates them on a political field in which they are presumed to represent a common type – religious groups – and to operate as equals. It legally consecrates these groups as faith communities with identifiable leaders and bounded orthodoxies. It calls forth official spokespersons to represent these communities, privileging leaders who enjoy friendly relations with the authorities. Not only are particular hierarchies and orthodoxies strengthened, but dissenters, doubters, those who practice multiple traditions, and those on the margins of community become invisible. Some violations of human 140

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dignity fail to register at all, languishing beneath the threshold of recognition as governments devote scarce resources to rescuing persecuted religionists and defending faith communities that enjoy political legitimacy. This is the politics of religious freedom. Certain questions recur: What counts as religion? Which religions merit protection? Which leaders to engage? Third, international religious freedom prioritizes belief as the core of religion. To be religious today is to believe in one of a few major belief systems, skewed towards Christianity as the template of what it means to be “religious”. This reflects an understanding of religion and the religious subject that emerged out of European Christianity and is not universal. To treat belief as the core of religion sanctifies a particular religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs and enacts them. It prioritizes individual subjects for whom believing is taken as the defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to choose one’s belief as the essence of what it means to be free. Those who subscribe to a modern liberal understanding of faith and those willing and able to reform their religion to conform to such an understanding are privileged. Other ways of relating to communities beyond the self are excluded.

The logic of religious rights Governing through religious rights singles out individuals and groups for legal protection as religious individuals and collectivities. There is an imperative to define identity in religious terms: “are you this or are you that?” You need to know what you are to know how you fit in. Individuals with multiple affiliations or mixed backgrounds are uneasily accommodated in these strict rubrics of identity and difference. Those who do not identify with orthodox versions of protected religions fall between the cracks. Families that include multiple traditions under the same roof must choose a side. Individuals can either make political claims on religious grounds, or have no ground from which to speak (Castelli, 2007, p. 684). This occurred in Bosnia in the 1990s, when many who described themselves as atheists before the war woke up to find themselves identified – and divided – by a newly salient religious identity (Campbell, 1998). Second, singling out religion from among the different given and chosen affiliations makes religious-religious and religious-secular divides seem natural and fixed. Individuals and groups are expected to identify along religious lines rather than on the basis of other ties – whether socio-economic, geographic, familial, professional, or political. This lends political agency and authenticity to religious groups. As religious groups come to occupy what Castelli (2007, p. 684) describes as “the full terrain of the thinkable vis-à-vis freedom”, it creates the world that religious freedom purports merely to describe. Religions become tractable, alienable commodities, in the sense described by Jean and John Comaroff (2009) in their work on ethnicity, and by Samuli Schielke (2010, pp. 4–5) in his discussion of world religions as entities with agency. As the Comoroffs explain, the commodification of ethnicity “has the curious capacity to conjure a collective imagining and to confer upon it social, political, and material currency – not to mention ‘authenticity’, the spectre that haunts the commodification of culture everywhere” (2009, p.  10). Governing citizens as Christians, Muslims, or Hindus conjures a collective imagining of stable categories of religious affiliation and grants them political currency. It diminishes the possibility of cross-cutting, nonsectarian forms of politics. Third, governing through religious rights reduces complex social, historical, and political structures and histories into a problem of religion. It “discourages recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to which it is purportedly relevant” (Peletz, 2013, p. 626). It collapses a bewildering array of social, economic, historical, political, and geographical considerations into 141

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an emphasis on religion, deflecting attention from issues of caste, class, colonialism, economic justice, and land rights. An example is the international community’s response to the plight of the Rohingya of Myanmar. A population of roughly 800,000 living primarily in northwestern Burma bordering Bangladesh, the Rohingya claim Burmese citizenship but are effectively stateless, having been denied citizenship by the Burmese state, classified by the government as “Bengali immigrants” and subjected to “persecution, discrimination and intrusive restriction on their rights to marry and have families” (Akram, 2013, paragraph 10). Though many have lived in Rakhine state for generations, the Rohingya have suffered a long history of oppression. As Hodal (2012) explains, “large-scale Burmese government crackdowns on the Rohingya – including Operation Dragon King in 1978, and Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation in 1991 – forced hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh. Thousands of others have left for Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, many of them by boat”. State-sanctioned violence has worsened, with Rohingya driven out of their villages, separated from their families, and confined to squalid refugee camps. Those who remain in their villages cannot leave, even to go to the hospital. According to Elliott PrasseFreeman, “local media, citizen bloggers, Buddhist monks all rallied around the Rakhine. Or more accurately, rallied against the Rohingya”, describing them as illegal immigrants, a threat to Buddhism, a threat to security, and “simply aesthetically unpleasant”. In 2012 USCIRF called for religious freedom for the Rohingya as persecuted Muslims. Yet the Rohingya are not excluded from Burmese society exclusively with religious slurs, but also with racist, classist, and other insults. Prominent monks have turned against the Rohingya, calling for their exclusion along the lines of apartheid in South Africa or segregation in the southern United States (Head, 2013). A leaflet distributed by a monks’ organization described the Rohingya as “cruel by nature”. Ko Ko Gyi, a democracy activist and former political prisoner, said the Rohingya are not Burmese. A loosely organized Buddhist activist group composed of monks and laity called “969”, and its most prominent spokesperson, a Mandalay-based monk named U Wirathu, call for the total exclusion of the Rohingya from Burmese society. Claiming to work on behalf of the “religious rights and freedoms” of the majority Buddhist population, 969 reportedly “enjoys support from senior government officials, establishment monks and even some members of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), the political party of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi” (Marshall, 2013). Another 969 affiliate, the Organization for the Protection of Nation, Race and Religion – or, in the Burmese acronym, Ma Ba Tha, is also led by well-known Buddhist monks and oriented around pro-Buddhist, pro-Burman activism. Understanding the Rohingya’s plight requires situating them in a broad analytical field that includes but is not reduced to religious discrimination. Three factors are crucial. The first intertwines colonial history, geography, and elite political competition. Rakhine (Arakan) state, where many Rohingya live, was independent from Rangoon and Mandalay until the Burman conquest in 1785, and a strong sense of territorial identity distinguishes the region from the rest of Burma. Muslim-Buddhist “divide and rule” policy dates to the British colonial era (1824– 1948) and was exacerbated throughout the twentieth century and into the present. During the Japanese occupation, which began with the Imperial Army’s invasion in 1942, the British armed Rohingya “Force V” militias while the Japanese armed a variety of Buddhist-led groups, with the two sides pitted against each other in a proxy struggle (Schonthal, 2016). In 1962, the Burmese military seized power in a coup and sought to impose ethnic purity by marginalizing minorities and non-Buddhists, increasing tensions. In recent times, according to one Burmese dissident, the conflict with the Rohingya and the Kachin has served as a “useful distraction” from Burmese grievances against China and power struggles within the governing elite (Zaw, 2013, paragraphs 5–6). 142

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Second, the Burmese economy is under pressure as a result of economic competition due to the relaxation of military rule and heightened competition for jobs and natural resources. The Rohingya are easily scapegoated as illegal immigrants and threats to job or rent-seekers. These tensions have been exacerbated by state interest in the securitization of border areas. The government oversees security for a multi-billion-dollar China-Burma oil and gas pipeline that stretches over 1,500 miles from the Indian Ocean through Burma to the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming. The pipeline, bringing gas from the Shwe fields off the coast of Arakan state, allows China to bypass the Malacca Strait, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. After decades of conflict, there is a heightened securitization of Myanmar’s borderlands as neighbors seek economic opportunities that require “constructive engagement” and “borderland stability” (Smith, 2010). A third consideration is the rise of linguistic violence and de-humanization campaigns. The Rohingya have been stripped even of their name, and are increasingly referred to as “Bengalis”. This is significant in that the name “Rooinga” had been recognized as early as 1799, before the First Anglo-Burmese War. Today security forces compel Rohingya to refer to themselves as Bengalis (Prasse-Freeman, 2013, p. 2; Ferrie, 2013) to qualify for the government’s resettlement plan. As Ferrie (2013) reports, “when officials tried to survey displaced people in camps around Theak Kae Pyin village, protests broke out with women and children chanting, ‘We are Rohingya’ ”. Prasse-Freeman (2013, p. 3) reports that, “those who are killed are arguably not even killed as an identity group, but rather as so much detritus falling outside of a group, and hence outside of the political community entirely”. Discrimination against the Rohingya is complex and multifaceted: it is ethnic, racial, economic, political, environmental, post-colonial, and statist. One cannot isolate a single factor as the definitive cause of violence. To speak of the Rohingya as a persecuted religious minority singles out religious identity from the vast web of discriminatory forces in which they are suspended. It misrepresents the crisis. It deflects attention away from the Rohingya’s comprehensive exclusion from Burmese society, masks economic and political interests that profit from their subordination and repression, and hides the role of political and economic disagreements among the governing elite concerning the speed and content of proposed reforms. It ignores the anti-immigrant and xenophobic basis of the discrimination, as well as the economic insecurities and power dynamics accompanying Burma’s tense and tentative opening to foreign investment. But the problem runs deeper. To depict the violence as fundamentally “religious” reinforces 969’s contention that Muslim-Buddhist tensions are the most salient aspect of the crisis. Foregrounding religion strengthens the hand of violent nationalist movements that depend on hardand-fast lines of Muslim-Buddhist difference and immutable ties among majoritarian (Buddhist) religion, race, and Burmese identity. The logic of religious rights empowers those for whom the Rohingya are subhuman. By reinforcing their status as Muslims rather than as Burmese citizens, lobbying for the religious rights of the Rohingya makes it less likely that the Burmese government – or the democratizing monks – will include the Rohingya in Burmese society as humans, rather than as (subordinated) Muslims. Nearly a decade ago, former US Ambassador John Campbell urged policy-makers not to describe the violence in Nigeria as religious. “Are people [in Nigeria] being killed because they’re Muslim, herders, or Hausa? It is often very hard to say” (Campbell, 2013). Are the Rohingya being killed because they are Muslim, immigrants, or because they are perceived as an economic or political threat to the former junta? It is hard to say. Many factors lead to discrimination and violence, including local histories, class disparities, disputes over resources, urban-rural tensions, family grievances, outside interventions, colonial legacies, land disputes, 143

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and economic rivalries. Reducing all of these to religious intolerance means that the multidimensional tapestry of human sociality is lost from sight, and the problems faced by persecuted groups become intractable. Imposing a religious rights framework heightens the socio-political salience of Muslim-Buddhist difference. Rather than defanging 969 and its allies, it aggravates perceived religious chasms while deferring the potential of alternative, cross-cutting movements that could challenge those who profit from genocide. These dynamics are not unique to Burma. The logic of religious rights entrenches differences between groups defined as “religions”. It eclipses other axes of being and belonging. The rise to prominence of religious rights is transforming the plight of groups all over the world who are subject to pressure to constitute themselves legally as faith communities with clear boundaries, identifiable leaders, and neatly defined orthodoxies. The next section examines the consequences and costs of these designations.

Empowerment and exclusion The logic of religious rights funnels individuals into discrete faith communities and empowers their spokespersons. It requires that religious identity be stable and singular in order to be politically legible. It compels those who identify with more than one tradition to choose one over the others. Boundaries solidify. Lines between groups become more salient, a process described by political theorist William Connolly (1995, p. 167) as “overcoding”. Religious rights overcodes the boundaries between religions and sharpens the line between religion and non-religion. It endows particular communities with agency and authenticity. This “assumption of strong boundaries and clear identities within the community” means that “rather than breaking down these boundaries the policy aims to work within them and to build on the assumed solidarity of the community itself ” (Stringer, 2013, p. 137). Faith communities need representatives. Governments and other power holders expect and encourage religious leaders to step forward as political actors. The US Agency for International Development Program Guide on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding informs practitioners: Engagement with top religious leadership is critical to engagement at the local level. Without buy-in at this level, leaders at the local level may be reluctant to participate in the program even if they are interested and personally supportive of the program. As a result, organizing at the community level requires a great deal of groundwork and relationship building with senior leaders. (US Agency for International Development, 2009, p. 11) Senior leaders meet with governments, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations, and other authorities. The United States relies on them to secure access to local populations and garner support for American strategic objectives. For instance, a Pentagon contractor paid Sunni religious scholars in Iraq $144,000 to assist in its public relations campaign. The contractor, “The Lincoln Group”, was paid to “identify religious leaders who could help produce messages that would persuade Sunnis in violence-ridden Anbar Province to participate in national elections and reject the insurgency” (Cloud and Gerth, 2006). Because such programs are sect-preferential, they would violate the Establishment Clause if undertaken domestically in the United States (Hayden, 2006). The logic of religious engagement empowers religious groups that have friendly relations with the authorities. It enacts a mini-religious establishment. 144

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At the same time, less established religions and those that do not qualify as religions become politically invisible. Violations of human dignity that fail to register as religion infringements languish beneath the threshold of recognition. To see these dynamics requires expanding our field of vision beyond mainstream legal and political understandings of religion and religious freedom to include a broader and more diverse variety of religiosities. It requires understanding local practices on their own terms, even or especially when they appear as odd or illegible. To fail to do so is to miss or to misconstrue a whole field of contentious politics. A case in point are the K’iche’, a Mayan ethnic group living in the western highlands of Guatemala. Tensions between the K’iche’ and the Guatemalan state increased in the wake of the K’iche’ People’s Council’s (KPC) unanimous rejection of mining and hydroelectric projects proposed in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other treaties. Foreign companies responded with offers to pay the KPC a higher percentage of profits, failing to understand that the K’iche’ refuse to allow the destruction of the earth for religious and cultural reasons. The KPC’s refusal has led to discrimination, dispossession, and violence, including massive violations of K’iche’ cultural heritage and land rights facilitated by Canadian and multinational mining corporations, the police, and the Guatemalan state. But officially there is no violation of religious freedom. K’iche’ attachment to the land does not register legally as religious. This makes it impossible for them to avail themselves of legal protections for religious freedom. Their persecution is invisible to legal instruments guaranteeing religious freedom, because, in an important sense, they are perceived as having no (recognizable) religion. The 2012 International Religious Freedom Report for Guatemala confirms this interpretation, with “no reports of abuses of religious freedom” in the country that year. Violations of K’iche’ religio-cultural heritage fall below the threshold of legibility. The politics of non-recognition is also a factor in the Central African Republic (CAR) where, in 2010, the State Department’s Religious Freedom Report noted that as many as 60% of the imprisoned women in the country had been charged with “witchcraft”, a form of African traditional religion considered a criminal offense by the government. But discrimination against African traditional religion does not count as religious discrimination and is not protected under the umbrella of religious freedom. Women imprisoned for witchcraft cannot suffer from violations of religious freedom because, in the eyes of the government and the authors of the State Department report, they have no religion. The State Department concluded that the CAR “generally respected religious freedom in practice”, and gave the government a good ranking. Like the K’iche’, imprisoned women in the CAR fail to appear on the radar screen because abuses of their traditional practices do not count as violations of the right to believe that is protected by international religious freedom. These instruments favor a religious economies model that privileges consumers of religion for whom believing is taken as the defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free. Those identifying with more than one religion also find themselves in a perilous position. At the time of its creation in 2011, the new state of South Sudan guaranteed religious rights for minority citizens, including Muslims. Yet the government struggled because in South Sudan, as elsewhere, it can be difficult to classify citizens as believers in a single faith tradition (Salomon and Walton, 2012, p. 406). Many South Sudanese practice both African traditional religions and Christianity or Islam, and do not distinguish sharply between these and other traditional practices. Under a regime of religious freedom, those who identify with several traditions are compelled to choose between (now, different and discrete) religious traditions or they become religiously invisible – even as officially recognized religions gain newfound political standing. The result is a striated political field organized by and through government-defined religious 145

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difference. In these circumstances, Hackett explains, “African indigenous or traditional religions are hampered by being part of a generalized and heterogeneous category with no clear designation or centralized leadership”. Indigenous religions become “religious freedom misfits”. The solution, Hackett concludes, is not to assimilate them into international protections because “recent moves to grant institutional, protective space to indigenous expressions of ‘spirituality’ not only essentialize and objectify traditional forms of belief and practice but also translate and recast them to appeal to cultural outsiders who formally or informally adjudge these rights’ claims” (Hackett, 2015, pp. 90–91, 96). Religious freedom is a specific, historically located technique of modern governance located within, and not above, history and politics. It requires that the government decide what constitutes religion (and non-religion), who counts as a legitimate religious subject or association, and who is authorized to represent them. This entrenches divisions by enforcing the interests and identities of groups defined in religious terms. It strengthens the hand of those in a position to determine what counts as religion, and whose religion counts most. It encourages states to approach religions in “cookie-cutter” fashion as static bodies of tradition and convention, and objects of regulation and reform. Practices that fall outside of the tradition are pushed aside or suppressed. Robert Orsi identified this dynamic in the tense relationship between the Catholic Church and the southern Italian popular religion of Italian Harlem’s Catholic community. Forms of religion that have “little to do with the Church”, do not “look like religion”, or are deemed politically undesirable or unorthodox – perhaps they challenge caste hierarchies, threaten entrenched material interests, or cast doubt on the legitimacy of social order in new ways – are cast out as “pagan and primitive” (Orsi, 2010, pp. 220–221). These dynamics of empowerment and exclusion cannot be overcome with a more informed understanding of religion or a more effective legal regime. Patchen Markell (2003) challenges the equation of recognition with justice, showing how the conception of justice employed by recognition obscures the dynamics of subordination. Correspondingly, the politics of recognizing faith communities and their leaders contributes to fixing politically authorized religious difference while straining and subduing alternative forms of subjectivity and agency. Analyzing the legal and affective practices and social effects of liberal multiculturalism in Australian indigenous communities, Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has shown that the insistence that colonized subjects identify not with the colonizer but with authentic traditional culture actually reinforces liberal regimes of governance rather than opening them up to difference. In the case at hand, the authorities marginalize those that resist or subvert the clean taxonomies and neat hierarchies of the secular-religious and religious-religious divides instantiated through regimes of religious freedom. They fall between the cracks. Exploring the diverse political possibilities in the lead-up to the establishment of Pakistan and Israel as a “Muslim Homeland” and a “Jewish National Home”, respectively, Maria Birnbaum traces the ways in which “Muslim” and “Jewish” references became differentiable and politically recognizable – in the process subsuming and suppressing a multitude of ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory, political possibilities. Uncovering the reifying tendencies of recognition, Birnbaum gestures toward alternative religio-political sensibilities that animated debates over partition (Birnbaum, 2020, 2014). There are also parallels between religious rights and the politics of recognition of sexual and religious minorities. Joseph Massad (2002), in his famous critique of the “Gay International”, argues that this global movement reifies boundaries and risks imposing western sexual ontologies and categorizations in diverse contexts (Massad, 2002, p. 363). Adapting his terms, one could say that a “Religious Freedom International” engenders “religions” in the terms described in this chapter while rendering invisible diverse and multiform religious practices that 146

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cannot or refuse to be assimilated into its frame. The next section discusses the forms of social and religious being and belonging excluded by a focus on belief as the essence of religion.

Believing in religious freedom Governing through religious rights regulates religious activity along particular lines and in accordance with the logic of the free-religious marketplace. As Janet Jakobsen explains, “Freedom in this sense – and this market-based sense of freedom becomes dominant in modernity – is not the repression of activity, but it is the regulated enactment of activity along particular lines” (2005, p. 285). Religious freedom is the regulated enactment of religion along particular lines. Privileging some forms of religion over others, it excludes modes of living in the world, and ways that individuals are beholden to communities beyond the self, that do not take belief as the essence of religiosity. International authorities have struggled to define religion or belief for the purposes of protecting religious freedom. For the UN Human Rights Committee, religion or belief includes “theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief ”. For the UK FCO, whether a belief is protected depends on its “cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance”: The word “religion” is commonly, but not always, associated with belief in a transcendent deity or deities, i.e. a superhuman power or powers with an interest in human destiny. The term “belief ” does not necessarily involve a divine being; it denotes a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance. So not all beliefs are covered by this protection. For example, if someone believed that the moon was made of cheese, this belief would not be likely to meet the test above. (UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2010, p. 4) The guidelines elaborate: “The following are examples of beliefs considered to fall within the protection of this freedom: druidism, veganism, pacifism, the divine light mission, scientology, Krishna Consciousness Movement, humanism, atheism and agnosticism” (UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2010, p. 4). This anguished attempt to define religion for the purposes of international legal regulation contrasts sharply with the fact that scholars of religion gave up long ago on an exclusive focus on belief as the essence of religion. Over the past three decades, explains Constance Furey, “attention to body and society corrected the Protestant-style tendency to equate religion with interiority and belief . . . .” This course correction led to a “fundamental change in the way many religionists now think about the religious subject . . . this scholarly trend in religious studies strongly undermined the assumption that the object of the religionist’s inquiry is (and should be) a freely volitional subject” (Furey, 2012, pp. 8–9). Yvonne Sherwood agrees that religion scholars “have spent most of their energy in the last 30 years decoupling religion from belief ” which has been “kicked into the sidelines as a Christian/colonial imposition” (Sherwood, 2015, p. 34). This shift permitted scholars of religion to catch up with the vagaries of lived religious practice and experience. Religious affiliation has always involved more than a choice between belief and disbelief. Citing a colonial American minister from the Carolina backwoods, historian Jon Butler reports that the minister “observed religious bewilderment, fascination, repulsion, confusion, and a distanced evasion, including indifference, rather than unbelief or a choice between belief and unbelief, or atheism” (Butler, 2010, pp. 206–207). Butler concludes that “the presence in 147

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modern times of choice to believe, as well as choice about what to believe, is the modern representation of long difficulties and complexities of belief itself, certainly in the West” Butler, 2010, p. 215). The difficulty with equating belief and religion is that “the laity have seldom phrased their own views about religion in such dichotomous and essentially exclusive ways” (Butler, 2010, p. 211). T.M. Luhrmann reinforces the point with reference to American evangelicalism: Secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice . . . that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches . . . people went to church to experience joy. (Luhrmann, 2013) Robert Orsi agrees, noting that “the word belief bears heavy weight in public talk about religion in contemporary America: to ‘believe in’ a religion means that one has deliberated over and then assented to its propositional truths, has chosen this religion over other available options, a personal choice unfettered by authority, tradition, or society. What matters about religion from this perspective are its ideas and not its things, practices, or presences. This is not necessarily how Americans actually are religious, of course, but this account of religion carries real normative force” (Orsi, 2005, p. 18). Viewed sceptically by those who study religion, the arguably nonexistent freely volitional subject who chooses to believe (or not) persists and carries considerable force in the world of international religious freedom. This is in part attributable to the historical context in which Article 18 of the UDHR emerged, including the influence of Christian missionaries whose interests lay in advancing a version of religious freedom that stressed the freedom to change one’s religion. As Linde Lindkvist explains, “the stress on the freedom of religious choice and the freedom to change was not derived from an abstract notion of what religious liberty is but rather stemmed from tangible concerns voiced by missionary organizations. By having this component of religious liberty recognized as a universal human right, they sought international legitimacy for those forces that worked to transform the political and religious landscapes of ‘Mohammedan societies’ ” (2013, pp.  442–443). The protection of religious freedom as a universal norm hinges upon a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them freely. This requires subjects for whom believing is taken as the universal defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to choose one’s belief as the essence of what it means to be free. Anchoring this approach to religion is a specific, historically located figure of faith, and a historically contingent notion of belief. Talal Asad questions the universality of the liberal democratic requirement that it is belief or conscience that properly defines the individual, thereby representing, for many liberals, the essence of religiosity (Asad, 2012). He dates this concept of belief to a new religious psychology and new concept of the state that began to emerge in seventeenth-century Europe. In that religious psychology, which is at the core of John Locke’s theory of toleration, belief should not be coerced because to do so would affront the dignity of the individual, and it cannot be coerced because it is located in the private space of the mind. Authenticity, according to liberal philosophers, thus “consists in the subject’s ability to choose his or her beliefs and act on them” (Asad, 2012, p. 43). Donald Lopez Jr. describes this notion as “an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths” (Lopez, Jr., 1998, p. 31). A particular understanding of the secular state

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accompanied this discourse of belief. “Although the insistence that beliefs cannot be changed from outside appeared to be saying something empirical about ‘personal belief ’ (its singular, autonomous and inaccessible-to-others location), it was really part of a political discourse about ‘privacy,’ a claim to civil immunity with regard to religious faith that reinforced the idea of a secular state and a particular conception of religion” (Asad, 2012, p. 44). Asad calls attention to the shifting, lived experience of belief. Experiences now translated as “belief ” (croyance) were always embedded in distinctive social and political relationships and sensibilities. This is illustrated in Dorothea Weltecke’s description of a young peasant woman, Aude Fauré, who was brought before the Inquisition: She was unable, she said, to credere in Deum. What she meant by this . . . emerges from the detailed context: She took the existence of a God for granted. It was because, in her desperation, she couldn’t see in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because she found herself struggling with disturbing thoughts about incarnation, that she had no hope of God’s mercy. It is not clear that the doctrine of God’s body appearing in the form of bread is being challenged here; what is certainly being expressed is her anguished relationship to him as a consequence of her own incapacity to see anything but bread. In short, it is not that our present concept of belief (that something is true) was absent in pre-modern society but that the words translated as such were usually embedded in distinctive social and political relationships, articulated distinctive sensibilities; they were first of all lived and only occasionally theorized. (Asad, 2012, pp. 45–47; emphasis added) This account of belief complicates the notion of a universal right to religious freedom understood as the freedom to believe or not. Inasmuch as the protection of religious freedom hinges upon and sanctifies a religious psychology that relies on a particular notion of an autonomous subject who chooses and enacts beliefs, and a particular notion of the secular state that does not (indeed cannot) coerce such beliefs, such laws and policies also privilege particular forms of religious subjectivity over others. They exclude modes of living in the world, as bodies in communities and in relationships to which they are obliged, without concern for individual belief. And even belief itself is limited. Religion or belief is a limited membership club: “There is no place at the table for purely political beliefs (known as ‘opinions’) – that is, beliefs that cannot aggregate in official and large collectives, or beliefs that lack the institutional edifices and props of antiquity to assert their status and make their case” (Sherwood, 2015, p. 41). International religious freedom is part of a larger story involving the costs and consequences of mistaking “a contingent power arrangement of the modern West for a universal and timeless feature of human existence” (Cavanaugh, 2009, p. 17). Despite all of this, efforts to globalize the rights of believers and non-believers persist. Prominent scholars have joined a chorus of experts warning that legal protection for religious freedom should be seen no longer as “only an option” as “it is fast becoming a necessity in order to prevent the further erosion of the position of religious believers in many countries” (Evans, 2011). Advocates like Evans have charged the international community with “developing a more precise understanding of what the freedom of religion as a human right actually entails, and to do so in a coherent and transparent fashion to which all interested parties can contribute” so that “we might then be better placed to develop the means by which it can be realized” (Evans, 2011). There is a drive to settle on a norm, agree on a definition, and cement it in a convention as a cure for a host of societal ills, from poverty and oppression to violence and discrimination.

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An international convention would breathe new life into an anemic global consensus that has not done enough to stem a rising tide of hostility and violence. It would tackle head-on “the overriding problem, which is how to hold States to account for their own failure to respect and protect the rights of all believers” (Evans, 2011). The reference to religion or belief, particularly outside the United States, includes non-religious belief as well. It is not only religionists but also non-religionists that are defined by belief. It is everyone. Yet the historical particularities of the rise of a certain economy of belief, and its close ties to modern, post-Protestant notions of religion, subvert the promise of these ambitions. Such advocacy not only protects particular kinds of religious subjects, but it also helps to create individuals and faith communities for whom choosing and believing, in the sense historicized by Asad and lionized by Evans, becomes the defining characteristic of what it is to be religious, and the right to choose to believe (or not) as what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief – belief in belief, as it were – across communities of belief is what it means to have achieved religious freedom. There are no exceptions. This identification of faith communities with a right to (non)belief sidelines those for whom religion is attained through practice and lived relationally as ethics, culture, and even politics but without, necessarily, belief and, perhaps, as a matter of command or presence, and not freedom. As Orsi explains: “belief has always struck me as the wrong question . . . the saints, gods, demons, ancestors, and so on are real in experience and practice, in relationships between heaven and earth, in the circumstances of people’s lives and histories, and in the stories people tell about them” (2005, p. 18). It is not that belief is necessarily absent or irrelevant to religious experience, but we need to destabilize its privilege and question its naturalness for the religious subject. It is not to deny the presence of belief but to posit its contingency on certain political, legal, and historical processes, and its complex relation to affective and corporeal practices in ways that destabilize the Cartesian divide and the dichotomy between ethics and theology. The foreclosure on religion without and beyond belief shuts out dissenters, doubters, and those on the margins of or outside of those “faith communities” celebrated by religious freedom. Who decides what counts as a religious belief deserving of special protection? “Should beliefs denounced by the medieval Latin church as superstitio (wrongheadedness) therefore be regarded as secular beliefs? Or should they be pronounced religious on the criteria provided by late-Enlightenment critics for whom all religion was superstition? Is the intention to carry out a particular act always crucial to its religiosity? If so, how and by whom is that to be judged?” (Asad, 2012, p. 46). It is also important to note that certain ways of life are protected under contemporary regimes of religious freedom: “the sort of faith-based life that accords with a modern liberal understanding of faith” (Slotte, 2010, p. 56). Protected belief includes a few major belief systems, skewed towards Christianity and token “unbelief ”. This infrastructure of religious freedom is disseminated through secular international institutions and instruments. The freely choosing, believing or nonbelieving subject is, like Lila Abu-Lughod’s subject of secular liberalism, “everywhere – translated, resisted, vernacularized, invoked in political struggles, and made the standard language enforced by power” (Abu-Lughod, 2010, p. 85). In the words of former US Ambassadorat-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson Cook, “anyone who identifies as a believer . . . can come to our roundtable” (Cook, 2013). This allows the state to claim to have covered all the bases. Believers and non-believers are protected through a proliferating series of public international legal regimes and administrative initiatives that adopt this template. These initiatives promote a particular notion of (free) religion understood as a set of propositions to which believers assent (Asad, 1993, p. 41), making religion, as Webb Keane (2007, p. 67) puts it, “a matter not of material disciplines or of ritual practices . . . but of subjective beliefs”. Part of the strength and appeal of international religious freedom is drawn from its entanglement with 150

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the political doctrine of freedom. Religiously liberated subjects are not brought into a particular American or international or capitalist normative system. They are brought into freedom itself.

The end of religious freedom? Celebrated as the key to emancipating individuals and minority communities from violence, poverty, and oppression, religious freedom is heralded the world over as the solution to political and economic backwardness, the tyranny of immoderate and archaic forms of religion, and the violence and despair associated with a host of societal ills from women’s oppression to economic desperation to environmental degradation. Communities stand in need of transformative social engineering to create the conditions in which secular states and their religious subjects become tolerant, believing or non-believing consumers of free religion, willing practitioners of faithbased solutions to collective problems, and compliant defenders of American and international security. Guaranteeing a right to religious freedom ensures an ideal balance between allegiance to the state and to (reformed) religion under law. Powerful forces, including the law, incentivize people to articulate their needs and demands in the language of religious freedom. Some may feel they have no alternative. If being a persecuted religionist makes it more likely that development aid will be forthcoming or asylum will be granted, then there will be a rise in persecuted religionists. The point is neither to judge people who find themselves in difficult circumstances nor to undermine local groups working to assist them. But there is a larger story to be told. Privileging the category of religion in developing foreign policy, writing constitutions, protecting human rights, distributing aid, and designing humanitarian interventions creates a particular kind of world and leaves behind other possibilities for coexistence. This chapter has analyzed the costs of locking into this narrative by protecting religion in law, positing it as a stable and coherent category in policy analysis, and privileging it as a basis for foreign policy. Viewing conflicts through the wider lens I have proposed reveals that religious rights often exacerbates the problems it is intended to solve. Religion is depicted as an exceptionally threatening form of difference that needs to be kept in check by the authorities (the logic of sectarianism). Established voices and institutions of protected groups that enjoy good relations with the authorities are privileged, while others falling into the grey areas between the secular and the religious are marginalized (the logic of empowering faith communities). An understanding of religion as the right to choose and enact one’s belief or non-belief is sanctified (the logic of the free-religious marketplace). The solution is not a more inclusive mechanism of protection or a more inclusive model of religion as communal practice or ethics. A new and improved religious freedom will (re)-enact a new version of the same exclusionary logic. Governing difference through religious rights and freedoms authorizes particular understandings of what it means to be religious, and what it means for religion to be free. In articulating and naturalizing the lines of difference it is meant to tame, it risks exacerbating the very social tensions, discrimination, and violence that it claims to be uniquely equipped to address. In its strongest versions, religious freedom “usurps the entire universe of moral discourse” (Asad, 2003, p. 138), capturing the field of emancipatory possibility, effacing the distinction between law and justice.

Note 1 This chapter is adapted from Chapter 3 of E.S. Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), reprinted with the permission of Princeton University Press.

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References Books and articles Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Against Universals: The Dialects of (Women’s) Human Rights and Human Capabilities.” In Rethinking the Human, eds. J. Michelle Molina and Donald K. Swearer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 69–94. Akram, Sophia. “Cutting Borders: Ethnic Tensions and Burmese Refugees.” Fair Observer, September 19, 2013. www.fairobserver.com/region/asia_pacific/cutting-borders-ethnic-tensions-and-burmese-refugees/ (accessed 9/8/21). Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Asad, Talal. “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 36–57. Birnbaum, Maria. “Becoming Recognizable: Postcolonial Independence and the Reification of Religion in International Relations,” (Ph.D. Thesis). Florence: European University Institute, 2014. Birnbaum, Maria. “Recognizing Diversity: Establishing Religious Difference in Pakistan and Israel.” In Culture and Order in World Politics, eds. Christian Reus-Smit and Andrew Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 250–270. Butler, Jon. “Disquieted History in a Secular Age.” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 193–216. Campbell, David. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Campbell, John. “Africa Update Panel Presentation, Seventh Annual Religion and Foreign Policy Summer Workshop.” Council on Foreign Relations (New York), June 25, 2013. Castelli, Elizabeth A. “Theologizing Human Rights: Christian Activism and the Limits of Religious Freedom.” In Non-Governmental Politics, eds. Michel Feher with Gaëlle Krikorian and Yates McKee. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Cavanaugh, William. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cloud, David S. and Jeff Gerth. “Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda.” New York Times, January 2, 2006. www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/politics/02propaganda.html?_r=0 (accessed 9/8/21). Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Connolly, William E. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Cook, Suzan Johnson. “Religious Tolerance at Home and Abroad.” Panel presentation at the Seventh Annual Religion and Foreign Policy Summer Workshop (New York), June 25, 2013. De Bernières, Louis. Birds Without Wings. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Evans, Malcolm. “Advancing Freedom of Religion or Belief: Agendas for Change.” Lambeth Inter Faith Lecture (Lambeth Palace), June 8, 2011. https://academic.oup.com/ojlr/article-abstract/1/1/5/1547608 Ferrie, Jarred. “Why Myanmar’s Rohingya Are Forced to Say They Are Bengali.” CSMonitor.com, June 2, 2013. www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/0602/Why-Myanmar-s-Rohingya-are-forcedto-say-they-are-Bengali (accessed 9/8/21). Furey, Constance M. “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(1) (2012): pp. 7–33. Hackett, Rosalind I. J. “Traditional, African, Religious, Freedom?” In Politics of Religious Freedom, eds. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood and Peter G. Danchin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 89–98. Hayden, Jessica Powley. “Mullahs on a Bus: The Establishment Clause and U.S. Foreign Aid.” The Georgetown Law Journal 95(1) (2006): pp. 171–206. Head, Jonathan. “The Unending Plight of Burma’s Unwanted Rohingyas.” BBC News, June 30, 2013. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23077537 (accessed 9/8/21). Hodal, Kate. “Trapped Inside Burma’s Refugee Camps, the Rohingya People Call for Recognition.” The Guardian, December  20, 2012. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/20/burma-rohingya-muslimrefugee-camps (accessed 9/8/21). Jakobsen, Janet R. “Sex + Freedom = Regulation. Why?” Social Text 23(3–4) (2005): pp. 285–308.

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The politics of international religious freedom Keane, Webb. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Lindkvist, Linde. “The Politics of Article 18: Religious Liberty in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4(3) (2013): pp. 429–447. Lopez, Donald S., Jr. “Belief.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 21–35. Luhrman, T.M. “Belief Is the Least Part of Faith.” New York Times, May  29, 2013. www.nytimes. com/2013/05/30/opinion/luhrmann-belief-is-the-least-part-of-faith.html?emc=eta1&_r=0 (accessed 9/9/21). Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Marshall, Andrew R.C. “Myanmar Gives Official Blessing to Anti-Muslim Monks.” Reuters, June 27, 2013. www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-969-specialreport/special-report-myanmar-gives-official-blessing-to-anti-muslim-monks-idUSBRE95Q04720130627 (accessed 9/8/21). Massad, Joseph A. “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World.” Public Culture 14(2) (2002): pp. 361–385. Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Orsi, Robert A. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (3rd edition). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Peletz, Michael. “Malaysia’s Syariah Judiciary as Global Assemblage: Islamization, Corporatization, and Other Transformations in Context.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55(3) (2013): pp. 603–633. Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. “Scapegoating in Burma.” Anthropology Today 29(4) (2013): pp. 2–3. Salomon, Noah and Jeremy F. Walton. “Religious Criticism, Secular Criticism, and the ‘Critical Study of Religion’: Lessons from the Study of Islam.” In The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 403–420. Schielke, Samuli. “Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam.” ZMO Working Papers 2 (2010): pp. 1–16. Schonthal, Benjamin. “Making the Muslim Other in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.” In Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 234–257. Shields, Sarah. “Mosul, the Ottoman Legacy, and the League of Nations.” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3(2) (2009): pp. 2–6. Sherwood, Yvonne. “On the Freedom of the Concepts of Religion and Belief.” In Politics of Religious Freedom, eds. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 29–44. Slotte, Pamela. “The Religious and the Secular in European Human Rights Discourse.” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 21 (2010): pp. 1–56. Smith, Martin. “Ethnic Politics in Myanmar: A Year of Tension and Anticipation.” Journal of Southeast Asian Affairs (2010): pp. 214–234. Stringer, Martin. Discourses on Religious Diversity: Explorations in an Urban Ecology. London: Routledge, 2013. Zaw, Aung. “Are Myanmar’s Hopes Fading?” The New York Times, April  24, 2013. www.nytimes. com/2013/04/25/opinion/will-hatred-kill-the-dream-of-a-peaceful-democratic-myanmar.html (accessed 9/8/21).

Government documents International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, HR 2431, 105th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1998). UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. “Freedom of Religion or Belief – How the FCO Can Help Promote Respect for This Human Right.” London, June  2010. www.gov.uk/government/publications/freedom-of-religion-or-belief-how-the-fco-can-help-promote-respect-for-this-human-right (accessed 9/9/21).

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11 RELIGION ON THE BATTLEFIELD Ron E. Hassner

Introduction The scholarship on religion and war draws on two historical moments. The first is the mythologized memory of the crusades, imagined as the ideal type of a war motivated by religion. In this account of the crusades, medieval armies embarked on wars of conquest in which the identities of participants, their motivations, goals, and rewards were defined by religion. The reality was quite different: European rulers were motivated by power politics, primarily the threat posed by the Seljuq Empire to the Byzantine Empire, and internal European power struggles (Stark, 2010). Some knights may well have joined the enterprise due to pious motives (or so their chroniclers would later insist), but most were drawn east by the allures of adventure and greed, attacking not only Muslims but European Jews and fellow Christians. Muslim imperialism in southwestern, southern, eastern, and central Europe was far more frequent, forceful, successful, and enduring than the one-hundred-year-long crusader mini-kingdom. Nonetheless, the folklore surrounding the crusades has exerted a powerful hold on the imaginations of European and Middle Eastern people alike. They have forged a disparate series of skirmishes of moderate intensity, scattered across three hundred years, into a uniform phenomenon called “the crusades” that serves as the atavistic model for the causes, characteristics, and outcomes of religious wars. The second influential moment is far more recent. It consists of the events of 11 September  2001 (9/11), and subsequent Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In pitting Middle East Muslims against Christian Westerners, the conflicts evoked their mythical medieval precursors, adapted to modern times. In these new crusades, states engaged in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts against non-state actors who employed terrorism and guerrilla tactics. Policy-makers emphasized that only the terrorists and insurgents were motivated by religious zeal, a claim echoed by Islamist leaders of these organizations. Scholars, consequently, focused on the role that extremist religious ideas had played in recruiting, mobilizing, and organizing these non-state actors. They devoted far less attention to the religion of soldiers and conventional armies, to the role of moderate religious beliefs, and to the enabling and constraining functions that religion could play after the initiation of violence. Two decades past 9/11, the scholarship on religion and war is gradually working to correct the preconceptions imposed by these crusading models, old and new. Scholarly emphasis continues to privilege non-state actors, especially extremist non-state actors motivated by Islam. DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-13

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At the same time, social scientists have increasingly employed quantitative analysis to seek novel and surprising patterns in the interaction between religion and war. Their qualitatively focused colleagues have begun exploring religions other than Islam, and have noted the significance of religious practices, and not only abstract and radical ideas, on the behavior of conventional militaries. This has yielded no grand theory of religion and war that can compete with the crusade cliché. But, as the following pages document, it has led to important insights about religion and the causes and conduct of war. Research on religion as a cause of war has explored the role of religion in identifying the parties to conflict, mobilizing combatants, and organizing them into combat units (Klocek and Hassner, 2020). Research on religion and the conduct of war has explored the contribution of religion to discipline and unit cohesion, and the opportunities and constraints that religion places on military operations.

Religion as a cause of war Whether or not religion is a factor, let alone a primary cause, of contemporary conflict remains hotly debated. Competing teams of researchers have used statistical evidence to show that religious identity is and is not a primary predictor of conflict, that wars with a religious element are and are not deadlier and longer lasting, and that the domestic repression of religion is positively and negatively correlated with conflict (Fox, 2000; Fox, 2004; Lai, 2006; Pearce, 2007; Toft, 2007; Henne, 2012; Kim and Choi, 2017; Henne and Klocek, 2019; Deitch, 2020; Zellman and Brown, 2022). This uncertainty rests, in large part, on the difficulties inherent in treating religion as a variable. Setting aside fruitless disputes on whether or how religion should be defined, scholars disagree on how fine-grained the religious unit of analysis should be. It is not obvious whether religious identity is an individual, group, or organizational variable or how the salience of that variable should be assessed in a given community. Nor is it clear whether the religious significance of a given war should be measured in terms of the religious identities of participants, the religious issues at stake, or the symbols that accompany the conflict. Thus, some scholars use differences between the religious identities of leaders as a proxy for the religiousness of a war, while others closely analyze the frequencies with which religious rhetoric is employed. Dominant theories on the causes of war in international relations suggest that religion ought to play a secondary role in war. Wars are costly, and states are reluctant to engage in conflict unless the benefits exceed the costs. When they do fight, states strive for power, resources, territory, or survival, not to convert their enemies or capture their sacred relics. Religious “goods” provide few of the material rewards that states are interested in. If religion has not now, or in the past, played a primary role in motivating conflict, then what is its function in the lead-up to war? It has three distinct functions: it provides a source for group identity, it can mobilize participants in war, and it can shape the organizations that engage in war. In addition, some scholars argue that particular religious movements are uniquely war prone.

Identifying combatants Religious identities, like other cultural attributes, provide clear boundaries that demarcate who belongs to a particular group and who does not. These distinctions are established and strengthened by shared myths, creeds, moral frameworks, rituals, dress, and even dietary restrictions. Tragically, war is not only the product of these identities but also their engine, producing a 156

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vicious cycle. Once sectarian instincts have propelled groups into battle, tragedy and loss may drive religious identities even further apart. When groups fear for their safety, group distinctions become more salient, and stronger boundaries develop. Myths of persecution, stories of martyrdom, and memories of collective exile all grow particularly relevant in the face of threats. These promote a positive affinity for ingroup members and prime individuals to be sensitive to their survival. Consequently, communities, which were previously only loosely connected, may develop into unitary actors with a common identity (Gagnon, 2004). Out-group derogation intensifies when communities feel threatened. This may be because religious differences inhibit effective communication and lead to misunderstandings and violence (Johnston, 2001). Fears of group extinction can also lead to a deep psychological distrust and enmity toward out-groups (Huntington, 1996). The destruction of the nearly 500-year-old Babri mosque in Northern India by Hindu nationalists in 1992 and the ensuing intercommunal riots across the country illustrate how antipathy between groups can persist for generations (Hassner, 2009). Hindu extremists have also targeted Christian communities in India, whom they associate with the Western political order and the threat of privatized religion (Bauman, 2020). When religious identities intersect with other cleavages in society, they amplify these effects. Ethnic and religious differences, for instance, can reinforce one another, leading each to become more salient. Religious discrimination may overlap with political, economic, and other social inequalities. These cross-cutting grievances can deepen trust among co-religionists and serve as an organizational platform for political mobilization, as with Catholics in Poland during the Soviet period or Sikh communities in India during the 1980s. Religious grievances have linked communities across borders and across the globe. When a religious group forms a majority in one state but constitutes a politically repressed minority in another, tensions can result in pressure to intervene in other states through multiple channels. Individual leaders may feel a duty to act in defense of their suffering co-religionists in foreign lands. Domestic groups may exert pressure on government officials to intercede. International norms can drive states to assist specific religious communities far from the homeland (Finnemore, 1996). During the nineteenth century, for example, nearly all cases of state intervention to protect people other than their own nationals involved the defense of Christians from Ottoman Turks, such as French intervention in Lebanon on behalf of Maronite Christians. At the turn of the century, the Great Powers of Europe sent troops to China following the massacre of Protestant missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion. A similar pattern characterizes Iran’s intervention on behalf of Shiite populations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. At other times, states produce narratives of religious and ethnic affinity in order to justify interventions that serve a primarily political objective (Huang and Tabaar, 2021). Are some religious identities more war prone than others? Several scholars have followed Samuel Huntington in espousing an essentialist view on Muslim identity and conflict. Huntington famously argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards” (Huntington, 1996, p. 298). Huntington’s broader claims on the clash between religious blocks have come under significant scrutiny (Haynes, 2019). Recent wars have occurred as often within religious lines as they have across religious lines. Statistical analyses of interstate conflicts suggest that geographic proximity, alliances, state power, and authoritarianism are better predictors of conflict than Huntington’s civilizational groupings (Chiozza, 2002). The most significant wars of the past decade, mostly in the Middle East, have pitted Muslim combatants against other Muslim groups and subgroups in far greater numbers than Muslims against non-Muslims. 157

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Nonetheless, the war-proclivity of Muslim-majority states continues to be a topic of debate in the literature. Between 1940 and 2000, violent actors identifying with Islam were involved in more than 80% of civil wars in which religion was a primary factor. These “religious civil wars” are becoming more frequent, and they are more destructive and prolonged than other civil wars (Toft, 2007; Toft, 2021). Toft offers historical, geographical, and structural factors to explain Islam’s higher representation in these wars, primarily the tendency of Muslim political leaders to frame threats in religious terms in order to outbid their rivals (see also De Juan, 2015). These dynamics are most pronounced in civil wars that involve Arab Muslim participants but not in civil wars that involve Arab Christian participants. Toft’s claims align well with quantitative patterns explored by Nilsson and Svensson (2021) who show that civil wars are 73% more likely to recur when they involve Islamist aspirations. Islamists invoke transnational ideological framing, drawing in foreign fighters and governments, which creates uncertainty around the capabilities and intentions of the participants to civil wars. Some scholars are sceptical about the relationship between Islam and violence. Even those who recognize that Muslim-majority states are disproportionately engaged in violence argue that the cause may not be religion. Poverty, oil dependency, state repression, autocracy, and demography exhibit a more statistically robust relationship to violence than Islam (Karayaka, 2015). Colonial history, great power intervention, and lack of economic and political development offer competing explanations for the relationship between Muslim-majority states and war (Gleditsch and Rudolfsen, 2016).

Mobilizing combatants The second role that religion can play in promoting war is mobilizational. European powers justified colonial efforts as a noble struggle to spread Christianity across the globe. Contemporary Islamist movements from Nigeria to Syria to Afghanistan profess religious goals. Religion can, of course, justify both violent and non-violent political mobilization. Political elites achieve the former by exploiting the “ambivalent” nature of the sacred (Appleby, 2000; Philpott, 2007). They emphasize the bellicose tenets of a faith, while simultaneously downplaying the peaceful ones. Both the ideas and institutions of faith traditions provide ample tools for this instrumental use of religion. The religious ideas that underpin violence are often drawn from the sacred texts or narratives of a community. When leaders invoke holy writings, followers may perceive hostile action as a sacred duty (Juergensmeyer, 2000). The status and charisma of religious elites enable them to interpret sacred texts with authority and to increase the odds of violence by engaging in aggressive religious discourse (Basedau et al., 2016). A recent survey experiment, with eight thousand participants across religious communities, demonstrates that pro-violence quotes from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an can raise support for religious violence, especially among fundamentalist audiences (Koopmans et  al., 2021). Freedman has analyzed thousands of pamphlets written by leading Israeli rabbis for their followers, noting the combination of nationalist and religious language that leaders used to highlight conflicts of religious significance (Freedman, 2019). Extremist Buddhist monks in Myanmar use inflammatory religious rhetoric to foment violence against Rohingya and Muslim communities (Ramakrishna, 2020). In Sri Lanka, in contrast, Buddhist monks are careful not to invoke violence directly but employ religious rituals to convey “implicit militarism” (Frydenlund, 2017). Political elites can draw on similar religious ideas, though they tend to focus more on myths than on holy texts. These foundational moments in a religion become influential points of reference that make certain courses of action seem more justified, even imperative. Christ’s 158

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resurrection, for example, served as a powerful metaphor during the Easter Rising in Ireland. Slobodan Milosevic frequently referenced the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to stoke tensions between Serbian Orthodox Christian and Bosnian Muslim communities during the Yugoslav Wars. In addition to theological justifications, the material resources and organizational capacity of religious groups can bolster support for war. Religious structures, for example, offer clear focal points for gathering, especially in the absence of mass communication. A  Congregationalist church in Boston, Old South Meeting House, served as a center for mass protests and meetings by American revolutionaries in the 1770s. Similarly, some Jewish insurgents used the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv to meet and store arms caches during their struggle against the British (Klocek, 2016). The protest marches that Lutheran leaders initiated after prayer services in East German churches culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Contemporary Islamist groups have been known to recruit from madrassas in, among other locales, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Religion can mitigate collective actions problems in other ways. Shared religious networks lower coordination costs and offer both the opportunity and motive for joint action and recruitment (Berman, 2009). Combatants have an easier time organizing when they enjoy overlapping religious, geographic, and regional identities (Toft, 2005). Participation in religious practices can enhance a sense of “group consciousness” (Masoud et al., 2016). Religious organizations can also provide the material resources needed to mobilize. The Islamic Republic of Iran provides funding, weapons, training, and instructions to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Saudi religious institutions support rebel groups in Chechnya and Syria. The Cypriot Orthodox Church directly channeled funds to the insurgent group EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston) during the 1950s. Social networks can provide further funding via charitable giving and volunteering for both religious and non-religious causes. One clear example of this phenomenon is the sizeable contributions from Roman Catholics in the United States to the Irish Republican Army during The Troubles. Much of this revenue was collected and channeled through local church networks.

Organizing combatants The third and final role that religion plays prior to war is to shape the organizations that employ violence. Religious structures, resources, and practices affect the combatants who make up these organizations and who partake in those practices. Non-state violent Islamist groups tend to be the focus of these organizational analyses. For example, several scholars have noted the unique methods that Islamist groups use to organize, recruit, and fundraise. Because they are decentralized, and characterized by fragmented hierarchies, they are less susceptible to attacks on their leaders (Byman, 2013). Indeed, further repression of these groups may drive them out of the domestic sphere and lead them to embrace international terrorism. Once they adopt a global identity, they encounter fewer obstacles for recruiting (Ahmad, 2016). Islamists who rely on an ethnic or tribal identity are more prone to group fragmentation since they have to take important local groups into account. Global Islamists, on the other hand, are better able to retain group cohesion by appealing to the global imagination of their adherents and through frequent and unrestrained purging of dissenters within the group. They may be less susceptible to government coercion than nationalist rebels because they can draw on global support structures, whereas nationalist rebels rely heavily on the local population (Toft and Zhukov, 2015). More recently, scholars have started shifting their focus onto the role of religion in conventional military organizations (Hassner, 2016a). All military organizations, even those employing 159

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broad conscription, select recruits from specific sectors of the national population. The distribution of religions in the military thus distorts the distribution of religions in society at large, with implications for religious practices in the military. In some instances, rare among modernized militaries, membership in a religious group constrains promotion across ranks. More commonly, decision-makers select religious adherents into military units and into positions of command so as to enhance unit cohesion and reduce incidents of insubordination either by forming religiously diverse or religiously uniform units. The religious composition of units, in turn, will constrain the geographic areas in which they can operate and in the tasks they can assume, particularly if those require contact with civilians. Both India, in choosing the units to confront Muslim and Sikh insurgents in Kashmir and the Punjab, and Israel, in selecting the units that would forcibly relocate Israeli settlers from Gaza, made difficult choices regarding the religious identities of soldiers in those units. The effects of religion on military organizations and on soldiers prior to battle often reflect political contention over constitutional issues in society. Freedom of religion debates tend to arise in connection to religious symbols, clothing, and grooming, the freedom to preach and proselytize, the freedom from religion, and the accommodation of religious needs. Society scrutinizes how these thorny issues are worked out in the pressure cooker that is the military. Struggles over religious rights and freedoms in the armed forces then spill back into the broader society, creating a feedback loop. As a consequence of this back and forth, religious accommodation in the military remains in a constant state of flux, never reaching a comfortable equilibrium.

Religion and the conduct of war Long before social scientists began to grapple with the effects of religion on the conduct of war, theologians and scholars of religion proposed theoretical religious criteria for evaluating, justifying, and constraining wars. The Just War tradition has its roots in theology and religious thought, and its branches reach into contemporary laws of war (Johnson and Kelsay, 1990). Alas, modern scholars of Just War theory have contributed little empirical work on the implementation of this theory in practice. Their work remains abstract, with little interest in the feasibility or effects of their theories on the conduct of armies. The glaring exception that proves the rule is Michael Walzer’s work (Walzer, 1977) that seeks to establish a secular theory of Just War. There are, however, two other research programs that have successfully combined theoretical and empirical analyses of the impact of religion on the conduct of war. The first deals with religion, discipline, and unit cohesion. The second evaluates the tactical and strategic opportunities and constraints that religion poses on the battlefield.

Discipline and unit cohesion Shared beliefs and practices can increase unit cohesion and discipline if they offer a common rallying point. At the individual level, they can help soldiers as they struggle with the psychological effects of battle. Some research on the mental health of soldiers and veterans suggests that high levels of religiosity, a close-knit religious community, and meditative religious practices can mitigate the effects of trauma both prior to battle and immediately following exposure to violence (Hassner, 2016a). That violence, in turn, also shapes the religiosity of soldiers in fundamental ways. It tends to empower the religiosity of soldiers who enter battle with a strong religious foundation, but it tends to weaken the faith of soldiers with a fragile sense of religious belonging. As a consequence, soldiers in this latter group can suffer a double psychological blow 160

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in response to trauma: a loss of faith and the loss of the mental health benefits that this religiosity would have provided. The concomitant rates of depression and suicide among soldiers who experience this process of disillusionment may explain why militaries have always invested significant resources in training and deploying chaplains. Consistently across history and across militaries, these religious leaders in uniform have doubled as sources of encouragement and hope, a cross between cheerleaders and psychiatrists. Though their formal role tends to include an advisory capacity to the commander, potentially restraining combat where ethical or legal lines are about to be crossed, in reality chaplains have performed no constraining function. They employ sermons, religious rituals, private sessions, and group prayer to prepare troops for battle, heal the psychological wounds of battle, and prepare combatants for the next round of fighting. In the Syrian civil war, Russian Orthodox priests motivated Russian troops, worked to enhance unit cohesion, and decreased post-combat stress (Adamsky, 2020). In Russia itself, the priesthood is present at all levels of military command, including Russia’s nuclear forces. It consecrates weapons, influences the symbols and rituals of the nuclear forces, and legitimizes Russia’s national security strategy (Adamsky, 2019). At the unit level, soldiers partake in a plethora of religious and semi-religious group rituals, ranging from the formal to the superstitious. The focus and intensity of these ceremonies tend to rise as the day of battle nears as well as in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. Soldiers routinely pray and participate in ceremonies together. Beliefs and rituals can increase the resilience of units in the face of stress or help sustain morale in the face of significant setbacks. For example, battle cries are meant to both intimidate the enemy and increase the esprit de corps of a unit. Soldiers also find encouragement in the various symbols or devotional items they wear or carry into battle. Collective religious experiences, such as miracles and visions, are not infrequent at times of crisis, be it in the trenches of the Great War or during counterterrorism operations in the Gaza Strip (Jenkins, 2015; Rosman, 2018). There are good reasons to suspect that just as religious groups employ rituals to define and unite their communities, so military units may benefit from group rituals. Shared faith, values, and ceremonies may play a role in enhancing the cohesion of military units. Research on this front is anecdotal at best, but if it is indeed the case that shared religious beliefs and practices are correlated with unit cohesion, then religion may contribute indirectly to combat effectiveness. By routinely participating in communal activities, such as prayer services, soldiers build stronger relationships and improve communication with one another. Some militaries have leaned on the moral teachings of religion in the conviction that it would improve soldiers’ character and obedience. In addition to providing encouragement, religious ideas about the afterlife can shift individual- and group-level calculations about the utility gained from continuing to fight. Soldiers with such beliefs may be able to absorb more costs as they discount the present for future benefits (Horowitz, 2009).

Religious opportunities and constraints during war Few soldiers in modern professional militaries fight due to religious motivations. Yet most soldiers are members of religious communities, and most armies have to contend with the presence of other religious communities on the battlefield and observing the battle from near or far. These communities reward individuals for abiding by religious regulations that safeguard the sacred and penalize them for religious transgressions, penalties that are viewed as both social and divine. These religious regulations, drawn from the religion of soldiers or the religion of locals, shape the incentive of military decision-makers by creating both opportunities and constraints 161

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(Hassner, 2016b). Those incentives are particularly powerful in wars of occupation that include a “hearts and minds” component: safeguarding indigenous religious values can earn the trust of a local community, while defying those values will cause offense at the local, regional, or even global level. These religious regulations can pertain to sacred places, times, peoples, objects, rituals, and discourses. Following religious rules can enhance the confidence, reputation, or freedom of movement of a military unit, thus acting as a force multiplier of sorts. Units fighting in times or locations considered religiously auspicious, or enjoying the encouragement that chaplains, ceremonies, group and individual prayer, religious garb, benedictions, or amulets provide, can be expected to fight with greater assurance and enthusiasm. Soldiers expected to desecrate sacred places or holy days, endanger religious leaders, or forego soothing rituals may fight haltingly or not at all, as exemplified by the reluctance of US Civil War generals to initiate battles on Sundays or the Allied hesitation prior to assaults on Monte Cassino, Rome, and other locations rife with Christian shrines during World War II. Similarly, exploiting the constraints that religious practices place on enemy units can act as a force multiplier unless that exploitation provokes the wrath of a broader religious community. North Vietnamese troops attacked American and South Vietnamese units in 1968 during the feast of Tet, and Arab armies attacked Israel in 1973 on Yom Kippur, in the expectation that these holidays would hamper the mobilization and combat readiness of their opponents. Insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, India, Pakistan, and Thailand have used sacred shrines as bases of operations, confident in the knowledge that counterinsurgents would hesitate to desecrate these sites for fear of regional and global repercussions. These insurgents have also targeted the sacred shrines, holidays, and processions of their religious opponents with the intention of provoking outrage and escalating conflict. This means that religion is present on the battlefield even when the pretext for war is far removed from religion and even when the parties to conflict exhibit next to no religious discord. Religion is a permanent element in the environment of war, like topography or the weather, not to be ignored even when it is not the underlying cause of the fighting. Professional armies are thus well advised to gather intelligence on religion just as they would on any other environmental factor. Decision-makers must familiarize themselves with their opponent’s religious proclivities, the preferences of local communities on or near the battlefield, as well as their own soldiers’ religious needs and capabilities. This “religious intelligence” is difficult to obtain: it is highly local and contextual. Information on pertinent religious practices, their salience, and specifics cannot be gleaned from official religious sources, let alone ancient scripture. Practices may vary from locale to locale and from year to year and will diverge significantly from formal doctrine, often veering into syncretism and superstition. Because acquiring this knowledge requires time-sensitive regional expertise, the US military has begun experimenting with the deployment of social scientists into theaters of operations in order to study local cultural, ethnic, and religious practices. This enterprise is in its early stages and has met with mixed success. Military organizations remain yet more reluctant to study the religious preferences and practices of their own soldiers, thus exposing themselves to dangerous blind spots regarding both unexpected religious constraints and undesired bursts of religious enthusiasm. They may underestimate their own biases in managing disputes with a religious dimension, and they may over- or underestimate the religious identities, ideas, and practices of their opponents. Scholars of religious practices on the battlefield have now started collecting such information, focusing on insurgents and terrorists. Some scholars adopt an ideational approach and study the intersection of religion and culture, including jihadist poetry, music, visual culture, 162

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and even dreams (Hegghammer, 2017). For example, Nanninga (2019) explores the notions of purity and pollution in jihadi culture, proposing that Islamist insurgents view acts of violence as acts of purification designed to cleanse society. These acts of purification include the destruction of cultural heritage, targeting of non-Muslim minorities, and punishing of alleged sinners. Revkin and Wood (2021) study the conditions under which the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has targeted specific communities with sexual violence. The bulk of research on religious insurgent behavior during war, however, seeks to understand how religion affects tactics and strategy, such as the timing of insurgent attacks to coincide with religious holy days (Hassner, 2011; Toft and Zhukov, 2015; Reese et al., 2017). Skeptics, in contrast, argue that religious insurgents have the same goals and engage in the same calculus as secular insurgents. Comparing jihadist groups to Marxist rebels, Kalyvas (2018) concludes that both are driven by opportunism and strategic imperatives, not ideological and religious motivations. Islamist ideologies are often flexible and can be tailored, post hoc, to particular needs and circumstances (Nejad, 2022).

Conclusion Recent research on religion and war has started down the path of correcting for early biases. Scholars have developed an interesting range of mid-level theories about the different ways in which religion can influence conflict, before and during wars, civil wars, and insurgencies. Now that this subfield has started shedding some of its preconceptions and has started normalizing and standardizing the study of religion and conflict, research opportunities abound. One of the largest questions that awaits answers relates to the role of religion at the conclusion of conflicts. Because the literature on religion and war was shaped by salient cases in which religion was perceived as a primary cause, scholars have paid less attention to religion’s role during conflict, and they have paid almost no attention at all to its role in the aftermath of conflict. In El Salvador, Colombia, and Rwanda, religion was not a source of identity, mobilization, organization, or constraint, yet it played a role in bringing the conflict to an end. The actors involved in halting the fighting, negotiation, disarmament, and reconciliation can include clergy and faithbased organizations (Johnston and Sampson, 1995; Little, 2007; Patterson, 2014). These often work behind the scenes to broker peace deals or rebuild communal trust. They make for less spectacular topics of analysis than extremist insurgents and suicide bombers, but their contribution to war and peace is no less significant. Religion can also obstruct peace and inhibit negotiation efforts. Some scholars argue that religious conflicts are difficult to resolve because of the challenge posed by bargaining over indivisible issues (Svensson, 2007; Hassner, 2009). When belligerent demands are anchored in a religious tradition, claims become less flexible, and cannot be easily divided or substituted, compromise becomes less likely. In Sri Lanka, for example, Buddhist nationalists refused to consider ceding territory to the Tamil Tigers because they viewed the whole territory of the country as sacred. Similarly, Fazal (2018) argues that “religionist rebels”, who draw on the divine as their source of legitimacy, tend to adopt unlimited war aims. Because they reject the modern state system, they refuse to negotiate with state actors. Others have argued that religious rebels are less likely to compromise because they enjoy longer time horizons than their non-religious counterparts (Toft, 2006; Horowitz, 2009). If pious combatants discount the present for future benefits, they can absorb higher costs during a conflict. As a consequence, it becomes more difficult to compel rebels to the negotiating table because they are willing to continue their struggle even after material benefits cease. Moreover, even where insurgents are willing to negotiate, they are often misperceived as 163

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extremist and uncompromising by counterinsurgents, who typecast them as religious fanatics (Klocek, 2016). The literature on religion and war is growing in leaps and bounds. The collections of the digital library JSTOR under the subject headings “religion” and “war” alone have grown by 5% to 10% per year since the library was founded in 1995. In the 1990s, scholars produced roughly 20 books or articles per year that referenced religion and war in their abstracts. In the decade after 9/11, the publication volume reached 50 a year. Today, according to JSTOR, that number is closer to 75 publications per year, with entire book series and journals dedicated to the topic. There is much left to study: what scholars know about religion on the battlefield continues to be dwarfed by what they have yet to discover.

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Religion on the battlefield Jason Klocek and Ron E. Hassner, “War and Religion: An Overview,” in Paul Djupe, Mark J. Rozell, and Ted G. Jelen, (eds.), Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Jeffrey Haynes, “Introduction: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and Relations between the West and the Muslim World,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2019), pp. 1–10. Jonathan Fox, “Is Islam More Conflict Prone than Other Religions? A Cross-Sectional Study of Ethnoreligious Conflict,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000). Jonathan Fox, “The Increasing Role of Religion in State Failure: 1960 to 2004,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2007). Kumar Ramakrishna, “Understanding Myanmar’s Buddhist Extremists: Some Preliminary Musings,” New England Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2020). Mara Redlich Revkin and Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Islamic State’s Pattern of Sexual Violence: Ideology and Institutions, Policies and Practices,” Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2021). Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Martha Finnemore, “Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention.” in Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996), pp. 153–185. Matthias Basedau, Birte Pfeiffer, and Johannes Vüllers, “Bad Religion? Religion, Collective Action, and the Onset of Armed Conflict in Developing Countries,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 60, No. 2 (2016), pp. 226–255. Michael Freedman, “Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 63, No. 10 (2019), pp. 2262–2288. Michael Horowitz, “Long Time Going: Religion and the Duration of Crusading,” International Security, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2009), pp. 162–193. Michael J. Reese, Keven K. Ruby, and Robert R. Paper, “Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (2017), pp. 439–459. Michael Walzer,  Just and Unjust Wars: A  Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Monica Duffy Toft, “Getting Religion Right in Civil Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 65, No. 9 (2021), pp. 1607–1634. Monica Duffy Toft, “Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War,” International Security, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2007), pp. 97–131. Monica Duffy Toft, “Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons as Rationalist Explanations for War,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2006), pp. 34–69. Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Monica Duffy Toft and Yuri M. Zhukov, “Islamists and Nationalists: Rebel Motivation and Counterinsurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 109, No. 2 (2015), pp. 222–238. Mora Deitch, “Is Religion a Barrier to Peace? Religious Influence on Violent Intrastate Conflict Termination,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020. Nils Petter Gleditsch and Ida Rudolfsen, “Are Muslim Countries More Prone to Violence?” Research & Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2016). Peter S. Henne, “The Two Swords: Religion – State Connections and Interstate Disputes,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 6 (2012), pp. 753–768. Peter S. Henne and Jason Klocek, “Taming the Gods: How Religious Conflict Shapes State Repression,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2019), pp. 112–138. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I became a Religious Crusade (New York: Harper Collins, 2015). Pieter Nanninga, “ ‘Cleansing the Earth of the Stench of Shirk’: The Islamic State’s Violence as Acts of Purification,” Journal of Religion and Violence, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2019), pp. 128–157. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Rana Nejad, “Why Did the Islamic Republic Continue Clandestine Cooperation with Israel?” Yale Review of International Studies, April 2022, at http://yris.yira.org/essays/5694 Reyko Huang and Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, “We Are All Coethnics: State Identities and Foreign Interventions in Violent Conflict,” Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2021).

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Ron E. Hassner Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Ron E. Hassner, “Hypotheses on Religion in the Military,” International Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2016a), pp. 312–332. Ron E. Hassner, “Sacred Time and Conflict Initiation,” Security Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2011), pp. 491–520. Ron E. Hassner, Religion on the Battlefield (Cornell University Press, 2016b). Ron E. Hassner, “The Pessimist’s Guide to Religious Coexistence.” in Marshall J. Breger, Yitzhak Reiter, Leonard Hammer (eds.), Holy Places in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2009). Ruud Koopmans, Eylem Kanol and Dietlind Stolle, “Scriptural Legitimation and the Mobilisation of Support for Religious Violence,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 47, No. 7 (2021), pp. 1498–1516. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon  & Schuster, 1996). Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Jihadi Rebels in Civil War,” Dædalus, Vol. 147, No. 1 (2018), pp. 36–47. Susanna Pearce, “Religious Rage: A Quantitative Analysis of the Intensity of Religious Conflicts,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2007). Süveyda Karakaya, “Religion and Conflict: Explaining the Puzzling Case of ‘Islamic Violence,’ ” International Interactions, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2015), pp. 509–538. Tanisha M. Fazal, “Religionist Rebels & the Sovereignty of the Divine,” Dædalus, Vol. 147, No. 1 (2018), pp. 25–35. Tarek Masoud, Amaney Jamal, and Elizabeth Nugent, “Using the Qur’an to Empower Arab Women? Theory and Experimental Evidence from Egypt,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 49, No. 12 (2016), pp. 1555–1598. Thomas Hegghammer (ed.), Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Valère Philip Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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12 RIGHT-WING POPULISM AND RELIGION IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Jeffrey Haynes

Introduction Damaging events characterized as the results of “Islamist terrorism” have taken place in many European countries in recent years (Kaya and Tecmen, 2019). As a result, it is now fashionable to “talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and Islam” (Waever, 2006). For many, this suggests that the West is engaged in an “intercivilizational” conflict with Islamist violent extremists and terrorists. The conflict, which may have begun with the Iranian revolution of 1979, was exacerbated by the egregious events of 11 September 2001 (hereafter, 9/11), and since then, it has gathered pace. Waever (2006) argues that, as a result, “the world” is “standing on the brink of a long conflict, perhaps a new ‘cold war’ that features small-scale, but spectacular violence”, involving the “West” and “Islam”. Concern with escalating intercivilizational conflict encouraged electoral support for right-wing populists in both Europe and the USA (Brubaker, 2017a, 2017b; Conférence du 6 March, 2017; Joppke, 2018; Haynes, 2019a, 2021). A key characteristic of right-wing populism1 is that representative politicians and supportive voices in the media highlight what they see as the cultural impact of immigration, leading to intercivilizational conflict. Beyond political exploitation of fears of large-scale immigration, right-wing populist parties also have two further traits. First, they seek to win political power via “personalistic leadership that feeds on quasi-direct links to a loosely organized mass of heterogenous followers” (Weyland, 2013, p. 20). Second, their political appeals are based on a “thin” ideology that “considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’ ”. (Mudde, 2007, p. 23) Right-wing populist politicians have recently enjoyed electoral success not only in the USA with the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021) but also contemporaneously in several European countries. Strategies and electoral platforms are not however identical, as what occurs in individual countries is affected by “nationally specific factors such as political history, system and culture” (Greven, 2016). Having said that, right-wing populists do have generic ideological similarities, which inform their political messages, platforms, and programs. First, the main DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-14

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target of populism, both left-wing and right-wing varieties, is a (supposedly corrupt) elite political class from which the mass of the ordinary people needs defending, and the populist politician depicts him- or herself as a “genuine” popular voice in opposition to the corrupt power holders. Second, right-wing populists claim to champion the rights and legitimacy of the indigenous “ordinary people” against the “immigrant-loving”, self-serving elites in politics and business. The latter in particular are said to be keen to see mass immigration for their own economic reasons: to flood the jobs market with myriads of people from different cultures able and willing to work for relatively low wages and thus undercut indigenous workers’ wage levels. According to Huntington (2004, p. 268), “these transnationals have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only function now is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. Third, right-wing populists in the USA and Europe routinely vilify Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community, in ways reminiscent of the lack of support for Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the USA and many European countries (Friedman, 1973; García, 2018).2 Fourth, right-wing populists typically seek to identify Islam as a faith and Muslims as a group as a fundamental “civilizational” threat to historically and culturally defined “Christian” or “post-Christian” nations of the USA and Europe, which challenges them culturally, religiously, civilizationally, socially, and politically. Finally, right-wing, anti-immigration, populist politicians have achieved enhanced electoral support in many European countries by exploiting real or imagined societal fears of a “Muslim invasion”, a concern stimulated by the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the continuing Syrian civil war (Brubaker, 2017a; Haynes, 2016; Kaya and Tecmen, 2019; Kratochvíl, 2019; Ozzano, 2019). Right-wing, anti-immigration, populist politicians have recently won either power or a significantly increased share of the vote, albeit without achieving power, in the USA and several European countries, including the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden (Brubaker, 2017a, 2017b; Haynes, 2019a, 2021; Joppke, 2018; Kaya and Tecmen, 2019). In the USA, a turn to right-wing populism was emphatically demonstrated by Donald Trump’s presidency. During the 2016 and 2021 election campaigns and on achieving power in January 2017, Trump expressed frequent anti-Muslim feelings, enacting policies to prevent Muslims from certain countries entering the USA because of the threat they supposedly posed (Mandaville, 2017; Subtirelu, 2017). In addition, Trump and several other Republican candidates openly questioned the loyalties of the three million or more American Muslims (Mandaville, 2017). In his nativist appeals, Trump also targeted illegal immigration into the USA from Mexico and Central America. The issue centred on whether ethnically or religiously different people – that is, Mexicans and Muslims – can be fully trusted in America by nativist Americans.3 Do they demonstrate “sufficient” and “acceptable” levels of loyalty, commitment, and identity to the USA, a country scarred by – and scared of – terrorism, especially since 9/11 (Crandall et al., 2018)? During his presidency, Trump made much political capital by stressing he would stop migration from Mexico into the USA, by building a “big, beautiful” wall on America’s southern border and compel the government of Mexico to pay for it. The aim was to curtail dramatically illegal emigration from Mexico (Haynes, 2016, 2019b). Before proceeding, here are a few words about methodology. Research for this chapter draws on relevant interviews, policy speeches, statements, remarks, and press conferences. In addition, where appropriate, it draws on primary source data, including policy documents and legislation. The research was informed by scholarly and journalistic critiques of and commentary on such right-wing populists’ rhetoric and policy in relation to Islam and Muslims. The overall methodological aim is to employ appropriate sources in order to present a range 168

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of views regarding the rhetoric and policies of right-wing populists in the USA and Europe vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims. The chapter is in three sections: (1) Christian Civilizationism in the USA and Europe: Provenance and Practice, which identifies and explains the issue to be looked at in this chapter, (2) Right-Wing Populism and Christian Civilizationism in the USA, and (3) RightWing Populism and Christian Civilizationism in Western Europe. Each section identifies and examines an aspect of the research question. The first looks at the theoretical and analytical underpinnings of Christian civilizationism. The following case study sections examine how and why Christian civilizationism is employed by right-wing populists in the USA and Western Europe. We examine what they have in common and where they differ and explain that both international and domestic factors are significant in identifying the rhetoric and claims of right-wing populists.4

Christian civilizationism in the USA and Europe: provenance and practice “Christianism” (or “Christian civilizationism”) is an ideology which trumpets the perceived superiority of “Christian values”; it is an essential building-block of right-wing populists’ political rhetoric and appeal in both Europe and the USA. A  blogger, Sullivan (2013), is widely credited with coining the term in 2003. Sullivan defines “Christianism” as a “partisan ideology wrapped in a veneer of Christianity”. Sullivan explained that it is adopted in the USA by “those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression”. Sullivan averred that Christianists were “as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam”. Another blogger, Jethani (2016), commented that what Sullivan identified as a fringe minority nearly two decades ago now seems to “be rapidly expanding to the point of becoming tolerated as mainstream”. Jethani recognized this in the November 2016 election of Donald Trump, a massively popular choice for president of most right-wing Christian evangelicals.5 This was hardly likely to be because Trump’s “character, story, agenda, or candidacy . . . finds alignment with Scripture, the cross, the gospel, or personal/social transformation (Bebbington’s evangelical markers in simple terms). However, his ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan, along with his maligning of women, immigrants, and all ‘losers’ while triumphantly holding up a Bible, fits Christianism perfectly” (Jethani, 2016).6 More generally, recent years have seen right-wing populist politicians in both the USA and Europe take “Christianity” as a defining feature of national purity. However, as “with the idea of Islamism this has little, if any, theological depth to it, but it is the application of Christianity to a political ideology, one that establishes the pure people against outsiders” (Ryan, 2018). In the USA, Christian civilizationism draws inspiration from and has foundations in what are purported to be “Judeo-Christian” values (Haynes, 2017). That is, the ideology of Christian civilizationism is rooted in a belief that, culturally, socially, and politically, US principles and achievements stem from the country’s claimed Judeo-Christian values.7 This view has been politically weaponized in recent years, with several cultural groups, especially “Mexicans” and “Muslims”, being vilified for not apparently having such values. For example, former Republican congressman Steve King called immigrants “dogs” and “dirt”; and Donald Trump “infamously declared that most immigrants crossing the southern border were ‘rapists and criminals’ and pledged to ban all Muslims from entering the US” (Siddiqui, 2019). In 2016 and 2020, Trump’s electoral appeal was in part based upon his claim that not only “Mexicans” but also “Islam” and “Muslims” pose an existential threat to America and its 169

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civilization. For figures such as Trump and King, Islam is a cultural, ideational, and emerging existential challenge to the USA that must be defeated in order to ensure the purity of American culture. It requires policies both to limit the numbers of Muslims in the USA and to prevent the spread of sharia law, allegedly spearheaded by American representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood (Beydoun, 2018, pp. 105–109). In Western Europe, the political ideology of Christian civilizationism draws extensively on a claimed contrast between “liberal” and “illiberal” values. The former is exemplified by, for example, French civilizational values. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, suggested in July 2017 that Africa’s problems are civilizationally rooted, a mix of security, social, and political issues. Macron claimed that Africa’s “problems .  .  . are completely different” to those of Europe, as they are “civilizational” and include “[f]ailed states, complex democratic transitions and extremely difficult demographic transitions . . . Islamist terrorism, drugs and weapons trafficking” (Dearden, 2017). Macron’s depiction of Africa highlights what he sees as the region’s lack of “European-ness”, that is, insufficient modernization. According to Huntington (1996, p.  68), “[m]odernization involves industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society” (emphasis added). For Huntington, being “modern” and being “Western” are different. That is, “modernity” has generic qualities – including industrialization, urbanization, and higher levels of literacy, education, and wealth. Being “Western”, on the other hand, implies adhesion to a particularist civilization (“the classical legacy”) and religion (“Christianity”), with foundations in ubiquitous political and social institutions (that is, church-state separation, “the rule of law”, and independent civil societies). According to Macron, some non-Western civilizations, such as those in Africa, lack these attributes. Instead, the region is replete with “failed states”, a lack of democracy, widespread Islamist terrorism, and extensive criminality. Macron sees these as the inescapable cultural and civilizational differences characterizing the West and Africa, respectively, which explains the relative political, economic, and social stability and security of the former compared to the latter. The notion of irreducible cultural differences between the West and non-West is a key claim of Christian civilizationism in both Europe and the USA, facilitating the targeting Muslims and other non-Christians, such as Jews, as the undesirable other.

Right-wing populism and Christian civilizationism in the USA This section examines the employment of Christian civilizationism by Donald Trump during his presidency. Many Americans view Islam and Muslims as undifferentiatedly linked to the violent events of 9/11 (Kamali, 2015). Trump was able to exploit fears of “Islamic terrorism” both to push for a “Muslim ban” and to highlight the alleged superiority of “Judeo-Christian” beliefs and values. Use of Christian civilizationism by Trump during his presidential campaign and his presidency highlights that to him Islam and Muslims were a key source of America’s recent travails, exemplified by 9/11. Overall, Trump’s Christian civilizationism sought to underline what he claimed needed to be done to “Make America Great Again”: build on the foundations of America as a “Christian nation” by excluding those of different religious and cultural persuasions. Quoting the Austrian author Kurt Seinitz, Kamali (2015, p. 204) notes that for all the talk of globalization bringing increased diversity, many Westerners, including Americans, continue to demonstrate a widespread lack of basic knowledge about Islam. That deficiency is compounded in the USA, as elsewhere in the West, by social secularization and accompanying the death of 170

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religious taboos, which serves to decrease interest in and empathy with non-Western religions. This helps explain how right-wing populist politicians in the USA and other Western countries are successful electorally by pointing to a perceived or imagined existential threat from “Islam” and Muslims, especially “radical Islamic terrorism”, to justify draconian, anti-Muslim policies in the interests of “security”. Examples of such a policy include President Trump’s Executive Order 13780, upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018, which barred from entry into the USA people from five mainly Muslim countries from which no one has been convicted of terrorism in America (Adida et al., 2016).8 Brubaker (2017a) argues that right-wing populists in both the USA and Europe have a “Christian civilizationist” worldview. This views “Islam” as the main threat to the indigenous society’s “civilizational integrity”. The proposed remedy is to counter the perceived threat to national integrity by use of a novel ideology – “Christianism”, a self-conscious counterpoint to “Islamism”. Christianism is characterized by overt, often extreme, anti-Islamism. It can include apparently liberal views on issues of gender and sexuality. They are used to seek to distinguish “enlightened”, secularized European civilization from allegedly regressive and repressive Islamic culture. This approach was adopted successfully by several prominent Dutch politicians, including the assassinated Pim Fortuyn, his ideological successor, Gert Wilders, and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, during 2007–2012. According to DeHanas and Shterin (2018, p. 178), the “same dynamics of Christian civilizationism are mirrored in many cases throughout Europe and in the U.S.” The recent political salience of Christianism is both manifested and exemplified by former US president Donald Trump’s words and deeds. The Trump presidency both stimulated and encouraged Trump “wannabes” around the world, not only in Europe, such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, but also elsewhere in the world, including Narendra Modi, prime minister of India; Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro; and the former prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson (Whitehead et al., 2018). Ideological links between such leaders bring together a group of like-minded, values-based, nationalist politicians, united by shared dislikes of liberalism, globalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism (Haynes, 2020, pp.  61–62). Trump’s ideas about immigration and the necessity of keeping Muslims out of the USA struck a chord with many such people. For example, Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s chancellor, thought out loud about a “Berlin-Rome-Vienna” axis to fight illegal immigration, and Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany between 2018 and 2020, sought to encourage Trump-style populist nationalists in Germany and other European countries (Stewart, 2020). Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016 in the context of rising anti-immigration and “anti-Muslim” sentiment. Trump is sometimes identified as a “nativist” (Bergmann, 2020). A nativist believes that the rights of indigenous people are much greater than those of immigrants. For the US-based, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, nativism is “xenophobic nationalism . . . an ideology that wants congruence of state and nation – the political and the cultural unit. It wants one state for every nation and one nation for every state. It perceives all non-natives . . . as threatening. But the non-native is not only people. It can also be ideas” (Mudde quoted in Friedman, 2017). Nativism is said to be most appealing during periods when people feel the harmony between state and nation is disappearing. This is not to claim that Trump is necessarily a nativist because of belief rather than opportunism. According to Mudde, Trump quickly learned during the presidential campaign that “nativism was popular”. Mudde notes that “Trump’s campaign speeches were initially quite boring, often with copious allusions to his ‘always successful’ real estate deals, but he noticed that crowds were very pleased when he spoke [about] ‘building a border wall with Mexico or barring radical Islamic terrorists from the country’ ” (emphasis in 171

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original; Mudde quoted in Friedman, 2017). DiMaggio (2019, p. 118) contends that Trump’s “support for a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and his plan to build a separation wall between the US and Mexico both demonstrated his support for racist, xenophobic policy positions”. Many Americans’ popular response to Trump’s allusion to twin dangers posed by Mexicans and radical Islam reflected fears among many voters at the outcome of growing economic insecurity following the 2008 global financial crisis. It is not the case that a resort to nativism is a uniquely Trumpian tactic to acquire votes. García notes that such sentiments have long been a feature of US politics. For example, initial naturalization laws in the USA allowed only white European immigrants to be eligible for naturalization. In the mid-nineteenth century, nativists, known as the “Know-Nothings”, opposed the entry into the USA of German and Irish immigrants. Later, in 1882, Congress voted to bar Chinese immigration to America. In the early twentieth century, the anti-immigrant targets sought to enter the USA from Eastern and Southern Europe, including Russia, Poland, Italy, and Greece. In the early 1920s, immigration was severely limited from these parts of Europe under a quota system. From the 1930s, the nativists’ main fear was unacceptable levels of immigration from Mexico; many blamed Mexicans for the economic woes of the Great Depression, as they were believed to be “stealing” Americans’ jobs. The 1970s saw the invention of a new term, “illegal alien”, which criminalized those attempting to enter the USA illegally. In 1994, California passed “Proposition 187” “that denied the undocumented, including their children, access to public services, including education” (García, 2018). Finally, as Belew (2018) explains, the development of “white power” crystallized fears among some Americans about what they saw as white people losing their historical supremacy in a fast-changing country. Clearly, there is nothing novel about Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and, as president, policies; such ideas have been a prominent feature of US politics for more than a century. As García (2018) puts it, “nativist and racist sentiments unfortunately continue under Trump. He is part of a long line of white Americans who fear ‘losing’ what they perceive to be ‘their country’ and not be ‘infested’, as Trump puts it, with immigrants and refugees of color”. During the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, it was clear that many Americans were concerned about the impact and effects of illegal migration from Mexico, as well as the threat from “radical Islamic terrorism”. The issue, on the one hand, was about illegal immigration into the USA from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, and on the other, it focused on the position of hundreds of thousands of Muslims already living legally in America and the policy to be adopted with regard to others who also wanted to immigrate to the USA. Some among them, Trump claimed, were actively engaged in terrorist activities (Milton, 2017). During his presidency, Trump surrounded himself with white nationalists, including Stephen Miller, Stephen K. Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka. Each was a short-term (Bannon, Gorka) or long-term member of his administration (Miller). These men share an understanding that the USA is engaged in a culture war between nativists and globalists. Miller was Trump’s chief speechwriter and is credited with authoring Trump’s “American carnage” presidential inaugural address. He was a key adviser since the early days of Trump’s presidency and chief architect of Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from several Middle Eastern countries. Few on the hard-right thought he needed to offer any clarification or qualification for this policy.9 Guerrero (2020) describes Miller as the architect of Trump’s border and immigration policies, helping Trump, “conjure an invasion of animals to come steal American jobs and spill American blood”. Stephen Bannon is a former White House Chief Strategist, past Breitbart chief,10 and putative leader of a far-right populist international movement, “The Movement”. “Bannon helped 172

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get Stephen Miller into the Trump administration, and Bannon was another one of Stephen Miller’s mentors” (Guerrero, 2020). Despite recent travails, Bannon is an influential figure on the far right both in the USA and internationally.11 He regards himself as an ideologue and proponent of the America First agenda. Bannon believes that America’s foundational values are rooted in nativist ethics and principles (Tondo, 2018). Bannon was a key adviser during the first nine months of the presidency of Donald Trump. He was ousted from this role in September 2017, following infighting in the White House, involving Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Bannon is both an economic nationalist and nativist, an admirer of several right-wing French ideologues and novelists, including Renaud Camus, who coined the phrase “The Great Replacement”, and Jean Raspail, author of a 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints. Camus refers to what he understands as a “plot” to replace ethnic French people with Muslim migrants. In his 2012 book, The Great Replacement, which echoes the concerns of Raspail’s earlier book, Camus writes of the conspiracy theory that native Catholic French people, and Christian Europeans more generally, will eventually be completely sidelined and substituted by waves of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This theory found a ready home among some right-wing nationalists in the USA, such as Richard Spencer (Malice, 2018). Raspail’s ideas are at the root of the “identitarian” doctrine, which claims that globalization will create an undesirable homogeneous culture, with disappearing distinct national and/or cultural identities. An alternative, “true pluralism” or “ethnopluralism” would imply separation of races. These ideas are said to have influenced both “Steve Bannon at Breitbart and the American white supremacist leader Richard Spencer” (Jones, 2018). The Trump administration closely linked populist nationalism with conservative Christian values and beliefs. Trump is electorally dependent on the combined political support of (secular) right-wing nationalists and conservative Christians – that is, the “Christian Right”. Trump’s electoral slogan – “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) – found favour with both Christian and secular supporters. MAGA brought together both strands of Trump’s support in a yearning for the perceived halcyon days of a white, conservative Christian America. The apparent desire was to “return” to a time when the “American dream” seemed eminently realizable, buoyed by strong and persistent economic growth, continually rising prosperity, and the triumph of get-up-and-go dynamism. MAGA also implied an extended fight against the allegedly corrupt administrative/bureaucratic system, that is, the “deep state” a.k.a. “the swamp”. For the Christian Right, MAGA included a strong social and political influence for their preferred brand of Christianity: conservative, Protestant, and evangelical. In this worldview, women know their place both in the workplace and at home; ethnic, religious, and racial minorities know their place in the social, political, and economic order and should not try “too hard” to improve their existential positions via “affirmative action”; and the USA is safe from both internal and external attack, including the baleful influence of “foreign” ideas, especially Islamism and globalism.

Right-wing populism and Christian civilizationism in Western Europe As in the USA, in Western Europe Christian civilizationism is a significant feature of current expressions of right-wing populism. Right-wing populists are widespread in the region, some are politically significant, and all seek to exploit some people’s increasing sense of insecurity. As in America, European right-wing populists portray “Islam”, Islamism, and Muslims as major threats to indigenous “Christian” Europeans’ “civilizational integrity” (Brubaker, 173

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2017a, 2017b; Joppke, 2018; Haynes, 2019b, 2019c). Although Christian civilizationism is generically characterized by anti-Islamism, it is expressed somewhat differently dependent on context, reflecting the specificity of political narratives according to local concerns. Generally, in Western Europe, Christianity and religion merge with nationhood and secularism, although the relationship varies from country to country. For example, Le Rassemblement National in France underplays Christianity and highlights secularism, in line with French republican values (DeHanas and Shterin, 2018). Compared to the USA, the use of Christian civilizationism by right-wing populists in Western Europe reflects the latter region’s more advanced secularism. Put another way, while most Americans believe that the USA is a “Christian nation”, many Western Europeans believe that they inhabit a “post-Christian” or secular environment. Christianity retains a cultural significance but is much less important politically compared to the USA, where the influence of the Christian Right is highly significant politically (Young, 2017; Whitehead et al., 2018). In Western Europe, the ideology of Christian civilizationism stems from a claim that there is little or no common cultural ground linking Muslims and Christians because of supposedly different cultural characteristics. For Christian civilizationists, the Muslim presence in Europe is destabilizing and leads to increased societal insecurity. European right-wing populist parties employ Christian civilizationist ideology reflecting one of two perspectives. Brubaker (2017a, p. 1203) observes that such parties tend to fluctuate between two opposing views. First, there is a “traditional”, patriarchal vision of society focused on Christianity’s conservative interpretation. Such “traditional” Christian values express socially and politically conservative ideas regarding gender issues, sexual morality, and personal rights. Examples include Marine Le Pen, former leader of France’s Le Rassemblement National, who expresses support for conservative “family values” (Joppke, 2018). Second, Dutch right-wing populists have long been at the forefront of the right-wing populist liberal approach to Islam’s claimed illiberalism, augmented by “philosemitism, gender equality, and support for gay rights”. These are regarded by such right-wing populists as “common European values”, along with respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality, and the rule of law. Such right-wing populists express “putatively liberal views on issues of gender and sexuality as a way of distinguishing a ‘Christian civilization’ from allegedly regressive and repressive Islamic cultures” (DeHanas and Shterin, 2018, p. 177). This approach was adopted by both the assassinated Dutch populist, Pim Fortuyn, and his ideological successor, Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom. While in a broader European perspective, the contours of Dutch right-wing populist, antiimmigrant politics are atypical, especially with respect to the centrality of the themes of sexual liberation and gay rights, more right-wing populists are now instrumentally adopting such a view. Anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim, right-wing populist parties not only in France, but also in Norway, Denmark, and elsewhere, place emphasis on gender equality, human rights, freedom of speech, individualism, and gay rights. They do this as they seek to increase their votes and thus acquire more mainstream legitimacy, repositioning themselves as defenders of liberal values, grounded in a secularized Judeo-Christian culture, against the “threat” of “illiberal” Islam (Herbert, 2020). DeHanas and Shterin (2018, p. 178) observe that, despite such differences, the “same dynamics of Christian civilizationism are mirrored in many cases throughout Europe and in the U.S.” Brubaker (2017a, 2017b), Joppke (2018), Kalmar (2018), and Lloyd (2017) identify Christian civilizationism as a key driver of right-wing populist ideas informing a sense of “pan-European civilizational identity”, which is said to be threatened by and ready to threaten another civilizational identity – Islam. Lloyd (2017) claims that Christian civilizationism “poses grave dangers 174

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to liberal democracy”. This is because Christian civilizationism is by definition highly socially divisive, pitting groups of people – that is, practising or cultural Christians – against another: practising and cultural Muslims.12 This emphasizes that the appeal of “civilizationism” is the clamed primacy of one group’s cultural and religious bonds compared to others because of allegedly “irreducible cultural differences” (Marchetti, 2016, p. 123). As ever, timing is everything in politics: “The fact that the Christian references were made just when the opposition to Muslim immigrants became central to these parties (which it had not always been) suggests that its adoption is not religiously but culturally, even instrumentally, motivated: Christianism in the hands of extreme right parties is simply a club to beat Islam”. ( Joppke, 2018, p. 238) In Western Europe, Huysmans (2000, p. 751) notes, “migration has developed into a security issue [and] the European integration process is implicated in it”. Farny (2016) observes that, in recent years, “many [Western] countries have seen a rise in immigration, coupled with an increasing fear of ‘terrorists’, ‘illegal migrants’ and other threats to internal safety”. According to Davies (2018), the rise of right-wing populist politicians in Western Europe is explicable both “as the expression of cultural anxieties surrounding identity and immigration” and “in largely economic terms – as a revolt among those ‘left behind’ by inequality and globalization” (Author’s interviews with #3, #4, #5). Brubaker (2016) notes that in Western Europe prior to 9/11, there was “growing civilizational preoccupation with Islam . . . responding to the increasing global visibility of political Islam in the post–Cold War environment. But of course, 9/11 and subsequent attacks in Europe gave it an enormous boost”. The 2015 refugee crisis was another “enormous boost” to the emergence and profile of Christian civilizationism, a catalyst for greatly increased political and media attention on desperate people fleeing conflicts in Syria and elsewhere, and some politicians and media chose to highlight that the great majority were Muslims. It coincided with the run-up to the UK’s June 2016 “Brexit” referendum during which right-wing populist politicians, such as the then leader of the UK Independence party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, chose to produce a highly misleading electoral poster advertisement purporting to illustrate almost unlimited demand from “Muslims” and other non-Europeans to enter the UK. The poster suggested that such people were not Europeans and could not be expected to adhere to European values and cultural norms. However, Farage’s was not an isolated voice; as Sharify-Funk (2013) notes in the title of a recent article: in Western Europe, there is a “pervasive anxiety about Islam”. Right-wing populist discourse in Western Europe is typically Islamophobic, and Farage’s stance is not unusual. Several Western European countries have relatively large percentages of Muslims, between 3% and 8%.13 In several regional countries, such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, right-wing populists identify Muslims as the “enemy within”, which threatens European civilization. Both George (2016) and Polakow-Suransky (2017) argue that real or instrumental right-wing outrage against “radical Islamic terrorism”, sharia law, and the alleged misogyny of many Muslim men, is a key component of a political project whose aim is to increase popular support and the political profile of European right-wing populist politicians. While they may profess no dislike for or aversion to individual Muslims, they do proclaim strong antipathy to the politicization of Islam in the form of Islamism and associated attempts to “impose” unwelcome “Muslim values” on “Christian Europe”. The electoral appeal of right-wing populist politicians is to their fellow citizens that share their concerns by focusing on the “competing” civilizational norms and values, which coalesce around individualistic, liberal values on the one hand, and collective, conservative values, on the other. In addition, there 175

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is the widespread popular fear of Islamist extremism and terrorism. Nigel Farage, then leader of the UK Independence Party, stated in March 2015: I think perhaps one of the reasons the polls show an increasing level of concern is because people do see a fifth column living within our country, who hate us and want to kill us. So don’t be surprised if there isn’t a slight increase in people’s worries and concerns. You know, when you’ve got British, when you’ve got people, born and bred in Cardiff, with British passports, going out to fight for Isis, don’t be surprised if there isn’t an uptick in concern. There has been an uptick in concern, but does it make us a prejudiced people? No. (Mason, 2015) Farage’s comments can be understood in the context of successive UK governments’ attempts to encourage a multicultural society in Britain. According to Zemni, “multiculturalism has taken shape as a legitimizing paradigm of the Western democracies, and of the European Union itself. It has developed into a cultural-political cornerstone of societies simultaneously in full transition towards economic globalization on the one hand, and potentially prey to the advent/resurgence of far-right and/or fascist political organizations on the other hand” (emphasis added; Zemni, 2002, p. 158). Writing two decades ago, Zemni saw multiculturalism as a “legitimising paradigm” and “cultural-political cornerstone” of both the European Union and Western democracies in general. It would be difficult to make the same claim with assurance today (Author’s interviews with #1 and #2). This is because many Western countries, including several in Western Europe, have experienced a diminution of the perceived desirability of multiculturalism and a parallel increase in the political salience of right-wing populism with civilizationist characteristics, seeking to pit practicing and cultural Christians against Muslim emigrants. This section has demonstrated that the recent use of Christian civilizationism by right-wing populists in Western Europe is not a reassertion of religious differences or a generic “return of religion” to the public realm. Rather, it is a focused employment of culturalized political language exploiting both the fear of sustained mass Muslim immigration, as well as the real or perceived malign socio-economic impacts of globalization. This has led to significant job losses in certain industries, augmented by cultural anxieties surrounding identity and immigration. Like in the USA, however, the focus on Islam and Muslims highlights the perceived difficulties of how to incorporate different people and their beliefs into environments historically dominated by Christian norms and values.

Conclusions What stands out, in both the USA and Europe, is the willingness of right-wing populists and their supporters to highlight what they regard as key civilizational differences between themselves and their supporters and Muslims. In the USA, figures such as Stephen Bannon lionize the virtues and values of Christian individualism, capitalism, and perceived links to “Judeo-Christian values” (Haynes, 2017). In Europe, the focus is on – often increasingly secular – “European values”, which are nevertheless said by right-wing populists to emanate from Christian foundations, different from those to which Muslims are supposed to adhere. In highly secular Western Europe, there is less opportunity to highlight Christian values. Instead, right-wing populist politicians, such as Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, attack Islam because of its allegedly unenlightened and anti-progressive values and highlight post-Christian “enlightened” and “socially progressive” approaches to social issues, including women’s rights 176

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and gay marriage. Figures like Wilders contrast their “liberal” views with those of supposedly “illiberal” Muslims. Muslim immigration and fears of Islamist terrorism are common factors in securitization of Islam in the USA and Europe. Coupled with this is a general, dramatic, and palpable decline in “toleration” especially in relation to Muslim immigrants who, many believe, are civilizationally – that is, culturally and religiously – distinct from the USA and Europe’s host communities. These divisions undermine the chances of democracy working for everyone, while making relationships between civilizations of great interest to students of democratization and society (Kaya and Tecmen, 2019). The ideology of “Christian civilizationism” encourages some right-wing politicians and commentators in the USA and Europe to characterize Muslims uniformly in a malign way. This approach makes no distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of “moderate”, “ordinary” Muslims and, on the other hand, the tiny minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller fraction of violent extremists and terrorists among Muslims. This encourages Islamophobia in both Europe and the USA, primarily characterized by a perception of “all-Muslims-as-threat”, whether via violent extremism and terrorism, by the specter of (extremist) sharia law or by (the fear of) Muslim mass immigration. Whatever the cause of the concern, however, the outcome is said to be the same: irrevocably to change host cultures for the worst. This leads to the conclusion that the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West has two interactive, although conceptually separate, dimensions: Islam as a security issue and Islam as a civilizational issue, focusing on culture and values. This chapter examined how and why the ideology of Christian civilizationism has been exploited by right-wing populists in the USA and Western Europe. It encouraged such politicians openly to vilify Islam and Muslims and to exhort voters to regard them as an existential threat. However, as the memory of 9/11 fades, the threat of “Islamic terrorism” seems to have diminished, consequential to the demise of the Islamic State and the downsizing of al-Qaeda. Right-wing populists turned to what they refer to as mass Muslim immigration into Europe. In the USA the alleged invasion of unwanted foreigners – especially “Mexicans” necessitating, according to President Trump, the building of a “great big beautiful wall” – also included Muslims from a number of countries (“the Muslim ban”). This was because of Muslims’ alleged propensity towards terrorism and the supposed cultural threat they posed to America’s “JudeoChristian” values. Future research might usefully extend the analysis to examine how the foci of right-wing populists differs in countries beyond the USA and Western Europe. For example, the comparative focus could be extended to include countries such as India and Israel. Both have right-wing populists in power who vilify Muslims for political gain, identifying them as security and cultural threats. How their political appeals differ from those of their counterparts in the USA and Western and Central Europe would help identify the comparative impact of global and domestic factors on right-wing populists and their policies and programs.

Notes 1 As Ekström et al. (2018) note, populism can be either “left-wing” or “right-wing”. This chapter is concerned with the latter in the USA and Europe. The term “right-wing” is analytically difficult. Many of the parties mentioned or noted in the chapter prefer a social democratic-style welfare-state compared to one where “market forces” take precedence. Where the designation “right-wing” comes in is that such a state is primarily meant for those judged on ethnicity rather than citizenship. This chapter looks explicitly at what the author refers to as “right-wing” rather than “left-wing” populism. Several parties in Europe, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, as well as Bernie Sanders in the USA would fall into the category of “left-wing” populism. Another difference between “left-wing” and

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Jeffrey Haynes “right-wing” populism is that the former are not generally associated with anti-Muslim discourse/ Islamophobia. 2 Islam is sometimes portrayed as something else than a faith, for example, a “fascist” political ideology, whereby some Muslims are said to be radicalized. The taqqiya trope is regularly referred to in this context: an extremist Islamist is said to deceive society by concealing his or her radicalization. The wider point is that both Islam and Muslims may be articulated in various ways, not only related to “faith”. 3 In this context, a nativist American is a white Protestant whose forebears entered the USA from the UK, Germany, or Scandinavia (Young, 2017). 4 This chapter is a revised and edited version of an open access paper by the present author: Haynes, Jeffrey. 2020. “Right-Wing Populism and Religion in Europe and the USA” Religions 11, no. 10: 490. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100490 5 Christian evangelicals are Protestant, often Pentecostalists. 6 https://hellochristian.com/1326-trump-and-the-heresy-of-christianism 7 See Matthew Bowman at https://religionnews.com/2018/04/19/donald-trump-is-not-a-christianbut-he-knows-what-the-religious-right-needs-to-hear-says-historian/ 8 The five mainly Muslim countries are Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia; as well as two, mainly non-Muslim states: North Korea and Venezuela. 9 The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February 2017, soon after Trump assumed the presidency, that the numbers of “anti-Muslim hate groups” in the USA had tripled between 2015 and 2017, increasing threefold: from 34 to 101 (www.splcenter.org/). 10 Breitbart is a right-wing website. 11 In July 2022, Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a Capitol attack subpoena (www. theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/22/steve-bannon-trial-trump-contempt-congress-charges). 12 A cultural Muslim is religiously unobservant, secular, or irreligious. Yet, such people continue to identify with Islamic or Muslim culture as a result of personal and/or social factors, including family background, personal experiences, or the social and cultural environment where they grew up. A cultural Christian has the same traits from a Christian perspective. 13 See www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/ for relevant percentages. In Western Europe, the highest percentages are in France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. The average in the region is 4.9%.

Author’s personal interviews #1 Academic expert on international migration, Maria Grzegorzewska University, Warsaw, Poland, Berlin, 19 June 2018. #2 Former Senior Official (2008–2012) of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE), Warsaw, 1 December 2017. #3 Former Senior Pakistan diplomat, Washington, DC, 25 April 2018. #4 Senior official of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s Muslim Minorities Division, London, 20 June 2018. #5 Senior Official of European Union via Skype, 21 September 2017.

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Jeffrey Haynes Herbert, David. 2020. Religion and Society. In Routledge Handbook of Religion and Political Parties. Edited by Jeffrey Haynes. London: Routledge, pp. 31–43. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Normanton: University of Oklahoma Press. Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huysmans, Jeff. 2000. The European Union and the Securitization of Migration. Journal of Common Market Studies 5: 751–77. Jethani, Skye. 2016. Christianity Leads to Atheism. Available online: https://skyejethani.com/trump-andthe-heresy-of-christianism/ (accessed on 13 February 2019). Jones, Tobias. 2018. The Fascist Movement That Has Brought Mussolini Back to the Mainstream. The Guardian, February 22. Available online: www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/22/casapound-italymussolini-fascism-mainstream (accessed on 14 February 2019). Joppke, Christian. 2018. Culturalizing Religion in Western Europe: Patterns and Puzzles. Social Compass 2: 234–46. Kalmar, Ivan. 2018. Islamophobia in the East of the European Union: An Introduction. Patterns of Prejudice 5: 389–405. Kamali, Mohammad Kashim. 2015. The Middle Path of Moderation in Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. Kaya, Ayhan, and Ayşe Tecmen. 2019. Europe Versus Islam? Right-Wing Populist Discourse and the Construction of a Civilizational Identity. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17(1) 49–64. Kratochvíl, Petr. 2019. Religion as a Weapon: Invoking Religion in Secularized Societies. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 1: 78–88. Lloyd, John. 2017. Commentary: Now, a Different Clash of Civilizations. Reuters: Commentary, December  15. Available online: www.reuters.com/article/us-lloyd-civilizations-commentary/commentarynow-a-different-clash-of-civilizations-idUSKBN1E923J (accessed on 14 February 2019). Malice, Michael. 2018. Alt-Right Bible “Camp of The Saints” Proves Everyone’s Still Insane. The Observer, May 2. Available online: https://observer.com/2018/05/the-insanity-of-alt-right-bannon-aroved-thecamp-of-the-saints/ (accessed on 14 February 2019). Mandaville, Peter. 2017. Designating Muslims: Islam in the Western Policy Imagination. The Review of Faith & International Affairs 3: 54–65. Marchetti, Raffaele. 2016. Global Strategic Engagement. Lanham: Lexington Books. Mason, Rowena. 2015. Nigel Farage: British Muslim “Fifth Column” Fuels Fear of Immigration. The Guardian, March  12. Available online: www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/12/nigel-faragebritish-muslim-fifth-column-fuels-immigration-fear-ukip (accessed on 14 February 2019). Milton, Daniel. 2017. Does the Cure Address the Problem? Examining the Trump Administration’s Executive Order on Immigration from Muslim-majority Countries Using Publicly Available Data on Terrorism. Perspectives on Terrorism. Available online: www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/ article/view/625 (accessed on 13 May 2019). Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ozzano, Luca. 2019. Religion, Cleavages and Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Italian Case’. The Review of Faith and International Affairs 1: 65–77. Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. 2017. Go Back to Where You Came from: The Backlash against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy. New York: Nation Books. Ryan, Ben. 2018. Christianism: A  Crude Political Ideology and the Triumph of Empty Symbolism. Religion and Global Society. Available online: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2018/11/ christianism-a-crude-political-ideology-and-the-triumph-of-empty-symbolism/ (accessed on 13 February 2019). Sharify-Funk, Meena. 2013. Pervasive Anxiety about Islam: A Critical Reading of Contemporary “Clash” Literature. Religions 4: 443–68. Siddiqui, Sabrina. 2019. Steve King, White Supremacy and the Problem with Donald Trump. The Guardian, January  20. Available online: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/20/steve-king-is-representative-of-the-problem-with-donald-trump (accessed on 13 February 2019). Stewart, Katherine. 2020. The Power Worshippers. Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. London: Bloomsbury. Subtirelu, Nicholas. 2017. Donald Trump Supporters and the Denial of Racism: An Analysis of Online Discourse in a Pro-Trump Community. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2: 323–46.

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13 RELIGION AND POLITICAL PARTIES Luca Ozzano

Introduction: do “religious parties” exist? The role of religion in the party politics of contemporary democracies is not a new phenomenon: indeed, it is rooted in the very early stages of development of representative systems. This is true in the case of Europe, where the first Christian parties (such as the German Zentrum) were created already in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Kalyvas, 1996), but also in relation to the developing world, where religiously oriented parties and movements have often played a crucial role, even in polities initially founded on strictly secular bases. However, the literature and the systematization of the research on religion and political parties are still underdeveloped. As explained by Ozzano and Cavatorta (2013b), in the first place this is a consequence of the predominance of the so-called “secularization paradigm” in twentieth-century social sciences, assuming that religion would gradually disappear or become an utterly private factor in modernized societies (Swatos and Christiano, 1999). This also engendered a normative bias towards the role of religion in party politics, since mainstream political theory regarded parties with a religious orientation as “not real parties [. . .] opportunistic and not committed to electoral democracy [. . .] intransigently ideological, uncompromising, militant, extremist [. . .] aim[ing] at conforming public policy to the imperatives of a single faith [. . .] authoritarian in their organization and goals [. . .] culturally conservative, even anti-modern [. . .] resist[ing] progressive social policies necessary for democratic stability” and therefore creators of “potentially radical political instability” (Rosenblum, 2003, p. 42). For this reason, the concept of “religious party” itself endures a negative stigma, being often used as synonymous for “estremist” or “intolerant”, in the conviction that “politics based on the sacred” is “antithetical to liberal democracy” (Tepe, 2008, p. 1). As a consequence, the concept of “religious party” itself is “both loose and controversial” (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013b, p. 800), and for this reason a number of scholars even reject the concept, preferring labels such as “religious nationalist”, “communalist”, etc. The main problem posed by the use of this concept is probably, however, its binary nature, implying that a party can be either secular or religious, with no room in between, and no possible nuances. Ozzano and Cavatorta (2013b, p. 800) have tried to overcome this problem by adopting the concept of “religiously oriented party”: “a party that can be explicitly religious or formally secular, where religious values in its manifesto are clearly identifiable, where explicit appeals 182

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-15

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to religious constituencies are made and/or where significant religious factions exist within the party”. It is however useful to briefly analyze the literature on religious parties, to review the features commonly associated by scholars to this type of party. A point frequently stressed by the literature is the presence of an “associational nexus” at the roots of many parties with an explicit religious orientation. This latter is a very strong tie with some kind of religious institution, association or network, whose organization and basin of militants was crucial for the emergence and growth of the party. In some cases, such as Christian democratic parties, it is a full-fledged church; however, it can also be represented by a religious brotherhood, as in the case of Turkish political Islam; or even a media network (as in the case of the US “televangelists” TV channels, crucial for the success of the Christian Right faction within the Republican Party) (Kalyvas, 1996; Rosenblum, 2003; Yavuz, 2003; Wilcox, Larson and Robinson, 2006). In some cases, especially where religion is heavily mixed with nationalist feelings, as in the case of India, this role can be performed by a grassroots religious nationalist movement (Jaffrelot, 1996). Many scholars warn, however, that religious political parties cannot be regarded simply as a “political arm” of religious organizations and groups: this is shown particularly by the fact that in the latter phases of their development, these parties often tend (or at least try) to become autonomous from religious networks, especially by developing their own base of political militants, and sometimes (as in the case of Turkey) even getting at odds with their former religious patrons. This is also visible in terms of leadership, with the emergence of secular leaders that sometimes even compete with religious authorities to define what a good believer actually is. With this mainstreaming process (which, in organizational terms, can coincide with the passage from the mass to the catch-all model), their platforms can also tend to become wider, to include non-strictly religious or ethical issues (Yavuz, 2003; Mohseni and Wilcox, 2009). In terms of cleavages (see following for a more thorough review of this literature) these parties are often seen as a consequence of the secular versus religious cleavage (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) engendered by the creation of modern national states. However, as explained later, this point of view has been challenged in the latest decades by the success of new political parties with a religious orientation that do not fit in Lipset and Rokkan’s model of the four “traditional” cleavages. Religious political parties are often recognizable because their religious identity is made explicit by their name (e.g. Christian Democracy, Islamic Salvation Front, Hezbollah, etc.); however, in some cases it is not, either because the parties want to stress their support for state secularism and their independence from churches (as in the case of Italy’s Popular Party in the early twentieth century), or because some kind of state regulation explicitly forbids religious parties: this is the case of Turkey, where parties’ names, and their symbols, refer to abstract concepts such as justice, truth, welfare; and in parties’ platforms religion is often disguised in terms of identity, tradition, and celebration of history (Yavuz, 2003; Galli, 2004). For many of the previously mentioned reasons, it is often difficult to single out a “religious party” from a conservative or nationalist party focused on the defense of some type of religious values. This is also why this chapter adopts the concept of “religiously oriented party”, that allows the researcher to consider more nuanced and changing phenomena that cannot be subsumed into the binary dichotomy of “secular vs. religious”. Considering the social science bias engendered by the predominance of the “secularization paradigm”, and the methodological problems highlighted in relation to the concept of “religious party”, it is probably no surprise that the comparative literature on religion and political parties is underdeveloped, especially when comparisons across regions and cultures are involved. 183

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To begin with, mainstream political science was at first reluctant to properly assess and categorize parties with a religious orientation. The first author to include this type of party in a comprehensive typology of political parties probably was Otto Kirchheimer, who elaborated a classification of four types of political parties which also includes the category of “massdenominational party”: a model of mass party which has managed to achieve integration not on the basis of class (as in the case of Socialist and Communist parties) but of religious identity. A factor which, however, someway undermines, according to Kirchheimer, its growth potential by engendering a “fortress-type character” (Kirchheimer, 1966, p.  183). This idea was later further developed and refined by Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond in their extensive multidimensional classification of 15 types of political parties. According to the authors, the massdenominational party, as a loyal and democratic party, must be set apart from another category: the “mass-fundamentalist party”, which is an anti-system party, trying to “reorganize state and society around a strict reading of religious doctrinal principles”, willing to erase separation between religion and state, and to impose its view of religious norms on all citizens, notwithstanding their private religious beliefs (Gunther and Diamond, 2001, pp. 21–22). Within the political science field, the comparative literature specifically focused on parties with a religious orientation (with the partial exception of specific discussions, such as those about the ‘religious cleavage’ and the ‘inclusion-moderation thesis’, both analyzed below in separate paragraphs) is also still scarce. The existing works prefer to work on national cases, or at most, they engage in comparisons involving single regions and/or religious traditions, such as Christian democratic parties (Irving, 1979; Mainwaring, 2003; Kalyvas and van Kersbergen, 2010), and Islamist parties (Roy, 1992; Noyon, 2003; Salih, 2009). They rarely engage in comparisons across cultures, and when they do, they usually focus on a limited number of cases (Tepe, 2008) or lack elaborated theoretical insights (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2014). So far, the only comprehensive classification has been elaborated by Luca Ozzano (2013, 2020), with his typology of five types of religiously oriented parties (fundamentalist, conservative, progressive, nationalist and camp) that are adopted in the following paragraphs of this chapter.

The religious cleavage and its evolution Before addressing the different types of religious identity a party can show, and their evolution, it is necessary however to mention a notable exception to the previously mentioned neglect of the role of religion in comparative works about political parties: the literature about the “cleavage thesis”, elaborated by Lipset and Rokkan (1967). According to their research, largely based on Europe, the European party systems of the late twentieth century were the consequence of long-term social divides, in turn engendered by traumatic historical events, such as the industrial revolution and the creation of the national state. The four main cleavages, according to Lipset and Rokkan, were “subject versus dominant culture” (also referred to as “centre versus periphery”), “churches versus government”, “primary versus secondary economy” and “workers versus employers”. Particularly, the “churches versus government” cleavage was the result of the creation of the national state, and more specifically of “the conflict between the central nationbuilding culture and the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries”: a struggle that “was one of morals, of the control of community norms”, whose “fundamental issue” was “the control of education” (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967, pp. 14–15). Although the conflict between religion and secularism was thus regarded by the authors as one of the main forces shaping European party politics, it was however debated how influent

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this factor really was. While of course liberal and Marxist scholars often gave priority to class cleavages or other divides, further research supported a central role of the religious cleavage: for example, Richard Rose and Derek Urwin affirmed in 1969 that “religious divisions, not class, are the main social basis of parties in the Western world today”: a feature that, according to the authors, was particularly true in Catholic majority countries, because “the Catholic Church stands for a distinctive form of social integration” (Rose and Urwin, 1969, pp. 12–21). Others contended that, although many political issues were more or less loosely connected to religion, “only a small number of political issues clearly follow the religious/secular conflict line” (Knutsen, 2004, p. 44). More broadly, a significant literature highlighted a decline of the role of this cleavage (Bellucci and Heath, 2012), in the context of a broader process of “unfreezing” of European party politics and decline of the role of “traditional” cleavages started in the 1980s (Lane and Ersson, 1999). In the same period, scholars started to notice the rise of new parties that did not fit in the cleavages typology drafted by Lipset and Rokkan: particularly, the ecologist parties (and, more broadly, the new left and the constellation of movements often prioritizing civil rights over social ones) (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005) and the new, “extreme” or “populist” rightwing parties (Kitschelt and McGann, 1997; Ignazi, 2003; Kriesi et al., 2008). These latter proved particularly puzzling for scholars of religion and politics, because they often referred to religious values, and, particularly, religious identity, in discourses that could not be understandable simply in terms of “religious versus secular”. Indeed, their reference to religion was more a matter of belonging than a matter of believing: an identity-driven and civilizational idea of religion where this latter is a marker of identity that allegedly unifies the local community while setting some groups (often migrants and Muslims) as “threatening others”, incompatible with the Western culture and civilization (Arato and Cohen, 2017; Brubaker, 2017; Haynes, 2020). In this context, marked according to Simon Bornschier by a new cleavage “between libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values” (Bornschier, 2010, p. 434), right-wing populists fiercely oppose “the elites who disregard the importance of the people’s religious heritage, and the ‘others’ who seek to impose their religious values and laws upon the native population” (Marzouki and McDonnell, 2016). Another interesting, and novel, feature of this new party type is the fact that it does not necessarily respect the authority of religious institutions, when their positions are at odds with the populist creed, especially in terms of migration and multiculturalism (Ozzano, 2019). Broadly speaking, the cleavages thesis, and the role of religion in it, have been the subject of relevant methodological discussions among scholars, which often revolved around the applicability of this thesis to non-European societies (also in the context of the broader debate about the “decolonization” of social sciences). Critics contend, particularly, the fact that the idea of “church versus government” is not applicable to religions such as Islam or Hinduism where the idea of church itself is often not applicable. As a consequence the most recent wave of studies about cleavages tends to refer to a broader “religious versus secular” cleavage, utterly dropping the role of churches; or, especially in the US context, they also describe a “values cleavage”, as more applicable to a religious pluralist context (Kriesi, 2010; Ozzano, 2020).

For the sake of God: fundamentalist parties As already mentioned, fundamentalist parties aim at reorganizing state and society around a strict reading of a religious tradition and erasing any separation between religion and politics. Therefore, they can be considered, according to Neumann’s model, parties of total integration

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with “ambiguous goals of seizing power and radically transform societies, demanding the full commitment and unquestioning obedience of members” (Neumann, 1956; Gunther and Diamond, 2003, p. 169). As a consequence, they have at best an ambiguous attitude towards democracy (and pluralism), with a tactical attitude towards it (Brumberg, 1997) rather than a full commitment to its values and institutions: the fact that they maintain their anti-system attitude even when involved in democratic systems can give rise to the so-called “paradox of democracy” (Sartori, 1976; Schwedler, 1998). As shown later, there is a wide literature on the possibility that democracy can have, or not have, a moderating influence on them, turning them into parties of the conservative type. In organizational terms, according to Gunther and Diamond, [g]iven the far-reaching objectives of these parties (which may verge on the totalitarian), the organizational development of these parties and the scope of their activities are extensive. Member involvement and identification is substantial and even intense, and ancillary organizations establish a presence at the local level throughout society. [.  .  .] authority relations within the party are hierarchical, undemocratic and even absolutist, and members are disciplined and devoted. Religious fundamentalist parties mobilize support not only by invoking religious doctrine and identity, and by proposing policies derived from those principles, but also through selective incentives; they often perform a wide range of social welfare functions which aid in recruiting and solidifying the loyalty of members. This web of organized activities and services encapsulates members within a distinct subculture. (Gunther and Diamond, 2003, p. 183) When analyzing this type of parties, a number of defining features come to the fore. First of all, they often have a particularly strong associational nexus with some kind of religious organization and/or social movement (whose grassroots activity and influence on the party can make even more difficult the moderation of the party) (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013a). Their leadership is often charismatic, with the leader as a quasi-religious authority competing with official religious institutions for the interpretation of religious law; the loss of the leader is often a defining moment in the life of the party (especially whether no succession or routinization of charisma mechanism is in place) and can result in schisms and disarray (Sprinzak, 1991; Almond, Appleby and Sivan, 2003). Their social base, and their militants, can usually be found among the poor and frustrated lower classes (often living in rural areas and urban shantytowns), which also benefit from the welfare activities these parties often carry out; however, examples of highly ideologized members of the middle class are not rare, especially in leading positions. As a consequence of their anti-system and sometimes openly violent attitude, these parties are frequently banned from either democratic and partly democratic/hybrid political systems. In this case, they can be forced to exist only underground and have to choose between political activity and a violent option (Cavatorta and Merone, 2013). In some cases, however, they can be tolerated insofar they remain small “testimony parties”, especially in the context of lowthreshold proportional electoral systems. Although examples from the Middle East (especially in relation to the transnational Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi networks) usually come to mind when thinking of this party type (Pargeter, 2013; Cavatorta and Merone, 2017), it is not at all a preserve of Islam, as shown by examples such as Kach in Israel (Sprinzak, 1986) and the Political Reformed Party in the Netherlands (Vollaard, 2013).

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From the margins to the centre: the conservative type This category includes political parties that have come to fully accept, ideologically and behaviourally, the values and rules of democracy as the only game in town and, organizationally, have developed from the mass-party model to show at least some features of the catch-all one, with the choice of “appealing to all voters, except convinced anti-clericals” (Krouwel, 2006, p.  258; Kirchheimer, 1966). Although their ideology is focused on the preservation of some religious values, and “the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions” (Huntington, 1957, p. 455), they have also widened the spectrum of the issues they deal with, to include also non-specifically religious or ethical issues. Coherently with the catch-all model, they engage with different types of interest groups and social groups, although they often maintain privileged relations with religiously oriented associationism and/or trade-unionism (La Palombara, 1964; Thomas, 2001). They are also quite pragmatic and flexible in terms of political alliances, when coalition politics is involved, accepting both centre-right and centre-left partners, insofar they are not openly anti-religious. This is also true at the supranational level, where they not rarely support cooperation and supranational integration agendas (Yavuz, 2003; Kaiser, 2007). They still usually enjoy good relations with religious institutions and communities (which, in some cases, were at the very roots of the parties’ creation), that often support them, but in most cases they have developed an autonomous organization of political militants rather than simply relying on religious networks for campaigns and electoral support (Kalyvas, 1996; Yavuz, 2003). They also rely on a wide and heterogeneous basin of voters, usually ranging from the lower to the middle and upper middle classes, although they are usually stronger in rural areas and small/medium towns rather than big cities. This wide constituency can also explain their pragmatic social and economic agenda, which often balances pro-free-trade policies with some kind of aspiration to social justice and promotion of welfare, in accordance with religious values (Shankland, 1999; Kersbergen, 2003). This wide outlook is also mirrored by the internal composition of the parties, which not rarely include very heterogeneous factions, ranging from social democracy to the far right, and have sometimes been likened to a “microcosm” of society (Lyon, 1967). The downside of this situation can be on the one hand the development of a fierce factionalism (Belloni and Beller, 1978; Boucek, 2009), and, on the other, the tendency to occupy the centre, that can result in stagnation and corruption phenomena (Sartori, 1976). When we look at the specific party families that refer to this party type, we must mention first of all Christian democracy, a wide strain of conservative and centrist parties born in Europe since the last decades of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the creation of the new secular states or, according to Kalyvas (1996), as the unintended consequence of the Catholic Church’s involvement in civil society. While in Europe, after the Second World War, they have often played a crucial role both in the democratization of formerly authoritarian and totalitarian countries like Italy and Germany, as well as in the creation of the European Union (Gerard and Hecke, 2004; Kaiser, 2007), they have later spread to other parts of the world, with a particular success in Latin America (Gill, 1998; Mainwaring, 2003). During the twentieth century, this huge family was joined by religiously oriented conservative and centrist parties with more heterogeneous roots: in some cases, such as the US Republican Party, they are even former secular parties that have developed some degree of religious outlook (Oldfield, 1996). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this party type has also been increasingly represented in the Muslim world, often as a consequence of the moderation of formerly extremist parties (as

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the cases of Ennahda in Tunisia and the early Justice and Development Party in Turkey show) (Yavuz, 2003; Cavatorta and Merone, 2013).

From religious nationalism to right-wing populism Another relevant group of parties, often neglected by the “traditional” literature on religious parties, proposes an ideology which blends the desire to widen the role of religion in the public sphere with nationalist/nativist feelings. This usually implies a strong focus on the opposition against other (ethno-)religious communities, perceived as incompatible with the local culture and, often, as illegitimate aliens or invaders. This worldview shows, very commonly, through some kind of sacralization of the homeland and its boundaries: thus, holy places shared with other communities can easily become a bone of contention, sometimes leading the opposing movements and parties to outright violence (as the cases of the Babri Masjid mosque in India and the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock in Israel have sadly demonstrated) (Jaffrelot, 1996; Gorenberg, 2001). More broadly, especially in democratic polities, this opposition takes the shape of a ‘culture war’ against specific religious or cultural traditions that are portrayed as alien or even threatening for the local cultural landscape, and a struggle to bend the secular state towards privileging the native local culture and religion (Bhargava, 2009). Parties adopting this kind of stance stand out not only for their nativist and often xenophobic ideology, but also for their organizational traits: although they are commonly organized as mass-based parties, with a wide participation of militants (especially among groups of displaced people or among middle-class citizens who feel threatened by other communities), and sometimes even show features of the catch-all model, not rarely they also develop a parallel militia organization, someway similar to the organizational model described by Duverger (1966) in relation to twentieth-century fascist parties. Sometimes, as in the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the militias are part of a formally structured and powerful movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates (Andersen and Damle, 1987); otherwise, they can be more voluntarist in nature, as the case of the settlers’ patrols in the Occupied Territories under the control of Israel shows (Sprinzak, 1991); finally, they can be a mainly symbolic phenomenon, as in the case of the Northern League’s “green shirts” in 1990s Italy (Guolo, 2000). This double layer of organization can usher into ambiguity between party and movement roles, and engender significant tension between the grassroots base and the institutional political representatives, sometimes even preventing – as shown later – attempts at moderation of political parties (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013a). Until the 1980s, this type of parties could be found mostly in some deeply divided societies in areas of the world such as the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; on the contrary, nationalist parties with a religious orientation were a rarity elsewhere, both in the liberal west and the communist east. This situation abruptly changed at the turn of the century: partly because of the change of international paradigm brought about by the demise of the Communist bloc (Huntington, 1996; Kaldor, 1999) but also because of the globalization and migration processes making regions such as Europe and North America much more inhomogeneous and hybridized in ethnic, religious and cultural terms (Kitschelt, 1994; Kriesi et al., 2008). This changing situation gave rise to a new wave of “extreme” or “populist” right-wing parties which showed different features in comparison to the early twentieth-century right-wing political groups, and primarily focused on the defense of a (real or imagined) local community against alien intruders (Betz, 1994; Ignazi, 2003). Among them, the most successful were the Northern League (later simply “League”) in Italy, the National Front (later renamed “National Rally”) in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Party of Freedom in Austria, the Law 188

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and Justice Party in Poland, and Fidesz in Hungary. However, especially since the 2010s, the new right-wing populist wave seems to have become a global phenomenon, with the adoption of a populist style by leaders such as Putin in Russia, Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Erdoğan in Turkey. Quite interestingly, even the leaders of ‘old’ nationalist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the Likud in Israel have recently shown a remarkable convergence with European populists in terms of rhetoric and policy proposals (McDonnell and Cabrera, 2019; Ozzano, 2020; Ozzano and Bolzonar, 2020; Ben-Porat et al., 2021) As shown earlier, this party type adopts a culturalized and identity-driven idea of religion which is often at odds with the “traditional” religious cleavage, and sometimes with institutional religious authorities (Ozzano, 2019). Hence, there are the ideas that right-wing populists “hijack” religion for other purposes (Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy, 2016), or that they use religion simply as “a mask” for their nationalist feelings (Ozzano, 2020). The degree of culturalization of religion varies however significantly among the different cases, in accordance to both local and party traditions: it is very strong in some cases, such as the gay-friendly and proabortion Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and, partly, France’s National Rally; while it is much less prominent in parties imbued with “traditional” religiosity such as Poland’s Law and Justice Party and some other right-wing populist parties, especially in central/eastern Europe (Brubaker, 2017; Haynes, 2020).

The (disappearing?) religious left It is not a surprise that religiously oriented parties with some kind of progressive orientation (either as the consequence of a blending between religion and some type of Socialist doctrine or because of the adoption of a socially oriented religious plank, such as the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church) are quite rare today. Indeed, the fact that religious identity is commonly associated to a conservative platform can be the source of both internal and external tensions for parties willing to affirm “progressive” social and civil rights while at the same time defending religious values. There are, however, notable exceptions, where the local cultural context can be more favorable to such ideological experiences. This is the case, particularly, of Latin America, where the legacy of the Liberation Theology movement has made possible the creation of wide Christian democratic parties with a mild progressive orientation (Luna, Monestier and Rosenblatt, 2013); and Southeast Asia, with significant experiences of “Buddhist Socialism” (Harris, 2007). Another partial exception is Italy, where left-wing Christian factions were a sizeable force within the Christian Democracy party; and, after its demise, have played a role of power broker in the centre-left coalition (Galli, 2004; Baccetti, 2007). In other cases, such as Israel (with a left-wing religious-Zionist faction, which in the 1980s created its own party, Meimad) and the US (with a religious left tradition which was largely a heritage of the civil rights movement), interesting past experiences seem to have withered in recent decades, with only small factions still active within the mainstream parties of the centre-left field (Ozzano, 2020). This seems indeed to be the fate of most cases belonging to this type, where external constraints and internal tensions make the existence of an independent party too costly.

Negotiating the position of religious communities in a pluralistic context A last group of religiously oriented parties includes political groups representing a specific (ethno-)religious community which, unlike nationalist ones, chooses to bargain this latter’s position vis-à-vis the secular state (and, sometimes, its separation) in a pluralistic environment, 189

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rather than adopting a conflict-oriented stance. Their identity, thus, blends those of a proper political party and a non-associational interest group (Almond, 1958), and their role closely resembles that of the “ethnic parties” active in many racially diverse societies (Ishiyama and Breuning, 2011). These parties, labelled as belonging to the “camp” type (Cohen, 2007; Ozzano, 2013), are “typified by the fact that a particularly large majority of those affiliated with the ‘camp’ vote for that camp’s party”, and “by the lack of political competition over its adherents via the establishment of significant political alternatives” (Cohen, 2007, p. 328). As a consequence of this strong identification, they get most of their votes from the community they represent, with an interclass attitude. These parties tend to be very pragmatic, in terms of policies and alliances, insofar they manage to promote the interests of their community, which can contribute to mitigate their dogmatism. On the other hand, their activity rarely leads to a real integration of their communities into the mainstream society. The prototype of this family of religiously oriented parties are the haredi parties representing the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, willing to preserve the separation and the privileges granted to their community by the “status quo” system (Greilsammer, 1991; BenPorat, 2013). Quite interestingly, while in the early decades of the state of Israel, a single party, Agudat Yisrael, represented the whole community, it later split into several parties and factions, representing distinct ethnoreligious communities. Among them, the most successful was Shas, representing the Sephardi (with origins in the Middle East) Ultra-Orthodox community (Filc, 2010; Ben-Porat et al., 2021). Other examples can be found in India (such as the Sikh party Shiromani Akali Dal, and some local Muslim parties), among the Tamil community of Sri Lanka, and in Northern Ireland; according to some, even the Shia Muslim party Hezbollah in Lebanon shows traits of this type (Jaffrelot, 1996; O’Malley and Walsh, 2013; Norton, 2014).

Dynamics of religiously oriented parties Political parties are complex organizations, especially if they are big and adopting a catch-all stance. They can show tensions between the leadership and the militants (especially if they are organized in strong grassroots movements) and can include a plurality of different factions and groups. This makes the previous categories ideal, rather than water-tight, types. Indeed, several examples previously reviewed (such as for example the Justice and Development Party in Turkey and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India – both showing a tension between their moderate and radical souls) show a hybridized identity, referring to different of the previously mentioned types. In several cases, however, there are clear trajectories of change, with the predominant identity of a party evolving from one type to another. In the most extreme cases they can even either secularize (as in the case of the Motherland Party in Turkey in the early 1990s) or “religionize” (as in the case of the Republican Party in the US). Even when they retain their religious orientation, the modalities and intensity of this latter can change, as a consequence of strategic choices of the leadership (or outright leadership change), grassroots pressures and external constraints (Brocker and Künkler, 2013; Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013a; Ozzano, 2020). Although there are examples of trajectories of radicalization from a conservative stance towards a fundamentalist or nationalist identity, the most significant literature has focused on the possibility that an extremist and anti-system religious party can moderate, by accepting both the procedures and the values of democracy, and rejecting intolerant and violent stances. The internal and external factors that can affect the moderation of a party according to the literature are indeed numerous (for a review, see Broker and Künkler [2013]). A huge debate (with a particular focus, since the 1990s, on Islamist parties in the Middle East, also in the context of the broader debate on the compatibility between Islam and democracy) 190

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has however focused on the so-called “moderation by inclusion” thesis: that is, the possibility that the inclusion in a democratic system can have a moderating effect on an extremist party. This thesis seemed to be supported by the cases of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey (at least until the early 2010s), and, a contrario, by radicalization processes following phenomena of exclusion (as the case of Algeria in the 1990s shows) (Clark, 2006; Schwedler, 2011; Kirdiş, 2018). However, especially since the 2010s, this idea was put into question by several contributions, showing a reversion of the previous moderation paths (as in the cases of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India), and cases of moderation in absence of inclusion (as shown by the Ennahda party in Tunisia); not to mention the “perils of polarization” endured by political systems including extremist parties (Cavatorta and Merone, 2013; Jaffrelot, 2013; Tepe, 2013; Öztürk, 2019). This conundrum is difficult to solve also because the debate on this issue, at least in the broader, non-academic field, is highly ideologized, and sometimes based on non-scientific points, such as the allegations that Islamist parties can harbor a “double agenda”, and that they can “fake” moderation, adopting a stance defined by Brumberg (1997) as “tactical moderation” (with a purely opportunistic acceptance of democracy, with the sole aim of taking power). To sum up, the understanding of the processes of change in the identity of religiously oriented parties is still a work in progress, which is made more difficult by the absence of a method to measure the religious orientation of a party and its change: which forces scholars engaging on the subject to remain on qualitative grounds (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013a); and, in turn, contributes to the broader underdevelopment of the literature on religion and political parties that was described earlier. The agenda for future research therefore surely includes the development of more refined analytical tools, concepts, and methodologies, which can allow the analysis of religiously oriented political parties to further develop and to more effectively include quantitative methodologies.

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14 RELIGION, POLITICS AND CIVIL SOCIETY Jeffrey Haynes

To understand the political and social importance of religious actors, it is necessary to comprehend what they say and do in their relationship with the state. Following Stepan (1988, p. 3), I mean something more than ‘mere’ government when referring to the state: it is the continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic, and coercive system that attempts both to manage the state apparatus and to ‘structure relations between civil and public power and to structure many crucial relationships within civil and political society’. In the modern world, states typically try to reduce or control religion’s social and political influence – that is, they seek to privatise it, to dominate it. Sometimes, in countries at differing levels of economic development – for example, the USA, Nigeria, Tanzania, Indonesia, Israel, Burma and Poland – the state attempts to build a ‘civil religion’, that is, where a specified religion ‘functions as the cult of the political community’ (Casanova, 1994, p. 58). The aim of civil religion is to create consensual, corporate religion, guided by general, culturally appropriate, societally specific religious beliefs, yet not necessarily tied institutionally to any specific religious tradition (Haynes, 1998). When the state seeks to build a civil religion, the aim is to avoid societal conflicts and promote national consensus, especially in countries with pronounced religious, ethnic or ideological divisions. Minority religious groups may perceive civil religion as an attempt by the state to perpetuate the hegemony of a dominant religious tradition at the expense of other, less major, ones. Religion’s relationship with the state is not only bounded by attempts to build civil religions. In recent years, it has become of greater public salience in relation to a range of state-religion relationships. That relations between religious organisations and the state have become more visible and often increasingly problematic in many countries in recent years does not, of course, constitute in itself evidence against the idea that states in the contemporary era do not need the kind of religious legitimation exemplified by civil religion. One certainly has, for example, to entertain the possibility that the recent proliferation of religious-based challenges to the authority of the state is merely a transitory reaction to the onward trajectory of secularisation. Moreover, even if states today seem vulnerable to legitimation crises, it does not mean that religion is necessarily becoming relevant to the functioning of state machinery. Religion-based or -linked challenges to the state often have their roots in endeavours by the latter to assert a monitoring role vis-à-vis religion, or to control it. This development is noticeable at three levels: political society, civil society and the state.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-16

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Religion and political society Today, religion is being liberated from providing slavish legitimacy for secular authority. Religious leaders and activists often criticise governments in relation to social, economic and political policies. Yet, even if heightened concern about state policy is held up as evidence of the regeneration of religion’s socio-political power, it is still necessary to examine further the nature of this development. When the issues are clearly secular – such as poverty alleviation, migration and gender equality – and religious actors are vocal, it indicates a radical shift of concern from the supernatural and from devotional acts, to topics emphatically concerned with the here-andnow. This is not to suggest that when religious interest and pressure groups act in ways similar to secular counterparts that they are necessarily more effective. Wilson (1992, pp.  202–203) points out that the more secular a society, the less likely religion has a consistently significant social or political voice. At the level of political society – that is, the arena in which the polity specifically arranges itself for political contestation to gain control over public power and the state apparatus – we can see a range of religious responses which are in part dependent upon the degree of secularisation in a country. They include (1) resistance to disestablishment and/or differentiation of the religious from the secular sphere – that is, a prominent goal of many so-called ‘fundamentalist’ religious actors; (2) the mobilisations and counter-mobilisations of religious groups and confessional parties against other religions or against secular movements and parties; and (3) religious groups’ organisation in defence of religious, social and political freedoms – that is, demanding the rule of law and legal protection of human and civil rights and protecting the autonomy of civil society and/or defending democracy against autocracy (Haynes, 1997).

Religion and civil society Civil society is the arena where multiple social movements – for example, neighbourhood associations, women’s groups, religious organisations, intellectual currents, and the like – join with civic organisations – including those coordinating lawyers, journalists, trade unions and entrepreneurs – constitute themselves into an ensemble of arrangements. The aim is to advance members’ interests (Stepan (1988, p. 3). The concept of civil society is sometimes used to contrast such concerns with those of political society. Unlike the latter, civil society refers to institutions and movements – not including political parties – not overtly or consistently involved in the concerns of governance or in obvious political management. This does not prevent civil society organisations from exerting sometimes pivotal political influence on various matters, ranging from single issues to the character and complexion of a country’s constitution. In relation to religion, at the level of civil society we may distinguish, for example, between hegemonic civil religions – such as evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth-century America – and the public intervention of religious pressure groups today. The latter may be concerned with single issues such as anti-abortion or with a morally determined view of wider societal development, including the role of women in society. Trying to influence public policy – without seeking to become political office-holders – religious leaders employ various tactics, including (1) lobbying the states’ executive apparatus, including the president or prime minister; (2) going to court; (3) cultivating sustained links with like-minded political parties; (4) forming alliances with groups in civil society – whether secular or religious – which have similar aims; (5) mobilising followers to protest or complain; and (6) seeking to sensitise public opinion via the mass or social media. The overall point is that religious actors use a variety of methods to try to achieve their social, political and/or economic objectives. 196

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Religion and the state Interactions between the state and the leaders of major religious organisations used to be widely identified as ‘church-state’ relations. In the modern world, however, this nomenclature is deficient. The very concept of church is a somewhat parochial Anglo-American standpoint with relevance only to the Christian tradition. It is derived primarily from the context of British establishmentarianism – that is, maintenance of the principle of ‘establishment’ whereby one church, such as the Church of England, is legally recognized as a country’s ‘established’ – that is, hegemonic – church. In other words, when we think of ‘church-state’ relations, we often assume a simple relationship between two clearly distinct, unitary and solidly but separately institutionalised entities of profound societal importance. In this implicit model, built into the conceptualization of the religio-political nexus, there is a state and only one church of singular religious authority; both entities’ jurisdictional boundaries are carefully delineated constitutionally. Both separation and pluralism must be safeguarded, because it is assumed that the leading church – like the state – will seek institutionalised dominance over rival organizations. For its part, the state is expected to respect individual rights even though it is assumed to be inherently disposed toward aggrandisement, sometimes at the expense of citizens’ personal liberty. In sum, the conventional concept of state-church relations is rooted in prevailing Western conceptions of the power of the state necessarily being constrained by forces in society – including those of religion – to deliver a ‘balance’ of power. This traditional European-centred perspective is built on the understanding that church and state have a fair degree of power in relation to each other. Yet, when we look at the situation in, for example, Central and Eastern Europe during Soviet-dominated communism, there was a different situation. There, Communist governments presided over – and typically rigorously enforced – monolithic unity with comprehensive institutional interpenetration of politicaladministrative and religious ideological orders. In Western Europe, there has been in many cases a declining societal position for Christian churches as the countries of the region have secularised. In France, for example, when the dominant Catholic Church placed itself on the wrong side of the French Revolution in 1789 it found itself losing much power, privilege and moral authority until, by the mid-twentieth century, the church in France had lost much of its earlier political influence (Martin, 1978, p. 16). The overall point is that in much of contemporary Europe, state prevails over church, while the political saliency of church-state issues has declined in importance as the trajectory of secularisation has been consistent, digging ever deeper into countries’ social fabric. Expanding the issue of church-state relations to non-Christian contexts away from Europe necessitates some preliminary conceptual clarifications – not least because the very idea of a prevailing state-church dichotomy is culture-bound. Church is a Christian institution, while the modern understanding of state is deeply rooted in the Post-Reformation European political experience. In their specific cultural setting and social significance, the tensions and debates over church-state relationships are uniquely Western phenomena, present in the ambivalent dialectic of ‘render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s and unto God the things which be God’s’ (Luke 21, 25). Encumbered with Western cultural history, the two concepts cannot satisfactorily be translated into non-Christian terminologies. Some world religions – for example, Hinduism – lack an ecclesiastical structure, and consequently there cannot be a clerical challenge to India’s secular state comparable to that of Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia or Shiite mullahs in Iran. On the other hand, political parties and civil society organisations motivated and energised by religious concerns – especially Hinduism and Sikhism – are of great importance in twenty-first-century India. 197

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Elsewhere in the Global South, only in Latin America is it pertinent to speak of church-state relations along the lines of the European model. This is because of the historical regional dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and the creation of European-style states from the early nineteenth century, following the demise of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Elsewhere, the traditional European-centric Christian conceptual framework of church-state relations is alien within and with respect to nearly all African and Asian societies – whether predominantly Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu – or in those countries with no dominant religion and a number of competing religious traditions. The differences between Christian conceptions of state and church and those of other world religions are well illustrated by reference to Islam. In the Muslim tradition, mosque is not church. The closest Islamic approximation to ‘state’ – dawla – means, as a concept, either a ruler’s dynasty or his administration (Vatikiotis, 1987, p. 36). Only with the specific Durkheimian stipulation of church as the generic concept for moral community, priest for the custodians of the sacred law, and state for political community can we use these concepts in Muslim and other nonChristian contexts. On the theological level, the command-obedience nexus that constitutes the Muslim definition of authority is not demarcated by conceptual categories of religion and politics. Life as a physical reality is seen as an expression of divine will and authority (qudrah’). There is no validity in separating the matters of piety from those of the polity; both are divinely ordained. Yet, although both religious and political authorities are legitimated in Islam, in the modern world they invariably constitute distinct, sometimes independent, social institutions, while in many cases regularly interacting with each other with various outcomes (Dabashi, 1987, p. 183). There is a variety of church-state relations in the contemporary world, which can be seen in five common relationships. First, there is the confessional church–state relationship where ecclesiastical authority is preeminent over secular power. The dominant religion seeks to shape the world according to its leadership’s interpretations of God’s plan for humankind. However, confessional states are rare in the twenty-first century, explicable by the trajectory of secularisation which has the effect of separating religious and secular power, to the advantage of the latter, seemingly regardless of religion or type of political system. On the other hand, as developments in Saudi Arabia after the country’s creation in 1932, in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and in Afghanistan since the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, indicate, some Muslimmajority countries have political and social systems dominated by religion under the hegemonic control of one interpretation of a religious faith. Second, there are the ‘generally religious’ states, such as the USA and Indonesia. Both are guided by (different) religious beliefs – where the concept of civil religion is important, untied to a specific religious tradition. Both countries express a belief in God as a crucial base of the nation’s values on which the country should be developed. In Indonesia, this belief is one of the five pillars of Pancasila, the official, foundational philosophical theory of the country, since its liberation from Dutch colonial control in 1947. Conceptually, pancasila is similar to the notion in the USA of civil religion. However, whereas the generally religious policy of religion in Indonesia is an official policy, civil religion in the USA is not formally recognised and in recent years, many have noted, has declined as inter- and intra-religious conflict has deepened (Haynes, 2021). Third, there are countries that, for long periods, had an officially established faith – yet are also socially highly secular. They include Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and England. Over time, voices of established churches in these countries became increasing marginalised. However, in England, the Anglican church has – quite recently – begun once again to add its voice to demands for greater social justice.

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Fourth, and frequently encountered in the modern era, there is the liberal secular model. Conceptually, it encapsulates the notion of secular power holding sway over religion; there is distance, detachment and separation between state and church(es) (Weber, 1978, pp. 1159– 1160). The state strives to use religion for its own ends, often to ‘legitimate political rule and to sanctify economic oppression and the given system’ of social stratification (Casanova, 1994, p.  49). In such countries, secularisation policies are widely pursued, where post-colonial governments believe that it is an avenue to enhanced national integration. In the liberal secular model, no religion is given official predominance. In aggressively modernising countries such as China, modernisation was expected to lead inevitably to a high degree of secularisation, a development enhanced by the national communist ideology. In India, a country, which in the post-colonial era believed that the state should be neutral towards religion, things developed in an unexpected way: democratisation and secularisation worked at cross-purposes. Increasing participation in the social and political arena drew in new social forces – including religious Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims – who demanded greater formal recognition of their religions by the state, leading to religious difference becoming a central issue in contemporary Indian politics. In Turkey, the accession to power in the early 2000s of the Justice and Development (AK) party and the subsequent turn to Islam in social policy, indicates that even when secularisation is aggressively pursued over a long period – in this case, more than 70 years – there is no certainty that, for important constituencies, the socio-political appeal of religion will wither (Haynes, 2022). Finally, there is the declining number of Marxist secular states. Before the overthrow of communism in 1989–1990, Central and Eastern Europe was filled with officially anti-religious polities, where the state sought to stifle religion or, as in Albania between 1947 and 1990, to ‘abolish’ it. Most Marxist regimes were less hard line than the government of Albania. Religion was at least permitted to exist – but only as the private concern of the individual, constituting a kind of promise that the authorities would respect the people’s religious faith and practice – as long as they did it behind closed doors as a solitary vice not for public view. Skeletal religious organizations were allowed to exist, but only so the state could use them for the all-important objective of social control. As a result, religions were reduced to liturgical institutions, with no other task than the holding of divine services, whose numbers were reduced at the behest of the state. Paradoxically, however, even the most strident and prolonged Marxist anti-religion campaigns failed to secularise societies. When measured by the high levels of religiosity and the pivotal role of the Christian churches in many – but not all – Central and Eastern Europe countries after the political demise of Communism in the early 1990s and the contemporaneous revival of Islam in formerly communist Central Asian countries, such as Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, it is clear that popular religiosity retained immense social importance during the years of Communist domination. The overall point of seeking to categorise state-religion relations is that none has been permanently able to resolve the tension between religion and the secular world. The chief manifestation of this tension in recent times is the desire of religious organisations not to allow the state to side-line them as – almost everywhere – secularisation bites ever deeper into social life. There are widespread attempts either to reverse or prevent religious privatisation in numerous countries, apparently irrespective of what form of relationship pertains between state and religion. The remainder of the chapter looks at three examples of recent religious involvement in civil society in relation to political change, including democratisation; culture wars; and recent rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Religion and political change, including democratisation To understand the general political importance of religious actors in the context of the third wave of democracy (mid-1970s to early 2000s), it is necessary first to comprehend what they say and do in their relationship with the state. The nature of the relationship between religion and political change, including democratisation, is a crucial issue in the political life of the contemporary world. Although scholars disagree about their nature and scope, there is widespread concern in many countries regarding the role of religious actors in civil society in (1) helping underpin or support authoritarian regimes, (2) intercommunal clashes, and (3) transnational extremist networks. In Europe, for example, such phenomena today represent a dual challenge: first, religious communities must effectively integrate into democratic institutions while, second, policy-makers must work out and implement new policies and forms of cooperation to cope with previously unexpected threats and issues, some of which come from religious extremist actors. Theoretically, the issue of how significant religious actors might affect political change, including democratisation, has long been debated. During the decades immediately after World War II, many scholars agreed that political culture – defined here as citizens’ orientation toward politics, affecting their perceptions of political legitimacy – was very important in explaining success or failure of democratisation. The political culture approach focused on how and in what ways religious traditions and actors were believed to feed into and affect a country’s political culture, including citizens’ preference or dislike of democracy. For example, in West Germany, Italy and Japan, cultural traditions – including Roman Catholicism in Italy, Christian Democracy in (West) Germany and a rich heritage of democracy-oriented philosophies and traditions in Japan – were said to be important, facilitating – with external assistance – the (re) making of these countries’ political culture after lengthy experiences of undemocratic, totalitarian regimes. By the 1960s, Germany, Italy and Japan were established democracies. Soon after, a new theoretical orthodoxy emerged. This was linked to the period of sustained decolonisation in Africa, Asia and elsewhere in the developing world. The theoretical focus in relation to democracy in the post-colonial world shifted to institutional and economic factors. The emphasis was on robust, more representative institutions coupled with sustained economic growth; to have these qualities would make democracy more likely, it was widely believed. At this time, the importance of cultural factors, including religion and ethnicity, was marginalised. Later, from the mid-1970s until the early 2000s, the ‘third wave of democracy’ – entailing the role of civil society, including religious actors, in the pivotal shift from communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe – encouraged attention to the role of culture, including that of religion and ethnicity via civil society, in political change. For example, in Poland, the Roman Catholic Church played a key role in civil society in helping to undermine the country’s communist regime, helping establish a post-communist, democratically accountable government. The perceived pro-democracy role of the church was not however restricted to Poland but extended to many Latin American, African and Asian countries. There was also the contemporaneous rise of the Christian Right in the USA, and its considerable impact via civil society on the electoral fortunes of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Add to this the widespread growth of Islamist movements across the Muslim world, with significant ramifications for electoral outcomes in various countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and the electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The overall result was that in multiple countries, religion was an effective motivator of civil society, with sometimes dramatic effects on political outcomes (Haynes, 2009). 200

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Culture wars and civil society in the USA In the USA, culture wars developed as the once consensual idea of civil religion declined. What is the connection between the two developments? To explain what happened, it is useful to identify why religion retains clear political significance in the USA. Writing three decades ago, Wald (1991, p. 241) argued that religion was multifaceted, expressed ‘through such diverse paths as the impact of sacred values on political perceptions, the growing interaction between complex religious organizations and State regulatory agencies, the role of congregational involvement in political mobilization and the functionality of Churches as a political resource for disadvantaged groups’. Wald explained that America’s cultural, political and social development was greatly affected by patterns of individual and group religious commitment, which encouraged religious differentiation. This led to a growing number of extant religions in the USA, often with divisions within them. It also resulted in religious voluntarism; that is, most people believe that religious choices are not necessarily an ascriptive trait, conferred by birth. Instead, they are more a matter of choice and discretionary involvement. What is the situation today, compared to Wald’s comments 30 years ago? Religious cleavages did not disappear as America modernised. Instead, they were redefined and extended to a growing number of social and political issues, expressed in what are known as the country’s ‘culture wars’. Following World War II, America went through a long period of rising prosperity and national optimism. At this time, America was said to be characterised by ‘civil religion’, a consensual non-partisan allegiance to a communal religious outlook. Society was believed not to be associated with any particular political or ideological position, reflective of a shared religious and cultural tradition, which had developed over time. The American state sought to cultivate ‘civil religion’ as the cult of the political community. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to use the term ‘civil religion’ in his The Social Contract, published in 1762, while de Tocqueville (1969) examined it in the specific context of America. To Rousseau, civil religion was the American polity’s shared religious dimension. Mainly through the work of Robert Bellah, civil religion became an important concept in the modern sociology of religion. He sought to define the concept as a demonstrative assertion of a shared civic faith, which had been of great social and political significance throughout the history of post-colonial America. In ‘Civil religion in America’, an influential article published in 1967, Bellah identifies civil religion as the generalised religion of the ‘American way of life’, existing with its own integrity alongside particularistic expressions of faith, including several Christian denominations and Judaism. Robbins and Anthony (1982, p. 10) understand civil religion as the ‘complex of shared religio-political meanings that articulate a sense of common national purpose and that rationalize the needs and purposes of the broader community’. Thus, for both Bellah and Robbins and Anthony, civil religion advanced the idea that a post-colonial democratic USA was an agent of God, signifying that the American nation exhibited a collective faith serving a transcendent purpose. Political and religious spheres were constitutionally separate, and civil religion was regarded as the means to unite them, a crucial component of what it meant to be American. Bellah (1964) saw civil religion as essential to restrain the self-interested elements of American liberalism, encouraging it towards a public-spirited citizenship which enabled republican institutions to thrive. He also regarded civil religion as a fundamental prerequisite of a stable democracy, a necessary antidote to the inherently pluralistic and individualistic culture of the USA. It was the glue that held society together, the key means by which Americans arrived at common societal values in a country built, on the one hand, on ideals of mutual tolerance and unity and, on the other, on great cultural and religious diversity. Civil religion made a highly positive contribution to societal integration, exhibiting a clear ability to bind a group of diverse 201

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people, who were nevertheless united in achieving a common goal, while imparting a sacred character to citizens’ civic obligations and responsibilities. The concept of civil religion also provided a means for public manifestation of religious faith, counteracting particular religious expressions’ tendency towards individuality. However, just as Bellah was proclaiming the great importance of civil religion to the integrity of the USA, the country was being torn apart by societal strife which, in hindsight, can be seen as the opening shots in the culture wars. On the one hand, there was increasing structural differentiation of private from public sectors, and on the other, there were widening societal divisions: religious, racial, ethnic and class. Collectively, these developments undermined generalised acceptance of a shared conception of moral order. Bellah’s book, The Broken Covenant (1975), argued that social changes were destroying public confidence in US intuitions, fatally weakening consensual traditions that had historically sustained faith in the republic. The societal consensus, believed central to civil religion, was effectively shattered by national reverses and scandals, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Adding to these specific social and political travails, American unity was further undermined by polarising disputes over racial, moral and ethical issues. While the former mainly focused on the position of African Americans and Hispanics, the latter included state prohibitions on gender- and race-based discrimination, abortion rights, increased rates of cohabitation, permissiveness towards sexual expression in art and literature, reduced sanctions against homosexuality and a Supreme Court decision proscribing school prayer. Taken together, these developments are indicative of a decisive shift from traditional JudeoChristian morality to a new divisiveness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where civil religion could no longer fulfil its traditional unifying role among Americans. It led to the Moral Majority, followed by the (New) Christian Right. As Wald (1991, p. 256) noted, ‘if the core of the concept’ of civil religion is ‘the tendency to hold the nation accountable to divine standards, then the case can be made that US political culture has actually been revitalized by the rise of the “New Christian Right” (NCR)’. Rather than seeking to rebuild the consensus manifested in civil religion, the Moral Majority and the Christian Right mobilised against perceived unacceptable manifestations of liberalism, viewed as the engine of America’s moral decay. From the 1980s, religion was a focus of public struggles over an appropriate moral and ethical direction for America. More generally, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of societal upheaval and division in the USA, as the country was roiled by profound economic, political and cultural insecurities. There were external shocks – including, the unforeseen ending of the Cold War, the unexpected demise of the Soviet Union and the multiple impacts of globalisation; all impacted significantly on the USA and its social, economic and political equilibrium. An earlier book of the current author, published in 1998, sought to capture a picture of America in turmoil: Angry white people blame African-Americans and immigrants for taking their jobs. Unemployed African-Americans look to blame the Hispanics. Forty million Americans have no health insurance, while blue-collar wages have fallen by nearly 20 per cent in real terms since the 1970s. Middle management is regularly ‘downsized’, while manufacturing jobs relocate to low-wage countries in Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, the richest 2 per cent of the population control the majority of the wealth (Abramsky, 1996, p. 18). A single company, communications giant AT&T shed 40,000 jobs in the mid-1990s, while its chief executive enjoyed a $5 million (£3.2 million) rise in the value of his share options. In short, the USA is racked by scapegoating and chronic insecurity in the 1990s. (Haynes, 1998, pp. 23–24) 202

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The purpose of the quotation is to illustrate that what was once a class-based, left-right, vertical political division in America was by the 1990s a horizontal societal and political split. It divided, on the one hand, elites and the educated, who on the whole were believed to benefit from globalisation and, on the other, the ‘left-behinds’. These were less privileged Americans further down the socio-economic pyramid. They believed their own positions were declining and, understandably wished to reverse things. Who to blame? Some politicians were quick to exploit the prevailing conditions of uncertainty, instability and growing insecurity for their electoral advantage. For example, in the 1990s the unsuccessful presidential bids of Pat Buchanan, a Republican, were built primarily on populist appeals to the socio-economic ‘left-behinds’ that he would reverse their declining position. Buchanan is a conservative Catholic and economic nationalist, who was the White House Communication Director in 1985–1987 during Richard Nixon’s presidency. In 1992, following a failed bid to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate, Buchanan made what was known as his ‘culture war speech’, when he derided liberals as the cause of America’s turmoil, claiming: ‘The American people are not going to go back into the discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed liberalism of the 1970s . . .’ (Buchanan, 1992). In 1996, Buchanan achieved credible but surprising victories in several early Republican caucuses and primaries. In 2000, he ran again unsuccessfully for the presidency with the slogan ‘America First!’ (NPR, 2017). Some have claimed that Buchanan is the man who made President Donald Trump electorally possible by airing an earlier version of neo-nationalism, whose central tenets Trump adopted two decades later (Mann, 2019). The overall result of America’s culture wars is today a polarised civil and political environment, with religious actors, especially the Christian Right, having a significant impact on the demise of the concept and practice of civil religion (Haynes, 2021).

The Arab Spring and civil society The difficulties of people working purposively together even when they objectively share the same interests and concerns is underlined by the decade-long trajectory of the Arab Spring, also referred to as the Arab uprisings. The Arab Spring/uprisings began in late 2010 in Tunisia. A decade later, in the early 2002s, there was a new wave of civic discontent across many Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As in the 2010–2011 Arab Spring events, popular concerns focus on universal problems: a perceived lack of democracy, few economic opportunities, especially for young people, and what some see as a lack of equality for women compared to men. Together, such concerns add up to a situation where many people, especially among the young, see little hope for a satisfactory future. Frustration and disappointment sometimes boil over and, in the lack of what are widely seen as legitimate political avenues to express discontent, people take to the streets and demonstrate their concerns via civil society. In 2010–2011, MENA countries saw political and societal stability undermined as a consequence of such protests, which had both political and economic causes. The targets of popular anger were typically incumbent political leaders, widely regarded as both corrupt and undemocratic. While peoples live in a variety of political environments in the countries of the MENA, protesters were united by feelings of alienation. Despite this, the decade following the Arab Spring events did not see clear progress towards a more democratic picture in any of the countries of the region, except perhaps for Tunisia, which until 2022 was a functioning democracy. There was no uniformity in what subsequently occurred, no blanket return to deep authoritarian regimes, as demands for fundamental change would not be cowed. In some cases, old dictators remain in power, while in others new undemocratic leaders acquired power via the 203

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ballot box. Some regional countries, such as Egypt, saw the ousting of the old authoritarian leaders, a brief spell of democracy, and then a new group of authoritarians took over. What is clear is that a decade of still-simmering rebellion reshaped the MENA. What is however unclear is what will be the eventual result in terms of political and economic outcomes. In Libya, the long-running Muammar Gaddafi regime was overthrown by rebels in 2011 aided by international intervention in the form of a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation bombing campaign. But a decade on, the country is still ungoverned and seemingly ungovernable, fragmented into numerous, sometimes mutually hostile, statelets and fiefdoms. As a result, the prospect of a re-created nation-state seems very far away. In Libya’s neighbour, Syria, the country’s civil war showed no sign of ending after a decade of conflict. In addition, in Yemen in 2023, a longrunning war rumbled on. What does a decade of political instability and upheaval in the MENA tell us about the voices of the people, in relation both to political changes and the impact of religion? On the one hand, it indicates that many people in the MENA are not content with the status quo and seek to express discontent in both ‘legitimate’ (the ballot box) and ‘illegitimate’ (demonstrations and riots) ways. Second, the post–Arab Spring upheavals highlight how many regional regimes manage to overcome popular demands for change; most stay in power and in many cases continue to rule in ways which have not fundamentally changed. The lack of success of the voices of the people to bring about fundamental changes highlights both the capacity of incumbent regimes to remain in power despite popular opposition and a continuing demand for more democracy and economic reforms in order to address the often-pressing need which many ‘ordinary’ citizens feel for political, economic and social improvements. A persistent question is whether governments have the ability or desire to deal with the challenge of fast-growing populations’ demands for more jobs, improved welfare and democracy? Such concerns animate tens of thousands of people in the MENA to continue to demand fundamental changes in order to improve their lives and future prospects. Such people – like their counterparts in many other parts of the world – expect and demand governments to bring about multifaceted improvements to their lives (Haynes, 2020). Events in North Africa and the Middle East since the Arab Spring events of the early 2010s also provide evidence that on their own the voices of the people raised in protests against what are often seen as fundamental political and economic injustices do not necessarily prevail in the face of determined resistance from rulers very anxious to stay put and not give in to such demands. In power, governments frequently have effective means at their disposal to curb, undermine or defeat citizen-led activists. Lewis (1993) points to the fact that the more than 20 countries of the MENA, with the exception of Israel, are Muslim-majority countries. For Lewis, this implies that Islam has characteristics which are not amenable to democratisation. Another view is that ‘Muslimness’ is not the problem; what is, is the fact that the Arab countries of the MENA share anti-democratic historical and structural characteristics (Fuller, 2002). Halliday (2005) argues that apparent barriers to democracy and development of effective and powerful civil societies in the Arab world are primarily linked to certain shared social and political features, but not to Islam per se. Impediments to democracy and civil society development include decades of authoritarian rule, fragmented societies and, if they exist, often-unrepresentative political parties. Although some such features may be expressed in terms of an often vague ‘Islamic doctrine’, there is nothing in fact specifically ‘Islamic’ about them. Karl (1995) asserts that as a result of various structural and historical features, the Arab/Muslim world of the MENA is characterised by ‘a culture of repression and passivity that is antithetical to democratic citizenship’. Fattah 204

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(2006, p. 1) notes that ‘[t]here is no question that Muslim countries are disproportionately autocratic . . . no single Muslim country qualifies today as a consolidated democracy’. The following historical and structural characteristics make achievement of democracy difficult in the Arab countries of the MENA: (1) Political systems headed by various kinds of personalistic leaders. Arab countries were long dominated by rulers heading undemocratic political systems, including personalistic regimes (Libya under Gadhafi), single-party rule (as in Iraq and Syria) and dynastic expressions (for example, Morocco, Jordan, the Gulf Emirates, Saudi Arabia). While each system had singular characteristics, what they shared were (1) top-down mechanisms reliant on institutionalised support from the military and (2) a lack of bottom-up input from civil societies. Instead, civil society was, typically, both weak and fragmented, without sustained capacity to keep a watchful eye on power holders. (2) Status quo-supporting militaries. Military personnel quite rightly see it as their job to protect the state from attack. Among Arab polities, however, the key job of the armed forces is to defend both individual rulers and, more generally, the political and economic status quo. Consequently, armed forces’ senior echelons typically function as a de facto arm of government, sharing power holders’ strong interest in preserving the status quo. (3) Weak and fragmented civil societies. Civil societies in Arab countries are typically weak and fragmented. This is not by accident. Instead, it is part of a divide-and-rule strategy designed to deter challenges to those in power. The Arab Spring events were stimulated by activists from ‘civil society’, notably people taking to the streets to demand fundamental changes. Yet this apparent show of popular strength and singularity of purpose partially masked significant political differences between, inter alia, Islamists and secularists. (4) Variable ideological stances of political Islam. Political Islam in the MENA takes three main forms, with different ideological views on the role of Islam in politics. According to Fattah (2006, p. 4), ‘three predominant [Muslim] worldviews’ significantly influence ‘religion and governance’ – including attitudes towards civil society – in the Muslimmajority countries of the MENA. They are ‘traditionalist’ Islamists, ‘modernist’ Islamists and (Muslim) ‘secularists’. ‘Traditionalist’ Islamists believe that they are the essential keepers of historic – yet timeless – Islamic traditions, with two central beliefs: (1) politics and religion are inseparable and (2) shariah law applies to all Muslims regardless of their own beliefs. ‘Traditionalist Islamists’ believe that for something to be authentically ‘Islamic’, it must be acceptable both to shariah law and to the ulama (Muslim clerics). ‘Western-style’ ‘liberal’ democracy is regarded as anti- or un-Islamic. A third belief is that Muslims collectively are the focal point of a conspiracy involving Zionists and Western ‘imperialists’ aiming to take over Muslim-owned lands and their oil resources. Such a concern is underlined, on the one hand, by US-owned transnational corporations’ ‘control’ over ‘Arab’ oil and, on the other, by what they see as Israel’s denial of full political and civil rights for its (mainly Muslim) Palestinian constituency. In Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, Salafist political parties and organizations are prominent ‘traditionalist’ Islamist political actors. Second, ‘modernist’ – sometimes referred to as ‘moderate’ – Islamists believe that core Islamic values, norms and beliefs offer a logical and appropriate approach to politics. They also accept that ‘Muslims can learn about anything they believe is good for themselves and society regardless of its origins’ (Fattah, 2006, p. 4). In other words, unlike ‘traditionalist’ Islamists, modernist/ moderate Islamists do not summarily reject ‘Western-style/liberal’ democracy, finding neither ethical nor theological problems with adoption of democratic structures and processes, while 205

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seeing nothing wrong in civil society having a role in seeking to advance such goals. Modernists base their acceptance of democracy and Western conceptions of civil society on two main arguments. First, neither democracy nor civil society are exclusively Western concepts and thus can be ‘Islamised’. Second, the Prophet Muhammad and other early Muslims were willing to adopt innovations if necessary to improve governance and the well-being of society (Cook and Stathis, 2012, p. 179). In sum, ‘modernist’ Islamists believe that politics and civil society should be authentically ‘Islamic’ – that is, they must not contradict shariah law – but this does not preclude adoption of democratic mechanisms if they are compatible with core tenets of Islam. In recent years, reflecting such beliefs, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco have all had important ‘modernist’ Islamist parties: respectively, Ennahda, the Freedom and Justice Party and the Justice and Development Party. Finally, there are (Muslim) ‘secularists’, who start from two assumptions. First, neither the Qur’an nor shariah law offers a blueprint for governance in today’s complex world, although they are seen as valuable sources of ethical and moral guidance. In other words, for such secularists Muslim holy texts do not usefully inform Muslims today explicitly how to run their societies, in the context of profound and continuing economic, cultural and social changes (Haynes, 2005). Muslim ‘secularists’’ second assumption is that to succeed, prosper and improve their existential position and conditions, Muslims must seek to emulate the most objectively successful societies in order to catch them up and eventually pass them. For many Muslim ‘secularists’, this involves adopting the West’s modus operandi: learn from wherever necessary and use that knowledge to make socio-economic progress. For Muslim ‘secularists’, for something to be authentically ‘Islamic’ it must be in society’s objective interests. Finally, Muslim ‘secularists’ agree that both democracy and a strong civil society are desirable and necessary to arrive at representative, legitimate and authoritative governments which respect human rights, including those of women and religious minorities. Both Tunisia and Egypt were for long periods officially secular countries, albeit informed, especially in the case of Egypt, by Islamic values and norms. Morocco, on the other hand, is a country with a monarchical system rooted in Islam with recognisably secular political institutions (Strindberg and Warn, 2011).

Conclusion Religion can affect the temporal world in one of two ways: by what it says and/or does. The former relates to religion’s doctrine or theology, the latter to its importance as a social phenomenon and mark of identity, which can function through various modes of institutionalisation, including civil society, political society and religion-state relations. It is necessary to distinguish between religion expressed at the individual and group levels: only in the latter is it normally of importance for understanding related political outcomes. From an individualist perspective, we are contemplating religion’s private, spiritual side, ‘a set of symbolic forms and acts which relates man to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ (Bellah, 1964, p. 359). Moving into the realm of politics and civil organisation, we are necessarily concerned with group religiosity, whose claims and pretensions are always to some degree political and societally orientated. That is, there is no such thing as a religion without consequences for value systems, including those affecting societal and political outcomes. Group religiosity is a matter of collective solidarities and, frequently, of intergroup tension, competition and conflict, with a focus on either shared or disputed images of the sacred or on cultural and/or class, in short, political, issues. To complicate matters, however, such influences may well operate differently and with differing temporalities in various parts of the world even for the same theologically defined religion. To try to bring together the relationship between politics, religious actors and 206

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civil society in their varied aspects and then to try to discern significant patterns and trends is not simple. In attempting it, three points are worth emphasising. First, there is a distinction to be drawn between looking at the relationship in terms of the impact of religion on politics and society and vice versa. Yet, they are also interactive: one stimulates and is stimulated by the other. In other words, because we are concerned with the ways in which power is exercised in society, and the ways in which religion is involved, the relationship between religion, politics and society is both dialectical and interactive. Both causal directions need to be held in view. Second, religions are creative and constantly changing; consequently, their relationships with politics and society can change over time. Finally, as political and civil actors, religious entities can usefully be discussed in terms of specific contexts; it is the relationship with government and the state – whether supporting or seeking to undermine them – which forms a common focal point. Yet, the model of responses, while derived from and influenced by specific aspects of particular religions, is not necessarily inherent to them. Rather this is a theoretical construct suggested by much of the literature on state-society relations, built on the understanding that religion’s specific role is largely determined by a broader context. The assumption is that there is an essential core element of religion shaping its behaviour in, for example, Christian, Muslim or Jewish societies and communities. As the case studies of the chapter show – on political change, culture wars and the post–Arab Spring events in the MENA – the role of religion is not uniform but is contextualised by many factors including local histories and cultural backgrounds of the societies involved.

References Abramsky, S. 1996. ‘Vote Redneck’, The Observer Life Magazine, 27 October, pp. 16–19. Bellah, R. 1964. ‘Religious Evolution’, American Sociological Review, 29(3): 358–374. Buchanan, P. 1992. ‘Patrick Joseph Buchanan, “Culture War Speech: Address to the Republican National Convention”, 17 August  1992’, Voices of Democracy. https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchananculture-war-speech-speech-text/ (accessed 12 November 2020). Casanova, J. 1994. The Remaking of Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cook, B. and M. Stathis. 2012. ‘Democracy and Islam: Promises and Perils for the Arab Spring Protests’, Journal of Global Responsibility, 3(2): 175–186. Dabashi, H. 1987. ‘Symbiosis of Religious and Political Authorities in Islam’, in T. Robbins and R. Robertson. (eds.), Church-State Relations, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, pp. 183–203. de Tocqueville, A. 1969. Democracy in America. New York: Doubleday. Fattah, M. 2006. Democratic Values in the Muslim World. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Fuller, G. 2002. ‘The Future of Political Islam’, Foreign Affairs, 81: 48–60. Halliday, F. 2005. The Middle East in International Relations. Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haynes, J. 1997. Democracy and Civil Society in the Third World. Politics and New Political Movements. Cambridge, Polity Press. Haynes, J. 1998. Religion in Global Politics. Harlow: Longman. Haynes, J. 2005. ‘Al-Qaeda: Ideology and Action’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(2): 177–191. Haynes, J. 2009. ‘Religion and Democratizations: An Introduction’, Democratization, 16(6): 1041–1057. Haynes, J. 2020. ‘Brexit, Hong Kong and the Arab Spring: Voices of the People’, E-International Relations. www.e-ir.info/2020/10/31/brexit-hong-kong-and-the-arab-spring-voices-of-the-people/ Haynes, J. 2021. Trump and the Politics of Neo-Nationalism: The Christian Right and Secular Nationalism in America. London: Routledge. Haynes, J. 2022. ‘Politics, Identity and Religion in Turkey: From Ataturk to the AKP’, in Jeffrey Haynes. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics (3rd edition). London: Routledge. Karl, T.L. 1995. The Hybrid Regimes of Central America, Journal of Democracy, 6(3): 72–86.

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Jeffrey Haynes Mann, W. 2019. ‘How Pat Buchanan Made President Trump Possible’, The Week. https://theweek.com/ articles/853163/how-pat-buchanan-made-president-trump-possible Last (accessed 12 November 2020). Martin, D. 1978. A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. NPR. 2017. Pat Buchanan On “America First” Under Trump. www.npr.org/2017/01/22/511048811/ pat-buchanan-on-america-first-under-trump?t=1598437262615 Last (accessed 12 November 2020). Robbins, T. and D. Anthony. (eds.). 1982. In God We Trust: New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America. New Brunswick: Transaction. Stepan, A. 1988. Rethinking Military Politics. Brazil and the Southern Cone. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strindberg, Anders and Wa¨rn, Mats. 2011. Islamism. Religion, Radicalism and Resistance. Cambridge: Polity. Vatikiotis, P.J. 1987. Islam and the State. London: Routledge. Wald, K. 1991. ‘Social Change and Political Response the Silent Religious Cleavage in North America’, in G. Moyser. (ed.), Religion and Politics in the Modern World. London: Routledge, pp. 239–284. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, B. 1992. ‘Reflections on a Many-Sided Controversy’, in S. Bruce. (ed.), Religion and Modernization. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 195–210.

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15 WHAT IS EXCEPTIONAL ABOUT RELIGION? MAJOR DEBATES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ISLAMISM STUDIES AND PEACE AND CONFLICT RESEARCH Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Morten Valbjørn and Dino Krause Introduction This chapter reviews selected debates that speak to the question of whether religion is or requires something exceptional for it to be properly accounted for in analysis. We pinpoint different dimensions of what we here label the ‘exceptionalism-debate’ across three academic fields by carving out relevant discussions and questions raised in the field of International Relations (IR), the field of Islamism Studies (IS) and the Peace and Conflict Research (PCR) on Islamism and jihadism. The selected literature that we have reviewed are occupied with different ‘main’ concepts: in IR the debates drawn out are conceptual and analytical regarding religion as such. In IS, religion is central in the form of a specific ideology, and hence we zoom in on the particular debates that this prompts regarding, e.g. the significance of Islam vis-á-vis other factors. The examined PCR literature has ‘jihadist conflicts’ at the center of attention, hence it examines the violent manifestations of a particular religious interpretation of religious warfare (jihad) which has triggered debates about, e.g. in what sense jihadist conflicts should be seen as a particular conflict constellation, and why. Most of the examples we draw out deal with Islam, Islamism and jihadism, but this focus does not mean that we disregard the relevance of other religions and religiously inspired ideologies. Rather, this focus stems from two coinciding trends that took up increasing pace after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks. Firstly, there has been an empirical development in the sense that Islamists today outnumber other religiously motivated militants in the world (Svensson and Nilsson, 2018). This empirical development has in turn sparked increasing scholarly attention, with studies exploring whether the rise in Islamist and jihadist violence reflects an exceptionality related to religion more broadly, Islam as such, or to Islamism and/or jihadism as particular ideologies. These works are therefore simultaneously relevant in relation to a potential exceptionality of Islam, Islamism and jihadism, as well as religion more broadly. DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-17

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What we mean by an exceptionalism-debate is a broad dialogue about how to access religion (as a concept, ideology, or related to conflict) as being different from or similar to other manifestations: is it a special category that requires the development of new approaches and theories, does it require more refined understandings of the variations when it comes to conceptualizing religion and the ‘religious’, how does it or does it not differ from other phenomena that might function in the same way or have a high degree of family resemblance. The ambition in this chapter is to display the multiple dimensions of the exceptionalismdebate, but also to advance our thinking about how to include religion into analysis and account for its significance. As this chapter shows, some scholars argue that religion requires an epistemological and ontological shift in order to be adapted into grand social science frameworks for thinking, while others argue that religion can be more easily adapted into existing theories and approaches. We proceed as follows. First, we zoom in on IR, where we identify three different questions that have occupied the field: is religion interesting as the dependent or independent variable, is it sui generis in content or in function, and what are the particular dimensions of religion that make it stand out? Secondly, we zoom in on the debates on Islamist exceptionalism in IS where we identify four currents: one that regards Islamists like no other actors, one that sees Islamists as being made into the exceptional Other as part of an orientalist practice, one that points out that Islamists are like any other actor, and finally one that sees Islamists as similar but not identical to other actors and is occupied with the variations among Islamists. Thirdly, we examine the PCR literature that point out three main questions that have been discussed in the literature on jihadist conflicts: one that asks if jihadist conflicts are exceptional, one that looks at similarities and differences between jihadists and other rebel groups, and one that asks whether jihadist conflicts require exceptional conflict resolution approaches? In all of the sections, we have focused on displaying different dimensions of the exceptionalism debates that often underlie discussions about the significance of religion.

Religion and exceptionality in IR Whereas religion was a more vivid part of IR debates in the mid-twentieth century, throughout the 1990s concepts like culture, identity and civilization were more prominent in the mainstream of IR research, while religion was occasionally included as a subcategory of the broader concept of identity (Sheikh, 2012; Valbjørn, 2008). Several IR scholars have provided convincing arguments why the attention to religion has fluctuated with the development of world political events and the dominant interpretational trends. Hence, during the 1990s religion was mainly understood as part of a specific ethnic heritage, culture or history, whether in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Republics, or in Central and East Africa (Haynes, 2021). The focus on religion as religion, and not a subcategory to identity, culture or civilization had its revival in the early twenty-first century, accelerated by the intensified focus on terrorism, asymmetric warfare and new types of threats sparked by the 9/11 events. This section highlights three aspects of the religion and exceptionality debate in IR that have been accentuated across these periods.

Explaining religion or religion as explanatory? One meta-analytical distinction that organizes IR approaches to religion is between literature that grapples with explaining religion and the literature that is concerned with explaining other IR phenomena and the particular role of religion therein. Though much of IR literature might be

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categorized to form part of the last-mentioned, there are also examples of the former. These are often genealogical in the sense that they are occupied with the ‘roots’ of IR theories, with modernity, or with the inspiration from religion or theology that particular IR scholars took onboard in their thinking (Kratochvíl, 2009). This literature provides critical reflections on a secular bias in IR, referring to its foundational moment where religion in world politics as well as in major modernization theories was seen as something that should be separated from rational thinking (Petito and Hatzopoulos, 2003). It highlights that the thinking about religion and the transdisciplinary influence on IR from other fields is not new. For example, Martin Wight, who was one of the foundational theorists of the English School of IR, was inspired by the theologian and philosopher Donald MacKinnon and included religious doctrines, cultures and civilizations into analysis by focusing on their role in different historic states-systems (Thomas, 2001). Also, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his Christian realism had significant impact on the influential IR theorist Hans J. Morgenthau – an impact that could be explained by the classical realist concern with the drivers behind human decision-making, including faith, morals, fears and emotions (Rice, 2008). The main argument is that just war theories (Rengger), classical realism (Morgenthau) or the early English School (Wight) had a natural – less tense – relationship to religious ideas, whereas a dominant secularization thesis about the outcome of modernity (predicting the demise of religion and its impact but also normatively embracing it) had estranged religion during a particular historical era. A review of this strand of literature points at two trends: one that stresses how religion and religious institutions have in fact impacted the modern state system, and another that unpacks how theological terms have been assimilated into IR thinking, hence challenging the idea that IR can be defined as foundationally secular but also stressing the religious nature of classical IR theories (Kratochvíl, 2009, p. 6). This type of literature is important to highlight in the context of this chapter as it points to a main difference in perspective: does it make sense to describe IR concepts, theories and our perspectives on the world as merely secular or does this reflect an ahistorical approach to IR and reduce the significance of religion from something that has foundationally impacted human thinking to something which is marginalized and in some cases demonized due to a specific European narrative about modernization and enlightenment? If one understands religion as a foundational category that has impacted human perception and continues to do so despite changes in vocabulary and discourses, then religion might not be understood as an exceptional explanatory variable, but something that is in fact a priori politics and vocabulary. A contrasting view is that there is a fundamental “ontological and epistemological” conflict between what one might call the transcendental and the secular (Kubálková, 2000, p. 685). The other side of the meta-analytical distinction we are making here is literature that is more concerned with how to include religion into the repertoire of explanatory variables characterizing the bulk of IR theories: be it power, common values or the desire for economic prosperity. These debates about what drives states and international actors in IR have always been linked to discussions or assumptions about human nature, including the role of ethics. Several questions have divided those who might find religion to be a sui generis phenomenon and those who would stress that the significance of religion for IR is how ‘it works’ (Sheikh, 2012). Examples include the questions of whether the existence of religion and the significance of religiosity require it to be carved out as a separate category, and whether religion could be easily included in the major IR frameworks of realism, liberalism and constructivism without having to adjust the major theories. Jonathan Fox’s work on how religion is relevant to international relations is an example of the last-mentioned, where religion is highlighted as a factor relevant

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for decision-making and providing legitimacy behind a cause (Fox, 2001). There are of course also scholars who are both concerned with the question of what makes religion particular and with the question of how to refine our understandings of its effects on IR phenomena (Sheikh, 2012). While the field of IR corresponds with an interest in the effects produced by religion on issues of peace, behavior, legitimacy, conflict, war and order, there are also voices who call for a better sense of what one might call the more substantial aspects of religion (Sheikh, 2012, Lynch, 2014).

The content versus the function of religion The meta-analytical distinction introduced is connected to the difference between literature that is concerned with how religion is exceptional in content (from other religions, identities, ideologies) on one side and on the other whether religion is different in its function: for example, does it have a particular escalatory function in conflict settings, or does it work in distinct ways when compared to other identities, ideologies, institutions, faiths, etc. On the content side, Scott Thomas and Jeffrey Haynes have for instance argued that religion requires special attention in IR, because it represents a transnational idea and offers a competing vision of international society challenging the universality of IR norms (e.g. sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-intervention) and perhaps even the very foundation of the Westphalian system (Thomas, 2005). The underlying premise is that religion is a particular worldview and represents a different set of norms than the hegemonic ones, though they rightfully warn against avoiding simplistic portrayals of the ‘enlightened West’ and the ‘dark Orient’ based on such differentiations (Haynes, 2009). Thomas’ suggestion about how to avoid the danger of essentialism when looking for the special ingredients that constitute religion is to approach religion as interpretive communities that can have diverse manifestations. Within the debate about whether religion is sui generis in its function, some scholars have challenged the validity of the religious/secular divide and argued that religion as an analytical category should be entirely avoided. For example, Gunning and Jackson (2011) argue that when it comes to the evaluation of violent behavior, the terms ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are based on assumptions about differences in motives and causes, which are not empirically robust. As a response to the stance about the analytical usefulness of the secular/religious divide, scholars have argued that giving religion separate attention does not necessarily mean accepting the religious/secular dichotomy as natural, or that there is a qualitative difference between so-called religious and secular violence. As argued by Wæver and Sheikh (2012), the analytical usage of the divide can also point to the importance of taking people’s use of the categories seriously. When people do in fact use these labels, fill these categories with distinctive content, and engage in disputes over them, scholars might risk overlooking if there are particular effects related to invoking certain ideas and ideologies over others if they are all treated like the same in analysis. Whether religious and secular doctrines function in the same way is a central question raised in the IR literature, particularly in the debate regarding the securitization theory and its different sectors (Buzan et al., 1998). Laustesen and Wæver (2000) introduced religion as a separate security sector by arguing that faith worked as a referent object in certain securitization attempts, and that the previous treatment of religion as part of the societal sector was only able to cover the community aspect of religion and not religion as faith. Their initial way of defining religion pointed to limitations in the applicability of the theory on non-Western cases, and a West-centric bias in the design of the theory (Sheikh, 2018). However, it also opened a debate on whether doctrines rather than religion ought to be seen as the referent object, in order to

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embrace equally the securitization of doctrines conventionally designated as secular (Sheikh, 2014). The literature that has tried to define religion as sui generis has hence been met by concerns about the importance of being aware of variations within and across religions, avoiding ethnocentric approaches to other religions than ‘our’ own, but also being aware of the similar functions that the elevations of doctrines to an uncompromising level can have.

Religion as religion means what? There are different takes in the broader field of IR on which dimensions of religion are particular and which of them share traits with other doctrines, institutions, identities, etc. The vast amount of social science and theology literature dedicated to defining religion testifies to the fact that religion is a composite concept that could be studied as a distinctive type of culture, identity, rationality, power, doctrine or interpretative community. In the IR literature, religion as religion can hence mean many different things, but typically some dimensions are highlighted more than others. Other than faith, as described earlier, Scott Thomas, for instance, argues that religious identity is characterized by its strong relation to the integrity of faith communities and is thus harder to compromise than other types of identity markers (Thomas, 2005). Religion as an individual and social identity is considered to be distinctive, since religious differences and identifications are perceived as more fundamental and unchangeable than other forms of identity. Religious rationality has also been described as containing distinct qualities since it is guided by particular ethical considerations about the common good (Lynch, 2009). Others maintain that religious rationality is exceptional because of its abductive reasoning influenced by an emotional affiliation to the faith community, or because of its alternative objectives to be achieved not in this life but in the life hereafter (Kubalkova, 2000; Moghadam, 2008). One should be aware that the conceptual debates that regard the question whether religion is sui generis in essence or function apply to each of the different dimensions of religion. Thus, one could ask if religious rationality is essentially a particular form of rationality and in what sense, but also to what extent it functions in the same way as other forms of rationalities. These are two different research questions, and there might be variations in the answer to them. This means that if religious rationality is seen to have a particular trait, then it does not necessarily follow that it will also ‘work’ in a special way or vice versa. This distinction is important to bear in mind for IR scholars considering whether they need to rethink schemes that are often applied to determine or predict the behavior of international actors.

Are Islamists exceptional? In the broader debate on linkages and conceptualizations of religion and politics, much attention has revolved around the relationship between Islam and politics and, in particular, Middle Eastern Islamism. Over the years, scholarship in Middle East studies on Islamism has on the one hand become increasingly sophisticated. On the other hand, the field is still highly contested (Volpi, 2010). For instance, it is not clear how Islamists can be distinguished from non-Islamists within a context of ‘Muslim Politics’, where Islam constitutes ‘the language of politics’ for a wide range of different actors (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996). It is likewise contested whether it is necessary to subdivide the Islamist category internally, and if so which of the countless existing typologies are then most useful (Lynch, 2017). In view of this confusion about what Islamism is, it should not come as a surprise that there also is little agreement as to whether Islamists should be regarded as any other or like no other

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actor, and what this implies for the scholarly study of Islamism. In other words, are, for instance, Islamist political parties first and foremost political parties in the sense that they can be grasped with analytical tools from the general literature on party politics? Or are they so fundamentally different from non-Islamist parties that they can only be understood on their own uniquely Islamic terms by scholars specializing in Islam? Simplified, it is possible to identify four overall approaches to the exceptionality question in the study of Islamism.

Like no other actors According to the first approach, often labelled essentialist or orientalist (Yavuz, 2003, Sayyid, 2015), Islamists are like no other actors, and they must accordingly be approached on their own distinct Islamic terms. This approach takes its point of departure in the assumption that if one is going to understand anything at all about what is happening in Muslim societies, it is, as Lewis (1976) puts it, necessary to recognize the universality and centrality of religion as a factor for Muslims. Thus, Islam is perceived as concerned “with the whole of life – not a limited but a total jurisdiction” affecting every aspect of Muslim societies, including warfare, governance, family structures, architecture and fashion. In this way, Islam becomes a kind of master explanatory variable. It is necessary to grasp the essential nature of Islam to obtain any real understanding of Muslim societies, including Islamists. From this perspective, Islamism is, first and foremost, about Islam. The two are, therefore, also often conflated as illustrated in Huntington’s (1996, p.  217) statement about how ‘the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization’. The uncovering of the ‘Islamist view’ on a topic is typically based on a textual exegesis either of classic Islamic primary sources such as the Qur’an or the hadith or of the writings of some of the founding figures of Islamism such as al-Banna, Maududi, Qutb or Khomeini. While this approach might be more common in popular discussions about Islamism, reminiscences of this mindset can still be traced in more academic debates as well. In addition to Wood’s (2015) much discussed statement that ‘the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic’, this perspective has, for instance, also been present in the discussion on Islamists in electoral politics, in particular on whether Islamists’ ‘true’ view on democracy is about ‘one man, one vote, one time’ as once remarked by the American diplomat Edward Djerejian. Thus, much ink has been spilled on quoting different passages from the Qur’an to support a view on the (in)compatibility of Islam(ism) and democracy. On the one hand, this approach is attentive to cultural difference as it does not assume that all actors are necessary alike or are holding identical worldviews. Instead, it aims at taking the role of religion seriously by recognizing that Islam may actually matter for Islam-ists. On the other hand, it is also vulnerable to various charges. The strong focus on religion easily comes at the expense of attention to the role of other and more general socio-economic and political factors. The textual and essentialist approach to Islam is, moreover, often very simplistic. It does not pay much attention to how Islamic sources are multifaceted and can be interpreted in various ways by different actors at different times. As a consequence, the approach easily becomes blind to variances in both time and space and internal diversities among Islamists, e.g. consider the profound differences between al-Qaida and an-Nahda, how some of the traditionally quietist Salafists changed their views on electoral politics after the Arab uprisings, or how the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2011established the Freedom and Justice Party despite al-Banna’s original skepticism toward party politics. The strong focus on Islam may furthermore lead to a neglect of how some Islamists might be quite similar to non-Islamist actors, posing the question why Islamists then often have been perceived as exceptional. 214

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Making of an exceptional other This question is addressed by a second approach sometimes labelled as Saidian, critical or poststructuralist/colonialist (Sayyid, 2015). It reverses the perspective by asking how Islamism has become an object of study in (Western) academia, and how and why Islamists often have been represented as the exceptional Other to a Western normalcy. This approach draws on Said’s (1978) argument in Orientalism – Western conceptions of the Orient about how geographical entities such as the ‘Orient’ are not an inert fact of nature or just discovered to be ‘Oriental’. On the contrary, they are, Said explains, ‘Orientalized’ because they ‘could be – that is submitted to being – made Oriental’ (pp. 5–6). While Western conceptions of the ‘Orient’ may have ‘less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’, they are, nevertheless, not harmless. Besides functioning as a contrasting image strengthening an identity as ‘Western’, an Orientalized Orient is also supposed to be part of a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority’ over other parts of the world (pp. 12–13). Based on the observation that Islamism allegedly is a term only coined in the 1970s French academia but rarely used by the actors it refers to, there has, similarly, been a debate, echoing Said’s broader argument, on whether Islamism was invented by Western scholars much in the same way as Orientalists ‘Orientalized’ the Orient (Volpi, 2010, p. 8). Instead of asking whether Islamists really are like any or no other actors, this approach focuses on how and why Islamists have been represented as or made exceptional. Thus, some observers argue that Western representations of Islamism often draw on a classic Orientalist schema between a modern, rational, peaceful West morally superior to a traditional, irrational and violent Orient, and suggest that this has played an important role in shaping Western policy and media framings of social phenomena such as the fight against Islamic State, the military coup toppling the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or electoral politics with secular and Islamist parties (Bassil, 2019; Jacoby, 2017). This approach provides an important reminder of how the production of knowledge may not be neutral and invites to a (self)reflection on how our (implicit) assumptions about an Islamist exceptionality may form the way we grasp Islamism as a phenomenon. At the same time, it has less to offer when it comes to providing analytical tools for gaining a less Orientalist understanding of the Islamists just as it has little to say about whether and, if so, how Islam matters for Islamists.

Like any other actor A third approach sometimes labelled as contextualist, materialist or instrumentalist, is also a critique of the essentialist tendencies, as it perceives Islamists like any other actor situated in a similar context. For this reason, it is also assumed that they can be approached by analytical tools from the general social sciences. Influenced by a universalist assumption, for instance found in the modernization theory, this approach takes its point of departure in the assumption that all societies are basically alike. In the long run, they are moving in the same direction, and all actors are assumed to be rational and shaped in the same way by the socio-economic context and the political opportunity structures within which they are situated. This also applies to Islamists, so in order to grasp their views and behavior, one should, instead of identifying the ‘essential nature of Islam’, focus on how they are affected by the specific socio-economic and political contexts. Thus, Islam is assumed to play a limited role for Islamists, and to the extent it does, Islam is mainly perceived as a tool for rational actors maximizing their material or political interests. 215

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Islamist groups have, for instance, been perceived as examples of social movements and analyzed within a general social movement theory framework (Wiktorowicz, 2004). Islamists such as al-Qaeda or Hamas have been classified in generalist typologies as, respectively, ‘ideological’ and ‘nationalist’ terrorists, where, for instance, Red Army Faction and Irish Republican Army figure as non-Islamist examples of the same two categories (Fettweis, 2009). In discussions about the emergence of Islamism, the focus has been directed at well-known general political and socio-economic factors such as modernization, globalization, (anti)colonialism, urbanization, uneven development, authoritarianism, the post-1967 failure of Arab nationalism and the 1970s oil-boom. Burgat (2019), for instance, argues that Islamism should be perceived as a part of a larger anti-colonial trend in the Global South, and despite its Islamic references it is less a product of Islam than a reaction to foreign powers and authoritarian Arab regimes. Similar to Roy’s (2013, p. 15) statement following the 2011 Arab uprisings that ‘Islamists are shaped more by the new landscape than vice versa’, there has also been a strong interest in examining how the political opportunity structures are affecting Islamists’ views on electoral politics and democracy. For instance, there has been a renewed interest in the classic debate on whether Islamists are ‘moderated’ and ‘normalized’ by being included, or whether exclusion radicalizes (Schwedler, 2011). This approach highlights some of the socio-economic and political factors the first approach has been charged with neglecting. By doing so, it also brings attention to how Islamists using a religious rhetoric might be motivated by fewer religious factors. In this way, features of Islamism that at first sight appear exceptional may at closer inspection become less puzzling. Contrary to the common assumption in the literature on electoral politics that parties try to gain power by vote maximizing, Islamists are sometimes ‘losing on purpose’ (Hamid, 2011). At first sight, this might seem odd, but on closer inspection it turns out to be a quite rational strategy in authoritarian elections, where ‘victory is not an option’ (Brown, 2012). This approach is also attentive to how Islamism is not a monolith. Thus, Islamists situated in different kinds of contexts are assumed to differ. Against this background, it is less puzzling that branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait have evolved differently. Changes in the political context, such as increasing/decreasing inclusion/exclusion, are similarly expected to change the behavior and maybe also the views of specific Islamist movements. The strong focus on broader socio-economic and political factors and the neglect of Islam as a possible factor does, however, also come at a price. This approach is far less sensitive to the role of meaning, worldviews and cultural diversity, and the tendency to reduce religion to an insignificant epiphenomenon raises several questions it is less well-equipped to answer. For instance, how can Islamists be said to be Islam-ists, if Islam does not really matter? It is moreover puzzling why non-Islamists movements, when addressing material grievances, often have been less successful in a “Muslim politics” context than Islamists framing similar grievances within a specific Islamic rhetoric (Munson, 2001), or why some Islamists, when included in politics, seem to have different ‘red lines’ than nonIslamists, when it comes to a willingness to moderate views on, for instance, moral questions.

Similar but not same Much of the current debate on Islamism draws on a fourth approach, often labelled as constructivist (Yavuz, 2003), which perceives Islamists as similar but not identical to other actors. In this way, it aims at combining insights from some of the other approaches. It acknowledges that religion, worldviews and meaning deserve attention, but does also recognize that religion can be used instrumentally and that socio-economic and political factors are important. It perceives religion as dynamically (re)constructed in a relational interaction between actors embedded 216

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within structures rather than as an unchanging essence discovered through textual exegesis. It does at the same time hold that religion structures how actors perceive and pursue their interests in the first place by shaping their identity, worldviews and repertoire of meaningful forms of behavior. From this perspective, it is, therefore, necessary to situate Islamists not only in their socio-economic and political contexts, but also in the context of what Eickelman and Piscatori (1996) have coined as ‘Muslim politics’. This means that when studying Islamism, one should on the one hand acknowledge that Islam constitutes (an important dimension of) ‘the language of politics’ (p. 12) in the sense that political struggles in Muslim societies often draw on and are informed by specific symbols and references from an Islamic tradition. On the other hand, it is equally important to pay attention to ‘the politics of language’. Thus, instead of searching for the Islamic view through textual exegesis, it is important to focus on the multiple and often rivaling interpretations of what Islam may say about a given topic provided by concrete Muslims situated in a specific time and space. This last approach provides a nuanced alternative to some of the previous, as it aims at acknowledging that Islam matters for Islamists without reducing religion to an ahistorical essence or ignoring more general socio-economic and political factors. During recent decades, this approach has given rise to a rich and complex discussion, where the focus is re-directed from the question about whether Islamism is about either piety or politics to an interest in how Islam and other factors matter and interact. There has been a growing attention to how Islamists have provided very different and changing interpretations of the relations between Islam and politics, and how religiosity is not only about doctrine but also lived religion and a communal feeling of belonging. In this regard, increasing attention has also been paid to the question of how Islam can matter in quite different ways for Islamists. It may play a major role in Islamists’ ultimate motives and notions about who they are and what they aim at. The role of Islam may also be limited to a shallow ex post facto rationalization serving to give a veneer of rectitude to actions informed by other motives. Or it may constitute a moral, cultural and intellectual resource delimiting the scope of what is permissible and hence more or less likely, though without being the ‘root cause’ for action. The degree and the specific ways in which Islam matters may vary among Islamists and over time, and in order to understand this, it is from this perspective necessary to also include non-religious factors, including some of the aforementioned socio-economic and political variables. While holding many promises, this approach does, however, also face its own challenges. Thus, it turns out to be quite challenging to explain exactly how Islamists are like but not the same as other actors, or to specify how Islam shapes and is shaped without collapsing back into a form of quasi-essentialism or instrumentalism.

Exceptionality questions related to jihadist conflicts The PCR literature has, especially since the rise of Islamic State from 2014 onwards, investigated various dimensions of potential ‘exceptionality’ around conflicts that involve jihadist rebel groups. This body of scholarly research has interacted with studies that fall within the wider literatures both on jihadism and terrorism. Overall, these contributions can be sub-divided along three sets of questions.

Are jihadist conflicts exceptional? The first of these regards the question if conflicts involving jihadist actors follow different patterns than other types of armed conflicts. This question has been examined in a range of large-N, cross-country studies of armed conflicts with self-proclaimed ‘Islamist’ or ‘jihadist’ insurgents. 217

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One empirically well-documented fact is that these conflicts have dramatically increased in terms of their frequency. As shown by Svensson and Nilsson (2018, p. 1136), the share of religiously defined conflicts among the world’s total number of armed conflicts increased from 3% in 1975 to 55% in 2015. Of all the religiously defined conflicts in 2015, 75% involved groups that had formulated ‘self-proclaimed Islamist aspirations’. When disaggregating the category of Islamist conflicts (defined as those in which at least one of the conflict parties ‘advocate an increased role of Islam in the society or the state’, Svensson and Nilsson, 2018, p. 1132), the authors find that it is one particular type of Islamist conflict that has become more frequent, namely those involving transnationally oriented groups. While jihadist conflicts are thus more frequent than other types of conflicts, they also appear to be fought at higher intensity levels. A study by Gleditsch and Rudolfsen (2016, p. 1) highlights that in 2012, all of the world’s six conflicts that caused at least 1,000 fatalities had been fought in Muslim-majority countries, and of the nine involved rebel groups, seven were Islamist. Even in 2018, after the loss of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, the share of fatalities related to the Islamic State alone made up 20% of all of the world’s battle deaths (Rustad et al., 2019). On a more aggregated scale, during the past decade (2009–2019), conflicts involving al-Qaeda, Islamic State and their local affiliate groups accounted for the majority of battle-related fatalities in state-based conflicts around the world (Pettersson and Öberg, 2020, p. 7). Accordingly, Toft (2021, p. 12) finds that civil wars with Muslim combatants who aim to impose their religious views upon a particular region, or the state as a whole, result in, on average, three times more battle-related deaths than any other type of civil war. Besides their frequency and intensity, scholars have further examined questions related to the duration, recurrence and termination of jihadist conflicts. Deitch (2020) finds religious conflicts as such to last longer, yet without distinguishing between different religious denominations. Still, given the strong prevalence of jihadist conflicts among the category of religious conflicts, it is likely that the finding is indeed driven by jihadist conflicts. This is further supported by the results produced by Nilsson and Svensson (2021), who demonstrate that Islamist conflicts are not only significantly less likely to terminate but also that they are more likely to recur after leaps of inactivity. With respect to Islamic State, specifically, Rustad et al. (2019, p. 2) conclude that when the organization establishes links with local rebel groups, conflicts become ‘more complex and difficult to resolve’. Last, while these empirical patterns suggest that jihadist conflicts stand out among the world’s contemporary armed conflicts, parallels have been drawn to conflicts of the Cold War era. On a more conceptual level and using macrosecuritization theory, Sheikh (2022, p. 2) argues that what links today’s jihadist conflicts with the Cold War era is the ‘bundling’ of various underlying conflicts, both local and transnational ones, into an overarching ‘ideological macro-narrative’.

Are jihadist insurgent groups exceptional? Scholars have further investigated if jihadist groups share different group-level characteristics than other types of insurgents. Three dimensions of exceptionality can be distinguished in this regard. First, distinct characteristics in the organizational structure of jihadist insurgents have been identified. Although the recruitment of foreign fighters has a long history that predates the rise of jihadism, in recent decades it was overwhelmingly jihadist groups that made use of this type of recruitment (Malet, 2013). Authors have further identified the structure of al-Qaeda’s and Islamic State’s networks of affiliate groups as exceptional. Kilcullen (2005) coined the term ‘global insurgency’ to describe this phenomenon. According to Pettersson and Öberg (2020, 218

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p. 8), ‘there is nothing similar in recent history’, although they note similarities to transnational, leftist insurgent movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such similarities have also been identified by Kalyvas (2018) and Lia (2016). For instance, Kalyvas notes that both radical leftist and jihadist insurgent leaders are typically driven by ideological concerns, rather than the desire to enrich themselves economically (Kalyvas, 2018, p. 41). In addition, both Kalyvas (2018, p. 42) and Lia (2016, p. 76) observe that Marxist insurgents of the Cold War, similar to jihadists, relied heavily on guerrilla tactics against militarily superior states, while receiving significant material support from external sponsors, although such support came primarily from states, especially the Soviet Union, rather than from non-state actors as is the case with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (Kalyvas, 2018, p. 42; Lia, 2016, p. 86; Moghadam and Wyss, 2020). As further jihadist-Marxist similarities, Kalyvas notes the rejection of liberal capitalism and the key role played by individual rebel leaders who took on great personal risks in the early phases of rebellions (Kalyvas, 2018, pp. 42–43). Moreover, both Marxist and jihadist rebels have repeatedly alienated local populations due to their radical attempts to impose their ideological views (Kalyvas, 2018, p. 44). The second, group-based dimension of exceptionality regards a particular use of battlefield tactics. Nanninga (2019) finds that over two-thirds of the world’s approximately 6,600 suicide attacks committed between 1981 and 2017 were carried out by jihadists. There have been disagreements about the role of jihadist ideology in driving this trend, with some authors being more sceptical towards its centrality (Pape, 2005) and others highlighting its central role but acknowledging that it interacts with political factors (Moghadam, 2008). Attention has further been paid to the degree to which jihadist groups target civilians. Here, again, findings point towards differences between locally focused and transnationally oriented jihadist groups. Piazza (2009) finds that while al-Qaeda-linked groups are more likely to target civilians, the same is not observed with respect to other jihadist rebels. He explains this finding through the organization’s transnational audience and the resulting lack of sensitivity for public backlashes in particular local contexts (Piazza, 2009, p. 65). Toft and Zhukov (2015, p. 225) use a similar theoretical argument – rebels being less dependent on local support due to their transnational linkages – to explain why Islamists appear to be more resistant towards counterterrorism and willing to accept high civilian casualties. Third, scholars have discussed to what extent the claims formulated by jihadists differ fundamentally from those formulated by other rebel groups. There is general agreement that religious claims as such are not exclusive to jihadists but have rather been formulated by militant Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Sikh militant groups too, although less frequently in recent decades (Juergensmeyer, 2003; Svensson, 2012). But, again, the differences between various jihadist claims appear to matter, particularly with regard to transnational jihadist claims. Although al-Qaeda and Islamic State disagree over when and where to establish a global caliphate (Crenshaw, 2017, p. 60), their global focus sets them apart from jihadist groups with revolutionary or separatist claims (Lia, 2016, p. 83). Parallels have been drawn to transnational leftist groups of the twentieth century. Piazza (2009, p. 65), for instance, aggregates both transnational jihadist and transnational leftist claims under the category ‘universal/abstract’ goals, as they transcend national borders and share a more ‘conceptual nature’.

Do jihadist conflicts require exceptional approaches to be resolved? Empirically, Islamist conflicts fought over revolutionary or separatist incompatibilities have been found to be neither more nor less likely to see the onset of negotiations than other conflicts, but those fought over transnational Islamist demands were found to be significantly less likely to be negotiated (Nilsson and Svensson, 2020). As observed by Melander et al. (2016), groups 219

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affiliated with al-Qaeda or Islamic State have, thus far, never signed a peace agreement. To explain the seeming intractability of these conflicts, previous research has highlighted factors that fall both upon the respective governments and the insurgents involved in these conflicts. As regards the role played by governments, scholarly debates have particularly revolved around the implications of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Some of these studies have emphasized that the GWOT indeed reached some at least temporary successes, for example by depriving al-Qaeda from its safe haven in Afghanistan and diminishing its ability to carry out attacks in Western countries (Byman, 2014, p. 461; Henne, 2021). On the other hand, it has been argued that military interventions, drone campaigns, but also Western support of repressive regimes have contributed to fostering anti-Western grievances, which jihadists have successfully capitalized upon (Hegghammer, 2006; Lia, 2016, p. 74–75). Moreover, the transnationalization of al-Qaeda’s and Islamic State’s networks has been analyzed as a form of risk diversification in response to counterterrorism pressure (Bacon, 2018, p. 19). One facet of the GWOT with direct implications for the prospects for conflict resolution is the vast increase in terrorist-listings of insurgent groups. It has been observed that this policy, which has targeted jihadist groups to a larger extent than other groups (Lundgren et al., 2022), closed off non-violent paths for jihadist groups and overemphasized their transnational linkages (Toros, 2008). In a similar vein, it was argued that terrorist-listings lead to the ‘vilification’ of the insurgents (Haspeslagh, 2021, p.  361), while also placing major hurdles for third parties to become involved in negotiations (Haspeslagh, 2013). Scholars have also pointed towards the problems around de-listing terrorist groups (Forcese and Roach, 2018, p. 269). Speaking to some of these arguments, recent case studies of jihadist conflicts show that, rather than the jihadists, the involved governments themselves often lack the willingness to even discuss basic, non-ideological incompatibilities (Matesan, 2020; Söderberg Kovacs, 2020a). In this literature, the exceptionality lies in the responses to jihadism more than the nature of jihadism. As regards challenges towards negotiations that fall on the jihadists’ side, it has been argued that their transnational demands diminish the bargaining space vis-à-vis governments, but also that due to their transnational support channels, they are less likely to perceive a mutually hurting stalemate (Matesan, 2020; Nilsson and Svensson, 2020). At the same time, the complexities of both organizational linkages and formulated claims were highlighted. For instance, Sheikh (2020) argues that despite the Pakistani Taliban’s organizational linkages to al-Qaeda, the group’s main grievances remained local. Both Sheikh (2020) and Söderberg Kovacs (2020a) further point towards intra-jihadist fragmentation as an additional obstacle, as governments may struggle to identify relevant spokespersons amongst the jihadists’ ranks (see also Engvall and Svensson, 2020). In line with Toros (2008, p.  422), Söderberg Kovacs (2020b, p.  385) emphasizes the ‘multilayered nature’ of jihadist conflicts as a potential entry point, because it allows the conflict parties to start by focusing on less exceptional, non-ideological issues such as economic and political empowerment. Beyond the sole question of how to approach the issue of negotiations with jihadist groups, previous studies have also examined cases of jihadist rebel-to-party transformations, identifying dynamics that resemble those observed with non-jihadist rebel groups (Dalacoura, 2011; Krause and Söderberg Kovacs, 2022).

Concluding remarks This chapter has pointed out different questions that the fields of IR, IS and PCR have posed – more or less explicitly – regarding the exceptionality of religion and its different dimensions. The questions and debates highlighted across the fields should be perceived as ideal types in the sense that they rarely come in their pure form. 220

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In IR, the debates we draw out are structured around three questions: first, is religion something that explains or should be explained? The literature that has sought to explain religion has pointed at how religion and religious institutions have in fact impacted the modern state system, and that theological terms have genealogically been assimilated into IR thinking. This strand of literature challenges the exceptionality of religion in the sense that it is not seen as something odd or external that can be explained separately from other developments. Instead, it highlights the integrated-ness of religion and politics, not as a recent development but as something that has also affected theory-building in IR. The second debate is on whether religion is sui generis in content or in function, and particularly the literature comparing the function of religious and secular doctrines has pointed out family resemblances, hence challenging perceptions of exceptionalism when it comes to the way religion ‘works’. The third debate differentiates between the significance of different dimensions of religion, including religion as faith, as social identity and as rationality. This literature is occupied with the question of what sets religious beliefs, identity and rationality apart from other forms of beliefs, identities and rationalities, and might develop further if the different dimensions are examined out of a functionalist interest also in whether they ‘work’ exceptionally in an IR context. In IS we point out four tendencies. In the first, Islam is considered to be exceptionally explanatory when it comes to understanding Islamist behavior. This approach is faced with the danger of essentialism and the disregard of other factors than religion that could potentially explain behavior. Instead of asking whether Islamists are like no other actors, a second tendency in the literature displays a self-reflexive interest in examining how and why Islamists have been represented as or made exceptional, hence the exceptionality question is seen in relation to Orientalist practices and power dynamics. A third tendency identified are approaches that perceive Islamists to be like any other actor-type, hence approached through general social science tools. In these approaches the similarities are at the center of analysis, highlighting often non-ideological aspects as being significant drivers of behavior. The fourth tendency is occupied with internal differences among Islamist movements and has a leaning towards perceiving religion as not only about static doctrine but rather as lived practices. Here the substance and manifestations of religious interpretation matter, but in tandem with other sociological factors that can explain the variations within. In the PCR literature on jihadism, the point of departure is that transnational jihadist conflicts from a statistical point of view appear to be exceptional: they are not only more widespread and fought at higher intensity levels than other conflicts, but they are also harder to resolve with traditional conflict resolution mechanisms. Our review of the PCR literature identifies potential explanations for these findings on different analytical levels. First, on a conflict level, it has been argued that similar to the Cold War era, jihadist conflicts are particularly complex because they ‘bundle’ several underlying conflicts, both local and transnational ones, into ideologically charged macro-narratives. Second, on the group level, existing studies point towards both similarities and differences to other rebel groups. Those that detect exceptionality point at al-Qaeda’s and Islamic State’s particular type of organization involving transnational affiliate groups, the large-scale recruitment of foreign fighters, but also the use of exceptional battlefield tactics and the particularly far-ranging claims for a global caliphate. Yet, in the last-mentioned there is a sub-debate on how much transnationality means in relation to the creed, when explaining escalation. A third strand within the wider PCR literature moves the lens to the exceptionality in ‘our’ responses to jihadism, posing the question whether jihadist conflicts indeed require a rethinking of traditional approaches to conflict resolution, or whether these conflicts have in fact been treated exceptionally by the international community. 221

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A better understanding of the multidimensionality of religion, but also the multidimensional debates, is helpful in order to understand how religion is similar to or exceptional in relation to other forms of large-scale identities and ideologies invoked in world politics. Additionally, awareness of the difference that lies in the exceptionality-debates related to the content versus function of the religious, and a continued reflection regarding the exceptionality in ‘our responses’ to religion and the positionality in scholarly conceptualizations of the religious is warranted.

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16 RELIGION AND ANTI-IMMIGRATION PARTIES IN THE WEST Identitarian Christianism and exclusivist secularism Tobias Cremer Introduction This chapter investigates the ambiguous relationship between anti-immigrant parties and religion. It thereby focusses in particular on the situation in Western Europe and the United States, where religious references have become a prominent feature in anti-immigrant parties’ and movements’ rhetoric (Marzouki et al., 2016; Whitehead and Perry, 2020). Examples range from pro-Trump protesters staging sit-in prayers during the 2021 Capitol riots, through Germany’s anti-immigrant Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) movement waving oversized crosses in Germany’s national colours at their demonstrations, to Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini brandishing rosaries and Bibles during campaign speeches. These episodes are representative of two broader developments across Western democracies: the rise of anti-immigrant and right-wing populist parties and their intensified references to religion. Anti-immigrant and right-wing populist parties prioritise national identity and culture, and claim that the “pure and homogenous” people are threatened on the one hand by a contemptuous and corrupt “liberal elite” and on the other hand by the mass immigration of culturally different, external “others” (Marzouki et al., 2016; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). Parties of this type have been present across the West for decades. However, they experienced a marked surge in electoral support and moved into the centre of public and scholarly attention in the mid-2010s after the successful Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as president in the US (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). Importantly the resurgence of anti-immigrant parties’ electoral fortunes also coincided with their intensified references to religion. This development is noteworthy not only because many anti-immigrant parties had historically been relatively indifferent or even hostile towards religion (Marzouki et  al., 2016), but also because most Western democracies experienced accelerating levels of secularisation at the same time (Norris and Inglehart, 2011; Pew, 2018, 2019). Thus, just as record levels of Europeans and Americans were turning away from the religious faith and practice, anti-immigrant parties began to politicise religious identity in several ways. One was their intensifying references to the West’s Christian heritage: DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-18

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from Washington to Warsaw and from Reykjavik to Rome, anti-immigrant politicians have begun to evoke their countries’ Christian identity, display Christian symbols, debate the role of religion in public spaces, and present themselves as defenders of the Christian West against culturally different migrants (Marzouki et  al., 2016; Whitehead and Perry, 2020; Cremer, 2023). Many scholars have taken these developments as cause to interpret anti-immigrant parties to be driven by Christian nationalism and conservative religiosity (Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Whitehead and Perry, 2020). However, references to Christianity are not the only way in which religion has been featuring in anti-immigrant parties’ rhetoric. Other traditional religious references include the use of neo-pagan symbolism in many identitarian and alt-right movements, as epitomised recently by the “Shamanic practitioner” in animal fur and Viking veneer who stood on the dais of the US Senate during the 2021 Capitol riots (François, 2008; Roy, 2016; Cremer, 2021c). More significantly, anti-immigrant parties, in particular in Western Europe, have also begun to politicise religion by embracing radical forms of secularism (Almeida, 2017; Brubaker, 2017; Cremer, 2021d). The French Rassemblement National for instance has positioned itself as a champion of a radically secularist reading of Laïcité, while the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has called for their members to leave the churches and demanded the latter to be stripped of their constitutional privileges (Cremer, 2021b). While the combination of Christian, neo-pagan and secularist references might appear perplexing, scholars have argued that their common thread is that none of them are based on a positive embrace of Christianity, neo-paganism or secularism, but that each is used as an antidote against the “Islamic other” (Betz and Meret, 2009; Rosenberg, 2021; Schwörer and Fernández-García, 2021). Indeed, according to some observers, anti-immigrant parties’ negative rejection of Islam is the key defining and unifying feature of an otherwise highly diverse and conflictridden party family (Zúquete, 2018; Hamid, 2019). Given these varied and ambiguous expressions of the relationship between anti-immigrant parties and religion, this chapter explores why these parties may seek to mobilise religious identity in times of growing secularisation in the first place, and how religious communities themselves have responded to this. To do so this chapter analyses the socio-demographic roots of anti-immigrant parties’ electoral success, the role of religion in right-wing identity politics as a cultural identity marker between the “us” and the “other”, as well as how clashes with the Christian churches, in particular over immigration policy, shape anti-immigrant parties’ relationship with religion across different countries and regions. The overall argument of this chapter is that in the West’s increasingly post-Christian societies, anti-immigrant parties are less interested in religion as a faith, than in religion as a cultural identity marker and that in particular an identitarian Christianism, and exclusive secularism are employed as ways to demarcate the national community from the Islamic “civilisational other”. Rather than being driven by any form of resurgent religiosity in the West, these findings suggest that the rise of anti-immigrant parties and their culturalised references to religion may be symptoms or even drivers of the further secularisation of religious symbols in Western politics as the latter’s focus shifts from religious culture wars of the twentieth century to a new more secular identity politics of the twenty-first century. This chapter is organised in three parts. The first section explores the concept of antiimmigrant parties and movements in more detail, paying particular attention to the sociodemographic roots of their support and the nature of their populist and nativist identity politics. The second section investigates the role of religion in the context exploring the culturalisation of religion as civilisational identity markers of the “us” and the “other”, and its detachment from religious values, beliefs and institutions in anti-immigrant parties’ rhetoric. Finally, the third 226

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section studies how these dynamics work out in practice by comparing the varying responses from Christian communities in Europe and the US.

The socio-demographic roots of anti-immigrant parties’ success: Secularisation, individualisation, and the new identity cleavage The rise and electoral success of anti-immigrant parties and movements has received much scholarly and public attention in recent years. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, Brexit in Britain, and Marine Le Pen’s repeated entry into the runoff for the French presidential elections in 2017 and 2022 have often attracted the brunt of the attention (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). However, anti-immigrant parties have experienced similar electoral successes in almost all Western democracies. In several countries such as Austria, Sweden, or Italy such parties have also participated in governments (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015; Kaltwasser et al., 2017). Yet, one conceptually confusing fact is that in spite of their success and ubiquity, scholars have hitherto failed to agree on a term to describe the new party family (Kaltwasser et al., 2017). While some call them “anti-immigrant”, others have labelled them as “right-wing populist”, “radical right”, “far right”, “extreme right”, “alt right”, “national populist”, “nativist” or “nationalist”; many observers use such terms interchangeably. This terminological confusion is intensified by many commentators’ tendency to use these terms as political “Kampfbegriffe”, conflating them with morally loaded terms like opportunism, political manipulation, or demagogy, and reserving them for the political “enemy” (Bale et al., 2011, p. 127; Mudde, 2004; Betz, 2018). It is, therefore, important to recognise that while terms like “populist” or “anti-immigrant” are often used to describe the same party family, they are not necessarily synonymous but tend to capture different characteristics and dynamics. Populism is at its core about the juxtaposition of the “pure people” against the “corrupted” elite and the idea that politics should be the expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people (Mudde, 2004, p.  543, see also Haynes in Chapter 1 of this volume). It can therefore be both right-wing and left-wing, as shown by the fact that both Jeremy Corby and Nigel Farage in the UK, or Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the US are widely defined as “populist” (Mudde, 2007; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015). Anti-immigrationism by contrast is primarily characterised by nativism; that is the view that “states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements are fundamentally threatening the homogenous nationstate” (Mudde, 2007, p. 19; Betz, 2018; Casanova, 2012). In principle, anti-immigrant parties could be populist or elitist, and their justification can be cultural or economic (Betz, 2018). Yet, in practice anti-immigrationism and populism increasingly overlapp in the West, as radical right and anti-immigrant parties have adopted populism and cultural nativism as key aspects of their rhetoric (Betz, 2018). As a result, contemporary anti-immigrant and right-wing populist parties’ worldview can be defined by a triangular relationship between, on the one hand, the pure and homogenous people (the “us”), and, on the other hand, a set of two “others” which are seen to threaten the identity of the “us”: first, the internal other, that is the corrupted liberal elite, which threatens the people from the inside (this is the populist component). And secondly, is the external other, which threatens the homogenous people from the outside (this is the nativist or anti-immigrant component) (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015). To better understand the roots behind the convergence of populism and nativism in antiimmigrant movements, and to make sense of why religious identity has become such a prominent feature in anti-immigrant definitions of the “external other” and of the “us”, it is important to examine the socio-demographic trends underlying anti-immigrant parties’ electoral success. There is a growing body of literature tracing these successes back to the emergence of a new 227

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social cleavage in Western societies around the question of identity: who are “we” and who is the “other” (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; De Wilde et al., 2019; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). On the one hand, of this divide is a sizeable and outspoken part of the population – including most of the economic and political “elite” – that tends to embrace individualist or globalist identities focussed on cosmopolitan values, multi-culturalism and diversity (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; De Wilde et al., 2019). And on the other hand, there is a camp that is characterised by a continued yearning for clearly defined collective identities, social ties, shared cultural frameworks and other sources of group belonging. Observers have called this a divide between “Globalists” and “Nativists” (Piketty, 2020), “Identity liberals” and “Identity conservatives” (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020), “Nomads” and “Settlers” (Fourquet, 2019), “Cosmopolitains” and “Communitarians” (De Wilde et al., 2019). In many Western societies this new “identity cleavage” is becoming a prominent feature of the political discourse, as identitarian concerns about immigration, national culture and ethnic identity rise in salience and overshadow traditional economic or social questions. This is particularly true for voters of anti-immigrant and right-wing populist parties, with surveys showing that, for instance, 80% of Marine Le Pen voters in 2017 ranked “immigration” as the most important electoral issue, placing it way above economic concerns such as unemployment or social questions such as gay marriage (Perrineau, 2017). Similarly, Donald Trump’s voters in 2016 rated “immigration”, “respect” and “race relations” amongst the top motives for their choice and far above social issues like abortion or gay marriage (Sides et al., 2019). Sobolewska and Ford have argued that immigration and a new “identity conflict” between “identity liberals” and “identity conservatives” were the key drivers for “Leave” voters in the Brexit referendum and the subsequent transformation of Britain’s political landscape (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). And Kaufmann concluded that “no one (. . .) can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the west” (Kaufmann, 2018, p. 2). The emergence of the new identity cleavage and of immigration and national identity as key wedge issues in Western politics is noteworthy as for most of the twentieth century Western politics and party systems were structured according to two other social cleavages around class and religion (Lipset and Rokkan, 1990; Bornschier, 2010).1 Broadly speaking, in this framework centre-left parties represented the interests of the secular state and the working class, whereas the centre-right represented capitalist interests and the position of the church (Lipset and Rokkan, 1990; Elff and Roßteutscher, 2017). However, this party system, which had been “frozen” for almost a century, has begun to “thaw” since the turn of the millennium, as new parties emerged on the left and on the right while mainstream parties began to shrink. Anti-immigrant parties have been one of the main beneficiary of this development, tripling their overall vote-share throughout Europe between 2006 and 2016 (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Some scholars have interpreted the rise of the populist right, too, through the prisms of the old cleavages as an economic revolt of the white working class, or as a reactionary backlash driven by white Christian nationalism (Rodrik, 2018; Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Whitehead and Perry, 2020). However, more and more studies suggest that the most important driver of this development may be the “identity cleavage” (De Wilde et  al., 2019; Piketty, 2020; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). In fact, it may be the very erosion of class or religious identity in the context of processes like secularisation and individualisation that has contributed to the new cleavage by creating a crisis of identity in parts of the population (Fourquet, 2019). In this context, the decline of class identity is often seen as a root cause for the defection of many blue-collar voters from left-wing to anti-immigrant parties (Piketty, 2020). Yet, it is the loss or transformation of religious identity and the ways it has fed into the rise of anti-immigrant parties that is of particular interest for this chapter. 228

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Christian practice, belief and affiliation, which had shaped the social fabric and identity of Western countries for centuries have entered an unprecedented decline over last few decades (Norris and Inglehart, 2011; Pew, 2016). Although critics of secularisation theory have been correct in pointing out that modernisation in many non-European societies had been accompanied by religious pluralisation or even revival rather than by religious decline, in the West itself secularisation theorists’ predictions that religion’s relevance in society was to progressively erode seem to be confirmed by the data (Norris and Inglehart, 2011; Fourquet, 2019). Thus, in many historically Christian societies such as Britain, France or Germany, self-identified Christians had become a minority by the beginning of the 2020, while the percentage of those attending church had dropped to single digits throughout most of Europe (Pew, 2016; British Social Attitutes, 2019; Gutmann and Peters, 2021; IFOP, 2021). Even traditional outliers to the secularisation trend such as Ireland, Italy and most notably the US, have begun to follow this trend. For instance, Americans professing no faith at all outnumbered any single religious group for the first time in 2016, and Ireland has recorded one of the most rapid drops in religiosity in the world with 44% of Irish considering themselves not to be religious in 2012 (up from 25% in 2005) (Gallup, 2012; Pew, 2019). The consequences of these developments for politics and society are likely to be momentous. Not only because they are set to further decrease the salience of the religious cleavage and associated moral issues, but also because religion has historically been a key source of social capital, especially in many working-class communities which historically strongly relied on religious institutions as cost-free providers of social capital and belonging (Putnam and Campbell, 2012). As a result some scholars have argued that Christianity’s demise might lead a collapse of the old social matrix and the subsequent emergence of a social and spiritual vacuum and identity crisis that can readily be exploited by political actors (Fourquet, 2019; Roy, 2019). This latent crisis of traditional sources of class and religious identity seems to have further heightened in recent years by cultural anxieties over rapid ethnic change, high levels of immigration, Islamic terrorism and challenges to national sovereignty through international integration (Betz and Meret, 2009; Casanova, 2012; Brubaker, 2017). As a result, the new identity cleavage is likely to only increase in salience as long-term socio-demographic developments like globalisation, secularisation, individualisation and ethnic diversification continue. It is in an attempt to capitalise on this development and to politicise identitarian grievances further, that anti-immigrant parties have begun to appeal to the communitarian end of the identity cleavage with their own brand of right-wing identity politics, in the context of which religious symbols and language have become an increasingly central feature (Roy, 2016; Haynes, 2020).

Religion in the context of anti-immigrant identity politics To better understand why and how anti-immigrant parties are seeking to mobilise religion in the context of their identity politics, it is useful to recall how in anti-immigrant parties’ triangular worldview the “us” (the pure and homogenous people) is defined in opposition to a set of two “others”: on the one hand the corrupted liberal elite, which threatens the people’s identity from within, and on the other hand the external “other” which threatens it from without. One key development in Western anti-immigrant movements over the last few decades has been that this external other is increasingly defined in identitarian, civilisational and subsequently also religious terms as the “Islamic other”, and that Christianity (alongside neo-paganism and secularism) has emerged as an analogous identifier of the “us” (Betz and Meret, 2009; Brubaker, 2017; Haynes, 2019). However, this “identitarian turn” in anti-immigrant rhetoric was not a matter of course. As Betz observed, for many years anti-immigrant parties had predominantly defined 229

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the “external other” on racial and economic terms (Betz, 2018). As a result, in the 1990s and 2000s anti-immigrant parties in Europe would mobilize primarily against central and eastern European economic migrants on the basis that they would undercut natives’ wages or abuse the welfare state rather than because of concerns about their cultural otherness (Betz, 2018, p. 55). The German far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), for example, campaigned with slogans like “work instead of migration” or “stop the Polish invasion”, while the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) launched a signature drive against eastern European migrants in 1993 under the motto “Austria First” (Betz, 2018). Migrants from non-European countries were additionally targeted based on their alleged racial or national “otherness”, but less so based on their culture or religion. As Casanova put it: Only a few decades ago immigrants from Turkey in Germany were viewed as Turks and not as Muslims, immigrants from Pakistan in the UK were viewed as Pakistani and not as Muslims, and immigrants from the Maghreb in France were viewed as Moroccans, Algerians or Tunisians, or generally as Maghrebis, and not as Muslims. (Casanova, 2012, p. 489) However, Casanova, observes a marked shift in anti-immigrant parties’ discourse of othering since the 1990s and early 2000s so that “today throughout Europe immigrants from Muslim countries are not only primarily classified as Muslims, but they have come to represent ‘Islam’ with all the baggage” (Casanova, 2012, p. 489). The sources of this move from racial and economic towards civilisational and religious othering are complex, but scholars generally point to the rise of Islamophobia in the context of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as to the spread of the concept of ethnopluralism in far-right circles in response to the new identity cleavage (Betz and Meret, 2009; Casanova, 2012; Brubaker, 2017). Ethnopluralism – a concept which originated among the intellectuals of the French Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s, and which has become the intellectual fundament for many anti-immigrant parties’ identity politics since – is not simply to be equated with traditional racism based on biological racial hierarchies (Roy, 2019). Rather it follows the doctrine of “equal but different”, which holds that particular nations, cultures or ethnic groups have the right to defend their cultural differences (Kaufmann, 2018). As Roy put it, “these new thinkers (of the Nouvelle Droite) replaced references to ‘race’ with the concept of ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’ as developed by anthropologists and social scientists (. . .) In short they replaced racism with culturalism” (Roy, 2016, p. 83). In doing so they sought to cater explicitly to identitarian concerns on the communitarian end of the new identity cleavage by mirroring but reversing the identity politics of the Left (Kaufmann, 2018; Jardina, 2019). For instance, right-wing identity politics emphasises ethnic, cultural, civilisational or religious identity as drivers of political action, but reverses the roles by claiming to defend the group rights of the ethnic majority rather than those of minorities (Kaufmann, 2018; Sides et al., 2019). Another critical distinction between left-wing and right-wing identity politics is the latter’s claim that the ethnic majority’s cultural norms and identity should enjoy a preeminent or even hegemonic position within society (Kaufmann, 2018; Jardina, 2019). Anti-immigrant parties quickly adopted this new brand of right-wing identity politics around the turn of the millennium, as appealing in such ways to the majority’s ethno-cultural group identity appeared of strategic value for two reasons. Firstly, conceptualising identity ex negativo and in such broad ways made right-wing identity politics sufficiently vague to appeal to large parts of an increasingly fragmented populace. Reflecting Hannah Arendt’s insight that it is only natural that “the masses of a highly atomized society (. . .) have tended toward an 230

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especially violent nationalism” (Arendt, 1973, p. 15), ethno-cultural group identity could serve as the smallest common denominator. The second advantage was that formulating this appeal in terms of identity politics resonated with the mainstream rhetoric about the importance of (minority) group rights, common perceptions of (in-)justice and victimhood narratives (Jardina, 2019). In this context, scholars like Kaufmann (2018), Jardina (2019) or Hochschild (2018) have argued that members of the majority population often feel “left out” by the identity politics of the Left, which they perceive as defending the group rights of minorities but undermining those of the majority. Growing parts of the majority population are therefore susceptible to rhetoric and policies that appeal to feelings of victimhood and decline. As biological racism was hence (at least rhetorically) replaced by “culturalism” (Roy, 2019) and “civilisationism” (Brubaker, 2017) in anti-immigrant parties’ definition of the “external other” as the “Islamic other”, religion also rose to greater prominence as an analogous identity marker of the “us” (see also Haynes, 2019). While in most of the literature the focus is traditionally put on far-right movements’ attempts to politicise Christian symbols and language in this context, in the nouvelle droite itself, neo-paganism initially emerged as the anti-Islamic antidote of choice (François, 2008). The reason was that it was perceived as most authentically “European”, whereas Christianity was seen in Nietzschean terms as a “slave religion” and “semitic-sect” that originated from the Middle East, and secularism merely as a spin-off of Christian doctrine (Roy, 2019; Rose, 2021). References to neo-paganism, anti-Christian sentiments are still prominent in some anti-immigrant parties, and have gained significant influence in the alt-right subculture (François, 2008; Cremer, 2021c; Rose, 2021). However, in recent years anti-immigrant parties’ public focus has increasingly shifted away from neo-pagan references and instead focussed on radical secularism on the one hand and a cultural Christianism on the other, both of which were generally perceived as more palatable to mainstream voters (Brubaker, 2017). References to secularism are particularly popular among anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe, where Christians are rapidly shrinking voting block that is historically bound to Christian democratic parties and still disproportionately focussed on the old moral rather than the new identitarian cleavage (Arzheimer and Carter, 2009; Elff and Roßteutscher, 2017). Rather than seeking to appeal on this hard-to-reach and dwindling demographic, some anti-immigrant politicians have, therefore, sought to instead present themselves as the defenders of Europe’s liberal and secular culture against reactionary Islam. One prominent example of this trend is the Netherland’s Geert Wilders who also presented himself as a defender of Western liberal values vis-à-vis gay rights and women rights (Morieson, 2021). Others are France’s Marine Le Pen who has emerged as the country’s perhaps most outspoken champion of a radically secularist reading of Laïcité (Almeida, 2017; Cremer, 2021d), or Germany’s AfD, which has called for the country’s religion-friendly constitutional settlement of “benevolent neutrality” to be dismantled in favour of a more radical separation of church and state (Cremer, 2023). While anti-immigrant parties’ references to secularism and “liberal values” remain largely superficial, primarily driven by the rejection of Islam and generally limited to Western Europe, the rise of this new “postChristian” or “secular right” is an important development which is likely to become more prominent as Western societies become more secular (Cremer, 2021d; Rose, 2021). Yet at least for the time being, references to secularist values in anti-immigration parties’ rhetoric are still overshadowed by the latter’s references to Christianity. One way to use Christianity in this context is to imply Christian language and concepts to sacralise populist and nativist politics. Arato (2013) and Zúquete (2017) for example have shown that secular concepts such as territory, the population, immigrants and political elites are systematically “theologised” in anti-immigrant parties’ rhetoric into “the sacred homeland”, “the pure people”, “the dangerous others” and “the corrupted elite”. Similarly, populists’ Manichean distinction between the 231

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“pure” people and the “corrupted” elite or “dangerous others” reflects religious concepts of good and evil (Arato, 2013). This construction of the “good people” as “a moral community” (Zúquete, 2017, p. 458) also endows the General Will of the alleged majority with “godlike dignity uniting power and justice”, whereas anyone who would want to restrain it becomes a heretic of democracy (Arato, 2013, p. 145). Even more prevalent, however, than the use of Christian concepts to theologise nativist politics, is the culturalisation – or perhaps even secularisation – of Christian language, symbols and identity as civilisational identity markers against the “Islamic Other” (Roy, 2019; Haynes, 2020; Ozzano, 2021). The prominent display of crosses at pro-Trump rallies, antiimmigrant politicians’ rhetoric surrounding the defence of the “Judeo-Christian West”, or their catering to the concerns of Christian conservatives are examples of this strategy. However, it is important to emphasise that like with secularism, anti-immigrant parties’ appeals to Christian identity are often not tantamount to a positive embrace of Christianity as a faith, let alone of a Christian revival in Western societies. Instead, in the context of anti-immigrant parties’ right-wing identity politics, ethnoreligious belonging is increasingly dissociated from Christian beliefs, values and institutions, and transformed into what Roy has called a “kitsch Christianity”, that is depleted of any positive theological references and primarily defined ex negativo against Islam (Roy, 2019). Indeed, scholars like Rosenberg (2021) or Schwörer and Fernández-García (2021) have shown that anti-immigrant parties’ references to Christianity almost exclusively appear in conjunction with negative references to Islam. What is more, elite interview-based research with anti-immigrant and right-wing populist leaders has revealed that both anti-immigrant party leaders and their grassroots often remain explicitly distanced from Christian doctrine and regularly clash with the institutional churches over key policy areas (Cremer, 2023). In this context, the clash between anti-immigrant parties and the Christian churches over the core issue of immigration is a central source of conflict. For across countries and denominations, Europe’s and America’s Christian churches have generally been outspoken and consistent in their support of refugees as well as in their criticism of anti-immigrant rhetoric (Marzouki et al., 2016; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt, 2019). Anti-immigrant parties themselves have openly acknowledged and reciprocated this animosity, with, for instance, the French far-right leader Éric Zemmour referring to the pope as “the enemy of Europe” or the German AfD calling the institutional churches “stooges of the asylum industry” and “government spokespeople” (Valeurs Actuelles, 2020; Cremer, 2021b). Even in countries like the US where anti-immigrant politicians traditionally have more amicable relations with the Christian conservatives, Christian leaders have openly spoken out against the Trump governments’ anti-immigrant policies such as the building of “the Wall” on the Mexican border (Winston, 2017; Guidos, 2019). In many western European countries, this clash over immigration policy has been supplemented by historical animosities towards anti-immigrant movements within the Christian communities, which often perceived the former as neo-pagan and neo-fascist parties inherently hostile to Christianity (Marzouki et al., 2016). Subsequent attempts by anti-immigrant politicians’ to present themselves as defenders of secularism or gay rights against the allegedly backwards religious values of Islam have not improved relations but added new tensions about religious freedom, church-state relations and even about societal issues such as gay marriage or abortion (Roy, 2019). Finally, some church leaders have publicly taken issue with the far rights’ culturalisation of Christian symbols itself. The president of the Lutheran World Association Bishop Christian Krause, for instance, has publicly called the anti-immigrant parties’ identitarian references to Christianity as “perverted” (Die Welt, 2015). Meanwhile, American faith leaders have openly condemned Donald Trump’s photo stunts of holding a Bible into the cameras during the BLM 232

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protests as “outrageous”, “baffling” and “reprehensible”, with the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, Mariann Budde lamenting that Trump “used our symbols and our sacred space as a way to reinforce a message that is antithetical to everything that the person of Jesus and the Gospel texts represent” (Chappell, 2020). Anti-immigrant parties’ leaders themselves have been candid about this discrepancy between their own identitarian conception of Christianity and that of the churches. French far-right leader Éric Zemmour, for instance, has declared to be “for Christendom but against Christ” (Lindell, 2022), while AfD leader Alexander Gauland clarified that his party was “not a Christian party” and references to Christianity were meant primarily to honour the heritage of “the faith of our fathers” (F.A.Z., 2016). Yet, even though some faith leaders have challenged such an identitarian re-interpretation of Christianity, their flock’s reactions vis-à-vis anti-immigrant parties’ references to religion are far from uniform and vary particularly between both sides of the Atlantic.

Comparing Christian reactions to anti-immigrant movements and religion in western Europe and the US (1854) In the twenty-first century, there has been a stark contrast between religious communities’ responses to anti-immigrant parties between western Europe and the US. While in the US record numbers (81%) of white evangelicals, as well as majorities of white mainline Protestants (58%) and Catholics (64%) voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (Smith and Martinez, 2016), and an “evangelical advisory board” of conservative Christian leaders was set up in the Trump White House, in western Europe organised Christianity has often emerged as a formidable bulwark against anti-immigrant parties. European church leaders, for instance, have vocally and consistently opposed anti-immigrant parties’ politics, and Christian voters – especially those who regularly attend church – have historically voted for anti-immigrant parties at much lower rates than their secular compatriots, so much so that scholars speak of a “religion gap” or “religious immunity” among Christian voters against anti-immigrant parties (Montgomery and Winter, 2015; Cremer, 2021a; Siegers and Jedinger, 2021). To better understand the sources of this transatlantic divide, it is important to look at developments within Christian communities and anti-immigrant parties, as well as at external factors such as electoral alternatives, or the structural settlement of church-state relations. One widespread account of why American Christians appear more supportive of anti-immigrant politicians than their European brethren is that they would hold more nativist attitudes. Specifically, scholars have identified “White Christian Nationalism” as a powerful factor linking Christian self-identification with nativism, authoritarian attitudes and support for Donald Trump (Whitehead and Perry, 2020). However, attitudes alone may be insufficient to account for the discrepancy between European and American Christians’ reactions towards anti-immigrant parties. For one, because trends in Christians’ attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic have actually been more comparable than often assumed. For instance, in the 2000s and 2010s both American and European Christians continued to be more conservative than their secular neighbours on social issues like abortion, gay rights or religious freedom, but were becoming more open on identitarian questions such as immigration, race relations or Islam (Immerzeel et al., 2013; Ekins, 2018; More in Common, 2018; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt, 2019). In Europe some studies suggest that practicing Christians may actually be more open towards immigration or Islam than their secular neighbours, which may help explain their historical “immunity” towards anti-immigrant parties (Arzheimer and Carter, 2009; Immerzeel et al., 2013). Despite their subsequent support for Donald Trump, there is evidence of a similar divergence on the core issue of immigration between Christians and Trumpism in the US. 233

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Thus, while under the aegis of Steve Bannon, Trump’s team explicitly picked up on European anti-immigrant parties’ “identitarian” rhetoric, directly referenced thinkers and concepts of the Nouvelle Droite, and painted the election as a civilisational struggle for America’s (white) cultural identity, America’s Christian communities had actually started to evolve in the opposite direction in the early twenty-first century (Sides et al., 2019; Haynes, 2020; Rose, 2021). Scholars like Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Lyman Kellstedt (2019) have stressed, for instance, that between 2011 and 2018, just as anti-immigrant sentiment surged among Trump’s base of secular conservatives, American evangelicals “increased their support [for immigration] over time” (p. 58; see also Ekins, 2018). And even studies identifying white Christian nationalist attitudes as a key driver for Trump’s success show that religious practice often correlates with greater openness towards immigrants, more positive attitudes towards racial minorities and higher levels of tolerance towards religious minorities (Whitehead and Perry, 2020, p. 143). These trends seem reinforced by the changing demographic make-up of American congregations. Thus, as white Americans have disproportionately turned away from organised religion in the US, ethnic minorities and immigrants have often become the main source of vitality for many Christian denominations. This is not only true for American Catholicism, in which non-white people are already a majority among millennials, but also for American evangelicals, 40% of whom self-identified as non-white according to some studies (LifeWay, 2017). However, these demographic and attitudinal trends in American Christianity clearly did not translate into a European-style “religious immunity” against anti-immigrant politics. To understand why, it is important to examine the evolution of the relationship between Trumpism and America’s Christian communities. For although the US is often presented as a prime example of an alliance – or even a fusion – of anti-immigrant Trumpism and Christian conservatism, this development was not a matter of course. Instead, initially conservative Christians were among the most hesitant parts of the Republican electorate to rally behind Trump. During the 2016 GOP primary, for instance, Trump performed best among those primary voters who never attend church (62% of whom voted for him), whereas he did worst among most frequent church attendees (32%) (Carney, 2019, p. 121). Similarly, most representatives of the evangelical “establishment” initially opposed Trump’s candidacy, with the evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today running editorials against him and evangelical leaders like Russell Moore and others publicly condemning his politics (Moore, 2015; Crouch, 2016). According to a survey of the National Association of Evangelicals, this animosity also extended to faith leaders on the ground (NAE, 2015). By the presidential election, however, Trump had been able to overcome Christian voters’ reservations and to rally them behind him in record numbers. One argument that is often brought up to explain this shift is that Trump had been able strike a “transactional bargain” with the Christian right by catering to their core priorities on abortion, LGBTQ rights or religious freedom. During the primaries, the formerly pro-choice businessman had referenced such issues much less often than his Republican competitors. However, once he became the Republican nominee Trump shifted course and promised to appoint pro-life supreme court judges, chose evangelical stalwart Mike Pence his running mate, and said that religious freedom would be a key priority of his administration. This policy distinguished Trump from many of his western European counterparts who used Christian symbols and language, but openly kept their distance from Christian values, beliefs and institutions (Marzouki et al., 2016). However, when trying to understand the sources of Christians’ varying reactions to the far right, perhaps even more important than the latter’s strategies may have been the religious and political context in which European and American parties operated. 234

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Several studies have found, for instance, that a key reason for why European Christians have remained comparatively immune to anti-immigrant parties’ appeals is neither the formers’ attitudes nor the latter’s strategies, but the political competition and in particular the presence of a credible “Christian alternative” in the party system (Montgomery and Winter, 2015; Siegers and Jedinger, 2021). The logic here is that religious immunity is indirect and rests on the mechanism that in countries with strong Christian democratic parties, Christian voters are, as Arzheimer and Carter put it, simply “not ‘available’ to these (anti-immigrant) parties, because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or Conservative parties” (Arzheimer and Carter, 2009, p. 985). In the cases of Germany, the Netherlands or Italy, for instance, the existence of powerful Christian democratic parties, which maintained ownership over key Christian issues and provided a political home for Christian voters, has been referenced as a key explanatory variable for the historical strength of the religious immunization effect against the far right (Siegers and Jedinger, 2021). In the US, by contrast, party loyalty seemed to have played an opposite role by allowing Trump to attract many initially sceptical Christian voters due to their long-standing attachment to “God’s Own Party”. For instance, 38% of white evangelical Trump voters, for instance, said that they supported him primarily because he was the Republican nominee, compared with only 13% of irreligious Trump supporters (Smith, 2016). Moreover, in a two-party system like the American system, negative partisanship may have played a similarly important role with 76% of white evangelicals stating that the “major reason” for supporting Donald Trump in 2016 was that “he is not Hillary Clinton” (Smith, 2016; Abramowitz and Webster, 2018). In addition to the party system, another key contextual factor is the structure of the religious landscape and the institutional settlement of church-state relations. For instance, there is some research suggesting that in Europe’s highly stratified religious landscapes, where the dominant Christian denominations have historically been (or in some cases still are) established national churches, faith leaders were both more willing and more able to speak out against anti-immigrant parties than in America’s unregulated religious market square (Cremer, 2021b). Specifically, American faith leaders appear to more frequently have muted their criticism out of concerns over losing followers or donations on which their economic survival often depended, whereas in Europe’s churches in which clergy tend to be primarily religious superiors, such pressures were much less important. Furthermore, the lack of hierarchies and of clearly identifiable “official representatives” of Christianity in the US also meant that it was more difficult for American religious elites to be “heard” in their criticisms in the same ways their European counterparts were. This is important because research suggests that one crucial source of electoral immunity against anti-immigrant parties are social taboos created by elites (Douglas, 2003; de Jonge, 2019). Eric Kaufmann, for instance, describes how the erosion of the “bounds of acceptable debate over immigration can set off the spiral of populist-right mobilisation” and how elite actors play a crucial role in either maintaining or eroding such social bounds (Kaufmann, 2018, p. 218). This mechanism may be particularly powerful in the case of religious communities, because of religious institutions’ traditional role in defining social norms as well as because psychologists have shown religious individuals tend to be more susceptible to social taboos (Haidt, 2012). As a result, in most European countries a relatively small number of leaders of the highly stratified and historically dominant denominations seemed to be able to effectively create powerful social firewalls against anti-immigrant parties by openly condemning anti-immigrant parties’ policies (Cremer, 2021a). By contrast, in America’s unregulated religious marketplace, there was no clearly identifiable group of leaders that could ex officio condemn Trumpism with the same normative authority. As a result, even if many members of America’s religious 235

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“establishment” may have been more critical of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, their normative ability to create a social taboo around it has been limited. Taken together, these differing strategies of anti-immigrant politicians, as well as the structure of the party system and religious landscape are important explanatory variables in understanding Christians’ varying reactions to anti-immigrant movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

Conclusion This chapter set out to examine the ambiguous relationship between anti-immigrant parties and religion in Western Europe and the US. Specifically, it addressed the questions of why antiimmigrant parties have intensified references to religion at a time of rapid secularisation, and how religious communities themselves have responded to this development. From the analysis of the socio-demographic roots behind anti-immigrant parties’ electoral successes, the ways in which religion features in anti-immigrant parties’ politics, and the responses of Christian communities on both sides of the Atlantic, several insights emerge. First, anti-immigrant parties’ electoral success appears to be fuelled less by any sort of religious revival in the West, than by the emergence of new social cleavage centred on the question of identity, which in fact appears connected to the very erosion of traditional religious and class identities through the processes of globalisation, individualisation and secularisation. Second, to appeal to this new social cleavage, anti-immigrant parties have used their own brand of right-wing identity politics, which focuses on civilisational and identitarian rather than on economic or racial forms of othering. In this context anti-immigrant parties are referencing neo-paganism, secularism but in particular Christianity primarily as a cultural identity marker against Islam, while remaining distanced from religious values, beliefs and institutions. And fourth, Christian communities’ reactions to these references vary widely depending not only on anti-immigrant parties’ strategies but also on the political and religious structures in which they operate as well as on the behaviour of religious and political elites. Overall, these findings suggest that as trends like secularisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change continue and as the identity cleavage increases in salience, references to both identitarian Christianism and exclusivist secularism as cultural anti-dotes to the “Islamic Other” will only become more prominent in anti-immigrant rhetoric. However, rather than being driven by any form of religious resurgence, anti-immigrant parties and their religiously laden rhetoric appear to be both symptoms and harbingers of the further secularisation of Western politics as the latter transitions from the class struggles and religious culture wars of the twentieth century to a new more secular identity politics of the twenty-first century.

Note 1 Social cleavages, thereby, denote the main social conflict lines that divide the population into social groups and according to which party systems are structured (compare Bartolini and Mair, 2007, pp. 199–202).

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17 THE NEGLECTED INTERACTIONS OF RELIGION AND NATION AND HOW THEY SHAPE POLITICIZATION OF RELIGION Jocelyne Cesari The main argument of this chapter borrows from my research on the concomitant dissemination of the nation-state and of the concept of religion (Cesari, 2022). This is not an attempt at deconstructing the concepts of religion and nation: this has been done (Asad, 1993; Masuzawa, 2005). It is an exploration of the mutual interactions of religion and nation-state and how these interactions explain the politicization of religion in different national contexts. A few disclaimers are in order. First, the allegation is not that prior to the nation-state, political and religious cultures were in a fixed and unchangeable state. There have, of course, always been influences and cross-pollination, and no claim can be made for untouched “authenticity”. Hindus lived under the rule of monotheist Muslims before Christian and Western imperialism, Russian Orthodoxy was influenced by the Byzantines and the Greeks. My argument is limited to the modern period for which I emphasize the specific input brought by the exportation and accommodation of the nation-state, in ways that have shaped the current forms of politicization of religion. Second, exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion and their intersections requires an approach to nation and secularization beyond the expected discussion of nationalism and secularism. Combining them can explain why and how religion and politics influence each other.

Nation is more than nationalism Nationalism usually refers to a group with a collective identity and aspiration to self-determination. When the borders of this group or nation line up with the borders of the state monopoly of power, we have the ideal type of nation-state. Yet, one may wonder, how does nationalism arise? That is where scholarly disagreements are the most acute. On one hand, some emphasize the pre-existence of cohesive social groups, grounded in culture or bloodline, which would explain unification (Kedourie, 2002). The basic assumption in that approach is that there must be some unifying factor in any given national identity – whether it be history, language, religion or otherwise. On the other hand, scholars argue that nationalism 240

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is the product of social processes that forged solidarity on the basis of shared communication or interests. In this second perspective, nationalism commenced with the expansion of capitalism, which implied shared language and cultural homogenization to foster a collective experience and commonality within the masses thereby brought into political history. The result has been described by Benedict Anderson (1983) as an “imagined community”, therefore giving priority to the language over blood. Besides Anderson, scholars like Ernest Gellner (2006) and Eric Hobsbawm (1990) forged the new paradigm, soon to be referred to as “modernism” or “constructivism”, which became hegemonic among scholars in the last few decades. Whereas the traditional paradigm confidently established nations in the longue durée of history and emphasized their continuity and organic, natural qualities, the modernists saw nations as “constructed communities” that coalesced only with a new discourse of politics that located sovereignty within peoples rather than divinely sanctioned monarchs. Anthony Marx has astutely objected that the imagined community shares with the liberal intellectual tradition the assumption that early social cohesion requires no institutional action; hence, in this perspective, no state action is necessary to encourage community cohesion or national loyalty (Marx, 2005, p. 15). However, it is worth noting that if nationalism is defined not only by collective consciousness but also by self-determination, the creation of a desired community only explains half the story. The coalescence of collective identity has to therefore be studied in the context of the political project of self-determination. In other words, all communities are to a certain extent imagined, but not all of them carry a specific project of political sovereignty and independence. From this perspective, it is important to distinguish nationalism and nation. The former is the ideology that tells the story of “us” or how people say “we”. The latter as the modern political community is the new frame for understanding all types of societal and political situations. Liah Greenfeld has demonstrated how the national frame has reshaped not only culture but also the mentality of individuals and even illness (Greenfeld, 2013, p. 2). She shows how nationalism is a form of consciousness that has redefined the boundaries of groups and relations between people according to two principles: equality of membership and popular sovereignty. This consciousness is at the foundation of our understanding of modern society and politics. In the words of R. Friedland: “Nationalism is not simply an ideology; it is also a set of discursive practices by which the territorial identity of the political power and the cultural identity of the people whose collective representation it claims are constituted in a singular fact” (Friedland, 2002, p. 386). While nationalism offers a form of representation, it does not determine the context of the representation itself or the identity of the represented population, whether it be civic, liberal, ethnic and/ or religious. The exclusive political legitimacy of the nation-state was established in 1648 with the Westphalian Treaty that marked the end of the War of Religions in Europe and the formation of the international secular order. The result of this political and cultural transformation was the deep change of the human psyche with the rise of the “nationalized personality structure”, i.e. collective psycho-cultural traits that shape people’s individual interests and social norms (Swanson, 1975; Hintze and Rokkan, 1975). This transformative capacity of the nation on collective mentalities and norms has been mostly ignored or understudied.1 The Foucauldian concept of “governmentality”, which emphasizes the connection between techniques of individual socialization (governing of the self) and techniques of domination (governing others), can help decipher these intertwined transformations of norms and identities (Foucault, 2010). Governmentality refers to different procedures for regulating human behaviors, which are not in any way limited to state actions or policies. 241

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Religious traditions, organizations, discourses and practices are a part of national governmentality even when they are independent from the state. Notably, religion was already an institutional space before the nation-state. Through a network of sacred sites and ritual spaces, community centers, associations, schools, hospitals, courts and charities, religion offered a social space from which to mobilize, as well as a concrete cosmos within which a particular vision of the social could be imagined and prefigured. This vision has been deeply transformed by the rise of national communities and state institutions. As a matter of fact, policies cannot be explained without analyzing the sets of acquired ideas, emotions, codes of behaviors and social etiquette that people in a given territory associated with political power and community. The differentiation of religion and politics came to be when the inherent political power associated with religion was transferred to the nation-state legitimacy.

The invention of the religion versus politics divide It is only in modern times that religion and politics emerge as distinct categories in association with the secular/religious ones. Charles Taylor (2007) has superbly described how the “secular” developed as a specific “category” within Latin Christendom in the aftermath of the War of Religions: saeculum, or “profane time”, was contrasted with eternal sacred time. In Latin, “saeculum” meant a fixed period of time, roughly one hundred years or so. In the Romance languages, it evolved into “century”. After the War of Religions, it became used to contrast this temporal age of the world from the divinely eternal realm of God. Anything “secular” has to do with earthly affairs rather than with spiritual affairs. In other words at this critical juncture in time, the Catholic Church was forced to delegate its guidance of the mundane affairs to the secular political power. It led to two major changes: first, the concept of good political order and social virtues was disconnected from Christian ethics; second, the immanent became the domain of secular activities while the church legitimacy was confined to the transcendent. To be clear, the division between transcendent and immanent is foundational to Christian thinking, but, as explained by Saint Augustine, both were under God’s purview. The division of tasks between the secular immanent and the religious transcendent was the invention of Latin Christendom and, incidentally, constituted Christendom’s contribution to the process of secularization. As a consequence, certain places, institutions, persons and functions were inscribed within one or the other “times”. The transfer of certain properties and institutions out of church control to the state was therefore “secularization”. For the first time since the establishment of the Catholic Church, the political community could exist outside the divine guidance of the Pope and be defined on its own terms. From this moment on, secularization in western Europe has never stopped, not simply at the institutional level but most importantly at the societal level, leading to today’s dominant perception that “this worldly” is all there is, and that the higher “other worldly” is the product of the human community. This separation between religion/politics and secular/religious was accelerated through the Reformation, which gave preeminence to the believer’s responsibility in the relationship to God while empowering the individuals in the regulation of mundane and political affairs. While the religious allegiance was re-centered on the individual, the nation became the superior collective identification that took precedence over religious collective allegiances. The implication is that religion can only be accepted if religious collectivities come to terms with their political disempowerment. In other words, religion is the domain of personal spirituality while all collective

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allegiances are oriented toward and subdued to the nation as the sovereign community made of individuals equal in rights. As a result, secularization is primarily defined as the separation between “this worldly” and the “other worldly”, relegating religion to personal faith and beliefs with no direct implication on society and politics. The problem is that this relegation has continuously challenged the societal and collective claims of religions, even in advanced secular democracies. In this regard, the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, Lord Sacks of Aldgate (1948–2020), repeatedly called to attention the fact that liberal democracies cannot handle the moral challenges that religion is able to address because democratic institutions are procedural and focused on individual differences. Along the same line, the public manifestations of religion pose a challenge to European secularities that locate most of the religious expressions in the private sphere. That is one of the reasons why behaviors of practicing Muslims are seen as a rejection of this private/public disjunction (while in the US, Islamophobia is mostly caused by security issues) (Cesari, 2013; Cainkar, 2009). Another recent contestation of the religion/politics divide is the rise of civilizationism and nativism, in the sense that some Christian groups in Europe and the US make religion a key marker of the national community, therefore challenging the taken-forgranted notion that being Christian is mostly a private affair. They also put the religion at the service of the sacred of the national community (and not the other way around). This distinction between secular and religious has not eliminated the sacred. In fact, it now refers to both political symbols, such as flags, national anthems and memorials, as well as religious ones, such as places of worship, shrines and rituals. In some circumstances, both converge to strengthen the nation. In others, they can compete or clash. Additonally, the division of labor between the state as regulator of the immanent and religion as the domain of the transcendent has been exported everywhere with the diffusion of the nation-state through colonization, trade and wars. Even when there is no immanent/transcendent distinction (like in Hinduism), religious traditions have nevertheless been transformed along this divide through the adoption of the nation-state. In fact, everywhere traditions had to grapple with what anthropologists call the “monotheistic diktat”, that is, the alignment of the message (there is only one God), the people (pledge exclusive allegiance to this one God) and the territory (a land is part of the covenant between God and the people who accept the message, at least for Judaism). Missionaries outside the West did not systematically convert the autochthones, but they contributed to the fashioning of local traditions toward homogenization and centralization, which facilitated the parallel building of the colonial state political power. These adjustments therefore reinforced the conceptions of the people and the territory brought by the national framework. It means that domains of action historically enacted by religious figures and institutions became increasingly challenged and sometimes replaced by state institutions. As a consequence, religious groups gradually emphasized spirituality, texts and doctrines over practices. It is important to point out that the immanent/transcendent split affected non-monotheistic traditions not because they adopted monotheistic creeds but because their scope of legitimacy was reordered along the immanent/transcendent axis exported by the nation-state. Even in the case of Buddhism, where the concept of transcendence preexisted the modern nation-state, the reordering of hierarchies brought by nationalization opened the door to new discussions influenced by the Christian understanding of the concept (see Cesari, 2022b). The politicization of Hinduism in modern India, as well as of Islam in the post-colonial Muslim states, are two distinct illustrations of the religious influence of the nation-building (Cesari, 2022b).

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The Indian nation: nexus of communalism and secularism The Indian national identity was conceived both as Hindu and secular, therefore clashing with identification at the local level where class, cultural and religious allegiances were at play. The critical transformation brought by the national community was to redefine local communities along religious lines. This reshaping of local allegiances was a key feature of the modern Indian political community in order to define “Indianness” amid an ostensible lack of unity. The problem is that Indian political identity and institutions are usually analyzed as secular, and hence are not really understandable through the religious angle. It means that secularism is presented as the glue that has held the country together, and the rise of the Hinduist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is decried as a denial of this secular project. By contrast, the modelling of Hinduism as a modern religion, adjusted to the national framework, sheds a different light on the politics of secularization. One of the consequences of British imperialism was the exportation to India of the immanent/transcendent axis. It started the self-reinforcing transformation of the multiple Hindu traditions into Hinduism as a text-centered religion associated with the construction of the nation and the state. In other words, the multiple and diffuse meanings associated with Hinduism have collided with the shaping of the national identity and of secularism, instead of being relegated to the private sphere. Therefore, they provide the language for politics shared by all protagonists, even the non-Hindu ones, creating the latent conditions for claims to Hinduist supremacy as well as the preeminence of the religious boundaries over local identifications. It therefore set the stage for local competitions between religious groups because for the first time, the religious boundaries prevailed over local identification instead of being embedded in it. This habitus can be captured through the cluster of meanings about Hinduism, nation, state and secularism that go back to the Imperial encounter with the British. With the British imperial politics in the Indian subcontinent, six critical periods created cumulative sequences in the formation of the national habitus: the cow movement (1893–1894), Swadeshi and the New Patriotism in Maharaja (1905–1910), the debate around constitutional reform and the status of Islam (1906–1909), the Khilafat Movement and the Separation of Sind (1919–1932), the Untouchable Reform (1932), and the debate on religion at the Constituent Assembly (1946–1950). These sequences led to the re-organization of Hindu practices and visions along the immanent/transcendent division by aligning them with the national narrative while the state promulgated secularism. The exploration of the conceptual history of nation, state and religion reveals a cluster of concepts: communalism, secularism, nation and dharma which were worked into building the collective meaning of the nation with a sense of rational-universal-superior meaning for all Indians. At the same time, the grafting of the Western concept of religion onto the multiple local traditions translated into religious communities legally defined by state law. It implies that the state commits to the support of religious education of all religious communities, whilst avoiding privileging by law one religion over another and defining nationalism as the coexistence of pluralities (religious, ethnic linguistics, class). From this perspective, secularism, as the state responsibility vis-à-vis all religious communities, has been established as the central feature of the national identity. Nonetheless, the principles of neutrality and fairness inherent to Indian secularism are not easy to translate into policies since they are grounded in the implicit priority of inter-religious over intra-religious diversity, hence holding the possibility of setting up one homogenous religious group against the other and minimizing the communality of language, culture or locality across religious groups, 244

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In sum, the modern political community is built on the conception of Hinduism as Vedanta, universalist, tolerant, spirituality, non-violent, and therefore presented as the epitome of Indian national identity. Additionally, secularism is defined as a state project for mediating and arbitrating between religious groups but not within religious groups. These features shape politicization of religion that takes four main forms: disputes over sacred spaces, local political competition between religious and ethnic groups, tensions over religious conversion and competition for the shaping of the national narrative. The Ayodhya dispute will serve as an example of the political tensions over sacred sites.

Dispute over sacred sites The most intense controversy concerns the access to a site regarded by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Rama, on which the mosque known as Babri Masjid was built. This temple/ mosque has been an object of local tensions between Muslims and Hindus for more than a century before the national independence, as attested by numerous reports of the British rulers (Van der Veer, 1992, p. 97). After independence, there were notable incidents like when in 1949, a Hindu crowd forced the entry of the mosque and installed an idol of Rama. The local administrators refused to remove the idol while allowing only some Hindu notables to enter the site every year on 22 December (birthday of Rama) for worship while the site remained closed to the general public. Such a solution highlights the political ambiguity at the time: the local political forces stopped the Hindu crowd from turning the mosque into a temple and closed its access to the general public. The fact that the local authorities did not stop Hindu worship completely meant that the mosque had de facto been turned into a temple (Van der Veer, 1992, p. 99). Interestingly, no further local action was taken. It was the campaign of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) movement in 1984 to liberate Rama’s birthplace that turned these local tensions into a divisive nationwide issue. As a result of the VHP mobilizations, the judge of the Faizabad district decided on 14 February 1986, to open the site to the public. Communal violence erupted all over North India, and on 30 March 1987, Muslims launched in New Delhi their biggest protest since independence (Van der Veer, 1992, p. 101). From that date onward, the local dispute has been a national political issue, taken on by all main political parties and made central in the agenda of the BJP, contributing to its national electoral influence. The site was assaulted by Hindu crowds, and the mosque was destroyed during a political rally which turned into a riot on 6 December 1992. This case is typical of the nationalization of a religious dispute. Instead of simply claiming as a matter of religious belief that the mosque occupies the spot on which Rama has been born, the VHP goes further by claiming that a temple was demolished by Muslims and replaced by a mosque, hence challenging the everlasting Hindu feature of the site. For this additional claim, evidence has to be provided in the form of historical and archaeological “facts”. A land title case was lodged by the local Muslim groups in the Allahabad High Court. In the landmark verdict of 30 September 2012, the three judges ruled that the 2.77 acres (1.12 ha) of Ayodhya land be divided into three parts, with one-third going to the Ram Lalla or Infant Rama represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha for the construction of the Ram temple, onethird going to the Islamic Sunni Waqf Board and the remaining one-third going to the Hindu religious denomination Nirmohi Akhara. The three-judge bench agreed that a temple predated the mosque at the site although they were not unanimous that the mosque was constructed after destruction of the temple. The excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India were heavily used as evidence by the court to establish that the predating structure was a massive Hindu religious building. The Muslim community challenged the verdict, asking with no success for 245

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the Supreme Court to hear the case with a larger bench of seven judges since it concerns a land belonging to a mosque and has implications for the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion (eLegalix, 2010). Finally, on 9 November 2019, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the ownership of the holy site in Ayodhya would be given to the Hindus. The Muslims, who also laid claim to the site, would be given a five-acre plot in another part of the city on which to build a mosque. The verdict was unanimous, and one of the strongest pieces of evidence was that archaeological remains of a non-Islamic, earlier building were found at the site (BBC News, 2019). Nirhomi Akhara, a Hindu religious denomination and a third party laying claim to the site, had their plea dismissed by the Supreme Court when they wanted control of the entire holy site (India Today, 2019). Additionally, the court ruled that the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992 was unlawful, as well as the forced placement of Hindu deities in the mosque in 1949 (Ahmed, 2019). This dispute is emblematic of the national Hindu/Muslim divide because the two groups competed for the longest ownership of the holy site, which is also a rivalry over the status of their respective religions within the nation. In other words, the sacred time and space of the nation have displaced the sacredness of the sites toward the political community. Within the nation-state framework, the sacredness of the religious sites is not only religious but also political. That is why “holy” and “sacred” are not synonymous. “Holy” refers to places of worship like a mosque or temple, while “sacredness” involves the religious centrality of a place for the whole religious community. In this perspective, the Babri mosque is holy for Indian Muslims, but not sacred like the Ka’aba. That is why the sacred space is the receptacle of the eternity or longevity of the religious identity of the group. This longevity is amplified and takes a political direction when it also confers legitimacy to the nation.

Hegemonic Islam beyond borders Nation-building in Muslim countries resulted in a decisive re-organization of the society-statereligion nexus, unknown in pre-modern times (Enayat, 2005). Under the caliphates, Islamic institutions and clerics were not subordinate to political power, since the former were financially and intellectually independent from the latter. Additionally, the caliphs ruled over a huge amount of ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse populations. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the emergence of the state as the central political institution went hand-in-hand with the homogenisation of the populations inhabiting the nation’s territory. That is why nation-building systematically omitted and sometimes eradicated particular ethnic, religious and linguistic groups in order to create one nation defined by one religion (Islam) and one language. This homogenisation also led to a politicised narrative of religion, i.e. what I  have called hegemonic Islam (Cesari, 2018). A  congruence was created between Muslims of a certain obedience (for example, Maleki, Shafi’i, Hanbali and Hanafi schools) and a bounded territory. Shari’a, previously the monopoly of Ulemas, was reshaped as state law and secularised with the introduction of French or British legal procedures. It was also reduced to family law (marriage, divorce, custody of children and inheritance), while Shari’a courts were abolished and replaced by a secular court system. Because of the lasting role of Islam in regulating these dimensions of the immanent (family life, sexuality, freedom of speech), they are nowadays the most acutely disputed issues between “secular” and “religious” actors. In other words, the Ulemas lost their influence on the immanent and were progressively relegated into

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the guidance of souls and regulation of family affairs. In this respect, hegemonic Islam occurred in three major ways: 1 2

3

The nationalisation of institutions, clerics and places of worship of one particular trend of Islam (for example Sunni over Shia) The re-definition and adjustment of Shari’a to the modern legal system as well as inclusion of Islamic references into civil law (marriage/divorce), criminal law, and as restriction of freedom of speech (blasphemy/apostasy), based on the prescriptions of that particular brand of Islam The insertion of the doctrine of that state-approved Islam into the public school curriculum though national history textbooks and civic education

Consequently, Islam became a marker of national and collective identity independently of the level of personal religious practice, not only for Muslims but also for religious minorities. In other words, the political cosmology brought by the nation-state is shaped by the co-terminality of Islam territory and political power in ways unknown in pre-modern Muslim empires. It creates a connection between Islam and citizenship by establishing Islam as the parameter of public space for Muslims and non-Muslims, believers and non-believers alike. It implies that before being expressed in Islamic parties or movements, political Islam is a foundational element of modern political identities framed by the nation-state. In this sense, religion is “less about beliefs” and more about a world view which is often effective without the active awareness of those experiencing it (Williams, 1996). It is therefore no surprise that the sacred that used to be associated with the foundational Islamic community has become a feature of the national one. Take, for example, the dispute over the Syrian flag. In 2018, the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition gathered in a constituent assembly in the northern Idlib province in order to change the Syrian revolution flag, which would retain the green, red and black colors adopted in 2012 but replace the red stars with the Shahada, the Islamic testimony of faith (i.e. “I believe that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah”). This decision caused an uproar among all factions of the Syrian revolution. Yahya al Aridi, a member of the Druze community, described the flag change as “heresy” and wrote in a tweet, “Those who came out of this heresy to change the flag of revolution did more harm to the cause of the Syrians . . .” (al Aridi, 2018). Even Islamists were conflicted. The leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Malik Tali, commented via telegram, “No party should oblige other groups or the general public with a specific color or shape. This is one of the divisions that should be avoided”, adding that “the Prophet, peace be upon him, had numerous flags, of different shapes, and banners shouldn’t be limited to a single color” (Enab Baladi, 2018). This battle over religious inscriptions on flags illustrates the tensions between the secular/sacred of the national community and the sacred of the religious community. Additionally, and most crucially, this genealogy of the religion/politics divide sheds a different light on Islamic parties and movements: they are not the beginning of political Islam, but the second iteration of a political culture ingrained into the national communities (Cesari, 2018). That is the reason why these movements claim an Islamic state. Their goal is not to get rid of hegemonic Islam but rather to expand its influence beyond the domains currently controlled by the secular states. In a similar vein, the dispute over Muslim minorities in the current Middle Eastern politics is influenced by the modern meaning of minority associated with the building of the nation-state. The status of the Alawi minority in Syria is a case in point.

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The shaping of the Alawi community The Alawi sect, founded by Muhammad ibn Nusayr al-Bakri an-Namiri (d. 883 or 873) in the ninth century, found a home in the coastal mountains of Latakia, currently Syria (Farouk-Alli, 2015). It is worth noting that Alawis were not defined as a religious minority in the Muslim empires, since the term applied only to the Dhimmis (mostly Jews and Christians). As a Shia sect however, this did not prevent their discrimination or oppression. The French mandate (1923–1946) over this portion of the Ottoman Empire changed the power dynamic between Alawis and Sunnis. The articles of the mandate allowed the French powers to impose or encourage divisions within groups along religious lines. As a result, the French administration defined the Alawis as a minority, similar in status to Christians and Jews (Rabinovich, 1979). Even more importantly, this political management operated on the misconceived understanding of the Ottoman millet system as a hierarchical relationship between the religious communities and the central power in Istanbul. As a matter of fact, the reality was that the locality was the dominant collective identity for diverse religious groups sharing the same history and culture to a particular region of the Empire, not to mention that this religious diversity within the various locales was regulated independently of the administration in Istanbul. The fact that the Alawis could also be identified to a particular portion of territory (i.e. the coast) facilitated the creation in 1924 of the État des Alaouites, set apart from the central state institutions, that would become the muhafaza (province) of Latakia within the Syrian postcolonial republic. In doing so, the French intended to counter the rise of Arab nationalism associated with the Sunni majority (Fildis, 2012). Such a purpose was endorsed by the Alawis as a way to overcome their historical marginality by becoming a legitimate component of the new nation. As a result, the Alawis became simultaneously a national religious minority and a sectarian community within the Syrian nation. Like the Alawis, all non-Sunni minorities from Christians to Druzes became the principal means by which the French maintained their control of the region (White, 2011, p. 135). All the non-Muslim religious leaders endorsed the modern concept of minority because they saw it as a way to secure a strong vertical relationship to the state and to ensure the political legitimacy of their respective community. Interestingly, these divisions and their connection to the central political power were also sanctioned by the Syrian nationalist leaders. As a result, the religious leaders became the sole mediators between the political power and their respective communities, hence establishing religion as a significant benchmark of political representation. The rise of the Baath Socialist Party in the 1940s promised Syrians equality on the basis of language and culture, not religion (Fildis, 2012). Nonetheless, due to the shift in distribution of power within the army, by 1963 Alawites made up 90% of the newly appointed officers. This new political dynamic was the opportunity for Hafiz al-Assad (1930–2000) to unify all factions around him, and for the minority to politically dominate the Sunni majority. In order to assert his legitimacy Hafez Al-Assad took great care at never emphasizing the Shia/Sunni difference. He also cultivated good relationships with the Sunni clerical establishment, even trying to include them in his repression of the Islamist political opposition (for more details see Cesari, 2022b, Chapter 2). It therefore does not come as a surprise that since the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, Bashar al-Assad has promoted the idea that the state and the Alawi minority are inextricably linked and has presented himself as the protector of all religions against radical Sunni opponents. Based on the existing power distribution and the patterns of politicization of religion, the relegitimization of the Assad system will probably translate into the acknowledgement of Islamic 248

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religious institutions and figures. Firstly, local and especially rural zones will be key to that strategy, which started during the siege of the towns occupied by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (al-Saidawi, 2019). Secondly, the state will continue to assert its role as the privileged provider of religious legitimacy. For example, the state has strengthened its grip on Islamic organizations and figures. After Assad retook Aleppo in 2016, individuals who had any role in local government in opposition-held areas were deemed terrorists and pushed out. To avoid any vacuum, the government granted religious institutions the capacity to operate in these areas. These government-supported entities are now establishing their own charities and medical, educational, economic and welfare services, which will lead to new societal structures and local networks and therefore influence the balance of power between state and religion at the national level. The law passed on 31 October 2018 exemplifies the government’s attempt to further control Syria’s religious networks. The new legislation expands the presence and powers of the Ministry of Awqaf (Ministry of Religious Affairs) and its personnel; defines the “correct” version of Islam; determines the appointment procedures for religious positions such as that of the grand mufti; outlines the responsibilities, limits and salaries of religious officials; and specifies penalties for violations committed by such officials. The document also confirms the government’s intention to strengthen the Waqf ’s socio-economic role in support of the local clerics (Syrian Law Journal, 2018). These actions are good indicators of the future of political Islam in Syria: the state will posit itself as the protector of religions in general and Islam in particular, while Islamically based political opposition will be discredited as anti-national and against the interests of the country. At the same time, Sunni political forces will not be able to create a united front because of conflicting allegiance to transnational Islamic movements like al-Qaeda or ISIS and to regional political powers in the Gulf. This succinct analysis illustrates how the power dynamics in the nation-state building were facilitated by the transformation of religious meaning within the nation-state. It is worth mentioning that most of the religious concepts redefined during the nation-building have spread beyond national boundaries to give rise to transnational forms of Islamism that can be radical, like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

From national to transnational politicization of Islam From this perspective, al-Baghdadi’s (1971–2019) caliphate is better understood as a globalization of the national forms of Islam, rather than a return to the pre-modern form of polity before nationalism. If political Islam is the result of the diffusion of the religion/politics divide associated with the nation-state, it implies that global jihadism is the most recent and radicalized iteration of the nationalized versions of Shari’a, jihad and Ummah. The transnationalization of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology and strategy illustrates this apparent contradiction. Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was not opposed to the nation-state, and since its inception, the brotherhood had a distinctly national focus on Egypt. This position led to divisions within the movement; the majority wanted to operate within the state-sanctioned political system, while the minority wanted to destroy the state. Sayyid Qutb’s (1906–1966) re-definition of jihad as the fight against the unjust ruler was instrumental to the systematic use of violence for political purpose. The pre-modern conception of jihad emphasized the efforts of the believer to implement the revelation-based community as defined by the message of Islam and can be compared to the just war tradition since it laid out the proper “rules” for starting and conducting a war. From this perspective, 249

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jihad was a collective duty and a tool for the caliph to preserve and expand his international authority. By contrast, the current global conception of jihad originates in the resistance against the colonial power, to turn against the secular nationalist rulers and finally to expand to all state powers (Peters, 1979). In the same vein, it is worth mentioning that the national form of jihads, from Hezbollah to Hamas, remains the most significant form of political resistance. With the creation of al-Qaeda, this re-definition has gone even further to define jihad as the use of indiscriminate violence against all enemies of Islam across national borders. In this regard, global jihad – also known as Salafi-jihadism – is a unique modern combination of the jihadi guerrilla of Qutb with the Wahhabi religious doctrine of Saudi Arabia. In other words, the national form of jihad from the Egyptian context became global with the internationalization of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet, while its literalist and exclusivist vision of the Ummah comes from the modern Wahhabi doctrine (Gerges, 2009). Transnational Islam and jihad also connect to the Ummah and its various definitions and interpretations. At its inception, the Ummah is defined as the human collective that uniquely received guidance from Allah through the revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad. Initially, it served as the political model for the successive caliphates, but their expansion across diverse populations, ethnicities, cultures and religions resulted in the plural understanding of the Ummah as the totality of territories under the rule of Islam, making it a multi-religious, linguistic and cultural entity. However, a turning point came in the nineteenth century, when activists and ideologues reformed the Islamic tradition in order to address the challenges of political modernization brought by the encounters with Europe. From this moment onward, the  Ummah  redefined by pan-Islamists such as Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and Afghani (1839–1897) came to designate an ideal political community of all Muslim believers under the rule of Islam, contrasted to the national community. At the same time, the loyalty to the Ummah was not in contradiction with the national allegiances and could in fact be channeled into national and state interests. For instance, Saddam Hussein’s rhetoric during the first Gulf War (1990–1991) promoted the shared virtue of the Arab and Muslim community and the duty of the Muslims to defend the Ummah. Hussein’s rhetoric further highlighted the Ummah’s role as a political transnational project, based not simply on faith, but also on the resistance against the imperialist project of the West. The Islamist versions of the Ummah have built on this modern understanding to turn it into a combatant community. From this perspective, true Muslims must see themselves as being in a permanent state of war against state and society, hence departing from the traditional definition of the Ummah as Muslims and non-Muslims under the rule of the caliphate. Ironically, this conception of a homogenous and political Ummah is also channeled into the Western rhetoric of the threat of Islam and its “deterritorialized community of Muslims”. In sum, the Ummah of the global jihad is not a rupture but an ultra-radicalized version of the modern political community of the nineteenth century. Like Christianity in Europe at the time of the Reformation but with very different outcomes, the Islamic tradition has seen not only its societal influence reordered by the nation-state, but also its doctrinal content redefined to make room for state sovereignty over mundane matters. Evidently, these transformations have not generated a stable consensus and are in fact a significant factor in the rise of political movements based on Islam.

Conclusion The genealogical method adopted in this chapter is not about finding historical causality but identifying discontinuities and changes. It seeks to understand how the present is made possible through specific circumstances from the past and to pay attention to how and when these 250

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circumstances change. That is why the focus is the rise of dissension about ideas, narratives and institutions, i.e. when people fight and compete to impose one particular meaning of concepts such as community, law, secularism, etc. over others.2 Such dissonances reveal the power struggle underneath apparently stable ideas and institutions. Social change is therefore the outcome of competition of power between different actors and ideas which operates in all social arenas and not only through state actions. Power is a dynamic of both struggle and repression: individuals and institutions are constantly affected by power and exercising power at the same time. Power is the constituting force shaping and forming discourses, knowledge, interests, and institutions in all aspects of social life, including religion. It is important to keep in mind that the timelines of these disputes are not always reflected in the political and academic established periodization of national and international politics. For this reason, there is no before and after associated with colonization or national independence. Instead, these events open new sequences that have disrupted pre-existing orders and debates but have not created them. For example, prior to Western imperialism, some indigenous secularization was occurring in the Ottoman Empire with the distinction between Shari’a as monopoly of the clerics and the Shari’a Syasa as the domain of the Ottoman administration. Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent, a sort of homogenization of Hindu practices was at play in some provinces in order to compete with the scriptural model of the Muslim rulers. These pre-Western processes were re-oriented and channeled into the building of the national communities. They are, in fact, key to understanding the specificity of the existing tensions and competition between religious and political actors and ideas. More broadly, the genealogy method is a useful tool to overcome two major limitations of the investigation of religion and politics. The first one is anachronism, i.e. attributing current meanings of politics and religion to past phenomena that were not politically salient or even understood as such. A significant example is defining all forms of political power as state, like empires or cities. We contend that the term “state” should be used only as the modern form of political power. This modernity does not refer to centralization and bureaucracy, which can be found in other polities. The most important feature of the state is its association with the nation as the political community founded on two principles: equality of individuals and popular sovereignty, which are not present together in any other political system. The second one is the taken-for-granted religious/politics dichotomy enshrined in our scholarship. There is no such a thing as two separate political and religious entities but instead, continuous interactions between actors, ideas and institutions to define what is religious and what is political. In this respect, despite its attempt to question secularism, the concept of postsecularity (Habermas, 2006; Abeysekara, 2008) does not capture this never-ending process because it implies that there was a fixed distinction between secular and religious that has been challenged. In fact, the genealogical method tells us that since the “division of labor” between politics and religion at the end of the War of Religions, the domain and boundaries of the secular have continuously shifted. The issue is that modern political orders were built and legitimized on the idea that religion is apolitical in essence, which can only be an occasional interloper on political affairs (Walhof, 2013). Consequently, the analysis of the never-ending interactions between religion and politics is challenging, if not impossible, within the existing political theories. For this reason, combining the investigation of ideas and institutions allows us to capture the interactions between the two. It then becomes more obvious that the redistribution of power between political and religious institutions has influenced the content of religious doctrines on issues of law, sovereignty and inter-religious interactions. In the case of Islam, the current conceptions of Islamic Law as state law or the claims for an Islamic state are the most salient examples of these theological changes 251

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brought by the nation-state framework. The building of the nation-state in India has also led to the re-definition of Hinduism as a scriptural and universal tradition, which is at the core of the current political tensions on Hindu and nationalism.

Notes 1 See Liah Greenfeld’s. Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (2013), which has documented the influence of the national framework on mental illness, happiness and other conditions usually seen as inherent psychological characteristics independent of social structures.

References Abeysekara, A. (2008). The Politics of Postsecular Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Ahmed, I. (2019). “The Indian Supreme Court’s verdict on the Ayodhya dispute.” Fair Observer, November  12. www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/indian-supreme-court-babri-mosquemasjid-ayodhya-india-79479/. al Aridi, Y. [yahya_alaridi]. (2018). “Those who came out of this heresy to change the flag of revolution did more harm to the cause of the Syrians .  .  .” Twitter, November  12. https://twitter.com/ yahya_alaridi/status/1062004528961204226. al-Saidawi, H. (2019). “How Syria’s regime used local clerics to reassert its authority in rural Damascus Governorate.”  Carnegie Middle East Center, March  27. https://carnegie-mec.org/2019/03/27/howsyria-s-regime-used-local-clerics-to-reassert-its-authority-in-rural-damascus-governorate-pub-78692 Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Jopkins University Press. BBC News. (2019). Ayodhya verdict: Indian top court gives holy site to Hindus, November 9. www.bbc.com/ news/world-asia-india-50355775. Cainkar, L. (2009). Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Cesari, J. (2013). Why the West Fears Islam: Exploration of Muslims in Western Liberal Democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cesari, J. (2018). What Is Political Islam? Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Cesari, J. (2021). “Time, power and religion: Comparing the Temple Mount and the Ayodhya dispute over sacred sites.” Journal of Law, Religion, and State, 9(1), pp. 95–123. Cesari, J. (2022b). We God’s People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press. eLegalix. (2010). Allahabad high court judgment information system. Decision of Hon’ble special full bench hearing Ayodhya matters, September  30. https://web.archive.org/web/20140827003623/http://elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in/elegalix/DisplayAyodhyaBenchLandingPage.do. Enab Baladi. (2018). Reactions rejecting the “Salvation Government” ’s adoption of a new banner in Idlib, November 12. www.enabbaladi.net/archives/262697#. Enayat, H. (2005). Modern Islamic Political Thought. London: I.B. Tauris. Farouk-Alli, A. (2015). “The genesis of Syria’s Alawi minority.” in Michael Kerr and Craig Larkin. (eds.), Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant. New York: Oxford University Press. Fildis, A.T. (2012). “Roots of Alawite‐Sunni Rivalry in Syria.” Middle East Policy, 19(2): 148–156. Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedland, R. (2002). “Money, Sex, and God: The Erotic Logic of Religious Nationalism.” Sociological Theory, 20(3): 381–425. Gellner, E. (2006). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gerges, F.A. (2009). The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenfeld, L. (2013). Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Neglected interactions of religion and nation Habermas, J. (2006). “On the relations between the secular liberal state and religion.” in de Vries, H. and Sullivan, L.E. (eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Hintze, O. and Rokkan, S. (1975). “Dimensions of state formation and nation-building: A paradigm for research on variations within Europe.” in Tilly, C. (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. India Today (2019). Ayodhya Ram Mandir case judgment: Supreme Court rules in favour of Ram Lalla 10 highlights, November  9. www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ayodhya-ram-mandir-case-supreme-courtjudgment-top-10-highlights-1617304-2019-11-09. Kedourie, E. (2002). Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Marx, A. (2005). Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peters, R. (1979). Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History. New York: Mouton. Rabinovich, I. (1979). “The compact minorities and the Syrian State, 1918–45.” Journal of Contemporary History, 24(4): 693–712. Swanson, G. (1975). Religion and Regime: A Sociological Account of the Reformation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Syrian Law Journal. (2018). The unprecedented ramifications of the Awqaf law and Parliament’s response, November 3. www.syria.law/index.php/unprecedented-ramifications-awqaf-law-parliaments-response. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Van der Veer, P. (1992), “Ayodhya and Somnath: Eternal Shrines, Contested Histories.” Social Research, 59(1): 85–109. Walhof, D.R. (2013). “Habermas, Same Sex Marriage and the Problem of Religion in Public Space.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39: 225–242. White, B. (2011). The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, R.H. (1996). “Religion as Political Resource: Culture or Ideology?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 35(4): 368–378.

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18 THE INTERPLAY AMONG RELIGION, POLITICS AND LAW IN EUROPE New challenges and future trajectories Adelaide Madera This chapter seeks to investigate the interplay among religion, politics and law through the prism of the main European constitutional and legal patterns in the framework of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Although influential scholars have emphasized the irreconcilable divide among them as the paradigm of modernity, a clear separation seems an unmanageable issue. At present, in modern democratic societies, religion has a growing role in the public sphere, legal systems must cope with “deep” religious diversity and the rise of an institutional dimension of religious freedom, and religious claims generate fierce judicial litigation. Moreover, there is increasing political and social polarization on extremely divisive moral-ethical issues, which gives rise to new “culture wars”, and nationalist-populist parties are driving forces which promote the politicization of religion. In the European scenario there is not a uniform legal approach toward religion: there is variable geometry concerning what is religion, whose religious freedom deserves protection, what degree of religious freedom can be granted in postsecular societies, and whether and to what degree third parties can suffer the impact of the exercise of religious freedom. This chapter analyses the increasing complexity of the interplay between religion law and politics in Europe focusing on new challenges (including migration flows, health crisis, new religious movements, gender discrimination, conscientious objection and ethical pluralism) and recent legal changes, with a view to tracing future common legal trajectories.

The religious turn in the public space In contradiction to the traditional theories of secularization and modernization, which predicted the disappearance of “the sacred” from the public discourse, the interplay between religion law and politics in Europe has given rise to new challenges to the two main pillars of a “secular age” (Taylor, 2007): the state and market economy (Casanova, 1994). Although influential scholars have emphasized the irreconcilable divide among them as the paradigm of modernity (Habermas, 2008; Rawls, 1971), a clear separation seems increasingly a controversial issue (Miller, 2016, p. 841). All over the world, there is a “religious revival”, generating two threatening trends: on one hand, the development of extremist strands (Christian 254

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Fundamentalism, Revivalist Islam, Pentecostalism, Hindu and Buddhist nationalism), showing prejudice and skepticism toward “the others” (Hirshl and Shachar, 2018, pp. 515–531); and on the other hand, the emergence of transnational religious actors, spreading their message beyond national borders with a view to influencing public discourse (Haynes, 2001, p. 143). The crucial question is whether religion is a threat for constitutional order or whether it can be a driving force in the pursuit of more sustainable and inclusive public policies. Indeed, modern democracies are expected to offer answers to the increasing demands of religious, cultural, moral, ethical, social and gender pluralism, and they have to cope with new social and religious actors claiming accommodation of their diversity. The clash between religious claims and the state need for neutrality are generating a process of increasing “juridification” (Alidadi and Foblets, 2012, p. 399). Western legal systems show their inability to provide satisfactory legal responses, emphasizing a process of “crisis of the rule of law” (Casuscelli, 2021, pp. 1–16), where the courts are becoming the main arena in which religious issues are regulated. The crucial concern is whether religion can be part of the problem or part of the solution with regard to new legal and political challenges and whether and to what extent they can give a contribution to the negotiation of diversities with a view to building a cohesive society. However, it goes without saying that in a multicultural society, religion can give rise to social conflicts, and a state has to identify effective mechanisms of management of religious diversity.

The re-politization of religion in a secular age Thirty years ago, Richard John Neuhaus predicted the failure of a democratic model founded on the neutralization of religious presence in the public space (Neuhaus, 1984). Indeed, since ancient times religion has played the key (direct or indirect) role of factor of legitimacy of power. Commentators have analyzed the current interplay between religion and public space. They have dismantled both the connection between modernity and secularism, emphasizing the notion of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt, 2000, pp.  1–29) and eroded the link between secularization and the need for a privatization of religion (Casanova, 1994). Furthermore, commentators have identified various factors justifying the impact of religion on state public policies, ranging from the establishment of a theocratic system to the rise of models of secular religion aimed at neutralizing religious influence (Mazurkiewicz, 2020, pp. 1–20). Since Iran’s Revolution in 1979, led by Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, there has been a resurgence of religion in the public sphere. There is little doubt that such a phenomenon relates to a massive “repolitization” of religion in various parts of the world (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 471). A series of events, such as the pivotal role of the Catholic Church in the dismantling of the Communist regime in Poland and in Latin American political conflicts, the growth of religious parties in Turkey and Israel, the development of religious nationalist movements in India, Christian nationalism in the US context (Casanova, 2000), and the rise of populist Christian neo-nationalism in central and eastern Europe, such as the Solidarity movement in Poland (Casanova, 2021, pp. 5–6), shows such a religious turn at a global level, with approaches ranging from conservative to progressive. The Catholic Church gave its own contribution to this trend, as since Pope Benedict’s pontificate it promoted a new doctrine aimed at emphasizing the convergence between faith and reason, whose result is a universal moral law (Cartabia and Simoncini, 2015, pp. 3–9). According to influential scholars the main causes of “de-secularization” (Berger, 1999) are the crisis of secular ideologies, globalization and new technological developments (Ferrari, 2008, p. 10). 255

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Such a “return of religion” has also promoted the development of competing narratives: although during the Cold War the issue was “eclipsed by the gigantomachia between capitalism and communism”, new patterns of “secular religion” have arisen (Ungureanu, 2012, pp. 1–2). However, the role of religion in the public space has become a divisive issue which polarizes political debate, provoking an increasing “juridification” (Alidadi and Foblets, 2012, p. 399) of religious issues, supported by nationalist-populist parties emphasizing “culture wars” (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2018, pp. 1–20) between secular and religious forces, and exacerbating the issue of accommodation of religion in modern democratic systems. Furthermore, the recent health crisis due to the spread of Covid-19, and the consequent restrictive measures indirectly affecting religious exercise have highlighted concerns about the special treatment of religion (Madera, 2020, p. 2) and have given rise to new religious discriminations and forms of “authoritarianism” (Hill, 2020, p. 1–19).

The controversial legal definition of religion Dealing with religion in modern secular societies implies the search for a legal definition of religion. Although the issue has been analyzed by other sciences (Bellah, 1964, pp. 358–374), providing a legal definition seems an “undertaking bound for failure” (Miller, 2016, p. 841). However, the lack of state competence in providing a definition of religion clashes with its status of recipient of legal protection (Pacillo, 2007, p. 69). Indeed, the multiple phenomena that can be defined as religion have caused the abandoning of a theocentric view of religion and the need for a transcendent dimension, although a more cautious approach has been adopted toward new forms of spirituality and new religious movements. Following new theological trends, US case law has ranged between a functional and an analogical approach with a view to defining the scope and limits of religious accommodation (Madera, 2018, pp. 539–542). The European approach to religion is extremely complex. Influential scholars have reversed the old stereotype of the clash between a religious America and a secular Europe, arguing that modernity is increasingly entangled with pluralism (Berger, Davie and Fokas, 2009, p.  12). Although some years ago the decline of traditional Christian churches was theorized and the rise of a new trend toward “believing without belonging” (Davie, 1990, p. 455), mainstream religions have “regained a strong public profile” showing their ability to “mobilize resources” (Griera, Ariño and Clot-Garrell, 2021, p. 2) and to influence public policies. In Europe, states had to balance claims of public visibility of religion with preservation of public safety (Torfs, 1999, p.  37). Nowadays the controversial distinction between religions and sects shows increasing inadequacy in a context where secular ideologies (such as, secular humanism) and positions regarding the nonexistence of God (such as atheism and agnosticism) claim increasing room in the public space. ECtHR case law has adopted an inclusive approach, which has moved beyond the borders of established religions, covering both religious and philosophical beliefs. Thus, legal protection extends to all claims of conscience, including deeply held secular convictions. Furthermore, the ECtHR sets broad standards to define what deserves protection under the paradigm of religion, explaining that a belief must “be genuinely held; be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available; be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour; attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance; and be worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others”.1

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The protection of religious diversity at European level Within the ECtHR framework, the right to religious freedom is grounded on a robust architectural structure, aimed at protecting such a right in its internal and external, public and private, individual and collective dimensions. Although the protection of the internal dimension of religion is absolute, the external dimension cannot be immunized from a balancing process with other competing values. The ECtHR has been often charged with the task of striking balances, following well-known standards of necessity and proportionality. Such a task is extremely complex as European states do not implement a uniform definition of religion, adopting models of church-state relations ranging from established churches to cooperation and separation. Differing views of neutrality can result in “absence of coercion”, “absence of preference” and “exclusion” of religion from the public space (Ringelheim, 2017, pp. 1–24), resulting in differing “exclusive” or “inclusive” approaches to religion (Vanbellingen, 2015, p. 237). According to some scholars such religious neutrality is part of the problem and not the solution: indeed, such neutrality seems a contradiction in terms as it barely masks its promotional attitude toward Christian faiths as well as indirectly singling out religious minorities (Ungureanu, 2012, pp. 1–18). However, we cannot underestimate that the current situation is the result of fierce conflicts between states and religions during previous centuries, which affects the current settlements. Taking into serious account different historical, social and cultural contexts, the ECtHR is reluctant to interfere in disputes where state relations are concerned and grants a broad margin of appreciation to national models of managing religious diversity. Furthermore, we cannot underestimate that although its gradual process of transition from economic unity to the building of a political and social structure, the European Union (EU) does not hold any power in the field of religion. Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states that “The Union respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations or communities in the Member States”. However, Article 17 also states European “recognition of the identity of the specific contribution” of religious and philosophical organizations, in the pursuit of an “open, clear, regular dialogue” with them. The crucial concern is whether and to what extent the clause implies that the EU is empowered to influence domestic policies and to implement such a dialogue (Mazzola, 2014, p. 3). EU enlargement through the inclusion of countries of central and eastern Europe has emphasized the pre-existing conundrum, providing a new comprehension of Europe as a multi-religious space (Leustean and Madeley, 2013, pp. 3–18) where religious communities play the role of increasingly powerful transnational actors able to influence the political discourse (Haynes, 2001, p. 143).

The entanglement between politics and religion: the Islamic exception During the last 50 years, in the European scenario, freedom of religion issues has underlined the tension between religious “deep diversity” (Alidadi and Foblets, 2012, p. 389) and an increasing “secular anxiety” (Nussbaum, 2012). Migration flows and the rise of new religious movements emphasize new tensions in liberal democratic systems and the need for new ways of management of religious diversity, in the pursuit of a genuinely inclusive society (Foblets, 2017, pp. v–xii). In Europe religious diversity has been problematized rather than considered as a driving force able to trigger new social dynamics

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(Alidadi, 2017, pp. 1–24), which emphasizes the inadequacy of both the models of assimilation and religious particularism (Madera, 2020, pp. 157–158). Islamic religious claims of visibility in the public space have contributed to erode the idea of religion as a private issue and have given rise to an “alarmed” legal reaction, underlying political and cultural tensions (Ferrari, 2016, pp. 10–11). Focusing on the collective dimension of religion, Islam has put under stress an established European individualistic view of religion, more in line with the liberal approach of the ECtHR (McCrea, 2014, pp. 73–90). In an era of financial crises, increasing Islamic migration has exacerbated religious intolerance and skepticism toward the “other”, triggering fear about a political Islam which could represent a risk for democratic values (Colaianni, 2020, pp. 1–11). Many European countries have enacted restrictive migration policies and even discriminatory tests of selection of migrants, with a view to preserving the “Christian heritage” (Forlenza and Turner, 2019, pp. 6–7). During the most recent presidential elections in France, a commentator raised concern about a French politics’ “normalization of anti-Muslim sentiment” (Whiteman, 2022). Growing Islamophobia is barely masked behind concern for the maintenance of public order, public safety and social cohesion. Such an otherization of Islam is increasingly connected with threatening religious political approaches which adopted an “anti-pluralist” and illiberal narrative (Danchin, 2011, p. 742) and a re-interpretation of human rights which exacerbates the marginalization of vulnerable minorities (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 469). On one hand, religious nationalism has contributed to the development of an idea of national identity strictly connected with majoritarian religion, to the detriment of minority religions, deemed as a risk for social cohesion. As an example, in Poland, the Catholic heritage gave a valuable contribution to shape the post-communist regime, as well as other eastern countries taking advantage of religion to forge a new political identity (Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary) (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, pp. 484–485). It goes without saying that a nationalist approach to religion “selects” those aspects of religious doctrine which are coherent with its political aims and ignores “counterproductive” aspects of a faith (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 486). An emblematic case is provided by Hungary, where the emphasis on a Christian identity in the Preamble of the Constitution turns into an anti-Islamic and anti-refugee xenophobic rhetoric in Orbán’s nationalism (Lamour, 2022, pp. 317–343). In Italy, certain right-wing politicians make political use of religious symbols and try to take advantage of Catholicism to promote anti-immigrant policies and anti-Muslim narratives, in contradiction with the Catholic Church’s attitude toward migrants (Caiani and Carvalho, 2021, pp. 211–230). On the other hand, religious populism promotes a restrictive view of “the people” under the leadership of a “prophet”, which excludes those who do not share the mainstream religion, nationality, ethnic group (i.e. the populist regime in Hungary) (Lamour, 2022, pp. 317– 343). Thus, religion has become a “marker” to distinguish insiders and outsiders, giving rise to “sacralized politics” and generating populism’s abuse (Greece) (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 491; Zúquete, 2017, p. 453). In many European countries (such as France, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands) certain political leaders have taken advantage of this “anti-strategy” funded on the need to protect a collective identity against the threat coming from “the others”, with a view to gaining electoral support, raising the risk of dismantling the core values of a democratic regime (Hirshl and Shachar, 2018, pp. 515–531). With specific regard to Islam, some European countries, for example France, have enforced laws banning the use of religious attire in public spaces, or at least in certain public settings, embracing an assertive notion of secularism. Here, the indirect targeting of the Islamic veil symbolizes the national pattern of interaction with Islam (Tabatabai, 2011, p. 26): it has become a 258

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kind of self-proclamation of a secular national identity of a state engaged in a “religion of laicité” (Dieni, 2006, p. 101). Indeed, the state has exacerbated a model of exclusive secularism which neutralizes religious claims and refuses alternative views of modernity (Licastro, 2018, pp. 1–29; Madera, 2020, p. 44). More recently, some countries have enforced laws banning face coverings (Howard, 2019, pp. 23–25; Narain, 2015, pp. 41–69; Madera, 2020, p. 158). Furthermore, prejudice and skepticism against Muslim communities have given rise even to defensive legal reactions towards applications for constructing/opening worship places (i.e. the minaret controversy in Switzerland). In Sweden, a Muslim woman was not recruited because of her religiously based refusal to shake the hand of her manager.2 European case law has been accused of subjectivity and unpredictability, and even of “secular fundamentalism” (Thornon Plessner, 2012, pp. 63–74) as it introduced a kind of “Islamic exception” (Chaibi, 2016–2017) barely masking an “asymmetric” treatment of majority and minority claims (Madera, 2020, p. 69). Although the ECtHR has in several judgements reiterated that the role of state authorities with regard to religious matters “is not to remove the cause of tension by eliminating pluralism, but to ensure that competing groups tolerate each other”,3 its language fails to convey a message of inclusion and integration of minorities. Upholding domestic exclusive views of neutrality (France and Belgium), the ECtHR defined the Islamic veil as a “powerful external symbol” having some kind of “proselytizing effect”, and unable to promote religious dialogue and tolerance4; likewise the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was reluctant to adopt an accommodationist approach toward Islamic clothing in the workplace.5 Instead, majoritarian symbols have been perceived as a “passive”, harmless and socially acceptable manifestation of religion. Their display is justified due to the overlapping of religious and cultural factors to the detriment of minorities who do not identify with such symbols. The presence of majoritarian symbols in public institutions identifies an “official state culture” which coincides with the majoritarian narrative, to the detriment of minorities whose marginalization risks being emphasized (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 506). As an example, in Romania the so-called “war of icons” emphasized a deep internal division within Romania society about the role of the Orthodox Church in the definition of national identity, and a dangerous identification of religion with a certain approach to morality (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 507; Horvath and Bakό, 2009, pp. 189–206). Another example concerns the display of the crucifix in Italian classrooms, justified as an element of national identity, which promotes the building of social cohesion.6 The Lautsi case, which culminated before the ECtHR, was litigated before the administrative domestic courts, according to which the crucifix incorporates social values shared by believers and non-believers, such as dignity, tolerance and freedom and is coherent with state secularism, and teaches students to refuse fundamentalism (Toscano, 2011, pp. 1–48).7 The case reached the ECtHR, giving rise to a lively debate about the role of Christianity in the public space and the future identity of Europe (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 508). At a first stage the court condemned Italy, holding that the display of the crucifix conflicted with parents’ freedom to educate children according to their religious beliefs. However, the Great Chamber of the Court reversed the judgement. The overturning was the result of the shared effort of multiple actors forming a coalition, including ten confessional member states, the Vatican, the Orthodox Church and American conservative evangelicals. Such litigation is said to demonstrate a battle of Christian forces against secularism and relativism (Puppinck, 2010). According to Forlenza and Turner, this is nothing new: European identity has been traditionally defined through “boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ ”; nowadays such “religious borders” seem to be revitalized and they more strongly “challenge established forms of political 259

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legitimacy, influence politics and policies and demand a reformulation of the rights and duties of citizenship” (Forlenza and Turner, 2019, pp. 6–7). However, in a global society every individual has multiple affiliations, and the authors argue that “narrow frameworks” are unable to “capture the complexity” of the European landscape (Forlenza and Turner, 2019, p. 7). Provided that European identity has become a more nuanced and complex issue, new political approaches are urged in the pursuit of a striking balance between the integration of diversity and preservation of social cohesion (Madera, 2015, pp. 9–17).

The rise of “culture wars” on ethical and moral issues in Europe However, new challenges concern both religious minorities and mainstream religions. The rise of religious diversity due to immigration flows has coincided with the decline of historic churches. An analogous situation has been experienced in eastern Europe where, after the dismantling of the Iron Curtain the coalition between an atheist state and the official churches enjoying a privileged status was overthrown. Although mainstream religions have given an undeniable contribution to the building of European cultural heritage, they have no longer the ability to affect the convictions, the conduct and the lifestyle of most Europeans. On this point, Gracie Davie underlines that “Europeans are rapidly losing the concepts, knowledge and vocabulary that are necessary to talk about religion” (Davie, 2016, p. xvii–xx). Furthermore, in an open and free marketplace of religion, mainstream religions are no longer providers of a common ethos and a shared morality. Although in the past religious doctrines had an open and incisive influence on political choices, today states are no longer inclined to fully align with traditional religious doctrines, and there is an unavoidable clash between certain religious approaches (including the Catholic Church, conservative evangelicals, Orthodox Judaism, etc.) and liberal constitutional views. Conflicting views generate increasing political and social polarization on extremely divisive moral-ethical issues, which gives rise to new “culture wars” (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2018, pp.  1–20). They give rise to new dynamics in political processes (comparable to the recent American experience), namely to a strategic attempt of “preservation through transformation”: where mainstream religions have lost their ability to influence political processes in order to promote the enforcement of laws coherent with their religious-moral tenets, they “speak as minorities” and claim for broad exemptions to general rules, in order to restrict their range of application (NeJaime and Siegel, 2018, p. 187). Nationalist-populist parties are driving forces which emphasize such a “new generation” (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2018, pp. 1–20) of conscientious objections. It goes without saying that certain religious leaders’ words have a valuable influence on the public discourse. However, in recent years there has been an increasing religious mobilization in terms of “cause-lawyering religious litigation”, “religious freedom agenda” activism, and lobbying, to promote and influence religion causes at a global level (Hirshl and Shachar, 2018, pp. 515–531). In the clash between liberal constitutional language and religious claims, the rise of transnational religious actors is a factor of the equation that should not be underestimated. According to Hirshl and Shachar, religious “interests and resources may be managed on a global scale that evades the grip of any single state-based constitutional order” (Hirshl and Shachar, 2018, pp. 515–531). Mancini and Rosenfeld argue that “nationalist and populist actors cast religious arguments in the language of ‘natural law’, to attack the very legitimacy of the dominant conception of constitutionalism and its nexus to institutional secularism, and to delegitimize the ‘culture of

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rights’ ”, in the pursuit of a “selective” approach to human rights (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 485). Such an approach implies an over-expansion of conscience claims against general laws in contradiction to traditional religious morality (reproductive rights, same-sex unions, assisted suicide). Indeed, there has been an increasing judicialization of religion where the judicial arena has become the main arena where a clash of values is fiercely litigated. “Judicialisation” raises the risk of a dangerous change in the balance of powers among the three powers of government, where the role of the lawmaker is “marginalized” (Casuscelli, 2021, pp. 1–16), reduced merely to provide detailed legislation following the court’s addresses. In this way, the lawmaker is exempted from regulating controversial issues, and the judiciary is charged with “tragical choices” (Calabresi and Bobbitt, 1978) between religious claims and competing interests. In what follows, I will examine three situations where the political use of religion risks substantially undermining public policies aimed at pursuing legitimate state aims and satisfying social expectations of civil society. Abortion is the emblematic case. An over-expansion of the recognition of conscience claims, involving a broad range of actors, whose involvement in abortive services is attenuated (“complicity claims”), risks rendering less accessible a medical service, and undermining the enjoyment of a right, if a state does not provide alternative options to access the service. On this point, the European Committee of Social Rights held that the Italian system infringed Article 11 of the European Social Charter, which guarantees the right to health and Article E of the charter, which forbids unreasonable discrimination. With a view to reducing the gap, some Italian regions opened public competitions reserved to non-objecting practitioners, and bills have been submitted to amend the law in-force to grant the presence of a certain percentage of non-objecting staff in public hospitals (Colaianni, 2017, p. 8). Other European courts have a cautious approach toward religious claims where they have a negative implication for third parties. The English Supreme Court adopts a restrictive approach toward conscientious objection to abortion, excluding activities which are not directly connected with the abortive performance.8 According to the ECtHR, conscientious choices cannot prevail in the judicial arena where they result in being imposed on individuals who do not share the same convictions.9 In the recent judgements Grimmark and Steen10 the ECtHR gave a strong message, holding that the Swedish authorities’ refusal to hire midwives who refused to take part in abortive services is coherent with Article 9 ECtHR, although religious actors claimed a violation of their employment rights. However, the evolution of medical science and technology has given rise to new ethical and moral issues. The recognition of a right to self-determination has exacerbated a political polarization between the secular and religious narratives which embrace different understandings about the beginning of life and its end.11 In the European framework both the right to life and respect for private life are guaranteed protection under the ECtHR. The right to life can be subject to striking balances with other competing interests. Some states adopt a more conservative approach toward the preservation of life, while others recognize broader room for self-determination. The Catholic Church expresses deep concern about the legalization of euthanasia: the real question is how much longer it will be able to influence further legal developments. In Italy, although a recent Constitutional Court decision has defined strict circumstances where assistance to suicide is criminalized,12 it declared inadmissible the request of a popular referendum to amend the law in-force providing a general decriminalization of euthanasia.13 At the moment, the Italian Parliament self-restrained from updating the current legal framework, notwithstanding judicial solicitations. Although the only legal response (the

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option of an interruption of life-sustaining treatment) does not satisfy urging social expectations, the Italian lawmaker is reluctant to de-align from the doctrine of the Catholic Church, even though it no longer mirrors the mainstream opinions of the civil society. However, other European courts provided broad recognition to self-determination, taking distances from conservative religious approaches.14 Finally, during the last ten years there has been an expansion of the recognition of the rights of the LGBTQ community, promoting their increasing integration in civil society. In many countries same-sex unions have been legalized as marriages or registered partnerships. The ECtHR was the first international court to recognize LGBTQ rights.15 Although the regulation of same-sex marriages is under the jurisdiction of the member states, the Strasbourg Court has strongly urged the legalization of same-sex unions.16 The ECtHR qualified the principle of non-discrimination as “fundamental” and stated that it is one of the core values underlying the Convention. The court established a positive obligation upon states to take action to guarantee the full enjoyment of the human rights of LGBTQ persons.17 However, the interplay between LGBTQ rights and religious exercise is still at the centre of a lively debate, as both claims are grounded on fundamental individual rights. The European Court seems reluctant to immunize religious freedom from comparison with legitimate state interests in relation to non-discrimination and equality.18 As an example, in the Ladele case (where a civil servant refused to register same-sex unions because of her faith), the court held that religious exercise can be subject to restrictions for the sake of the public interest of equality and elimination of discrimination and to protect the rights of others. Following this perspective, European courts are even less prone to recognize a right to conscientious objection to civil servants.19 However, the European attitude toward LGBTQ rights is not uniform, and it ranges from legal systems that assertively protect the LGBTQ community against dignitary harms (England) to the regressive approach of certain eastern European countries where the recognition of LGBTQ rights is a lively battleground.20 Not only in eastern European countries are LGBTQ rights at the centre of a lively political debate: in Italy, the recently proposed legislative decree, Zan, aimed at strengthening sanctions against discrimination and crimes against LGBTQ individuals was not approved, due to the strong opposition of right-wing parties. However, the bill gave rise to a strong reaction from the Catholic Church, which claimed an infringement of the church-state agreement and undermining the church’s freedom of organization. The church’s reaction was strongly criticized, as “unprecedented”. It was the first time in the history of church-state relationships in Italy that the Catholic Church activated a diplomatic intervention to interfere in the legislative process of passing a law. Furthermore, in Europe, during the last years there has been an over-expansion of providers of goods and services refusing to provide cooperation to same-sex unions. When have religious exemptions to be granted and what religious actors can take advantage of them were still open questions in 2022. European courts do not have a uniform approach toward for-profits claiming a religious conscience. In cases concerning for-profits who refuse to provide services or goods to samesex couples because of their religious convictions, the UK supreme court firmly rejected claims for religious exemptions, as they caused dignitary harms.21 However the rise of “gaycake” litigation in Europe22 and the recent inability of the ECtHR to provide satisfactory responses23 makes still uncertain the right of LGBTQ people to enjoy equal and non-discriminatory access to goods and services. A Christian organization (Christian Institute) had campaigned on the side of the for-profit concerned and declared that the decision was “good news for free speech and for Christians”. 262

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The Ukrainian crisis: a new religious war in Europe? Pope Francis condemned the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022; he called the invasion “sacrilegious” and lashed out against “some potentate” with “anachronistic claims of nationalist interests”.24 However, the crucial concern was the effective link between religion and the Ukrainian war. It is extremely difficult to say whether and to what extent the war was provoked by genuine religious reasons or whether religious arguments mainly masked “core secular goals”, and religion was “just one more battlefield” (Vovk, 2022). According to Vovk, “religious identification goes beyond Christian Orthodoxy, goes beyond symbols of faith or some traditional practices. It includes the secularization of the Russian state and ‘Russian-ness’ as a part of their identity . . . it has as much to do with the sacralization of secular issues of Russian statehood as it does with Christian Orthodoxy” (Vovk, 2022). According to Stoeckl, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church symbolized the failure of a church to build its role independently from the state and its adaptation to the role of a “vehicle of a nationalist ideology” (Stoeckl, 2022). Indeed, after the erosion of the Soviet Regime and of Communism, a partnership gradually developed between the state and the Orthodox Church, following the traditional “byzantine” perspective governing church-state relations, aimed at establishing a “symphony of powers” (Cimbalo, 2022, p.  3), to the detriment of minorities. Although a regime of separation and mutual non-interference was established during the 1990s, subsequent laws gradually restored the privileged status of the Orthodox Church, restricted the scope of religious pluralism and condoned repression of religious minorities in the pursuit of the protection of public order against religious extremism. It goes without saying that the Orthodox Church has gained a privileged legal status, enjoying tax exemptions and public funding. Furthermore, an anti-pluralist approach has been adopted toward religious minorities (for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered consistently discriminatory treatment)25 and sexual minorities (including “anti-gay propaganda” laws).26 An analogous anti-liberal approach to human rights was adopted towards reproductive services, providing broad recognition to conscientious objection and rendering it more difficult for women to access abortion facilities, in the pursuit of a convergence between public policies and Orthodox tenets (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 524). For all these reasons, the relationship between the Russian State and the ECtHR is called “turbulent” (Pomeranz, 2012, p. 17), culminating in the well-known Fedotova v. Russia decision, where the ECtHR imposed a positive duty on Russia to recognize same-sex unions. Whether the judgement will lead to changes in the Russian approach to human rights is uncertain. We cannot underestimate that in 2015 the Russian Constitutional Court held that the ECtHR’s judgements clashing with the constitutional text could not be implemented and in 2020 the Russian Constitution was amended, establishing the predominance of the constitution over international treaties in case of conflict. Referring to the annexation of Crimea in 2020, Mancini and Rosenberg predicted that the alliance between the Orthodox Church and the state raised “major challenges” in the field of foreign policy, expressing concern about Putin’s “narrative of shared religious and cultural roots to legitimize his intervention” (Mancini and Rosenfeld, 2020, p. 532). According to Cimbalo, the current Ukrainian crisis is the result of a broader “institutional crisis” involving various eastern European countries who were part of the Soviet bloc (Cimbalo, 2022, p. 3). Among all the reasons that Putin cited, the crisis also had a cultural-religious dimension. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church was perceived as “the bearer of hope of a humiliated nation” and a basic factor of national identity, generating a new “rise of religiosity” in Russia (Pollack and Rosta, 2017). Patriarch Kirill provided an ideological basis to the Ukraine war, as one of the main advocates of the doctrine of the “Russkii Mir” (Russian 263

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World), according to which Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are a unique civilization, giving rise to a “multinational space” (Denysenko, 2022). Putin revitalized the narrative traditionally adopted by Russian state and church leaders, since the Russian Revolution, according to which those who fight for independence are “radical nationalists, fascists, neo-nazis, schismatics”, namely enemies “aligned with West” against the “Right Church” (Denysenko, 2022). Such an alliance between religion and politics is founded on the above-mentioned refuting of liberal values: LGBTQ rights and cultural pluralism are perceived as a threat for Russian identity. Following this perspective, Kirill’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine was perceived as an “ideological war” to protect conservative values (Pollack and Rosta, 2017) against the “depraved Western World” (Stoeckl, 2022). The “ideological divide” between capitalism and socialism translates into a “clash” between “conservative, communal” and “progressive, individualistic” views of society, giving rise to a dramatic transition from a “war of opinions” in a “war of territory” (Stoeckl, 2022). Putin even invoked the argument of an alleged “religious persecution” (Vovk, 2022) to justify the invasion, showing his ability to make a strategic use of human rights language. There is little doubt that one of the elements that exacerbated the crisis in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine was the establishment of the autocephaly of the new Ukrainian Orthodox Church, called a “challenge to the Russian Neo-Imperialism” (Denysenko, 2022). Indeed, the religious narrative of the Orthodox churches in Ukraine has traditionally influenced Ukrainian political discourse. Such an establishment was the result of an extended period of fighting for religious independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox movement and forced religious annexations. Furthermore, in 2013–2014 Ukrainian religious leaders were deeply involved in Ukrainan political discourse, siding against Putin’s invasion of Crimea and war in Donbas. For his part, Putin accused Ukrainian religious leaders and their faithful of radical nationalism and schism, justifying the war in Donbas to protect Orthodox identity, and calling the Crimea a “sacred place”. The final recognition of autocephaly, notwithstanding the opposition of Patriarch Kirill, exacerbated the split within Orthodox churches, namely the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church, and “induced the different Patriarchates to take sides” (Cimbalo, 2022, p. 5). In any case, the establishment of an Orthodox Church in Ukraine was also the result of a view of religion as “a matter of national security” (Vovk, 2022). It cannot be underestimated that at the beginning of April 2022, Ukrainian Orthodox clergy accused Patriarch Kirill of heresy in an open appeal and invoked the Primates of the Orthodox churches for his deposition. However, not only the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, but also the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Patriarchate of Constantinople blamed Putin for the invasion of Ukraine. Even some bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine are refusing to commemorate Patriarch Kirill during the liturgy. Such strong reactions emphasize a deep internal crisis within the Orthodox Church, where various dissenting voices are being raised worldwide: they are not no longer inclined to passively accept a “symphonic” alliance between Orthodoxy and an autocratic state and invoke respect of democracy and liberal values (Stoeckl, 2022).

Religion as a problem or as a solution? De-privatization of religion cannot necessarily result in an enhancement of exclusive policies. Religious actors can offer a valuable contribution to public policies. Their narratives can influence individual conduct and social changes and contribute to facing global challenges. Indeed, nowadays religious narratives are undergoing a process of evolution. Religious systems are endowed with internal resources which promote the dynamism of religious doctrine and facilitate dialogue and communication with the secular world. Religious traditions do not have 264

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a uniform attitude toward homosexuality, gender identity and sexual orientation and ethical matters are undergoing a process of revisitation in different religious traditions (Endsjø, 2020, p. 1684). Progressive actors within religious groups are developing changed attitudes towards sexual ethics and social justice (Endsjø, 2020, p. 1684). Baptists and Lutherans have adopted attitudes of openness toward same-sex unions, anticipating state legalization (Carmella, 2020, p. 544). Pope Francis is moving toward a growing openness toward the LGBTQ community, demonstrating solicitude toward all the situations of vulnerability. In many cases he spoke not only as a religious leader but also as a political activist, addressing crucial issues such as migration flows, environmental issues and gender equality. An emblematic example was offered in 2020 by a devastating health crisis, due to the spread of Covid-19 infection. There is little doubt that the pandemic crisis exacerbated several political and social tensions on the role of religion in the public discourse (Haynes, 2020, pp. 1–20). As restrictive measures affected the enjoyment of fundamental rights (mobility, association, privacy), religious communities had different reactions. Some of them adopted an oppositional approach, refusing to comply with restrictive measures, while others self-enforced restrictive measures and provided guidance and support to their faithful and the community (Madera, 2021, pp. 1–10; Hill, 2020, pp. 1–19). Some commentators feared a “radical political experiment” undermining the role of religious freedom within human rights (Lévy, 2020, p. 32). According to Jocelyne Caesari, the main question is whether “COVID-19 will lead to increased nationalist exclusionary and defensive attitudes among the religious, or might the pandemic be the cure that leads to radical social re-orientation with a new emphasis on collective solidarity?” (Caesari, 2020). On this point many scholars complain about the inadequacy or the lack of global strategies to combat the spread of Covid-19. It is not surprising that religious communities gave local responses to the pandemic, and the same religious tradition gave various responses depending on different national contexts. However, religion demonstrated its resilience and played a pivotal role in suggesting “a new path of solidarity” (Caesari, 2020). The pandemic underlined the need to reassess the role of religious communities within the “network of social actors” (Madera, 2021, p. 6). Religious communities enforced self-precautionary measures and adapted their practices and rituals to the needs of the pandemic situation showing their inner ability to make more flexible their religious tenets. They provided primary goods to vulnerable classes. They provided a valuable contribution to the immunization challenge, providing guidance to vulnerable classes of individuals and hosting vaccination centres in their premises (Madera, 2021, p.  6). In European countries, regardless of church-state systems of relationship, “new channels of communication” have been opened between religious and secular actors, giving rise to fruitful partnerships whose shared aim was the protection of public health (MartínezTorrón, 2021, p. 8). Such a trend will not provoke the disappearance of religious nationalism and populism. However, the pandemic showed in an overwhelming way that between rigid exclusion of religion and recognition of an absolute protection there is the intermediate possibility of finding “spaces of compromise” (Minow, 2017, p. xvii) where cooperation between secular and religious forces can be fruitful and effective in the pursuit of the shared goal of preserving salus corporum in conjunction with salus animarum (Madera, 2021, p. 6). It demonstrated that all religious groups can provide an effective contribution to the implementation of a more inclusive and sustainable society, if they engage in a constructive dialogue with public actors, with a view to building a “common language” and negotiating differences (Farrar and Krayem, 2016, p. 168), even though such dialogue implies “mutual gains and sacrifices” (Cartabia, 2018, p. 677). According to Jocelyn Caesari, “While the role of religion in shaping the post-COVID order remains unclear, faith communities have the moral resources needed to help rebuild trust in political communities that are seriously weakened by the ongoing crisis” (Caesari, 2020). 265

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Notes 1 Arrowsmith v. United Kingdom (1978) 3 EHRR 218; H v UK (1992) 16 EHRR CD 44; Campbell and Cosans v. United Kingdom (1982) 4 EHRR 293; Chappell v. United Kingdom (1987) 53 DR 241 See also Graiger v. Nicholson, [2010] IRLR 4. 2 Swedish Employment Court, 15 August 2018, no. 51 (www.arbetsdomstolen.se/upload/pdf/2018/5118.pdf). 3 ECtHR, Serif v. Greece, App. No. 38178/97, 14 December 1999. 4 ECtHR, Grand Chamber, Dahlab v. Switzerland, App. No. 42393/98, 15 February 2001. 5 CJEU, Achbita c. G4S Secure Solutions NV, case C-157/15, 14.03.2017; CJEU, Bougnaoui, ADDH c. Micropole SA, case C-188/15, 14.03.2017; IX c. Wabe e MH Müller Handels Gmbh c. MJ, 15 July 2021. 6 ECtHR, Grand Chamber, Lautsi v. Italy, App. No. 30814/06, 18 March 2011. 7 Administrative Regional Court Veneto, 17 March 2005, n. 1110; Council of State, 15 February 2006, Section 4575/03–2482/04. 8 Greater Glasgow Health Bd. v. Doogan and Another [2014] UKSC 68, [2015] 1 AC 640 [19], [38]. 9 ECtHR, Third Section, 2 October 2001, Pichon et Sajous c. France (App. No. 49853/99). 10 ECtHR, Ellinor Grimmark v. Sweden, App. No. 43726/17, 12 March  2020; ECtHR, Linda Steen v. Sweden, App. No. 62309/17, 12 March 2020. 11 ECtHR, 29 April 2002, App. No. 2346/02, Pretty v. United Kingdom. 12 Italian Constitutional Court, no. 242/2019. 13 Italian Constitutional Court, no. 50/2022. 14 BundesVerfassungsGericht, 26 February 2020. 15 ECtHR, Court (Plenary), App. No. 7525/76, 22 October 1981, Dudgeon v. United Kingdom. 16 ECtHR, First Section, App. No. 30141/04, 24 June 2010, Schalk and Kopf v. Austria; ECtHR, Fourth Section, App. Nos. 18766/11 and 36030/11, 21 July 2015, Oliari v. Italy; ECtHR, Grand Chamber, App. No. 37359/09, 16 July 2014; Hämäläinen v. Finland; ECtHR, Fifth Section, App. No. 40183/07, 9 June 2016, Chapin and Charpentier v. France; ECtHR, Third Section, App. No. 40792/10, 13 July 2021, Fedotova and Others v. Russia. 17 www.coe.int/en/web/sogi/-/new-factsheet-on-the-execution-of-the-echr-judgments-related-tolgbti-persons-rights 18 ECtHR, Fourth Section, Eweida and Others v. United Kingdom (App. Nos. 48420/10, 59842/10, 5167 1/10 and 36516/10), 26 May 2013. 19 McClintock v. Department of Constitutional Affairs, [2007] UKEAT/0223/07/3110; Tribunal Supremo. Sala de lo Contencioso, sent. no. 3059 11 May 2009; Conseil constitutionnel [CC] [Constitutional Council] decision no. 2013–353 QPC, 18 October 2013. 20 On 15 June  2021 the Hungarian Parliament passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBTQ issues. http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2021/06/hungarian-parliament-passes-law-banning.html 21 Bull v. Hall, [2013] UKSC 73. 22 Lee v. Ashers Baking Company Ltd and Others [2018] UKSC 49. 23 ECtHR, Lee v. United Kingdom, App. No. 18860/19, 6 January 2022. 24 www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-pope-francis-condemns-vladimir-putin/ 25 ECtHR, Third Section, Cheprunovy and Others v. Russia,  App. Nos. 74320/10 and four others, 22 February 2022; ECtHR, Third Section, Zharinova v. Russia, App. No. 17715/12, 22 February 2022. 26 ECtHR, Third Section, Bayev and Others v. Russia, App. Nos. 67667/09, 44092/12 and 56717/12, 20 June 2017.

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The interplay among religion, politics and law in Europe Puppinck, G. (2010). ‘Lautsi v. Italy: An Alliance Against Secularism’, L’Osservatore Romano, July 28. www. eclj.org/pdf/ECLJ-LautsivItaly-crucifix-case-20110315.pdf (accessed 20 April 2022). Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ringelheim, J. (2017). ‘State Religious Neutrality as a Common Standard? Reappraising the European Court of Human Rights Approach’, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 6, pp. 1–24. Stoeckl, K. (2022). ‘The Use of Religious Arguments for the Justification of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine’, Takabout, March  18. https://talkabout.iclrs.org/2022/03/18/the-use-of-religious-arguments-for-the-justification-of-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/ (accessed 25 April 2022). Tabatabai, F. (2011). The Veil: Symbol and State Identity. France and Iran. Boston: University of Massachusetts. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thorson Plesner, I. (2012). ‘The European Court of Human Rights between Fundamentalist and Liberal Secularism’, in Durham, W.C., R. Torfs, R. and Kirkham, D.M. (eds.) Islam, Europe and Emerging Legal Issues. London: Routledge, pp. 63–74. Torfs, R. (1999). ‘Les noveaux mouvements religieux et le droit dans l’Union Européenne’, in European Consortium for Church and State Research. (ed.) New Religious Movements and the Law in the European Union. Milan: Giuffrè, pp. 37–66. Toscano, M. (2011). ‘La sentenza Lautsi e altri c. Italia della Corte Europea dei Diritti dell’Uomo’, Stato Chiese e Pluralismo Confessionale October 31, pp. 1–48. Ungureanu, C. (2012). ‘Introduction’, in Zucca, L. and Ungureanu C. (eds.) Law, State and Religion in the New Europe: Debates and Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–18. Vanbellingen, L. (2015). ‘L’accommodement raisonnable de la religion dans le secteur public: analyse de cadre juridique belge au regard de l’experience canadienne’, Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Études Juridiques 75, pp. 225–248. Vovk, D. (2022). ‘Religion and the Russian-Ukrainan Conflict’, Talkabout, February 25. https://talkabout. iclrs.org/2022/02/25/religion-and-the-russian-ukrainian-conflict/ (accessed 25 April 2022). Whiteman, A. (2022). ‘In Run-Up to Election, French Politics Has Normalized Anti-Muslim Sentiment: Experts’, Arab News, April 22. www.arabnews.com/node/2068681/world (accessed 26 April 2022). Zúquete, J. P. (2017). ‘Populism and Religion’, in Rovira Kalwasser, C. et al. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Populism. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 445–466.

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19 MAY I HAVE A WORD WITH YOU? GLOBAL PATTERNS OF RESTRICTIONS ON PROSELYTIZING Jonathan Fox The right to proselytize is a central aspect of religious freedom. The right to teach and propagate one’s religion is protected in multiple international documents and treaties (Grim and Finke, 2007, pp. 26–27; Mardsen, 2020, pp. 2–4) as well as national constitutions (Fox, 2011; Fox and Flores, 2009) which cover religious freedom. For many religions, preaching to nonbelievers and seeking converts is a central religious practice (Mardsen, 2014, p. 486). Given this, many argue that religious liberty is not possible under circumstances where preaching, proselytizing and missionary activity are banned (Gill, 2008, pp. 10–17) and freedom to proselytize is included in major academic indexes of religious freedom (Grim and Finke, 2011; Fox, 2020). Yet, restrictions on proselytizing are among the most common types of restrictions placed on religious minorities around the world. While the vast majority of countries restrict the religious practices and institutions of at least some religious minorities in some manner, few specific types of discrimination against religious minorities are present in a majority of countries. (Fox, 2015, 2016, 2020) As discussed in detail in this chapter, restrictions on proselytizing is an exception in that it is present in over 60% of countries, and this includes numerous democracies and even Western liberal democracies. Why is this the case? As discussed in detail in this chapter, there are many causes and motivations for restricting religious minorities. These include religious ideologies which are intolerant of other religions, religious institutions seeking religious demographic domination, secular ideologies which are intolerant of certain religious practices, a country’s desire to protect its national culture from foreign influences, the perception of missionaries and political or security threats, and fear of dangerous cults. As discussed in this chapter, all of these general motivations for religious discrimination apply specifically, and arguably especially, to proselytizing. This chapter proceeds as follows, the motivations for restricting proselytizing are discussed. Then the extent and nature of restrictions on proselytizing around the world are presented.

Why restrict proselytizing? While there are many reasons to discriminate against religious minorities in general and restrict proselytizing and missionary activity specifically, the focus here is on six of the most common but interrelated motivations. The first is religious ideology. Religions, particularly monotheistic 270

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religions, are by nature intolerant of other religions. This is because their beliefs focus on an exclusive truth that leaves no room for other truths (Jelen and Wilcox, 1990; Wald, 1987). As Stark (2003, p. 32) puts it, “those who believe there is only One True God are offended by worship directed toward other Gods”. This motivation applies in particular to proselytizers. “To proselytize is to work on others in an attempt to influence their thought, conscience, and choices [and] in practice depicts one religion as more valid than another” (Thomas, 2001, p. 527). That is, proselytizers from non-majority religions actively and aggressively challenge the religious ideology of all other religions. Thus, if anything is likely to trigger religion’s ideological tendency toward defending its exclusive truth, it is missionaries from another religion working to convince its members to convert to their religion. The second motivation is the desire for a religious monopoly – a condition where the state designates and supports an official religion. This perspective on the desire for religious dominance takes a rational choice approach and focuses on how religious leaders and institutions seek dominance within politics and society. Gill (2005, 2008) argues that majority religious institutions and their leaders seek a political relationship where the government supports their religious monopoly in return for the religion supporting the legitimacy of the government. Political leaders benefit because as Robert Dahl (1971) notes, legitimacy not only makes ruling easier, some measure of legitimacy is essential for all governments. While this desire for a religious monopoly is ultimately motivated by ideology, this perspective focuses on the mechanics of how religious institutions and leaders seek to maintain political and social dominance. Perhaps one of the greatest threats to this dominance is losing members to another religion. Demographic dominance often contributes to political dominance. That is, the beneficial religion-state relationship of a religious monopoly is predicated in its ability to deliver the loyalty of its members to the government. Losing members to other religions undermines this base of power. Thus, for a monopolistic religious institution, losing members undermines the social, political and financial base of support for these institutions. Given this, from a rational choice perspective, religious leaders and institutions would be unlikely to tolerate proselytizers from other religions seeking to poach members from its congregation and would seek to influence the government to restrict these proselytizers. Third, many countries seek to protect their national culture from outside non-indigenous influences (Goff, 2000). Minority religions which are seen as native to the country are not subject to this motivation, only religions seen as coming from outside (Nelsen and Guth, 2015, pp. 225–226). Religion is considered an important basis for identity (Breakwell, 1986; Little, 1995) and is often linked to nationalist ideologies (Smith, 1999, 2000). Many countries have official policies which recognize those religions which are native. This type of policy, in practice, excludes non-native religions. Hungary, for example, officially designates four “historical” religions. Other countries including Russia, Austria, Latvia, and Lithuania, among others, have similar laws which give benefits to recognized native religions and in some cases effectively restrict those that are excluded from these lists. This motivation for discrimination and exclusion also often applies particularly to missionary religions. There are many missionary groups, particularly those based in North America, which send missionaries globally to convert people to their religion. In societies which seek to preserve indigenous culture, these missionaries are almost inevitably seen as foreign and a threat to national culture (Turner, 2013, p. 119). Under such circumstances, restricting these foreign missionaries is a predictable response. Fourth, religions seen as cults tend to be subject to considerable discrimination. While there is no agreed upon definition of cults, they are generally small religions considered new to a country. They, in practice, are considered cults by governments precisely because they are new 271

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to a country, seen to engage in strange or dangerous practices, and to be outside the legitimate universe of accepted spiritualties (Thomas, 2001, p. 529; Barkun, 2003, p. 55). While few of those religions that are so perceived are actually dangerous, they are seen to engage in dangerous practices such as violence, brainwashing and other controlling or manipulative behavior. Because of this perception, cults are particularly likely to attract negative government attention (Peretz and Fox, 2021). Many religions seen as cults actively proselytize. As many of them are new religions, or at least new to a particular locale, seeking to expand their flock, this is natural. Thus, any religion new to a country which engages in missionary activity is likely to be seen as a cult, no matter whether the same religion is seen as mainstream elsewhere and regardless of whether its activities and practices are actually dangerous (Peretz and Fox, 2021). This makes them more likely to attract discrimination. Fifth, governments often restrict religious minorities perceived as a political or security threat. It is important to emphasize that the perception rather than the reality is the key factor for this motivation. Securitization theory posits that when leaders use speech acts to portray a group as a security threat, the group can become “securitized”. This removes the normal limitations on what types of limits are acceptable for governments to place on religious minorities (Buzan and Segal, 1998; Mabee, 2007; Wæver, 1995; Laustesen and Wæver, 2000; Fox and Akbaba, 2015). Missionary groups, especially if they are also seen as cults, can be seen as a security threat. As noted, they are often portrayed as engaging in manipulative and perhaps coercive behavior. They are also in effect seeking to change the religious demography of a country. This can be perceived as a political threat in cases where politics is tied to religious identity. Finally, anti-religious secular ideologies can be a source of religious discrimination. Fox (2020) argues that while in theory secular ideologies should dislike all religion equally, in practice some religious practices are considered particularly odious to secular beliefs and can attract discrimination from ideologically secular quarters. To the extent that missionary religions are seen as cults, beliefs that cults engage in brainwashing and coercion would certainly trigger the perception that these groups are engaging in objectionable practices. Also as many missionary religions are patriarchal, this would trigger secular beliefs in women’s rights.

Global patterns of restrictions on proselytizing This analysis is based on the Religion and State (RAS) dataset which currently covers government religion policy between 1990 and 2014 (Fox, 2008, 2011, 2015, 2019). However, some countries, including many former Soviet bloc states, were not independent states until after 1990. Accordingly, statistics labeled 1990 are for 1990 or the earliest post-1990 date for which data are available. Overall restrictions on proselytizing are common worldwide. Unlike many other forms of restrictions on religion which are increasing worldwide (Fox, 2015, 2020), these restrictions are holding mostly steady. In 1990 (or the earliest date available) 111 of the 183 (60.7%) countries included in this study restricted proselytizing in some manner. In 2014 this number was 110 countries (60.1%). As shown in Table 19.1, these restrictions are well distributed across world regions and major world religions. Other than sub-Saharan Africa, a majority of countries in all world regions engage in some form of restriction on proselytizing. Similarly, other than Christian majority counties which are neither Catholic nor Orthodox, a majority of countries across major world religions restrict proselytizing in some manner.

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Global patterns of restrictions on proselytizing Table 19.1  Percentage of countries which restrict proselytizing in 2014 World Region

Majority Religion #

%

Western democracies Former Soviet

15 19

51.9 65.5

Asia Middle East and North Africa Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America

22 23 16 17

75.9 95.7 33.3 63.0

All cases

110

60.1

Catholic Orthodox Christian Other Christian Muslim Other

#

%

24 11

54.5 84.6

13 43 19

28.3 84.3 65.5

Types of restrictions on proselytizing In this study, seven categories of restrictions on proselytizing are discussed. This categorization looks less at exactly what is restricted, which in all cases is either the act or proselytizing or proselytizers themselves, and more on the manner in which the government goes about enforcing these restrictions. This includes four different factors. First, are the restrictions formal or informal? That is, do governments make proselytizing outright illegal or do they use other means such as the arrest and harassment of proselytizers on other pretexts in order to limit proselytizing? Second, which governments are enacting the restrictions? Is it the national government or is it some or all local or regional governments within a country? Third, which proselytizers are being restricted? For instance are proselytizers from the majority religion restricted or are only those from minority religions restricted? Similarly, are only foreign missionaries restricted or are legal residents and citizens also restricted? Finally, also explored are some specific tactics such as denial of visas to religious workers. These questions are important for at least three reasons. First, the breadth within states of restrictions on proselytizing and the manner in which they are applied are essential to understanding the extent to which this phenomena is present globally. Second, the tactics a government uses to restrict proselytizers often reveals something about the motives for these restrictions. Third, efforts to combat these restrictions, which are a basic violation of religious freedom according to most interpretations of the term, require accurate information on the nature and locus of these restrictions. It is important to emphasize that the categorizations that follow take into account both official policy and actual policy. As demonstrated, some governments often do not fully enforce laws restricting proselytizing and many governments in practice restrict proselytizing in the absence of laws restricting them. In some cases, governments place legal restrictions on proselytizing and, in fact, restrict proselytizing but not in the manner prescribed in the laws. Also, it is possible for countries to fall into multiple categories. For example, it is possible for the national government to restrict proselytizing while at least some local governments engage in restrictions above and beyond those national-level restrictions.

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Category 1: proselytizing by all religions is illegal or banned Only five countries officially ban all proselytizing by all religions – Greece, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea and Uzbekistan. All of them enforce this prohibition, though in some countries like Greece and Nepal there have been some gaps in enforcement. Unless one considers North Korea’s national ideology a form of leader worship, North Korea is arguably the most anti-religion country in the world today (Fox, 2020). While there seems to be no explicit law prohibiting proselytism, this is likely because it is encompassed in a more general ban on religion. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in practice harshly restricts proselytism in its continuing effort to sever foreign influence from its people. Reports from non-governmental orgamizations, refugees and defectors indicate that proselytizers and missionaries who have ties or contact with foreigners, including Christian missionaries, are especially likely to be arrested and subjected to harsh punishment including execution. The government allows some overseas faith-based aid organizations to operate inside the country to provide humanitarian assistance; however, such organizations are not allowed to proselytize or have contact with the locals.1 Uzbekistan’s 1998 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations provides for freedom of worship, freedom from religious persecution, separation of church and state and the right to establish schools and train clergy, but only to registered groups. It also bans all proselytizing, as do several other laws. The law prohibits “actions aimed at converting believers of one religion into another (proselytizing), as well as any other missionary activity. The criminal code punishes proselytism with up to three years in prison. These laws are enforced. For example in 2009 a court found 13 Baptists guilty of proselytism and fined them each 50 times the monthly minimum wage (approximately $1,000). Foreigners caught proselytizing are usually deported”.2 Both Uzbekistan and North Korea are states with secular anti-religious ideologies. Their general government religion policy is to strongly regulate, control and restrict religion (Fox, 2008, 2015). For this reason, those who seek to spread religion are considered subversive. In addition, North Korea considers religion something foreign to the country’s culture and therefore especially restricts foreign missionaries. Nepal, while declaring itself a secular state, is less anti-religious than North Korea and Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, proselytizing is forbidden by Nepal’s 1990 constitution as well as its 2007 interim constitution. Nepal always allowed foreign religious organizations to engage in charitable work and education but does not allow them to engage in missionary activities. This ban was enforced strictly for much of the study period, but between around 2010 and 2014 there was a gap in enforcement with few if any proselytizers prosecuted or deported. However, by 2015 prosecutions and deportations resumed.3 Kyrgyzstan’s 2008 Law on Freedom of Religion and Religious Organizations prohibits proselytism, which is defined as “insistent attempts to convert followers of one religion to another”.4 Before this law, proselytizing was not illegal but strongly discouraged.5 Greece officially bans all proselytizing but in practice this is enforced only on minority religions and not the country’s official church, the Greek Orthodox Church. This indicates the motivations include protecting the country’s majority religion and culture (Article 13 of Greece’s constitution).6 In September  2009 the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance expressed concern that proselytizing remained a criminal offense. The government responded that anti-proselytizing laws had “long since fallen into disuse” and that only proselytizing that was coercive or disturbed public order was illegal. Nevertheless, the law is enforced sporadically, particularly against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and evangelical Christians. Most incidents involve the arrest of proselytizers who are then released by the police after several 274

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hours. In most cases where charges are pressed, the accused were acquitted. In December 2011 the Bishop of Piraeus Seraphim filed charges against the Catholic Church for proselytism following the blessing of the school year by a Catholic priest in the presence of Greek Orthodox students. There were also reports that police were complicit (did not intervene) in cases of Greek Orthodox clergy verbally and physically harassing Mormons who were proselytizing7 (Anderson, 2003; Pollis, 2002). Overall this type of policy is rare. Other than Greece all of the countries that follow this policy have secular anti-religion policies. All of them are also arguably interested in protection of their national culture from outside influence. While some of the policies described later in the chapter could be attributed to these five countries, the RAS dataset does not code these five countries in these additional categories because the dominant policy is the overall ban on proselytizing.

Category 2: proselytizing to members of the majority religion is illegal but proselytizing to members of minority religions is legal Other than Laos and Myanmar, all of the 24 countries which followed this policy at some point between 1990 and 2014 were Muslim-majority countries. All of them had this policy for the entire study period other than Iraq which had this policy only during the Saddam Hussein era. Laos, for example, prohibits proselytizing by foreigners. In addition, Article 12 of the 2001 Decree on Religious Activities states that other religious groups must have permission from the local government to preach or disseminate religious materials outside their house of worship. In effect, this restricts proselytizing to only Buddhists, the country’s majority religion. In addition many local officials seek to force converts to Christianity to recant their conversion. The tactics include evictions from homes, destruction of crops and detention. In some cases these tactics are used in locales where conversion to Christianity occurred several generations in the past.8 The reasons behind this policy are complicated since Laos is officially an anti-religious Communist state. Fox (2020, pp. 179–180) argues that this pattern is likely due to a combination of two factors. First, some local Communist officials pay lip service to Communism but, in fact, support Buddhism. Second, Buddhism is considered an integral element of the national culture, and the government seeks to maintain that culture. The 22 Muslim-majority countries in this category – Afghanistan, Algeria, Brunei, Comoros, Gaza, Iran, Iraq (Hussein era), Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the UAE, Western Sahara, and Yemen – all follow similar policies where seeking to convert Muslims away from Islam is illegal but seeking to proselytize among the country’s religious minorities is allowed. Other than Sudan, Islam is the official religion in all of these countries, and all of them, including Sudan, strongly support Islam. This indicates a largely religious motive for these policies. Levels of enforcement in these countries vary. In Morocco, for example, proselytizing to Muslims is forbidden; however, voluntary conversion away from Islam is not. Thus, foreign missionaries focus their efforts on non-Muslims or conduct their work discreetly. Attempts to induce Muslims to convert are illegal, but this restriction is not enforced in practice since there have been few incidents of non-discreet proselytizing.9 In contrast in Kuwait, non-Muslim missionaries are forbidden from entering Kuwait, and religious leaders of unrecognized religious groups must enter the country as “non-religious” workers. Missionary groups in the country may proselytize to non-Muslims, but they strictly are forbidden from proselytizing to Muslims. Violators are arrested but are sometimes released on their first offense with a warning. The government actively supports Sunni Muslim proselytizing to convert non-Muslims.10 275

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Category 3: proselytizing is legal but is restricted in practice by the national government In many countries there are no laws restricting proselytizing, but the government uses other means to in practice restrict proselytizing. In both 1990 (or the earliest date available) and 2014, 24 countries followed this policy. Between 1990 and 2014 three stopped this practice (Belgium, Djibouti and Israel) and three (Eritrea, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) began this practice. In Israel, for example, a 1977 law prohibits any person from offering material benefits as an inducement to conversion. It is also illegal to convert a minor. Otherwise, proselytizing is legal. However, until 2011 in practice, both national and local governments occasionally restricted proselytizing, mostly by foreigners, using other laws such as charging proselytizers who hand out religious literature for “peddling” without a license. In other cases police and soldiers harassed, threatened and sometimes detained proselytizers, telling them proselytizing is illegal. In some cases these proselytizers were deported. After an incident where several proselytizers were arrested in 2011, a district court judge declared these detentions illegal, and the practice mostly stopped subsequently.11 Similarly, in Egypt proselytizing is not explicitly forbidden by law, but the government may impose legal penalties against non-Muslims proselytizing to Muslims, citing issues such as “disrupting social cohesion”. The government tolerates foreign religious workers on the condition they do not proselytize among Muslims. Proselytizers who distribute Christian literature are regularly detained on various charges and, if not residents, deported.12

Category 4: proselytizing is legal but is restricted in practice by local or regional governments or government officials This type of policy is similar to the previous one except the officials restricting proselytizing are primarily local officials in some locations. In most cases this is in the absence of a coherent national policy of restricting proselytizers. In some cases there is such a national policy but some local officials engage in restrictions beyond those found in the national policy. This pattern of restriction was present in 25 countries in 1990 (or the earliest data available). By 2014 this practice stopped in four countries but began in six, bringing the total to 27. In some cases these restrictions are minor and at least partially opposed by the national government. Bulgaria’s 2002 Religious Denominations Act protects the right to write, publish and disseminate beliefs orally, in print, via electronic media and through various types of educational programs (Article 5.1 and 6.5) and also to preach or teach “in places that the organizations find appropriate for their purposes” (Article 6.6). However, it does prohibit proselytizing to minors without their parents’ permission (Article 7.4).13 Nevertheless, there are reports of local officials harassing proselytizers, particularly Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. For example, in 2010 there were several instances of Jehovah’s Witness members being fined for various proselytizing activities conducted without permits, including organizing public religious meetings, proselytizing door-to-door and distributing religious materials.14 In 2013 the town of Burgas passed an ordinance that prohibited door-to-door proselytizing and the distribution of religious literature. Bulgaria’s Directorate for Religious Affairs protested the restriction and advised affected religious groups to consider legal action.15 In Romania there is no law against proselytizing, but this type of local harassment is more common than in Bulgaria. There are reports of proselytizers being told not to speak to people on the streets and police demands to pay fees to hand out information. In other cases local officials tacitly supported campaigns by the Orthodox Church to prevent proselytizing. 276

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For example, in 2004, the mayor of Dofteana under influence of the local Orthodox priest obstructed activities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and warned them to cease their door-to-door ministry. Also in 2004, the Mayor of Mizil, despite repeated complaints filed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, issued a resolution forbidding any actions of proselytizing. In 2007, two members of Jehovah’s Witnesses were stopped by the mayor of Branisca while they were practicing religious ministry. The mayor asked them to leave the locality and told the Witnesses that their preaching activity was illegal.16

Category 5: countries deny entry to foreign proselytizers or otherwise limit the activities of foreign proselytizers This category of policy tends to focus on religions not considered native to the country which are considered by at least some government officials to be undesirable. It often takes the form of denial of visas or special requirements for visas for religious workers that are not placed on other visa applicants. Thus, a primary motive, though certainly not the only motive, is protection of national culture. This is the most common category of restriction on proselytizing measured by the RAS dataset. It was present in 65 countries in 1990 (or the earliest date available) which increased to 66 by 2014. In some cases the restrictions are minor and involve some bureaucracy in order to enter a country. For example in Italy missionaries or religious workers must apply for appropriate visas prior to arriving in the country. Those seeking a visa for religious work must provide documentation regarding their religious qualifications, information on the nature of their religious work in the country and proof of economic support.17 In other countries the burdens for gaining a visa can be more substantial. For example, in 2004 Denmark passed the “Imam Law”, which is directed at foreign religious leaders seeking residence visas in Denmark. This law limits the number of religious residence visas issued in proportion to the size of the religious community and requires that the applicant be associated with a recognized religion, possess a proven relevant background for religious work and be selffinancing. Most importantly, it states that visas will not be issued if there is reason to believe the applicant may be a threat to public order, public safety, security, decency, health or other people’s rights and duties. Thus, it is generally believed to be targeted at imams who preach ideas considered contrary to Danish cultural norms.18 In a more extreme example, Turkmenistan by law prohibits all foreign missionary activity and all foreign religious organizations. The state denies visas to foreigners suspected of conducting or intending to conduct missionary activity. In fact most visas for anyone suspected of wanting to enter Turkmenistan for any religious purpose are usually refused and visitors who are discovered meeting with religious communities risk deportation. The sole exception is when registered religious communities apply to invite foreign religious leaders. Such requests are occasionally approved.19

Category 6: proselytizing is limited by location This type of policy limits proselytizing based on the location where the activity is allowed to occur. This can include limiting proselytizing to specific locations, usually recognized places of worship, and bans proselytizing and missionary activity in all other locations. It also includes instances where proselytizing is banned in specific locations within a country but is legal elsewhere. This type of restriction was present in 1990 (or the earliest available date) in five countries which increased to nine by 2014. 277

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Fiji is an example of a more limited manifestation of this type of restriction because the country’s constitution places limits on proselytizing on government premises and at government functions. Similarly in some parts of India it is illegal to engage in missionary activity near places of worship of other religions. This is intended largely to prevent social unrest. In Vietnam, this type of restriction is part of a larger pattern of restrictions. Only members of registered religious organizations may proselytize their faith, and only in their registered places of worship. The government must approve all foreign missionary groups, and these activities must take place under the sponsorship of a national or local religious organization. This is sporadically enforced as undeclared missionaries from several countries are active in the country. However, foreign religious workers or delegations are occasionally prevented from entering Vietnam.20

Category 7: proselytizing is limited to legally recognized religions Restricting religions by restricting their ability to legally register is a common tactic, particularly in autocracies (Sarkissian, 2015; Finke et al., 2017). Thus this type of restriction on proselytizing is often part of a larger set of restrictions in unregistered religions. This type of restriction was present in 17 countries in 1990 (or the earliest date available) which increased to 20 by 2014. Austria is a borderline case where proselytizing is legal for all religions, but religious workers for confessional communities or legal associations must apply for a general immigrant visa that is not employment or family based and is subject to a quota. Unrecognized groups may not be able to secure work/residence permits and therefore may not be able to bring missionaries, teachers or pastors from non-EU countries to Austria. This may diminish their activity.21 Ecuador similarly requires religious groups to be licensed or registered if they engage in proselytizing activity. Tajikistan applies this type of restriction more strictly. A 2009 law states that only officially registered religions may engage in preaching and teaching religious doctrines. This includes missionary activity. Even before this law was passed, missionaries who openly proselytized were often harassed by authorities. The government bans organizations which illegally proselytize and deports proselytizers if they are not citizens.22

Conclusions Restrictions on proselytizing and missionaries are common and perhaps most common against foreign missionaries. It is important to emphasize that while restricting proselytizing is often a violation of religious freedom, there is a balancing issue where individuals may not wish the attentions of missionaries and proselytizers. As Witte and Green (2009, p.  595) put it, “in addressing instances of proselytism, states must balance one community’s right to exercise and expand its faith versus another person’s or community’s right to be left alone to its own traditions”. That being said, I would argue that most of the restrictions discussed in this work are beyond what is necessary to protect the right to be left alone. It can also be contextual. For example, the ban in some parts of India on proselytizing close to the place of worship of another religion could certainly be seen as a reasonable effort to avoid unnecessary friction in a country where inter-religious tensions are high. Nevertheless, even minor intrusions such as a government requirement that proselytizers be licensed are, in effect, a government regulating who may or may not engage in a religious practice. Thus, these contextual-based exceptions ought to be comparatively rare. 278

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On a more general level, restrictions on missionaries and proselytizing are important because they are a microcosm of larger patterns of religious discrimination. Proselytizers and missionaries are among the least popular members of religious minorities among religious majorities who engage in activities seen as cultural and ideological threats and often also as political and security threats. This makes them particularly vulnerable and likely to be among the first to be repressed by a government that is becoming more repressive and intolerant of religious minorities.

Notes 1 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 2009– 2014; Joseph Yun Li-Sun, “Religion spreading among soldiers, secret directive issued to eradicate it,” AsiaNews/International Christian Concern (September  13, 2007). www.persecution.org/2007/09/13/ religion-spreading-among-soldiers-secret-directive-issued-to-eradicate-it/. 2 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Uzbekistan, 2009–2013. 3 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Nepal, 2009–2014. 4 Law on Freedom of Religion and Religious Organizations in the Kyrgyz Republic 2008; European Association of Jehovah’s Christian Witnesses Submission to the UN Human Rights Committee, April 24, 2013. 5 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Kyrgyzstan, 2004–2014. 6 Constitution of Greece 1975 (revised 2001). 7 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Greece, 2004–2014; European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, ECRI Report on Greece, April 2, 2009. www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/ecri/Country-by-country/Greece/GRC-CbC-IV-2009-031-ENG.pdf; Caroline Moorhead, “Jehovah’s Witnesses Jailed in Greece for Proselytism”, The Independent, September 28, 1992. 8 Decree on Management and Protection of Religious Activities in the Lao PDR; The Independent, Laos, 2004–2014; “Food denied to 65 Laotian farmers to force them to renounce Christianity” AsiaNews, February  5, 2011 www.asianews.it/news-en/Food-denied-to-65-Laotian-farmers-toforce-them-to-renounce-Christianity-20878.html; “Lao Christian families who refused to convert to Buddhism flee village” AsiaNet, March 28 2014, www.asianews.it/news-en/Lao-Christian-familieswho-refused-to-convert-to-Buddhism-flee-village-30681.html. 9 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Morocco, 2004–2014. 10 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Kuwait, 2004–2014; Christian Freedom International, www.christianfreedom.org/faq/74-where-are-christians-persecuted/326-kuwait.html. 11 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Israel, 2009–2014; www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/ irf/2009/127349.htm; Mordechai Goldman, “Ultra-Orthodox fight to restrict Christian missions in Israel”, Al-Monitor, October  5, 2015; www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/10/christianembassy-missionary-ultra-orthodox-jerusalem.html; Haim Lev and Cynthia Blank, “Report: Christian missionaries accosted Jews during Sukkot”, Arutz Sheva, October 22, 2014; www.israelnationalnews. com/News/News.aspx/186473#.VrHKg9J961s; “Israel orders deportation of Jews for Jesus missionary” Christianity Today, November 26, 2013, www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2013/november/ israel-orders-deportation-of-jews-for-jesus-missionary.html. 12 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Egypt, 2013. 13 Religious Denominations Act 2002. 14 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Bulgaria, 2010. 15 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Bulgaria, 2013. 16 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Romania, 2003–2009. 17 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.esteri.it/visti/home_eng.asp. 18 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Denmark, 2009; Anthony Browne, “Denmark to Curb Muslim Preachers” The Times (London), February 19, 2004. 19 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Turkmenistan, 2009–2013; Felix Corley and John Kinahan, “Turkmenistan: Religious Freedom Survey: 2012”, Forum 18 News Service, March 8, 2012, www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=1676. 20 US Department of State Religious Freedom Report, Vietnam, 2009–2013; Religlaw, International Center for Law and Religion Studies, Vietnam, www.religlaw.org/portal.country.php?pageId=22&co untryId=207#home.

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References Anderson, John. Religious Liberty in Transitional Societies: The Politics of Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Barkun, Michael. “Religious Violence and the Myth of Fundamentalism”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 4 (3), 2003, 55–70. Breakwell, Glynis. Coping with Threatened Identities. London: Methuen, 1986. Buzan, Barry, and Gerry Segal. “A Western Theme”, Prospect, 1998, pp. 18–23. Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1971. Finke, Roger, Dane R. Mataic, and Jonathan Fox. “Assessing the Impact of Religious Registration”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56 (4), 2017, 720–736. Fox, Jonathan. A World Survey of Religion and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Fox, Jonathan. “Out of Sync: The Disconnect between Constitutional Clauses and State Legislation on Religion”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 44 (1), 2011, 59–81. Fox, Jonathan. Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Fox, Jonathan. The Correlates of Religion and State. London: Routledge, 2019. Fox, Jonathan. The Unfree Exercise of Religion: A World Survey of Religious Discrimination against Religious Minorities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Fox, Jonathan. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me: Why Governments Discriminate Against Religious Minorities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Fox, Jonathan, and Yasemin Akbaba “Securitization of Islam and Religious Discrimination: Religious Minorities in Western Democracies, 1990 to 2008”, Comparative European Politics, 13 (2), 2015, 175–197. Fox, Jonathan, and Deborah Flores. “Religions, Constitutions, and the State: A Cross-National Study”, Journal of Politics, 71 (4), 2009, 1499–1513. Gill, Anthony. “The Political Origins of Religious Liberty: A Theoretical Outline”, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 1 (1), 2005, 1–35. Gill, Anthony. The Political Origins of Religious Liberty. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Goff, Patricia M. “Invisible Borders: Economic Liberalization and National Identity”, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (4), 2000, 533–562. Grim, Brian J., and Roger Finke. “Religious Persecution on Cross-National Context: Clashing Civilizations or Regulating Religious Economies”, American Sociological Review, 72, 2007, 633–658. Grim, Brian J., and Roger Finke. The Price of Freedom Denied. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Jelen, Ted G., and Clyde Wilcox. “Denominational Preference and the Dimensions of Political Tolerance”, Sociological Analysis, 51 (1), 1990, 69–81. Laustesen, Carsten B., and Ole Wæver. “In Defense of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects for Securitization”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29 (3), 2000, 705–739. Little, David. “Belief, Ethnicity, and Nationalism”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 1 (2), 1995, 284–301. Mabee, Bryan. “Re-imagining the Borders of US Security after 9/11: Securitization, Risk, and the Creation of the Department of Homeland Security”, Globalizations, 4 (3), 2007, 385–397. Mardsen, Lee. “Faith-Based Diplomacy: Conservative Evangelicals and the United States Military”, Politics and Religion, 7 (3), 2014, 475–498. Mardsen, Lee. “International Religious Freedom Promotion and US Foreign Policy”, Religions, 11 (260), 2020, 1–18. doi: 10.3390/rel11050260. Nelsen, Brent F., and James L. Guth. Religion and the Struggle for European Union: Confessional Culture and the Limits of Integration. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015.

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20 (SECULAR) HUMANISM AND POLITICS Stefan Schröder

Introduction After months of internal dispute, in March 2021, the German Humanist Association (Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands), the largest Secular Humanist organization in Germany in terms of membership, left the Coordinating Council of Secular Organizations in Germany (Koordinierungsrat Säkularer Organisationen). This decision was preceded by a resolution that member organizations of the Coordinating Council agreed upon in a closed conference in October 2020. It stated (with the dissenting voice of the Humanist Association) that the Coordinating Council shall develop towards becoming a lobbying pressure group organization. Humanist Association officials, who preferred an understanding of the Coordinating Council as an internal Secular Humanist exchange platform, feared to be confused with publicly announced positions that contradicted their own policy. In an interview with the Humanist News Service (Humanistischer Pressedienst), Katrin Raczynski (*1970), chief executive of the Humanist Association BerlinBrandenburg, pointed towards insurmountable differences she saw between her own and the council’s member organizations (Nicolai, 2021). First, she disliked the radical anti-religious accent of the latter. By contrast, the Humanist Association attempted to peacefully co-exist with other life stances and criticized religion only if it harmed personal rights or caused social conflict. Second, the association has been incorporated into religio-political arrangements in Germany in terms of legal recognition and public funding, while member organizations of the council aimed for the abolition of the entire system of public cooperation or funding for religious and secular life stance organizations. Although in the same interview, Raczynski and Rainer Rosenzweig (*1968), chairman of the Coordinating Council, tried to calm the waters by failing to call the withdrawal of the Humanist Association a “split” of the Secular Scene in Germany and by agreeing upon a “strategic partnership”, the above-mentioned course of events provides evidence to the fact that a united Secular Humanist movement in Germany does not exist. This is less a result of disagreement in terms of worldviews, but rather of varying strategies, reflective of two political projects of Secular Humanism that are not only different but contrary (Schröder, 2018). I call these political projects: Pluralism and Secularism. While they share a naturalist worldview as well as a distinctive religion-relatedness (Quack, 2014), the forms of this religion-relatedness and their accompanied strategies and goals clearly separate one from the other. 282

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The Pluralist project depicts Secular Humanism as a non-religious life stance that exists side by side with churches and other collective religious actors. On a political level, the main objective of this project is for Secular Humanist groups to be treated equally with religious bodies, seen as competitors in a life stance market that takes up basic human needs to give people’s lives meaning, orientation and practical life support. Imitating competitive as well as dialogueoriented and even cooperative forms of religion-relatedness are central aspects to understand this Pluralist policy of Secular Humanism. The Secularist project promotes Secular Humanism as a scientistic Leitkultur (that is, “guiding culture” or “leading culture”). It aims not only to remove religion completely from the political and public sphere, but also to lead to a continual secularization of private lives on grounds of scientific temper and technological progress. The dominant Secularist form of religion-relatedness is epistemological as well as social and ethical critique and confrontation, often represented in antagonist binaries like religion versus science or belief versus knowledge. The central argument of this chapter is that Secularism and Pluralism as political projects of Secular Humanism exist not only in Germany but are also present in other western European countries and in the USA. It explains their development against the background of different cultural and historical secular trajectories (Wohlrab Sahr and Burchardt, 2012) that can be seen in different versions of Secular Humanism which took shape over time in various national and social environments. At the same time, employing a Grounded Theory analysis of academic literature and organizational documents and websites, as well as interviews and participant observations conducted in Germany and Norway between 2013 and 2021, this chapter develops the argument that basic features of Pluralism and Secularism are detectable in one way or the other in all of the aforementioned contexts.

The roots of Secular Humanism International Secular Humanism entered into public discourse after the Second World War. Its formative process was completed by its institutionalization in 1952, when the International Humanist and Ethical Union, today’s Humanists International, was founded as an umbrella organization by Humanist Associations and Ethical Societies from the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Austria and India (van Deukeren, 2002, pp. 20–25). Today, the organization has more than 170 member organizations. In 1991, they agreed upon a “Minimum Statement on Humanism”: Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance that affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. Humanism is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality. (Humanists International, 2022) Even in this short statement, the concurrency between Pluralism and Secularism as political projects of Secular Humanism is apparent. On the one hand, Humanism is identified as a “life stance”, which puts it on the same level with other non-religious and religious life stances, such as Christianity, Islam or Nihilism. On the other hand, by stating that Humanism “stands for the building of a more humane society [. . .] in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities”, it is lifted above the life stance level and becomes a Leitkultur, a kind of meta life stance in the light of which society as a whole is supposed to be reformed. These two ways of 283

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understanding Humanism – as a life stance on the one hand and as Leitkultur on the other – lies at the heart of the political projects of Pluralism and Secularism. However, the “Minimum Statement on Humanism” includes both – without connecting them to one another or reflecting the tensions between them. The institutional roots of Secular Humanism in the Western hemisphere date back to nineteenth-century Europe, when a number of small secular organizations and even smaller splinter groups sprang up from emerging civil societies all over the continent (Kaiser, 2003, pp. 99–103). Even though they constituted the grounds of what would become Secular Humanism in the twentieth century, none of these organizations initially called themselves “Humanist”. A wide range of designations arose, from Free-Religious Congregations in Germany and Freethinker Associations in Romanesque European countries to Secularist Societies in Britain. Although their aims and programmes were as diverse as their names, these organizations can be identified as groups that wanted in one way or the other to challenge the enormous political and societal power of the Christian churches. Since this power took particular shapes and forms depending on different cultural, social and national contexts, the organizations varied in their agendas and foci of action. Freethinker roots lay in the Romanesque world and originated as opposition to the overarching influence of the Roman Catholic Church on politics, education and other areas of both public and private life. An early influential Freethinker Movement with numerous organizational bodies emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium, beginning with l’Affranchissement in 1854. Their programme was based on claims for free speech, separation of church and state and secularization of public life. Without doubt, this secularist agenda drew on ideas of laïcité developed in France. However, Belgian freethought sought to design its own version of laicism, including the development of social services, secular moral support and ceremonies without clerical interference. One major area of practice was the fight against the monopoly of church burials and the creation of secular alternatives (De Nutte, 2019, pp. 45–56; Sägesser, 2019). In contrast, a transregional Freethinker organization in Germany emerged later, in 1881, a year after the founding of the World Union of Freethinkers. Until then, institutionalized protest against the equally dominant Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches predominantly took the form of church reform movements, including nationalist German Catholicism (independent from Rome) and the Protestant Friends. Local congregations withdrew from the mainline churches and formed a national Free-Religious umbrella organization in 1859. Their critique was essentially directed against theological dogma. They maintained the structural framework of ritual and educational church practices while giving its theological contents a more liberal and rational veneer. Over time, some of the Free-Religious activists diverged from Christian religiosity altogether for the benefit of naturalist philosophies with no more than pantheist references to transcendence. This was one of the foundations of the German Freethinker tradition, which, in the beginning, was no more than a loose merger of liberal individuals who wanted to become not only free in their religion, but also free from religion altogether. They criticized the “religious remainders” of Free-Religious programmes and aimed at spreading a scientific temper through public lectures and publications. Others were influenced by the Ethical movements from the USA and Britain, founding Ethical Societies in Germany in the late nineteenth century which focused on moral education independent from religion (Kaiser, 2003, pp. 100–110; Groschopp, 2011, pp. 102–119). Similar to the differences and tensions between the Free-Religious and the Freethinkers in continental Europe, from the 1840s onwards two versions of “Secularism” emerged in the Secular Societies in Britain. They are generally associated with their two most famous leaders, public speaker George J. Holyoake (1817–1909) and member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh 284

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(1833–1891). Holyoake drew on utopian ideas based on self-improvement and rational morality and suggested cooperation with liberal Christians to initiate social reforms and turn secular individuals into respectable citizens in a pluralist society. Opposed to this dialogue- and even cooperation-oriented non-religiousness, Bradlaugh promoted strong and radical anti-religious, atheist and secularist positions that aimed at secularizing British mainstream culture and society. Budd (1977, p. 35) describes the different policies of Bradlaugh and Holyoake as “militancy versus respectability”. By comparing them, we can already find the roots of the Pluralist and the Secularist political project of Secular Humanism that still exist today. The two ideological versions also manifested themselves in different ideas of practice. The landscape of secular organizations in Britain broadened at the end of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the British Union of Ethical Societies in 1896 and Rational Press Association in 1899. Although Felix Adler (1851–1933), leading figure of the American Ethical Union (see later), and Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) positivism were influential in the formation of the British Ethical Union, the British version of the Ethical movement developed its own flavour as an “Ethical Church” by imitating the organizational structure and social, educational as well as ritual practice of the Anglican Church, while at the same time neglecting supernatural views and advocating anticlerical positions. In contrast, the Rational Press Association concentrated mainly on editing books and journals in order to popularize scientific knowledge, especially on evolution theory, and to educate the masses in a rationalist, frequently Social Darwinist manner. Additionally, the association became a venue to plan and organize anti-religious and rationalist programs and protests to foster enlightenment. The secular rituals and church-like structures of the Ethical Union alienated some members who considered them “quasi-religious” (Campbell, 1971, pp. 77–85). While the Freethinker tradition in Europe was dominated by political liberalism in its early years, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, it was deeply influenced by socialist political ideas and programmes. In Germany, separate Proletarian Freethinker Associations were founded. In part inspired by the Belgian freethinkers, they developed a special focus on cremation funds to break the church monopoly in the area of burials. With this programme, German Freethinker Associations became mass organizations as proletarian advocacies with a membership of about half a million (Kaiser, 1981). However, this increase in socialist Freethought remained a continental European phenomenon with no equivalent in Britain or the USA. Whereas Secularist organizations with a strictly anti-religious agenda did not exist in the USA until the mid-twentieth century, American Unitarianism and, a little later, Ethical Culture, developed with some proximity to Germany’s early Free-Religious communities. Felix Adler, son of a reformist Rabbi, founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1867. With the slogan “deed not creed”, he sought to develop a progressive secular system of moral education independent from religion (Campbell, 1971, pp.  72–76). Ethical Societies in the USA organized Sunday morning meetings as well as life cycle ceremonies and ran kindergartens, schools and philanthropic projects. Kosmin (2017, p.  310) sees them as antecedents of today’s Sunday Assemblies. The radical theological programme of American Unitarianism dates back to the early nineteenth century. It dissociated itself from traditional trinitarian Christianity based on revelation, evolving into a naturalist religion without God, creed or confession. Unitarians celebrate rationalist thinking, democratic culture, modern science and theological diversity (Weldon, 2019, pp. 75–79). The Second World War was a decisive turning point for Secularists, Freethinkers, the FreeReligious, Ethicists and Unitarians alike, especially in Europe. The growth of conservative religious nationalisms aggravated their often socialistic-informed programmes and their practical 285

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work in, for example, Germany. There, members were persecuted as agitators of “cultural bolshewism” and legally banned as early as 1932 (Kaiser, 1981, pp. 330–337). It was in reaction to the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust and in fear of a nuclear war that Secular Humanism emerged in the immediate post-war era. The 1952 Amsterdam Declaration, the founding document of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, identifies a “widespread demand for an alternative to the religions which claim to be based on revelation on the one hand, and totalitarian systems on the other. The alternative offered as a third way out of the present crisis of civilisation is humanism” (Humanists International, 2022). Appeals to overcome strategic differences in order to raise a strong united voice for a humane global society superseded the tensions between the Secularist and the Pluralist political programmes that membership organizations carried into the international umbrella organization. With this, however, conflicts over policies were not resolved but rumbled on beyond the surface.

Secular Humanism in Europe The early years of the International Humanist and Ethical Union were dominated by Dutch and Flemish Humanists (van Deukeren, 2002, pp. 28–35). In both the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium, new Humanist Associations were established in the aftermath of World War II and soon developed a Pluralist strategy against the background of the socio-political context of the pillarized societies from which they emerged. The concept of pillarization refers to the formation around political parties of highly integrated, ideologically oriented networks of organizations. These networks would structure and organize social lives from the cradle to the grave. Part of this social order is the principle of subsidiarity. Instead of being publicly administered, the welfare and educational system is predominantly managed by pillarized private institutions that a neutral state funds in return for taking over these functions for their pillar. During their height in the first half of the twentieth century, pillars in the Netherlands and Flanders became a main source of social and political power and tended to effectively monopolize central decision fields through political agenda setting. A comprehensive secular pillar did not take shape either in the Netherlands or in Flanders, since potential political partners like the Liberal Party preferred to not scare away Christian voters. Nevertheless, eventually both the Dutch and the Flemish Humanists benefited from pillarization, ironically at a time when it began to be disrupted. In the wake of neoliberalism and an accompanying individualism in the 1970s, the pillars began to dissolve into politically more independent service organizations that remained powerful and publicly funded. Secular Humanism in the Netherlands and Flanders learned to relate to this logic. In both contexts, Secular Humanist organizations engaged in identity politics, reforming as secular life stances and as alternatives to religious institutions. They claimed that the growing secular population in their countries would need services both in education and counselling to meet non-religious convictions. In numerous uphill battles against administrations, courts and the media, they gradually achieved equal treatment. In both cases, the adaptation of a Pluralist Policy was a learning process (Tyssens and De Nutte, 2019, pp. 156–163). In the early years of the Dutch Humanist Association (Humanistisch Verbond, established 1946), this process was deeply influenced and moderated by chairman Jaap van Praag (1911– 1981), who also served as president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union for the first 25 years of its existence. In his attempt to constitute Humanism as a counter to what he experienced as spreading nihilism after World War II, he managed to build a broad coalition against moral indifference not only within the secular spectrum, but also to include pantheists, monists and liberal protestants. However, a non-religious self-understanding would eventually prevail as official organizational doctrine. Van Praag was convinced of the existence of a human 286

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need for meaning and moral orientation, and he insisted that religion was not the only potential source. For him, Humanism was a secular life stance, an alternative to religion from the cradle to the grave. He stood back from radical anti-religious and communist directions and claimed a common effort for humanity rather than fighting losing battles on questions concerning worldviews. Based on this Pluralist agenda, the Dutch Humanist Association as well as the allied charity Humanitas (established in 1945 as Stichting voor Maatschappelijk Werk op Humanistische Grondslag) began to successfully seek the same rights and subsidies as Christian and other pillarized organizations. Today, the Humanist Association and Humanitas receive public funding, the former to employ Humanist counsellors and advisers, who are trained in the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, and the latter to engage in social work, and care of the elderly and children. Based on this understanding of Secular Humanism, Dutch Humanists encouraged and advised the formation of Secular Humanist organizations in several European countries, among them Belgium (Gasenbeek, 2019). However, factoring in the rich and unique Freethinker tradition in Belgium, it would be wrong to consider the Belgian Humanist Association (Humanistisch Verbond, established in 1951 in Flanders) a Dutch offshoot. Within its orbit, further organizations sprung up in the 1950s and 1960s, specializing in specific Secular Humanist agendas like moral counselling or non-religious life stance education, among them the Working Community for Ethics Teachers (Werkgemeenschap Leraars Ethiek) in 1952 and Humanitas in 1958. For the purposes of professionalizing and maintaining this work, Flemish Secular Humanists turned to state support and aimed for equal treatment with the Roman Catholic Church and other religious bodies, funded for their educational and social work in Belgium. For the sake of this Pluralist fight for equality, different Flemish Secular Humanist organizations were merged into the representational umbrella organization Union of Freethinking Associations (De mens nu – Unie Vrijzinnige Verenigingen) (De Nutte, 2019). The Humanist Association in Flanders had no Wallonian equivalent until the late 1960s, when the Centre for Secular Action (Centre d’action laïque) was established (Sägesser, 2019, pp.  30–34). Whereas the Flemish Humanists, similar to their Dutch counterpart, promoted Humanism as a life stance, French Wallonia was permeated by the idea of laïcité in political and cultural terms, although the meaning of Belgian laicism changed over time, detached from its French influence, and moved towards the Flemish meaning of vrijzinnigheid (Tyssens and De Nutte, 2019, p. 152). While officials of the Centre for Secular Action moderated this policy change towards Pluralism with patience and prudence, it was and still is controversial among Wallonian Humanists (Sägesser, 2019, p. 35). Functioning as the representative body of Secular Humanism in Belgium and partner of the federal government, the Union of Freethinking Associations and the Centre for Secular Action send representatives to the Central Secular Council (Centrale Vrijzinnige Raad), the highest-level Humanist body in Belgium (established 1972). It succeeded in lobbying for an official recognition of Humanist counselors as secular chaplains, and in the same year for a partnership of one of its education-based member organizations with the Flemish regional government in offering an elective non-confessional Ethics course in public schools. In 2002, Secular Humanism was officially recognized as a Life Stance equal to the churches and other religious communities in each of the Belgian provinces. Member organizations of the Central Secular Council now receive annual state funding of around 20 million Euros and employ 330 counsellors. Yet, while the trend of Secular Humanism in Belgium seems to point towards a Pluralist policy, this is only half the story. Member organizations of the Central Secular Council repeatedly functioned as Secularist pressure group organizations for the adoption of progressive laws concerning ethical issues, like the de-criminalization of abortion, the legalization of gay marriage and the right 287

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of married gay couples to adopt children, and, one of the socio-political key issues for Secular Humanist organizations in Belgium today, euthanasia. Furthermore, despite its incorporation into the pillarized logic of public cooperation and funding, the Wallonian Centre for Secular Action has not acted as a Life Stance organization in a variety of cases. When reform of religious and moral education in public schools was debated in 2012, the original position of the centre was not to promote a non-religious subject designed by Secular Humanists as an alternative to religious confessional subjects, but a civics subject for all pupils for which the state only holds responsibility. This is exactly in line with a Secularist policy. Thus, there is a substantial inner opposition to the recent Pluralist developments of Wallonian Secular Humanism (Sägesser, 2019, pp. 31–40). Compared to the Secular Humanist organizations in the Netherlands and Belgium, the social service sector of the Norwegian Humanist and Ethical Association (Human-Etisk Forbund, established 1956) is less pronounced. Instead, Norwegian Humanists emphasize the congregational side of Humanism and especially secular life-cycle ceremonies. The Humanist and Ethical Association carries forward the agenda of its predecessor organization, providing civic confirmations for adolescents, and expanded its service to other life-cycle ceremonies (including Humanist naming rituals, weddings and burials) to break the Lutheran state-church monopoly in this area. It has received per head membership funds by the state since 1981, when it was put on equal legal footing with religious groups. This extended its capabilities and enabled the association to employ professional staff (Alberts, 2011). The Humanist and Ethical Association in Norway has grown to be the largest Secular Humanist organization in Europe with about 105,000 members in 2022 (Human-Etisk Forbund, 2022). Notwithstanding the engagement of Norwegian Humanists in anticlerical and anti-religious campaigns in the 1970s, the agenda of the association predominantly developed towards a Pluralist policy. Association officials call upon tolerance and regularly participate in interfaith dialogue initiatives. However, Norwegian Humanists still campaign against religious and especially Christian dominance in public life. In 1997, they approached the UN Human Rights Committee as well as the European Court of Human Rights, when a non-confessional integrative school subject on religion and life stances with a focus on Christianity was implemented in public schools. In the opinion of a group of parents with Secular Humanist backgrounds, the emphasis on Christianity violated the religious freedom of their children. The UN Human Rights Committee agreed with the appeal in 2004, and the European Court of Human Rights confirmed this decision in 2008. The Norwegian ministry of education had to revise the school subject, change its name and reform its curriculum in a more pluralist manner. For this group of parents and the Norwegian Humanists, this was a remarkable success in their fight for religious freedom and equal treatment (Alberts, 2011, pp. 223–237). However, the Humanist and Ethical Association is not the only organization with a Secular Humanist self-understanding in Norway. Although Ateistene, founded in 1974 as the Norwegian Pagan Society (Det norske Hedningsamfunn), is substantially smaller than the Humanist and Ethical Association in terms of membership, its media-oriented anti-religious agenda has made it popular and publicly visible. While in the beginning the organization predominantly protested against the political influence of the Lutheran state-church in Norway, in recent times it shifted its focus towards criticism of Islam. During the cartoons debate in Denmark, it made several statements in favour of freedom of satire and art. When the city mosque of Oslo granted permission to call for the Adhān (the Islamic call to worship), they obtained permission from the municipality to publicly propagate the sentence “God does not exist”. Furthermore, Ateistene is engaged in Secular refugee relief projects (Ateistene, 2022). Ateistene is disconcerted by the Pluralist policy of the Norwegian Humanist and Ethical Association which contradicts their 288

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own radical Secularist agenda. Vice versa, a Humanist and Ethical Association official told me in an interview about his struggles with being confused with Ateistene positions in negotiations with politicians or civil society institutions. In the Norwegian case, therefore, the two different political projects of Secular Humanism took shape in the formation of different Secular Humanist organizations as carriers of corresponding strategies, aims and practices. A similar situation has emerged in Germany, with increasing tensions between the Pluralist policy of the German Humanist Association (Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, established in 1993) and the Secularist agenda of the Giordano Bruno Foundation (Giordano Bruno Stiftung, established in 2004). The association and the foundation can be considered the two most influential and visible Secular Humanist organizations in the country. Free-Religious and Freethinker organizations in Germany had to be rebuilt after their rupture between 1932 and 1945. They had lost most of their human and material resources during the Nazi regime and could not return to their societal impact and membership numbers from Weimar times. In the process of striving for re-orientation in the 1980s, the Freethinker Association in Berlin played a central role in building networks with like-minded organizations from Germany and beyond. Socio-political developments like pervasive neoliberal tendencies and a shift towards individualism led to a departure from the traditional self-understanding as labour advocacy to a programme of providing social and educational services for the non-religious. Encouraged by this trend, in the context of German reunification, organizations in the new eastern states of Germany particularly engaged in maintaining the Jugendweihe practice and offered social and counselling services with financial support from the state. Further important partners in this process were former Free-Religious congregations from various regions in Germany, who had left the Free-Religious national umbrella organization to ultimately discard their religious remainders and widen their influence among the increasing secular population. However, the formation of a national Humanist Association in 1993 would not have been possible without the establishment of contacts to fellow European Secular Humanists, like Levi Fragell (*1939) from Norway or Rob Tielman (*1946) from the Netherlands. The most obvious evidence for their influence on the association is its Humanist self-designation, which was completely unusual in Germany at this point in time. The Humanist Association grew to be the largest Secular Humanist organization in Germany with a membership today of about 20,000. Over the years, several affiliate associations were put on equal legal footing with the Christian mainline churches by gaining the status of corporation under public law. Among them, the Humanist Association of Berlin is by far the largest and most influential branch. Its annual budget amounts to about 50 million euros, most of which is granted by the state government of Berlin, especially for functioning as an educational agency. The Humanist Association runs around 30 preschools and is also responsible for its own school subject in Berlin and Brandenburg public schools called Humanistische Lebenskunde (Humanist Life Skills). Furthermore, the Berlin branch operates as a social agency for four hospices, a college of education, several centres of counselling and welfare, youth and family. Its professional staff amounts to about 1,200, most of them preschool or Lebenskunde teachers. Other branches of the German Humanist Association specialize in providing congregational Humanism and especially life-cycle ceremonies like naming rituals, Jugendweihen (adolescence ceremonies), weddings and burials. The German Humanist Association has clearly left behind its anti-religious Freethinker roots and embraced a Pluralist policy. Organization officials are regularly involved in interfaith initiatives. In Berlin, the Association even cooperates with a Buddhist organization in a Korean hospice project (Schröder, 2018, pp. 60–70). Similar to the Norwegian case, a Secularist counter-movement arose from within the German Secular Humanist spectrum via the establishment of the International Association of the 289

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Non-Affiliated and Atheists (Internationaler Bund der Konfessionslosen und Atheisten) in 1976, and, more recently, the influential Giordano Bruno Foundation in 2004. Both organizations are very active in Secularist campaigning, i.e. for the separation of church and state, individual freedom rights and what they explicitly call a scientific and Humanist Leitkultur. With this programme, especially the Giordano Bruno Foundation is successful in attracting famous public and academic individuals to its advisory committee and in gaining the support of grassroot groups from all over German-speaking Europe. The foundation seems to have met a demand and hit a nerve by filling the Freethinker gap in Germany that groups like the Berlin Freethinkers left when they shifted towards a Pluralist policy. Despite occasional joint projects, like the Bertha Suttner Foundation which grants selected students and doctoral candidates with a Secular Humanist background a bursary, the Giordano Bruno Foundation observes the Pluralist policy of the Humanist Association with disconcertion. According to chairman Michael Schmidt-Salomon (*1967), secularization in Germany has to be completed instead of being undermined through applying public funding and cooperation to increasingly more religious groups or incorporating Secular Humanist organizations into the same confessional logic. In particular, religious instruction at public schools is a key problem for him – including its expansion on Humanistische Lebenskunde as a school subject run by the Humanist Association. Dividing pupils according to their affiliation would broaden a confessional division of society instead of making a contribution to integration (Schröder, 2018, pp. 70–81). This Secularist policy of the Giordano Bruno Foundation is not only different, but is contrary to the Pluralist agenda of the German Humanist Association. In Norway and Germany, different Secular Humanist organizations represent Pluralism and Secularism as two types of policies within Secular Humanism more or less neatly, which leads to tensions and conflicts between them. In other European countries, organizations from both camps try to form a unity front and represent Pluralism and Secularism at the same time. The discussion now turns to Britain and Sweden as two national examples in which this is the case. A British Humanist Association was founded in 1963 as Secular Humanist unity front by members of the Rational Press Association and the British Union of Ethical Societies, which both suffered a membership decline and an identity crisis in the post-war years. Within the new organization, Rationalism and Ethicism as different agendas existed side by side, which rapidly led to tensions and open conflict. Only two years after the fusion, the Rational Press Association left the Humanist Association again to keep its status as a nonprofit organization (Budd, 1977, pp. 244–265). The Ethical Union merged completely into the Humanist Association, which changed its name to Humanists UK in 2017. It has 60 local branches in England and Wales that regularly meet in pubs or other locations for companionship or discussion. Alongside this congregational Humanism in its local branches, the agenda of Humanists UK combines social services (including counselling services, homeless charity, ministry for the elderly) and lifecycle ceremonies for the non-religious population with Secularist pressure group work through media-effective campaigns, for example, in favour of individual freedom rights or the separation of church and state (Engelke, 2012; Nash, 2019, pp. 105–109). Furthermore, in the wake of the so-called “New Atheism”, an anti-religious grassroot movement emerged from within the association membership. The leadership and their official Pluralist policy were attacked internally by members in favour of criticizing religion as important common ground for Secular Humanists. In 2009, the Humanist Association engaged in an Atheist Bus Campaign, funding an advert on public buses in England with the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. With Richard Dawkins becoming honorary vice president, the Humanist Association gained further public interest and doubled its membership numbers. On the other hand, the renewed emphasis on anti-religious campaigning resurfaced inner tensions 290

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and conflicts on the understanding of Secular Humanism in Britain. While its “comeback” is celebrated among large parts of the membership of Humanists UK, organization officials, whose majority favours a Pluralist policy, feel overwhelmed by what they consider destructive approaches of Secular Humanism (Bullivant, 2010; Plessentin, 2012). These inner tensions threaten to shatter the idea of unification that initially brought the organization into life. By distinguishing “Life stance Humanists” and “Opinion-making Humanists”, Kind (2019) illustrates a similar constellation of inner-organizational conflict between leadership and members for Humanisterna, the Secular Humanist Association of Sweden. To avoid competing over the same small secular constituency, both factions decided to form a national unity front when they founded Humanisterna as Humanist and Ethical Association (Human-Etiska Förbundet) in 1979. Kind characterizes Life stance Humanists as claiming a Pluralist agenda. Their vision of Humanisterna is to provide holistic life stance services for its members, like social activities and life-cycle ceremonies. To achieve this goal, they openly suggest to learn from the Church of Sweden, with which they maintain friendly relations. Repeatedly, they failed with applications for being recognized as established Life Stance equally to religious communities, which led to continual financial hardship. The Norwegian Humanist Association filled in several times to fund the life-cycle ceremony work of Humanisterna. Opinion-making Humanists do not care for congregational work and Humanist life-cycle ceremonies, for these would reproduce and strengthen religious ideas, structures and norms that should be critically reflected and tackled instead. In educational seminars, philosophical cafés and working groups, Opinion-making Humanists within Humanisterna rather focus on anti-religious campaigns and the propagation of scientific temper. One of their major aims is to decouple morality from religion. Strategically, they want Humanisterna to become a non-governmental organization, not an established Life Stance community. Kind (2019) describes fierce debates within Humanisterna on the nature of its Humanism.

Secular Humanism in the USA The history of Secular Humanism in the USA differs from European examples described earlier for several reasons. First, for a long time the American Humanist landscape lacked organizations with a Secularist policy. This is often explained by the founding myth of the American nation, in which the concept of individual religious freedom plays a central role. In line with this myth, the First Amendment to the American constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ”. Therefore, at first glance, the goals of the Secularist agenda of Secular Humanism already seem to be achieved in the USA. However, the establishment of radical Secularist collectives in the 1960s and 1970s provided evidence that this narrative was oversimplistic and had to be critically reflected. Organizations like American Atheists or the Freedom from Religion Foundation claimed that although the US constitution guaranteed individual freedom on paper, the sociopolitical realities of unbelievers were confronted with the religious normativization of a quasiestablished civil religion deeply imprinted by Protestantism (Klug, 2015, pp. 190–194). During the Cold War, atheism was often associated with communism. This could lead to stigmatization and severe social, political and economic hardship. Atheists still are the least trusted minority group in the USA (Didyoung et al., 2013). An Anti-discrimination Support Network documents acts of discrimination against the non-religious (Hammer et al., 2012). The second major difference between the European and American context is that parts of the Pluralism project of Humanist organizations in the USA have maintained a religious selfunderstanding, despite their naturalist worldview and humanistic morality. While in European 291

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countries like the Netherlands, Belgium or Norway, post-war Humanism is self-evidently considered a non-religious undertaking, its character is far more controversial in the USA. First published in the Unitarian magazine The New Humanist, the Humanist Manifesto from 1933 explicitly labels Humanism as “religious”. Despite its rationalist tone, it values religions in their general function to meet basic human needs (American Humanist Association, 2022). When the American Humanist Association was founded in 1941 from within Unitarianism and took over the Magazine The New Humanist, it pursued this religious self-understanding. An inner opposition on holding on to “religion” was spearheaded by Paul Kurtz (1925–2012), one of the most influential figures of American Secular Humanism. He became editor of The New Humanist in 1968 and published a Second Humanist Manifesto in 1973, in which he dropped the religious characterization of Humanism altogether. Ongoing tensions and conflicts with a religious fraction within the organization lead Kurtz to found the Council of Secular Humanism in 1980 (Fazzino and Cragun, 2017, pp. 65–70). This line of conflict in the Pluralist spectrum of Humanism is specific for the US context and hardly plays any role in Europe. Notwithstanding the specific cultural trajectory of American Humanism, tensions and conflicts between Pluralism and Secularism as two different political projects also exist in the USA (Kettell, 2014; Shook, 2017). LeDrew labels these projects “Humanism” and “Atheism”, the former seeking socio-political accommodation and a positive system of ethics, the latter seeking confrontation and the negation of religion as “the essential enemy (that has) to be vanquished by rational critique” (LeDrew, 2015, p. 64). He is sceptical whether debates between the fractions can be resolved in any way, since they were “directly opposed to each other” (LeDrew, 2016, p. 147). By contrast, Fazzino and Cragun (2017) consider the normalization of non-religion as a shared agenda of all Secular Humanist bodies in the USA and refer to their cooperation as evidence for tendencies of consolidation within the national lobby umbrella organization Secular Coalition for America (established 2002) or in the context of hosting the Reason Rally, a secular convention that took place twice (2012 and 2016) in Washington, DC, with about 20,000 participants. Differences between a Secularist and a Pluralist policy, they argue, can and will be overcome. As mentioned earlier, the Secularist project of Secular Humanism in the USA is pursued by organizations like American Atheists (established 1963) or the Freedom of Religion Foundation (established 1976). The first explicitly anti-religious and Secularist organization in the USA, however, was the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (established 1925). Its co-founder Charles L. Smith (1887–1964) became the last person to be juristically sentenced for blasphemy in the USA in 1928. He sought to abolish Military Chaplaincy and tax exemptions for religious bodies as well as the removal of the slogan “In God We Trust” from coins and dollar bills (Richter, 2017, pp. 17–19). Decades later, American Atheists took up this agenda and expanded it into comprehensive civil rights campaigning for atheists. Its founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919–1995) became famous in the context of the Supreme Court trial Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), in which mandatory Bible readings in public schools were declared unconstitutional. After this legal victory, American Atheists established a separate department for lawsuits and legal disputes and pursued billboard campaigns with anti-religious messages. After O’Hair disappeared in 1995, rumours circulated that she misappropriated funds and eloped with donations, when she, her son and her granddaughter were actually kidnapped and found dead in Texas in 2001. After this scandal, American Atheists only slowly recovered from a steep decline in membership and funding (Fazzino and Cragun, 2017, pp. 66–68). Today, the organizations has about 2,000 members (Cimino and Smith, 2007, p. 410) and an annual income of about USD600,000 (Kettell, 2013, p. 65). Personal conflicts in leadership lead to the dissociation of the Freedom From Religion Foundation from American Atheists in 1976. Similar to American Atheists, the support of atheists in legal disputes is the organization’s main 292

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practice. It broadcasts its own podcast and radio show and provides grants to secular students who suffer social and financial hardship after “coming out” as atheists (Cragun and Manning, 2017, p. 1; LeDrew, 2013, p. 447). The Freedom From Religion Foundation has around 20,000 members and an annual income of more than USD 2 million (Kettell, 2013, p. 65). When Secularists in the USA realized that their optimistic teleological visions of a victory of science over religion and continuous progress and secularization of society from the nineteenth century would not come true, they partially shifted their strategy from Leitkultur to identity politics. One prominent example was the “Out of the Closet Campaign” from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, for which individual atheists all over the country celebrated a public “Coming Out” as atheists, often online. However, this strategic move was and still is not without inner opposition. Many Secularist activists criticize that Secular Humanism belittles itself when it acts as minority group. They remain convinced that a secular Leitkultur will prevail eventually (Cimino and Smith, 2007; LeDrew, 2016, pp. 111–131). The Pluralist political project of Humanism in the USA is predominantly pursued by local organizations with congregational outlooks, like Houston Oasis (Schutz, 2017, pp. 123–124), as well as national organizations such as Camp Quest, a non-governmental organization hosting summer camps for non-religious children and families (Bullivant, 2015), the American Humanist Association and the Council of Secular Humanism. The American Humanist Association engages in congregational work in its local branches and maintains the Foundation for Humanist Celebrant training, especially for Humanist weddings and burials. Paul Kurtz, former editor of The New Humanist, left the organization after fierce debates about his autocratic leadership and the question of whether or not Humanism should be considered “religious”. He founded the Council for Secular Humanism, which leans a bit more towards a Secularist policy than the Humanist Association. Kurtz was editor of its magazine Free Inquiry, in which he aimed at developing an independent secular ethics and popularizing scientific knowledge for the general public (Fazzino and Cragun, 2017, pp. 69–70). In 1991, the Council for Secular Humanism became part of the Center of Inquiry, also founded by Kurtz. Today, the Center of Inquiry is the Humanist organization with the highest membership numbers and most financial resources (annual budget: USD2.4 million) in America (Kettell, 2013, p. 65). Despite moves towards a Secularist policy in some areas, until his death in 2012 Kurtz opposed a pure confrontational strategy of Secular Humanism. He was one of the main critics of the anti-religious programme of the so-called “New Atheism”, which he considered antagonistic and counterproductive for his project to overcome societal divisions based on the religious versus non-religious binary (LeDrew, 2016, pp. 144–146). The originally literary phenomenon “New Atheism” whirled around the Humanist scene in the USA and beyond. Following Hyman (2012) and LeDrew (2016), one of the most crucial effects of the anti-religious books of authors like Richard Dawkins (*1941), Sam Harris (*1967) or Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was the emergence of a conservative and patriotic social movement within American Humanism which opposes not only religious (mostly Islamic) fundamentalism, but also epistemic relativism and multiculturalism as anti-scientific and antienlightened movements (LeDrew, 2016, p. 7). Whereas Secular Humanism and its predecessors from the nineteenth century traditionally leaned towards progressive liberal or left-wing politics, New Atheism introduced what LeDrew calls an “Atheist Right”: despite differences on metaphysical questions, it shares many opinions with the Christian Right in political key areas like security, economy and gender. This development can be traced in European countries as well, but to a far lesser extent (LeDrew, 2016, pp. 178–210). The sketched portrayal of (Secular) Humanism in the USA unveils a particular social and cultural flavour of Pluralism and Secularism as political projects, with divergent parting lines, 293

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transverse to the ones in the European examples. Nevertheless, both projects can be found in the USA as well, although tensions and conflicts between them seem less heated than in Europe. One of the main reasons for this could be the missing strategy of Pluralist Humanist organizations to be incorporated into public funding or cooperation structures, simply because, based on the First Amendment, they hardly exist in America. This religion-incorporation strategy, utilized as part of a Pluralist policy of Secular Humanism in many European countries, seems a red line for their Secularist counterparts, and the subject of highly controversial internal debates. Instead, other conflict lines play a more prominent role in the USA than they do in Europe, including the role of identity politics and the question whether Humanism is religious or non-religious.

Conclusion (Secular) Humanism in Europe and the USA are diverse and heterogenous phenomena, institutionalized in many different organizational bodies. Within and between them, tensions and conflicts constitute a highly fragmented environment. Different theoretical attempts have been made to explain this fragmentation. While Fazzino and Cragun (2017) choose a psychological approach and attribute conflicts within Secular Humanism to personal feuds between uncompromising leaders like Kurtz and O’Hair, in this chapter, I attempted to identify an international pattern, reconstructing Pluralism and Secularism as two opposing political projects within (Secular) Humanism. While Pluralism considers Humanism a life stance amongst others, Secularism attempts to establish it as a Leitkultur for society. This comes along with different organizational practices, aims and strategies that can interfere or even contradict one another. As illustrated by different national contexts, Pluralism and Secularism can take different shapes in the light of “multiple secularities” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchard, 2012), while producing various conflict lines due to the diversity of cultural trajectories of secularization and other societal and political conditions in Europe and the USA. Nevertheless, as ideal types they have explanatory value for understanding the fragmentation of Secular Humanism in all our examples. Whereas many Humanist activists stress the importance of overcoming inner conflicts and finding ways to unite into a joint movement, others are more sceptical and predict a permanent fragmentation of the scene (Kettell, 2014; LeDrew, 2015). As Fazzino and Cragun (2017, pp. 62–76) argue, however, such fragmentation does not have to be interpreted as decline or demise of what they consider a Humanist “social movement”. Social movement theory notes that almost everything can be a resource, including differentiation into multiple organizational bodies with de-centralized authority and varying agendas. Although I am rather cautious to call Humanism a “social movement” too hastily, the argument that its strategic fragmentation can be considered a resource instead of a problem strikes me as an interesting change of perspective. To illustrate this, I would like to come back to the current developments of Secular Humanism in Germany described in the introduction. After years of frustration by failed attempts to unite different Secular Humanist groups within the Coordinating Council of Secular Organizations, the withdrawal of the German Humanist Association seems to have released the umbrella organization from obstructing policies and quarrels, allowing it to set the agenda in a Secularist direction. The name of the organization was changed to “Central Committee of the NonAffiliated” (Zentralrat der Konfessionsfreien), a paid spokesman was added to the executive board and the self-understanding of being a Secularist lobby organization was explicitly emphasized (Zentralrat der Konfessionsfreien, 2021). These developments were all blocked by the Humanist Association. At the other end of the policy spectrum, the Bavarian branch of the Humanist 294

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Association left the national umbrella and changed its name to Humanistische Vereinigung to pursue a radical Pluralist policy, including an establishment of Humanist private schools, a confessional Humanist school subject and application of the ecclesiastical employment law in Germany to some of its staff. In an interview with me, an organization official described the withdrawal from the German Humanist Association as a “relief ” from unloved compromising. Maybe, Secularism and Pluralism as political projects of Humanism can develop successfully this way: in their own right and apart from one another.

References Alberts, W. (2011) ‘Religionskritik, Alternative zu Religion oder säkulare Religion? Der Human-ethische Verband Norwegens’, in Baumann, M., and Neubert, F. (eds.) Religionspolitik – Öffentlichkeit – Wissenschaft. Studien zur Neuformierung von Religion in der Gegenwart. Zürich: Pano, pp. 219–250. American Humanist Association. (2022) Humanist Manifesto I. Available at: https://americanhumanist.org/ what-is-humanism/manifesto1/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Ateistene. (2022) Official Website. Available at: https://ateistene.no/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Budd, S. (1977) Varieties of Unbelief. Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Bullivant, S.C. (2010) ‘The New Atheism and Sociology. Why Here? Why Now? What Next?’, in Amarasingam, A. (ed.) Religion and the New Atheism. A Critical Appraisal. Leiden: Brill, pp. 109–124. Bullivant, S.C. (2015) ‘Believing to Belong: Non-religious Belief as a Path to Inclusion’, in Beaman, L.G., and Tomlins, S. (eds.) Atheist Identities – Spaces and Social Contexts. Cham: Springer, pp. 101–114. Campbell, C. (1971) Toward a Sociology of Irreligion. Reprint (2013) with New Introduction by Lois Lee and New Bibliography. London: Alcuin Academics. Cimino, R., and Smith, C. (2007) ‘Secular Humanism and Atheism beyond Progressive Secularism’, Sociology of Religion, 68(4), pp. 407–424. doi: http://doi.org/10.1093/SOCREL/68.4.407 Cragun, R.T., and Manning, C. (2017) ‘Introduction’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 1–11. De Nutte, N. (2019) ‘Vrijzinnigheid: Post-War Humanism in Flanders’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 43–74. Didyoung, J., Charles, E., and Rowland, N.J. (2013) ‘Non-Theists Are No Less Moral Than Theists: Some Preliminary Results’, Secularism and Nonreligion, 2, pp. 1–20. doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/snr.ai Engelke, M. (2012) In Spite of Christianity. Humanism and Its Others in Contemporary Britain, 28 November. Available at: www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/engelke/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Fazzino, C., and Cragun, R.T. (2017) ‘ “Splitters!”: Lessons from Monty Python for Secular Organizations in the US’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 57–85. Gasenbeek, B. (2019) ‘Organised Humanism in the Netherlands: 1945–2018’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 115–149. Groschopp, H. (2011) Dissidenten. Freidenker und Kultur in Deutschland (2nd edition). Marburg: Tectum. Hammer, J.H. et al. (2012) ‘Forms, Frequency, and Correlates of Perceived Anti-Atheist Discrimination’, Secularism and Nonreligion, 1, pp. 43–67. doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/snr.ad Human-Etisk Forbund. (2022) Official Website. Available at: https://human.no/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Humanists International. (2022) IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism. Available at: https://humanists. international/policy/iheu-minimum-statement-on-humanism/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Hyman, G. (2012) ‘Dialectics or Politics? Atheism and the Return to Religion’, Approaching Religion, 2(1), pp. 66–74. doi: http://doi.org/10.30664/ar.67493 Kaiser, J.C. (1981) Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik. Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Kaiser, J.C. (2003) ‘Organisierter Atheismus im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Gärtner, C., Pollack, D., and Wohlrab-Sahr, M. (eds.) Atheismus und religiöse Indifferenz. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp. 99–127. Kettell, S. (2013) ‘Faithless: The Politics of New Atheism’, Secularism and Nonreligion, 2, pp. 61–72. doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/snr.al

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Stefan Schröder Kettell, S. (2014) ‘Divided We Stand: The Politics of the Atheist Movement in the United States’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 29(3), pp. 377–391. doi: http://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2014.945722 Kind, S. (2019) ‘Contested Humanist Identities in Sweden’, in Quack, J., Kind, S., and Schuh, C. (eds.) The Diversity of Nonreligion. Normativities and Contested Relations. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 35–76. Klug, P. (2015) ‘Der Religionsbegriff der Religionswissenschaft im Spiegel von Nichtreligion und Nonkonformität. Religiöse Normierung als blinder Fleck eines implizit emischen Religionsverständnisses’, Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft, 23(1), pp. 188–206. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/zfr-2015-0003 Kosmin, B. (2017) ‘Old Questions and New Issues for Organized Secularism in the United States’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 301–317. LeDrew, S. (2013) ‘Discovering Atheism. Heterogeneity in Trajectories to Atheist Identity and Activism’, Sociology of Religion, 74(4), pp. 431–453. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srt014 LeDrew, S. (2015) ‘Atheism Versus Humanism. Ideological Tensions and Identity Dynamics’, in Beaman, L.G., and Tomlins, S. (eds.) Atheist Identities. Spaces and Social Contexts. Cham: Springer, pp. 53–68. LeDrew, S. (2016) The Evolution of Atheism. The Politics of a Modern Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. Nash, D. (2019) ‘Humanism in Britain’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 95–113. Nicolai, F. (2021) ‘Der Humanistische Verband verlässt den KORSO. Strategische Partnerschaft bleibt bestehen’, Humanistischer Pressedienst, 29 March. Available at: https://hpd.de/artikel/strategische-partnerschaft-bleibt-bestehen-19142 (Accessed: 14 January 2022). Plessentin, U. (2012) ‘Die “Neuen Atheisten” als religionspolitische Akteure’, in Berner, U., and Quack, J. (eds.) Religion und Kritik in der Moderne. Berlin: Lit, pp. 83–114. Quack, J. (2014) ‘Outline of a Relational Approach to “Nonreligion” ’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 26, pp. 439–469. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341327 Richter, C. L. (2017) ‘ “I Know It When I See It”: Humanism, Secularism, and Religious Taxonomy’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 17–29. Sägesser, C. (2019) ‘Secularism in French-speaking Belgium’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 23–41. Schröder, S. (2018) Freigeistige Organisationen in Deutschland. Weltanschauliche Entwicklungen und strategische Spannungen nach der Humanistischen Wende. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schutz, A. (2017) ‘Organizational Variation in the American Nonreligious Community’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 113–134. Shook, J. R. (2017) ‘Recognizing and Categorizing the Secular: Polysecularity and Agendas of Polysecularism’, in Cragun, R.T., Manning, C., and Fazzino, L.L. (eds.) Organized Secularism in the United States. New Directions in Research. New York: De Gruyter, pp. 87–112. Tyssens, J., and De Nutte, N. (2019) ‘Comparative Humanisms: Secularity and Life Stances in the PostWar Public Sphere’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 151–171. van Deukeren, H. (2002) ‘From Theory to Practice – A History of IHEU 1952–2002’, in Gasenbeek, B., and Gogineni, B. (eds.) International Humanist and Ethical Union 1952–2002. Past, Present and Future. Utrecht: De Tijdstroom uitgeverij, pp. 15–104. Weldon, S.P. (2019) ‘Organized Humanism in the United States’, in De Nutte, N., and Gasenbeek, B. (eds.) Looking Back to Look Forward – Organised Humanism in the World: Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States of America, 1945–2005. Brussels: Vubpress, pp. 75–93. Wohlrab-Sahr, M., and Burchardt, M. (2012) ‘Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities’, Comparative Sociology, 11(6), pp.  875–909. doi: https://doi. org/10.1163/15691330-12341249 Zentralrat der Konfessionsfreien. (2021) KORSO wird Zentralrat. Available at: www.korso-deutschland.de/ korso-wird-zentralrat/ (Accessed: 14 January 2022).

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PART III

Religion and international relations

21 POSTSECULARISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Luca Mavelli and Erin K. Wilson

Introduction Postsecularism has gained increasing relevance within and beyond international relations (IR) in recent years. Within IR, the term has been employed primarily in two different yet interconnected ways. Firstly, postsecularism has operated descriptively to explain the return or resilience of religious traditions in modern life. This has produced two different responses. On the one hand, scholars have attempted to develop conceptual frameworks that move beyond the dominant assumptions of secularization theory in order to explain religion’s surprising persistence in late modernity. On the other hand, there have been calls for the development of new models of politics able to include religious views. Such calls represent the second and more innovative meaning attributed to postsecularism, in which it operates as a form of radical theorizing and critique prompted by the idea that values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may be a site of isolation, domination, violence, and exclusion. The thriving debate on religion in international politics originally revolved around the ‘return of religion’ in IR. Scholars have focused on how religion could be incorporated into existing conceptual and political frameworks by exploring its contribution to processes of modernization, democratization, and peace building and its wider implications for future world orders. The recent debate on postsecularism, however, has more radical connotations which encompass the idea of a paradigm shift. This is an attempt to move beyond the secular and thus the secular/religious divide, which can be considered one of the foundational dimensions of Western secular modernity. The question raised by the postsecular, then, is not just one of incorporation of the presence of religion into existing theoretical frameworks, but one of conceptual innovation to account for a transformation which affects the very structures of consciousness and power, and existing understandings of political community. The importance of this transformation surfaces in the latest work of Jürgen Habermas, the thinker who, probably more than anyone else, has contributed to igniting the current debate on postsecularism. For Habermas (2008a, p. 20), postsecularism is a ‘change in consciousness’ that characterizes traditionally secular societies, such as European ones. This change stems from, on the one hand, the perceived emergence of increasingly pluralistic societies, where a growing number of citizens are bearers of religious convictions, which calls for the elaboration of new DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-24

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frameworks of public engagement and civic coexistence; and, on the other, from the crisis of secularism and secular consciousness, characterized by a progressive fragmentation of values and an underlying incapacity to address pressing ethical and political questions (such as euthanasia or social justice) in a context of increasing neoliberal globalization (Habermas, 2008a). These two questions, according to Habermas, demand new sources of moral inspiration and interpretation and suggest that ‘the modernization of public consciousness’ can no longer be conceived solely as the secularization of religious sensibilities, but demands a reflexive cooperative effort of both secular and religious mentalities (Habermas, 2008b, p. 310). Religion can thus act as a reservoir of moral resources for the secular domain. The debate on postsecularism has primarily focused on the normative implications of this argument by discussing the possibility of ‘a model of law and politics in which religious arguments are not excluded from political debate’ (Cooke, 2007, p. 225), in order to face the challenges of pluralism, cohesion, and integration in a globalized world in which secularism no longer or not always seems to be capable of providing the framework in which democratic participation, freedom, equality, justice, and inclusion may be achieved. A  second, interconnected, but less studied dimension of postsecularism concerns the underlying politics of resistance to neoliberal market rationalities that characterizes this concept. Once again Habermas seems to suggest this path when he argues that postsecularism is an attempt to rescue a ‘pure practical reason’ that ‘can no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernization spinning out of control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice’ and to oppose the disruptive forces of ‘markets and administrative powers’ which ‘are displacing social solidarity’ (Habermas, 2008b, pp. 211 and 111). As Mariano Barbato (2010, p. 549) points out, postsecularism for Habermas is the use of ‘religious semantic potential’ to oppose ‘the pathologies of neoliberal modernisation and globalisation’. Similarly, Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont (2013, p. 32) describe it as ‘an expression of resistance to prevailing injustices under neoliberal global capitalism, and an energy and hope in something that brings more justice for all citizens’. This chapter introduces these two dimensions of the contemporary debate on postsecularism in IR. It starts by looking at Habermas’ understanding of postsecularism and argues that, despite its merit and achievements, his perspective is shaped by an ultimately secular logic that reduces religion to a set of cognitive choices and a function in broader processes of social production, using it instrumentally to address the crisis of secularism by leaving the political authority of the latter fundamentally unchallenged. This, in turn, neglects religion as tradition, practice, and lived experience, an ineffable phenomenon that means different things and indeed cannot always be identified in different contexts. These problems, we argue, rest on a disembodied and cognitive understanding of religion and, accordingly, of postsecularism. In the second section, we discuss the role of emotions in shaping a contending ‘embodied’ understanding of postsecularism. We analyse how cognitive and embodied understandings of postsecularism need not be seen in opposition but can work in cooperation. This requires reconsidering the traditional boundaries between secularism and religion and considering the authority of secularism as a power/knowledge regime that shapes contemporary forms of religiosity and practices of solidarity. To illustrate this argument, we explore contemporary discourses surrounding migration, particularly those concerning responsibility for the deaths of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in the attempt to reach Europe, and how they reproduce in a secular fashion an underlying theological argument (theodicy) that blames the migrants for their own deaths. We discuss how faith-based organizations may be considered postsecular agents who resist this logic, and whose contribution encompasses both reasoned argumentations in the public sphere and embodied practices of solidarity towards migrants. 300

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In the third section, we further explore the contentious issue of the boundary between secularism and religion by questioning Habermas’ idea of the market as the ultimate expression of secular reason. For Habermas (2008b, p. 107), the market is the incarnation of a secularism which has enslaved the modern subject in ‘mechanisms of instrumental action guided by individual preferences’ and the ‘uncontrolled dynamics of the global economy’. Religion as a reservoir of moral resources can help remoralize the market by freeing the individual from the latter’s totalizing instrumental rationality. For Habermas the market is thus in need of an urgent postsecular shift. We contend that the market is already a postsecular entity that combines both secular and religious rationalities, semantics, and modes of argumentation. The religious rationalities that govern the market, however, are not the regenerative forces that should oppose the neoliberal logics of profit, exploitation, and extraction, but modes of belief and acts of faith which have contributed to the sacralization of the market. The latter has become a partially unknown domain, system of relations, and epistemic framework that cannot be questioned or challenged. We suggest that the postsecular sacralization of the market is closely connected to the emergence of a sacrificial order in which individuals and populations regarded as superfluous or even detrimental to the needs of the market – such as the dispossessed, the indebted, the stateless, the poor, and the undocumented migrants – can be disposed of on the altar of economic value. The conclusion explores some of the implications of the arguments advanced in the chapter for future research agendas on postsecularism in IR.

Habermas’ cognitive account of postsecularism For most of his career, Habermas has overlooked the constitutive role of religion in the public sphere by endorsing a model of dialogic interaction based upon secular rationality. However, since the mid-2000s, he has started to question the extent to which the ideal of a common human reason as the epistemic justification for the secular state can demand that citizens with religious beliefs act in the public sphere as if they were devoid of any religious conviction (Habermas, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Habermas and Ratzinger, 2007; Habermas et al., 2011). The problem, Habermas argues, is that ‘many religious citizens would not be able to undertake such an artificial division within their own minds without jeopardizing their existence as pious persons’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 8). Moreover, should the secular state discourage religious persons and communities from expressing themselves politically, it would risk cutting ‘itself off from key resources for the creation of meaning and identity. Secular citizens or those of other religious persuasions can under certain circumstances learn something from religious contributions’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 10). ‘We should respect the “power of articulation” of religious language and recover the “regenerative power” it offers for a “dwindling normative consciousness” ’, yet ‘without burning the bridges to secular languages and cultures’ (Habermas, cited in Harrington, 2007, p. 544). To make room for religious contributions in the public sphere, Habermas (2006, p. 9) suggests drawing a line between ‘informal public sphere’, where religious reason can flow unconstrained, and ‘institutional public sphere’, where only secular reason counts. This separation means that for religious beliefs to have institutional representation, they must be ‘translated’ into secular language. Separation and translation are for Habermas essential requirements: separation to protect religious and cultural minorities; translation to allow the wider public – be it secular or of a different faith – to understand and subject religious arguments to rational scrutiny. This understanding of postsecularism is grounded in a shift from traditional to more reflexive forms of secular and religious consciousnesses (what Habermas would call ‘postconventional morality’) capable of questioning their own limitations and recognizing the reciprocal validity of their 301

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respective arguments. For Habermas, postsecularism is an ethos grounded in the mind: it is the outcome of a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious citizens, both conceived as the expression of a postconventional consciousness capable of reflecting upon itself and using religion in a way that may help us ‘express our best moral intuitions without tearing down the bridges to secular languages and cultures’ (Habermas cited in Harrington, 2007, p. 544), thus keeping the boundaries of knowledge and faith firmly in place, preventing that reason may succumb to the potentially ‘irrational effusion’ of religious motives (Habermas, 2008b, p. 243). Habermas’ account has received two main criticisms. First, it restates the primacy of secular reason, as it requires that for religious arguments to have a space in the institutional public sphere, they be ‘translated’ into secular language. For Fred Dallmayr (2012, p. 968), however, the Habermasian idea that ‘there is a standard [secular] public discourse whose language is readily accessible’ is ‘a myth of the Enlightenment’. He asks: are not modern rationalist texts, from Kant to Rawls, ‘exceedingly difficult texts constantly in need of interpretation and re-interpretation, and hence of translation into more accessible language? . . . Do the judgments of courts not always involve the interpretation, application, and thus practical translation of earlier legal texts, precedents, and judicial opinions? And do members of parliament not always claim to interpret, apply and hence translate the will of the “people”?’ (Dallmayr, 2012, p. 968). The second main criticism concerns Habermas’ instrumental notion of religion, which reduces the latter to a set of cognitive choices and a function in broader processes of social production, where religion’s main (and somehow paradoxical) task is to address the crisis of instrumental secular reason. This perspective, Luca Mavelli suggests (2012), is the product of a dualistic image of human nature as the unstable mixture of body and soul, which in turn supports an idea of critique and emancipation as a process of transcendence of the body. This understanding finds its most systematic instantiation in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant conceived of man as ‘homo duplex’, that is, as a ‘sensibly affected rational being’ split between the ‘freedom of pure intellect’ (‘a rational nature . . . shared with God and the angels’) and the ‘desires of a sensuous nature’ (Hunter, 2002, pp. 911, 910). For Kant, our bodily and sensuous nature is ‘morally corrupting’, as it constrains our capacity to join ‘the world of pure, self-governing intelligences’ (Hunter, 2002, p. 912), where all concepts have the status of universal frameworks of moral and practical action. Accordingly, Kant grounded the possibility of critique and emancipation on an impulse of self-transcendence whereby the individual rises above the bodily/phenomenal/empirical world to join the transcendental world of pure intellect. Kant, however, deemed traditional religion as an essential component of this process of self-transcendence for two main reasons. First, religion can act as a motivational force that may elicit a moral life. As Emmet Kennedy (2006, p. 138) explains, ‘Kant thought it impossible to act morally if there were no sanctions to do so . . . He feared how we would be apt to act, if there were no ultimate reward or punishment. If the soul is mortal and all ends at death, man can calculate his pleasures and pains as he likes (hedonism)’. Second, religion endows the secular with an understanding of critique as a process of self-transcendence where communion with God is replaced by communion with our ‘higher intellect’, that is, our soul. However, according to Kant, once traditional religion has motivated us to act morally and embrace a communion with our soul, it should leave the scene to ‘rational religion’, namely a ‘universal moral faith’ that, under the checks of reason, can perform its role of guardianship and source of inspiration for moral life. Habermas’ idea of postsecularism actualizes Kant’s notion of rational religion. Whereas for Kant traditional religion could act as a source of moral persuasion (often through the threat of eternal sanction), for Habermas it is a reservoir of moral resources. Whereas for Kant traditional religion provided a model of self-transcendence that enables the individual to grasp the universal 302

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law of morality, for Habermas it is part of the dialogic interaction between secular and religious mentalities that may enable us to ‘express our best moral intuitions’. However, inasmuch as Kant considered that ultimately traditional religion should leave the scene for a universal rational form of religion, so Habermas conceives postsecularism as a domain in which secular reason has precedence and traditional religion can find a space only if translated into secular language. Finally, if Kant considered that rational religion was only possible through a process of transcendence of the senses, for Habermas the only dimension of traditional religion that may enable a postsecular public sphere concerns its cognitive moral aspects. Accordingly, Habermas focuses on religion’s semantic potential and almost completely overlooks religion as a sensory and lived experience, practice, emotions, mode of subjectivation, or community of believers. Habermas, in other words, neglects the embodied dimension of religion as the latter is conceived as something that can undermine religion’s semantic potential and lead to ‘irrational effusion’. Habermas’ postsecularism as an ideal of critique and resistance to the crisis and instrumental rationality of secularism is based on a disembodied rendering of religion. This requires a shift from traditional to postsecular forms of religious allegiances. Once properly translated into secular language (i.e. once turned postsecular), the moral intuitions of the former can be useful to address the crisis of secular reason. This view thus rests on a Kantian process of transcendence of the body, which supports an understanding of critique, emancipation, and resistance as part of the search for universal structures to oppose to the fluctuation of our empirical, emotional, and embodied condition. This rendering of postsecularism has three main limitations. First, by neglecting the body and emotions and confining postsecularism to the instrumental use of the moral teachings of religion to cure the distortions of secularism, Habermas’ approach makes it impossible to grasp the emotional dimension of postsecular resistance and the extent to which it may be linked to embodied practices. Second, Habermas’ view relies on a rather stark separation between secularism and religion. Yet, if one considers Carl Schmitt’s (2007, p. 42) famous argument that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ and embraces the idea that secularism and religion may be political categories whereby regimes of power and knowledge are deployed, the possibility emerges that the boundary that separates them, and the related separation between ‘cognitive’ and ‘embodied’, may not be as ‘hard’ as Habermas suggests. Third, Habermas, like Kant before him, bases his idea of what ‘religion’ is on predominantly European experiences of Christianity. Thus, both Kantian notions of ‘rational religion’ and Habermasian postsecularism are highly Eurocentric, homogenize diverse forms of Christianity into the single category of ‘religion’ and ignore other varieties of belief, ritual, practice, and world-making. These arguments will be explored in the next section by looking at the case of faith-based organization and migration.

Towards a cognitive and embodied postsecularism: the case of faith-based organization and migration Some contemporary discourses surrounding migration reproduce in a secular fashion an underlying theological discourse – theodicy – which blames the migrants for their own misfortune. This logic is particularly evident in narratives surrounding the appalling conditions in which migrants and asylum seekers are often kept by government authorities across Europe, the USA and Australia, and the callous way in which the deaths of migrants during migration journeys are discussed by some politicians and media pundits. In January 2022, thanks to the controversy surrounding Novak Djokovic’s Covid-19 vaccination status ahead of the Australian Tennis Open, the plight of a group of male asylum seekers being held in the Park Hotel in Melbourne came to public attention. Most of the men in the Park Hotel had been in detention for nine 303

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years, with more than two of those years spent at the hotel. Prior to being incarcerated in the hotel, most had been held in Australia’s offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, then transferred to the mainland for medical treatment. Conditions on Nauru and Manus are widely acknowledged to be terrible. Detainees were deprived of their mobile phones, only allowed to make phone calls approximately once a month. Health care was limited to visits by nurses who generally only gave out paracetamol (Boochani 2018). Numerous detainees suffered from depression and anxiety, as a result of traumas they had previously experienced and made more acute by the atrocious conditions in the centres, with regular suicide attempts (Cave, 2017). They were also not allowed access to materials to occupy their time, such as games or hobbies (Boochani 2018). They were only allowed out to attend medical appointments, in some cases windows had been screwed shut preventing access to fresh air. They were fed mouldy, maggot-infested food, and regularly had bugs in their rooms (Zhuang and Cave, 2022). Most disturbingly, there was no clear indication of when their detention would come to an end or what, if anything, they could do themselves to expedite that. When asked about the situation of the men in detention, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated: ‘it’s not clear that to my information that someone in that case is actually a refugee. They may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and have chosen not to return’ (quoted in Hurst, Martin, and Doherty, 2022). The Prime Minister’s statement lays the blame for the dire situation with the men themselves. It is a result of their own choices that they have been detained indefinitely in these conditions, not the responsibility of the Australian government. The men literally exist in a state of bare life – biologically, they are alive, yet the way their life is lived is in the shadows, prevented from experiencing life in its fullness (Agamben, 1998). This obfuscation of responsibility and blame for their own misfortune is not new, however, when it comes to government responses to the plight of people seeking asylum. Consider, for instance, the October 2014 UK government announcement that it would no longer support search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean on the grounds that such operations are ‘an unintended “pull factor”, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths’ (Travis, 2014) The construction and distribution of responsibility that frames this argument portrays the migrants as fundamentally irresponsible as they have chosen to embark on a journey that between January and September 2014 saw 3,000 people lose their lives (Brian and Laczko, 2014), and 20,000 deaths in the 20 years prior to that (Schenker, 2013). Since 2014, however, the number of deaths has sky-rocketed, with an estimated 24,039 people having drowned or gone missing attempting to cross the Mediterranean (https://missingmigrants.iom.int). Blaming the migrants for their own deaths is made possible by deliberately neglecting the ‘push factors’ behind the lives packed on the precarious boats crossing the Mediterranean, namely extreme poverty, persecution, war, famines, and genocide, amongst others, with migrants turned into weapons by European fears of invasion and unscrupulous regimes such as Gaddafi’s and the Islamic State in Libya. By ignoring these ‘push factors’, the UK could portray itself as a responsible actor, whose responsibility consists in letting the irresponsible migrants drown to prevent future ‘unnecessary deaths’. In this account, the migrants are the only ones to blame for their own death. The UK is by no means alone in such a harsh stance, with successive Australian governments using similar logic to justify the excision of the entire Australian mainland from the migration zone for anyone arriving by boat, the ‘stop the boats’ policy of the mid-2010s, and the decision to leave the bodies of drowned asylum seekers in the ocean. As Maley (2013) points out, such policies are not about ‘saving lives’ or preventing ‘unnecessary deaths’. ‘The real message of the . . . Australian [and UK] approach is a simple one: “Go and die somewhere else” ’.

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This logic enables the construction of migrants as bare lives, namely lives that can be ‘killed with impunity’ (Agamben, 1998). They can be killed by the violence of the secular law (even though they have not yet violated any law), which has decreed the halt of search and rescue operations, and the necessity of indefinite detention, despite its demonstrated harm to the physical and mental well-being of detainees. Crucially, migrants can also be denied compassion for their tragic destiny, since according to this discourse, their plight is the result of their own choices. They are the ones to blame for their own tragedy. This condemnation, we argue, can be understood as a form of secular theodicy or sociodicy. Theodicy concerns the problems of how to reconcile the existences of God with the presence of evil in the world, namely, ‘How is it that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind could have created such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice and hopeless stupidity?’ (Weber, 1946). According to Max Weber (1946), the question of theodicy is the fundamental question of all religions, which they have addressed by inscribing suffering, injustice, and violence in the inscrutable God-given order of creation. However, Weber contends, with the process of secularization and the emergence of a human-made order, theodicy does not disappear, but simply secularizes. Suffering, violence, and inequality no longer find their meaning and justification in God, but either in the greater good (of society, the state, the economy) or as the outcome of individual (ir)responsibility. Secular theodicies include, for instance, the liberal idea that income inequalities can be an incentive for the worst-off to improve their condition with overall benefits for society as a whole through ‘the invisible hand’ of the market (Elster, 1981) or, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 2003), neoliberalism as a whole. The latter, Bourdieu argues, ‘justifies suffering on the ground that it is necessary for economic progress’ and legitimates a ‘racism of intelligence’ which depicts the poor as ‘intellectually incapable’ and therefore responsible for their own condition. When it comes to the drowned migrants, the underlying secular theodicy behind their double condemnation enables the projection of responsibility whereby they are considered to merely deserve their due. In this framework, letting migrants drown or wallow indefinitely in detention centres becomes rational and instrumental to ensure that the social fabric will not be destroyed by the presence of ‘others’, that jobs will not be taken, that identities will be preserved. These deterrence-driven policies towards migrants raise two important questions in relation to Habermas’ argument on the postsecular. First, while the justification to hold migrants indefinitely in detention or not rescue them from the sea is secular and rational, its underlying logic rests on and reproduces a theological discourse. In fact, one may argue that the justification not to save drowning migrants or to hold them in distant detention centres shrouded in secrecy is not rational, but purely instrumental, as it exploits popular emotional and irrational fears of ‘strangers’. And yet, from the government’s perspective it may be absolutely rational to pander to these feelings for the purpose of preserving power. What seems certain is that at the heart of the matter there is an ultimately dehumanizing logic that constructs migrants as a security issue rather than human beings in need of solidarity. Habermas’ critique of a secular instrumental reason dominated by the disruptive forces of ‘markets and administrative powers’ which ‘are displacing social solidarity’ and incapable to address pressing ethical and political questions speaks to this case. However, the postsecular solution he advocates – drawing on the moral intuitions of faith to infuse values into the secular domain – rests on the problematic assumption that secularism and religion are two different and clearly demarcated worldviews. As the previous discussion suggests, however, these two domains may often be indistinguishable. If this is the case, postsecularism cannot be conceived solely as the cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious views but should be the very attempt to question

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these categories whenever they are employed to justify forms of violence, oppression, and exclusion. To this end, we contend, the cognitive effort cannot be thought in isolation from emotional and embodied practices of resistance. Grassroots actors involved in forced migration are a case in point, transcending the religious/ secular divide and engaging in embodied practices of solidarity and resistance with asylum seekers and refugees. These practices have emerged largely in response to the secular theodicies described earlier, where asylum seekers and refugees are criminalized, cast as lawbreakers, ‘queue jumpers’, and potential terrorists (Abbott, 2014), justifying increasingly harsh policies of marginalization and exclusion. Faith-based actors’ resistance to these policies draws on traditions of sanctuary and asylum that exist across numerous religious traditions (Wilson, 2011). Actions range from providing housing assistance, food, education, and health care; billeting asylum seekers with host families to build understanding (Stapleton, 2014); visiting and praying with asylum seekers in detention centres (Wilson, 2014); and non-violent protest. On the US-Mexico border, faith-based organizations are engaged in providing water, food, and protection to prevent migrants dying horrible deaths from dehydration and exposure (Humane Borders, 2022). Grassroots actors draw on a range of resources, both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, to critique and challenge the theodicies underlying governments’ asylum policies, offering alternative moral frameworks that utilize ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ arguments to recast migration as a humanitarian rather than a security issue, and emphasize common bonds of shared humanity between asylum seekers and host populations. Let us consider two cases exemplifying cognitive and embodied postsecular resistance to secular theodicy. Led by a group of multidenominational Christian leaders and including activists from many and no faith traditions, Love Makes a Way (LMAW) is a protest movement in Australia, self-consciously positioned as a continuation of the non-violent civil disobedience engaged in by Martin Luther King Jr and his followers during the US Civil Rights Movement (Gray, 2015). LMAW’s main goal is to raise awareness about the plight of children in detention and campaign for their release. Protesters conduct ‘prayins’ at the offices of Australian parliamentarians (Wilson, 2014). When asked to leave, the protesters refuse, saying they will stay until they are told when all children will be released from detention. Consequently, 138 protesters have been arrested and charged, approximately half of whom are clergy and nuns. Some have been strip searched by police. To date, however, subsequent court hearings have resulted in all charges being dismissed, or small fines (Gray, 2015). Following one court hearing, protesters stripped to their underwear outside the courtroom before walking to the Foreign Affairs Minister’s office as an act of defiance in response to being strip searched by police. As the activists were disrobing, spokesperson Jarrod McKenna read from Matthew 5:38–44, going on to say, ‘Those who thought that strip searches would be enough to stop us; well, we serve with Jesus, who was strip-searched before he went to the cross’ (Wahlquist, 2015). McKenna’s statement, coupled with the simultaneous act of stripping by the protesters, is a moment in which the cognitive and embodied practices of postsecular resistance can be clearly seen operating together. A second example is the Palm Sunday ‘Walk for justice for refugees’. While Palm Sunday has historically been a focal point of many left-leaning protest and resistance movements, since 2014 in Australia the marches have focused specifically on opposing the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Participants range from religious leaders, lay people, activists, unionists, people of all faiths and none (Lillebuen, 2014). Protesters assemble outside landmarks in capital cities then march through central business areas. Through the physical act

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Figure 21.1 Love Makes a Way protesters march, wearing signs reading ‘Refugees are People’, from the Perth Court House to the Offices of Julie Bishop, MP, then Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Source: Author photo

of gathering and walking together, disrupting traffic, and carrying signs such as ‘Jesus was a refugee’, protesters engage in embodied acts of resistance, while at the same time, through speeches given by leading figures in business, the arts, and civil society, the cognitive form of postsecular resistance is also visible. At the 2015 Perth gathering, acclaimed Australian author Tim Winton delivered a speech exemplifying the postsecular resistance we are describing in this chapter. Winton challenged the secular theodicy underlying government policies, offering an alternative theodicy in which the Australian government and the fear and apathy of the Australian public are responsible for the fate of asylum seekers, not the migrants themselves: So great and so wild is our fear, we can no longer see them [asylum seekers] as people, as fellow humans. First, we criminalised them. Then, we turned them into faceless objects .  .  . for someone seeking asylum, someone arriving by boat, this special species of creature called a “boat person” . . . Pity is forbidden. All the usual standards are overturned. Their legal right to seek asylum is denied. They’re vilified as “illegals”. And their suffering is denied. As if they’re not our brothers and sisters. Yes, we hate suffering. But apparently their kind of suffering is no longer legitimate. And therefore, it’s no longer our problem. Our moral and legal obligations to help them are null and void. (Winton, 2015)

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Figure 21.2 Sign reading ‘Jesus was a Refugee’ from the 2015 Palm Sunday March for Justice for Refugees in Melbourne, Australia. Source: Author photo

Figure 21.3 Sign reading ‘Jesus, Mary + Joseph/The Most Famous Refugees/St David’s Uniting Church/ Oakleigh’ from the 2015 Palm Sunday March for Justice for Refugees in Melbourne, Australia. Source: Author photo

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Winton offers an alternative moral framework that draws on both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ resources, including ‘mateship’ and ‘a fair go’, themes central to Australian national identity. He draws on imagery and narratives from the Christian tradition to critique dominant attitudes towards asylum seekers, while at the same time lauding secular egalitarianism as a defining characteristic of Australia: There’s a punitive spirit abroad, something closer to Victorian England than the modern, secular, egalitarian country I love . . . In this country, a nation built upon people fleeing brutes and brutality for 200 years, we have a tradition of fairness and decency and openness of which we’re rightly proud. Whether we’re inspired by the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan, the universal dignity of humankind, or the sanctity of the individual, we’ve always thought it low and cowardly to avert our gaze from someone in trouble or need, to turn our face from them as though they did not exist . . . That’s where our tradition of mateship comes from. Not from closing ranks against the outsider, but from lifting someone else up, helping them out, resisting the cowardly urge to walk by . . . Now, of course, we don’t see faces. And that’s no accident. The government hides them from us . . . Asylum seekers are rendered as objects, creatures, cargo, contraband, and criminals. And so, quite deliberately, the old common sense of human decency is supplanted by a new consensus . . . Jesus said: “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world only to lose his soul?” And I wonder: What does it profit a people to do likewise, to shun the weak and punish the oppressed, to cage children, and make criminals out of refugees? What about our soul as a people? (Winton, 2015) Winton’s speech, arguably, is not a call to a particular kind of secular or religious ethics, but a plea for an ethics that transcends such divisions and instead focuses on a sense of common humanity, a postsecular ethics, a plea echoed and taken up by numerous actors involved in asylum politics, within and beyond Australia. We have argued, in this section, that the secular/religious divide underpinning much Western political practice and analysis of religion in IR must be rethought, moving away from understanding this division as a description of worldviews and instead conceiving the secular and the religious as political categories where regimes of knowledge and power are (re)produced, the line between these political categories far more blurred than Habermasian postsecularism acknowledges. The analysis of the politics of contemporary forced migration highlights how the secular and the religious operate in this way, firstly in the logic employed by state powers to exclude asylum seekers, which, following Weber, we have described as secular theodicies, and secondly in the responses of grassroots actors challenging and resisting these secular theodicies. Not only do these grassroots actors transcend the division between religious and secular, they also employ cognitive and embodied forms of postsecular resistance to challenge secular formations of power that oppress and exclude. This analysis advances an idea of the postsecular that challenges the secular/religious divide, as well as the argument that, rather than remoralizing the secular, the religious may contribute to accentuate the latter’s distortions. As the theodicy of migrant deaths analysed in this section has shown, religious discourses, practices, and semantics may be deploye in conjunction with secular logics to justify forms of violence, oppression, and exclusion. In the next section, we explore this argument in greater detail by considering the case of the sacralization of the market. 309

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The postsecular sacralization of the market The idea of postsecularism as the use of ‘religious semantic potential’ to oppose ‘the pathologies of neoliberal modernisation and globalisation’ (Barbato, 2010, p. 549) can be read as a continuation of Weber’s famous thesis of the secularization of the market and attempt to reverse its tragic outcome. For Weber (1946 [1919a], pp. 122–123), religion is not a timeless dimension of life but the first systematic attempt to address ‘the experience of the irrationality of the world’ as manifested by ‘undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice and hopeless stupidity’. Religion is thus, at its inception, the attempt to rationalize the irrational of the human condition. Ironically, however, the very advancement of the process of rationalization marked by the emergence of modern science contributed to shift religion ‘into the realm of the irrational’ (Weber, 1946 [1915], p. 281). As a result, Weber contends, science and bureaucratic rationality have replaced religion as dominant rationalizing frameworks. The emergence of modern capitalism is the epitome of this process. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2003 [1905]), Weber famously argues that the main driver behind the development of capitalism was ascetic Protestantism. In particular, the Calvinist notion of predestination – the idea that economic and social success may be taken as an indication of future salvation decreed by God – became a disciplinary force that commanded virtuous and sober behaviours compliant with religious precepts. However, scientific rationalism advanced a process of secularization (which Weber labels ‘disenchantment’) that resulted in the progressive separation of the spheres of religion, morality, and the sacred from that of the economy. Accordingly, the original religious rationale for the process of capitalist accumulation – the Calvinist sacred calling – was eventually replaced by the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism, namely, ‘the technical and economic conditions of machine production’ and ‘care for external good’ – that is, mass consumption – ‘which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force’ (Weber, 2003 [1905], p. 181). Capitalism for Weber is a secularized version of the Protestant ethic. It is a regime of norms, practices, and aspirations devoid of sacred religious meanings and governed by a bureaucratic rationality that is ultimately an ‘iron cage’ that imprisons modern individuals into a ‘meaningless’ pattern of accumulation and consumption. In the remainder of this section, we wish to challenge this ‘secularist’ reading of capitalism and show how a postsecular reading reveals that the market, far from being a secular domain, has been increasingly sacralized (Mavelli, 2020, 2022). To this end, two trajectories of postsecular sacralization must be considered: one connected to the totalizing process of commodification and one resulting from an ‘epistemology of limited knowledge’ (Walker and Cooper, 2011) that understands the market as a transcendent entity. It has long been argued that capitalism commodifies everything, namely, that it turns every aspect, dimension, domain, space, feeling, and object of human existence into something that can be exchanged for money (Brown, 2015). Commodification can therefore be theorized as the inverse of the process of consecration or sacralization (Agamben, 2007). As philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2007, p.  73) observes, for Roman jurists, ‘[s]acred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could be neither sold nor held in lien, neither given for usufruct nor burdened by servitude’. To ‘belong to the gods’ does not exclusively mean to belong to an otherworldly domain. For Immanuel Kant, for instance, feelings of piety, compassion, solidarity, dignity, and empathy should be regarded as sacred because, albeit experienced and practised immanently, they belong to the transcendental domain of universal morality. By desacralizing these principles through their incorporation into the market system, the totalizing process of commodification leaves no outside domain from which the neoliberal market can be questioned 310

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or challenged. The paradoxical result, Agamben observes, is that the ‘commodification of everything’ entails the very sacralization of the market as a transcendent domain that, following Émile Durkheim’s (1995 [1912], p. 44) classical definition of the sacred, is ‘set apart and forbidden’, hence turned into a source of truth and revelation that cannot be subjected to rational scrutiny but only worshipped. The question that the market has been sacralized and neoliberalism turned into a quasireligion has forcefully emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression. Numerous authoritative scholars have described this crisis as the product of ‘theological free-market ideology’ (Eric Hobsbawm, cited in Peck et al., 2009, p. 99) and ‘market fundamentalism’ (Block and Somers, 2014, p. 3) which have become ‘the prevailing religion of the West’ (Stiglitz, 2009, p. 346). Far from being a purely secular domain governed by instrumental rationality, the neoliberal market has turned into a realm of ‘quasi-religious certainty’ (Leeson, 2013, p. 147). In the face of the growing inequality, casualization of labour, impoverishment, and a relentless pattern of local and global economic crises since the end of the 1970s, the celebration of the self-organizing and self-healing capacities of the market – which should be left untouched by human intervention according to the apostles of neoliberalism – suggests a mode of reasoning based on ‘revelation’ rather than ‘empirical verification’ (Block and Somers, 2014, p. 3). To understand how the market has acquired the postsecular status of quasi-transcendent domain beyond human governance that blurs the traditional secular/religious divide, we need to consider the argument of Friedrich Hayek, widely regarded as one of the most important forefathers of neoliberalism. According to Hayek (2005 [1944], p.  210), the idea that human beings may govern the market to improve its functioning is the expression of an ‘erroneous rationalism’, namely, the mistaken presumption that human minds may have greater computational capacity than the market. For Hayek, markets are ‘complex systems’ comprising an extraordinarily high number of variables that greatly exceed the human capacity to grasp them in their totality. At the same time, markets also have an innate and spontaneous capacity to produce order, progress, and growth (Hayek, 1967; see also Walker and Cooper, 2011). Hence, any human attempt to intervene on the market will negatively affect its performance and potentially threaten our freedom by establishing new forms of tyranny. Tyranny is for Hayek a direct consequence of the hubris of scientific knowledge. By claiming an unprecedented ability to grasp and successfully intervene upon the complexity of the market, scientific rationalism endows ‘other men’ in the guise of communist dictators, socialist planners, leftist redistributionists, and central bankers with the ‘arbitrary power’ to compress our freedom (Hayek, 2005 [1944], pp. 204–205). It follows that the only way to escape the ‘serfdom of the individual’ and defend our liberty ‘rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us’ (Hayek, 2011 [1960], p. 80), namely, on the recognition that individuals only possess scattered fragments of knowledge, and that government cannot overcome the inherent unknowability of the market. To preserve our freedom, Hayek intimates, it is paramount to believe in the truth of the market in very much the same way that ‘men in the past’ used to believe in the truth of religious traditions. Hayek (1988, p. 137) admits that this faith in the market is ultimately not ‘verifiable or testable’. Yet, he maintains, the very advancement of progress and civilization is also the product of ‘beliefs which are not true . . . in the same sense as are scientific statements and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation’ (Hayek, 1988, p. 137). These beliefs or ‘symbolic truths’, as Hayek (1988, p. 137) describes them by citing The Book of Genesis, have forcefully encouraged ‘their adherents to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1, 28)’. Indeed, he concludes, ‘nonfactual beliefs’ have been essential for the establishment of ‘the extended order that we now enjoy’ to the effect 311

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that ‘now the loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, creates great difficulties’ (Hayek, 1988, p. 137). It can be inferred that for Hayek the Weberian process of disenchantment – the shift from religious rationalism to scientific rationalism and the related downgrading of ‘belief ’ to the sphere of the irrational – threatens the advancement of human civilization (Mavelli, 2022, p.  179). Weber’s (1946 [1919b], p.  139) famous idea that, with modernity, ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ becomes for Hayek the very condition of possibility for the ‘erroneous rationalism’ (Hayek, 2005 [1944], p. 210) and ‘pretence of knowledge’ (Hayek, 1989) that pose a grave threat to human freedom. Hence, to be free and to advance our material and civilizational wellbeing, we have no choice but to bow to the inscrutable mysteries of the market by abandoning our ‘pretence of knowledge’ (Hayek, 1989), confessing our ignorance, and letting ourselves be guided by the wisdom of a superior intellect – the neoliberal market – whose impenetrable design we can neither understand nor grasp in its totality. Hayek’s idea of the neoliberal market offers a remarkable instantiation of postsecularism as a process of transcendence of the secular/religious divide. His approach mixes secular and religious registers. It blurs the divides between science and faith, facts and beliefs, the secular and the religious, as well as the practical and moral divide between knowledge and ignorance. In an almost mystical and transcendent turn, it gestures towards the unknowability and inscrutability of the market, thus asking for an act of faith in its inherent goodness. Yet, this act of faith is justified in purely secular and rational terms concerning the epistemological limits of scientific knowledge. The result is a postsecular process of dislocation of religious and secular discourses that constantly blurs the boundary between sacred and profane. The neoliberal market is sacralized, and yet its sacralization does not seemingly rest on revelation but on a secular rationality that reveals the inherent epistemological limits of our capacity to know due to the sheer complexity of the market. And yet again, Hayek’s secular scientific reasoning also crucially encompasses an element of revelation, a leap of faith, in the natural goodness of the market (Mavelli, 2022, pp. 179–180). As Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung perceptively observe: [I]f it is true that we cannot sufficiently understand the factors and dynamics of the market so that we can intervene in it, how can we know that the market always produces beneficial effects or that it is essentially a ‘force for good?’ Is knowing that the market always produces beneficial effects not a pretension of knowledge of the market? Since one cannot prove this providential character of the market, we have here a ‘leap of faith’ in the affirmation of the essentially beneficent quality of free market. (Míguez et al., 2009, p. 82) For Hayek, the ultimate justification for trusting the market is the expression of an eminently scientific and secular rational argument: our epistemological incapacity to fully grasp the complexity of the social world in its sheer intricacy. However, through a ‘leap of faith’, this secular approach ends up advocating trusting the market as a benevolent entity capable of delivering economic growth and advancing the pathway of human civilization. This reasoning performs a paradoxical subversion whereby it is rational to have faith in the market – even when the market delivers crisis, shocks, and failures – and it is irrational not to have faith in the market – as this would express a ‘pretence of knowledge’ that clashes with secular registers. The neoliberal market thus emerges simultaneously as a sacred and profane space that draws strength on competing frames of authority, and results in a power that transcends both secular and religious registers (Mavelli, 2022, p. 180). 312

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Hayek’s neoliberal market is ultimately a postsecular domain, yet not one in which religious traditions are as a reservoir of moral resources which can help govern, control, and smooth the excesses of a secular market rationality ‘spinning out of control’ (Habermas, 2008b, p. 211). Hayek’s postsecular market – the neoliberal market which over the last 40 years has become ‘the prevailing religion of the West’ (Stiglitz, 2009) – draws on religious frameworks of meaning and authority to justify, support, and further advance neoliberal rationalities of inequality, appropriation, dispossession, and sacrifice for those superfluous or detrimental to the needs of the market. These considerations suggest that postsecularism has a dark side beyond the benign and progressive discourse of inclusivity of religious traditions in the secular order that emerged in the mid-2000s. In the perpetual climate of crisis that since 2008 is gripping the global order (global financial crises, refugee crises, Covid pandemic, Russo-Ukrainian war) marked by a widespread decline of the human capacity to distinguish facts from beliefs and exercise critical judgement (the rise of fake news and so-called post-truth politics, which mimic modes of reasoning based on faith rather than reasoned argumentation), it is likely that this hidden, dark underside of postsecularism will become increasingly more prominent in the years to come.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the emergence of postsecularism as a form of critique and resistance to dominant secular, (neo)liberal ethics in contemporary IR. Much of the recent debate around postsecularism has been catalysed by the Habermasian approach, which, as we noted, is problematic as it operates from within the prevailing secular framework and logic. This is evident, firstly, in its construction of religion as a primarily cognitive activity, overlooking the embodied, lived, experiential dimensions of religion. Secondly, Habermas neglects the power of secularism, enabling it to construct religion in narrow ways and delimit where and when religion can appropriately enter and contribute to debates within the public sphere. In essence, then, Habermasian postsecularism reinforces rather than disrupts the secular/religious divide that underpins the structures and logics giving shape to contemporary Western politics and society. It is also primarily concerned with the potentially positive impacts of religious meaning and ethics in the public sphere, a position that overlooks the complicated blurring of secular and religious modalities in seemingly secular formations such as the market. Following on from this critique, we have suggested several ways in which the debate surrounding postsecularism may be expanded to address the shortcomings of the Habermasian approach and enable further nuance and complexity in the analysis of religion in IR. The first of these is shifting the focus of the postsecular from religion as a cognitive activity to understanding it as both cognitive and embodied. The discourses surrounding people seeking asylum show the limits of a purely cognitive account of postsecularism to move beyond a paradigm in which spheres of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are clearly demarcated. However, the necessity of a postsecular imagination capable to consider this embodied, practical, and experiential dimension of faith clashes with the cognitive understanding of religion sustained by the power/knowledge regime of Western secularism. The apprehension for any attempt at reconsidering the boundary between the secular and the religious, the rational and the emotional, is well summarized by Habermas: ‘[Once the] boundary between faith and knowledge becomes porous, and once religious motives force their way into philosophy under false pretences, reason loses its foothold and succumbs to irrational effusion’. The analysis in this chapter suggests two potential future research avenues on the postsecular in IR. First, although dominant, the Kantian-Habermasian perspective is not the only tradition 313

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of Western secularism. William Connolly (2006), for instance, has pointed in the direction of a minor Western tradition centred on the thought of Baruch Spinoza whose ‘metaphysical monism’ challenges the mind/body dualism, considering them as expressions of the same substance. This perspective, Connolly contends, advances an idea of ethics not as the search for universal categorical imperatives, but as an embodied-spiritual cultivation of ethical dispositions, resisting ‘the thin intellectualism that grips secularism – that is, the idea that thinking can be separated from its affective dimension and that exercises of the self and collective rituals merely represent or symbolize beliefs’ (Connolly, 2006, p. 84). The challenge for scholars of postsecularism in IR is thus to move beyond the Kantian-Habermasian ‘cognitive’ tradition of secularity by considering conceptual resources of contending secular traditions sensitive to emotions, and how these traditions may be ‘harness[ed] for radical purposes’ (Linklater, 1998) such as devising modes of subjectivity beyond the mind/body dualism or disclosing the power/knowledge inscriptions of existing secular formations. Second, the asylum case and the sacralization of neoliberal market ideology demonstrate that, contra Habermas, the secular and the religious are not distinct, separate worldviews but rather domains of knowledge and power that can be deployed to mutually constitute and reinforce one another in the service of or in resistance to sovereign power. Political actors articulating an implementation of the secular theodicy where migrants are blamed for their own fate are often the same political actors proclaiming the importance of Christianity in their own personal lives as well as the life of the nation. At the same time, activists involved in resisting the secular theodicies of governments on migration draw on both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, cognitive and embodied modes of resistance. This highlights that framing the postsecular as a cognitive cooperation between two worldviews does not do justice to the complex ways in which the secular and the religious are entangled, and how this entanglement can equally resist or facilitate regimes of oppression. As we have attempted to show, the postsecular involves rethinking subjectivity beyond the mind/body dichotomy; questioning the naturalness of the boundary that separates the secular and the religious; and challenging the idea that the postsecular may be an inherently benign force, particularly in those instances when religious rhetoric and argumentation are used to justify market rationalities of inequality and subjugation. The postsecular may offer a new critical edge to reconsider the very categories of critique and resistance by turning the boundary between the secular and the religious into a space in which new forms of embodied political agency and imagination may be observed. Yet to realize this potential, postsecular critique and analysis must move beyond its predominant preoccupation with Kant and Habermas, acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of religious and secular entanglements, and problematize the sacralization of the market as a manifestation of this ambiguity and blurring. Ultimately, postsecular critique cannot ignore that the dissolution of traditional secular-religious divides may generate hope but also monsters.

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22 INTEGRATING RELIGION INTO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox

Religion and International Relations (IR) theory have had a unique and interesting relationship. It is arguable that the modern system of international relations has some of its roots in religious conflict because the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was motivated by the desire to end international wars over religion. Despite this, until around the new millennium, few international relations scholars addressed religion (Hassner, 2013; Philpott, 2002). Yet today it is becoming increasingly clear that religion is an important influence on IR theory. There is an emerging body of work that recognizes and investigates this influence (Sandal and James, 2011; Snyder, 2011; Sandal and Fox, 2013). In this chapter, we discuss the multiple influences of religion on IR theory. We argue that religion is a multifaceted phenomenon which interacts with politics, society, and the economy in multiple ways. This is also true of its interaction with IR theory. Any one of these influences, by itself, would be worthy of note and the sum of these influences results in a combined impact that makes it one of the most important intervening variables in international relations. In addition, we discuss how one prominent IR theory strand, classical realism, can accommodate an understanding of these influences. This is not to argue that other prominent IR theories like neorealism, liberalism, constructivism, the English school, and Marxism have no explanatory power. Rather, we use classical realism to demonstrate how an understanding of religion can be integrated into the existing IR theory strands. For the purposes of this chapter, we define religion as a social and political phenomenon that influences aspects of politics, society, and the economy. Of course, religion is more than this, but this definition is sufficient for the purposes of this chapter – to determine religion’s influence in the international arena. This is because the discussion that follows focuses on what religion does and the nature of its influence in the specific context of international relations rather than what religion is (Fox, 2013, pp. 4–6).

Classical realism and religion While realism is not a monolithic school of thought, most thinkers within this school of IR theory agree on some basic parameters. States are the key unit of analysis, and they seek power in a competitive anarchic environment. Decision-makers are rational in that they have consistent and ordered preferences which they seek to achieve in a utility-maximizing manner. Many DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-25

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scholars of IR theory argue that realism cannot easily account for issues of culture and identity, including religion (Keohane and Nye, 1998; Lapid, 1996). Yet if one looks closely, the origins of realism did include religion in their thinking. Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, included multiple religious references. For Machiavelli “religion was something that demanded scrupulous attention, but its importance derived from its impact on the causes of men’s actions, not from its truth” (Preus, 1979, p. 173). For example, Machiavelli argues that “rulers . . . should uphold the basic principles of the religion which they practice in, and, of this be done it will be easy for them to keep their commonwealth religious, and, ion consequence, good and united . . . even though they be convinced it is quite fallacious” (Machiavelli, 1984 [1513], p. 168). Hobbes, in his book The Leviathan, recognized religion as a powerful motivational force. Yet all of these thinkers, while recognizing religion’s power to create outcomes in an anarchic world, warned political leaders against basing their policies upon moral considerations including matters of faith. Twentieth-century thinkers who are foundational to modern classical realism such as Hans Morgenthau make similar arguments (Fox and Sandal, 2013, pp. 31–35). Given this, we posit that religion is not foreign to realism, including its classical variant. Following we discuss several ways religion can influence international relations and how classical realism can accommodate an understanding of these influences.

Legitimacy While classical realism emphasized material power and interest, these concepts contain sufficient flexibility to include less tangible forms of power including legitimacy and persuasion. For example, Morgenthau (1956, pp. 8–9) argues that “power comprises anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man. Thus, power covers all social relationships which serve to that end, from physical violence to the most subtle and psychological ties by which one man controls another”. Niebuhr (1996, p. 260) similarly acknowledges many forms of power “from that of pure reason to that of pure physical force”. Along these lines, religion can lend legitimacy to governments as well as specific policies followed by governments (Brasnett, 2021). Legitimacy can be defined as “the normative belief by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed” (Hurd, 1999, p. 381). To convince another actor that your policy preference is legitimate is to convince them that you are correct, perhaps even morally correct, and that they should support your policies and the actions based on those policies, or at least not oppose them. Religion can be a potent tool in this arena and even shape threat perceptions and conflict patterns (Zellman and Brown, 2022). Religion can facilitate leaders’ desire to look relatable to their constituents and play a critical role in populist politics (Yabanci and Taleski, 2018; Sandal, 2021a). It can also help project power regionally and globally (Mandaville and Hamid, 2018). Religion can be a versatile tool of persuasion. Most religions are complex with multiple traditions upon which policy-makers can draw to justify different, and often contrasting policies. For example, most religious traditions can and have been used at various times to justify both policies of war and violence as well as peace and reconciliation (Sandal, 2012, Appleby, 2000). Perhaps this is why many US presidents have used religious imagery to support their foreign policies. Religion was a critical factor in the Trump administration’s foreign policy, partly due to the influence of the evangelicals among his electorate (Ülgül, 2021; Haynes, 2021). Ronald Reagan called the USSR an “evil empire”. George W. Bush repeatedly used religious imagery in his justification for the war in Iraq and the subsequent war on terrorism. The use of religious legitimacy as a means for persuasion has at least three limits. First, religious persuasion is often limited by cultural and religious boundaries. For example, invoking 318

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Jesus is more likely to sway Christians than Muslims or Jews, much less Hindus or Buddhists. Second, not everyone will be swayed by religious arguments. In fact, some people are antireligious, and religious persuasion may make them more likely to oppose a policy. Many secular circles in Israel, for example, resent the influence of religious parties on the government and are likely to oppose any policy that is perceived as driven by religion. Finally, religious persuasion is to a great extent dependent on the credentials of the one using it. Someone who is known to be not particularly religious will have more difficulty using religious persuasion than someone with good religious credentials (Fox, 2018, pp. 59–72). For example, the Pope or the Dalai Lama will have an easier time invoking religious legitimacy to support a cause than a secular leader. Classical realism can encompass this view of religious legitimacy by classifying it as a form of power. While most classical realists focus on material power such as military and economic might, there is room for other forms of power. Hans Morgenthau (1956, pp. 8–9) specifically states that “Power comprises anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man. Thus, power covers all social relationships which serve that end, from physical violence to the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another”. Niebuhr (1996, p. 20) similarly argues that it is possible to “create an endless variety of types and combinations of power, from that of pure reason to that of pure physical force”. While classical realist thinkers rarely addressed religion as one of these psychological or social forms of power, it clearly fits into that mould.

Worldviews The discussion of legitimacy and persuasion implies that in some cases religion is a tool used cynically by policy-makers, among others, to advance their goals. While this certainly occurs, religion can also act as an independent motivating force. This argument is common in the literature. For instance, Seul (1999, p. 558) argues that “no other repositories of cultural meaning have historically offered so much in response to the human need to develop a secure identity. Consequently, religion often is at the core of individual and group identity”. Mark Juergensmeyer (1997, p. 17) similarly argues that religion “provides the vision and commitment that propels an activist into scenes of violence, and it supplies the ideological glue that makes that activist’s community of support cohere”. This argument that religion can strengthen identity and influence behaviour is clearly applicable to IR theory. This can influence international relations in two ways. First, religion can influence the worldview or belief system of a policy-maker. To the extent that this is true, religion has the potential to influence that policy-maker’s decisions. In cases of religious worldviews this can lead to extreme and intractable policies because “religion deals with the constitution of being as such. Hence, one cannot be pragmatic on concerns challenging this being” (Laustsen and Waever, 2000, p. 719). On the other hand, religion can also encourage peace and reconciliation (Gopin, 2000; Sandal, 2017; Sandal and Trauschweizer, 2022). There are numerous important international incidents and trends that are clearly influenced by religious motivations. Iran’s ruling clergy feels that its actions are divinely inspired and, therefore, cannot be wrong. Yousuf and Hussain (2022) demonstrate how religion influences Iranian strategic culture and attitude towards nuclear hedging. Similarly, the motivation for the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks was based at least in part on a version of the extremist Wahhabi Islamic theology. It also does not fit well into paradigms of international relations which are based on material motivations because the Saudi elites, from whom this ideology arose, are to a large extent dependent upon the US support, thus religious motivations provide a potential explanation for why they acted against their material interests. 319

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It is not necessary that a policy-maker’s worldview be completely religious for religion to have an impact. Most people, including religious people, have complex worldviews based on a number of factors including, but not limited to, their upbringing, education, friends, family, cultural heritage, political ideologies, and personal history. Religion need only be among these influences to have an impact. It is likely that the most significant influence of religious worldviews on the decisions of policy-makers is not in the more blatant examples like Iran, but rather in the cumulative influence of religious aspects of policy-makers’ worldviews. The second influence of worldviews on international relations is the constraints placed on policy-makers by widely held religious beliefs among their constituents. Even under autocratic regimes it can be unwise for policy-makers to take an action that runs directly counter to some belief, moral, or value that is widely held by their constituents. For example, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, leaders from both sides need to weigh how their populations will react to any agreement. This is particularly true of agreements dealing with the disposition of holy sites like the city of Jerusalem. While there are few large-N studies which specifically focus on the religious constraints that can be placed on policy-making, studies show that religion can influence the political and cultural mediums in which policy-makers act (Fowler et al., 2018). Other studies show that religiosity can influence foreign policy attitudes (Guth, 2013; Ciftci and Tezcur, 2016; Inbari et al., 2021). In addition, when religious groups are influential in local politics, this can influence aspects of foreign policy (Henne, 2016, pp. 12–13; Marsden, 2020). There is no shortage of studies showing not only how religious affiliation is associated with political attitudes (Ksiazkiewicz and Friesen, 2021; Beyerlain and Chaves, 2003) but also how politics can change religion (Margolis, 2018). While classical realism focuses on power as a primary motive, theorists in this tradition allow for other motivations. For example, Niebuhr (1932, p.  xx) argues that reason can become subservient to “prejudice and passion and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism”. Morgenthau (1956, p. 234) both argues for and criticizes the power of these irrational motives: carrying their idols before them, the nationalistic masses of our time meet in the international arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandate of history . . . and that it fulfills, a sacred mission ordained by providence, however defined. Little do they know that they meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed. Thus, realist thinkers allow that ideology and religion can influence foreign policy, but they strongly advise against allowing this to occur. Also, shared religious ideology can be the basis for alliances between states just as political ideologies are the basis for such alliances. For example, the bipolar system that existed during the Cold War based on political ideology could be seen as a model by some for a similar division of states along religious lines. This is essentially Samuel Huntington’s (1993) basic argument in his Clash of Civilizations theory.

Institutions Religious institutions clearly play a role in domestic politics. In domestic politics they can be potent agents of political mobilization. Classic mobilization theory (McCarthy and Zald, 1976; Tarrow, 1989) holds that any group which has an existing set of institutions which organize them, such as religious institutions, can use those institutions as a basis for mobilization. This strategy for mobilization is effective because religious institutions tend to have most of the features one would want to have in order to mobilize people for political action. They have meeting places and communication networks. They can influence legislative and judicial systems. 320

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Tyson (2021), for example, studies the complicated dynamics behind the revival of blasphemy as a punishable crime in Indonesia, and how it is related to power politics and the significant role of religious actors in the public sphere. People who are active in religious organizations also tend to develop organizational and leadership skills. Religious institutions often have considerable economic assets and good access to the media. In some cases, they are part of international networks (Fox, 2018). However, there is also a countervailing trend where religious institutions tend to be conservative and support the status quo. Comparative research shows that when religious institutions benefit from the status quo, they tend to support it but when some aspect of the status quo is a threat to these institutions or the religion they represent, they tend to support the opposition. For example, Gill (1998) shows that in Latin America the Catholic Church tends to support opposition movements in countries where they are in danger of losing their congregants to other denominations. Usually in such cases these congregants are disillusioned with the government and the church needs to disassociate itself from the government to remain legitimate in their eyes. In cases where this challenge is not present and the church benefits from government support, it supports the government in return (Gill, 1998; Fox, 1999). Religious organizations are active both domestically and internationally supporting political causes. For example, the World Council of Churches played a key role in supporting the various international divestment and actions which led to the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa (Sandal, 2011; Fox, 2018). The Russian Orthodox Church was politically active in Ukraine even before the invasion of the country, rallying support for Russian policies in the region leading Ukraine’s Orthodox Church seeking independence of Moscow (Shestopalets, 2020). Ozturk and Sozeri (2018) demonstrate how Turkey is using Diyanet (Presidency of Religious Affairs) as a foreign policy tool in countries where there are significant Muslim populations. While classical realism focuses on the state as the primary actor in international politics, it is possible to expand the pool of actors to include religious institutions. This can be true of those religious institutions which are themselves international. It is also possible for religious actors and institutions to influence a government’s foreign policy. For example, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (2007), two prominent neorealists (a school of thought even more strict in excluding non-state actors than classical realism) acknowledge that ethnic and religious lobbies have influenced US foreign policy.

Non-State religious actors and transnational religious movements There are a number of types of non-state religious actors and transnational religious movements which clearly influence international relations. Perhaps the most prominent type of transnational religious movement is religious fundamentalism. Both the origins and agenda of religious fundamentalism can be said to be transnational. A  major goal of fundamentalists is to protect their religious identities and traditions from modernity and secularism (Appleby, 2000, pp. 87–94). Ultimately many fundamentalist movements hope to create a worldwide religious society that knows no borders. Thus, for them, transnationalism is very much the goal. Certainly, few of these movements feel that their ideology is limited by state borders and many of them seek to spread their movement internationally. This is accomplished through a number of strategies. First, many movements seek to take control of or at least influence state and local governments. If they manage to gain control of a state, in addition to enforcing their religious ideals locally, they use the state to spread the revolution worldwide. This places them firmly within the bounds of classical realist thought. Iran is a prime example of this. 321

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Second, they try to take over religious institutions and become the sole arbiters of religious legitimacy and authority (Sandal, 2021b). If they succeed this allows them to use this monopoly of religious legitimacy and authority to portray their goals as moral, and paint any who oppose them as evil and subversive. Third, these movements form transnational linkages with other like-minded movements worldwide. These linkages range from the informal to the formal but clearly represent an effort to form a transnational agenda. In some cases, they constitute individuals crossing borders on their own to join religious movements and terror groups in other countries such as the phenomenon of foreign fighters (Mishali-Ram and Fox, 2021). Fourth, they make use of the media and international communications to both co-ordinate activities and spread their message worldwide (Weirman and Alexander, 2020). While there are some isolated examples of fundamentalist movements taking over states, it is likely their success in persuasion and framing public debate and influencing governments (rather than taking them over) which has the greatest influence on international politics. Religious states like Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban, while having a significant impact on international relations, can be effectively marginalized and countered by the international community. However, the ability of fundamentalist movements to persuade and influence world leaders and, more importantly, the constituents of these leaders of the morality and correctness of their agenda has a less measurable impact, but one that is most likely more significant. Thus, the grassroots efforts of fundamentalists to gain converts to their ideologies will likely have the longest-lasting and most important long-term impact on international relations. Religious movements that employ terrorism are another prominent set of international religious actors. A series of studies has shown that beginning in the 1980s religious terrorism has become the most prominent form of terror and that most, but certainly not all, terrorist groups formed during and since the 1990s are Muslim groups as well as that most terror from this period onward was perpetrated by these groups (Weinberg and Eubank, 1998; Weinberg et al., 2002). Despite the prominence of Islam in recent religious terrorism, it is important to note that both currently and historically religious terrorism is not synonymous with any religion. Religious terrorism has been prominent in a number of high-profile conflicts such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Chechen rebellion against Russia, the Iraq war, the ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka and the civil war in Algeria. Pan Islamic terror groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are responsible for high-profile attacks in the West as well as in the Muslim world. In fact, many of these terrorist organizations operate in Muslimmajority countries which they deem insufficiently religious (Henne et  al., 2020; Hamming, 2020). Religious terrorism is also present in conflicts that do not involve Muslims such as the civil war in Sri Lanka. This phenomenon, in its current form, is related to the growth of fundamentalism. This is true for at least three reasons. First, as noted earlier, fundamentalism is in part a reaction against modernity. Fundamentalists feel the need to alter the political status quo in order to bring the world into alignment with their ideology. Second, fundamentalist movements are often linked with nationalist movements supporting minorities that seek some form of self-determination. Third, fundamentalists of all stripes resent the encroachment of secular values into their societies (Juergensmeyer, 1993, 2008). All of these motivations require political changes in order to accomplish their goals. This, along with the tendency of fundamentalists to want to reorder the world is a potent combination. Why terrorism specifically? Because terrorism is perceived by the fundamentalist movements that use this tactic as the most effective form of violence available to them. Put differently, if these movements were able to achieve their ends peacefully or had military forces comparable

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to that of the US, for example, they would not need to use terrorism. But in most cases these movements are involved in asymmetrical conflicts against state forces which have more objective military and police power. This leaves terrorism as one of the few options available to them. In the few cases where Muslim fundamentalists control a state, their efforts to spread the Islamic revolution might also include terrorism. This is because engaging in more traditional state warfare is dangerous to those states, especially since those whom they consider their primary enemies have strong militaries. Thus, engaging in terror through various proxy groups allows them to pursue the violent path but still insulate themselves from retaliation. The hostilities between Israel and both the Hamas-led Palestinian government and Hezbollah in Lebanon show that this insulation is not complete. Be that as it may, it is clear that this religious wave of terrorism has significantly influenced international politics. It has caused the formation or realignment of international alliances between states in order to fight it. It has also led to a recognition that non-state actors can be a potent force which undermines the traditional state monopoly on the use of violence. It has also influenced the foreign policies of many states and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While fundamentalism and terrorism are high-profile issues, there are other forms of international religious actors. Traditional religious institutions often try to influence foreign policy and act internationally. While dealing with transnational entities such as religious movements, fundamentalist, terrorist, or otherwise, is likely better addressed by other schools of international relations such as neoliberalism, constructivism, or the English school, there are avenues for explorations within classical realism. These movements can be seen as a challenge to the international system as a whole or even an effort to create a world government. Wolfers argues that “lack of consensus among the major nations about the desirability of a world government as well as about the kind of world government today would be more likely to lead to war than to reduce enmity” (Wolfers, 1949, p. 87). On a more limited basis they can be seen as a challenge to state governments which, when successful, create religious states.

Religious states States which are fully guided by a religious ideology are rare but almost half of the states in the world either have an official religion or give one religion prominence over all other religions without declaring that religion the official one (Fox, 2018). An official religion can mean different things in different states. For example, Saudi Arabia and the UK both have official religions, but few would argue the impact of religion on international policy is the same in these two states. Nevertheless, many governments’ foreign policies are influenced to some extent by religion. In these states, all of the factors we discussed become more relevant. While, as we note earlier, classical realism clearly recommends against religious factors influencing foreign policy, classical realism does have tools to account for religious states. For example, Morgenthau (1945, p. 12) allows for religion to influence how a state determines its interests when he argues that “the kind of interest determining political action in a particular period of history depends upon the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formulated”. Foreign policy can be seen as the consequences of elite preferences and their reaction to the external environment (Schweller, 2004, pp. 169–170). It is possible to include religion in these preferences and perceptions. The ideological imperative to spread the influence of one’s religion is not altogether different from the Soviet Union’s policy of spreading communism, a topic discussed extensively

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by classical realists. In fact, Morgenthau (1952, p. 4) described this imperative in decidedly religious terms: Today, the two main power centers in the word, Washington and Moscow, are also the center of two antagonistic political philosophies which have a tendency to transform them into political religions. These two power centers profess and at upon two incompatible conceptions of human nature, of society, and of government, and have found it at times hard to resist the temptation to try and make the world over in the image of these conceptions. Even if one does not accept this interpretation of classical realism with ideology driving policy, it is clear that during the Cold War, ideology drove alliance formation and there is no reason this could not also occur with religious ideologies. Also, national security and national interest are ambiguous terms that are open to interpretation. Accordingly, threats to religion can be interpreted as threats to national security or national interest (Shani, 2021). Wolfers (1952, p. 481) argues that these terms permit “everyone to label whatever policy he favors with an attractive and possibly deceptive name”. Lippman similarly argues that such threats can include threats to a state’s “core values” (1943, p. 51).

Other transnational religious trends, issues, and phenomena There are several additional transnational trends, issues, and phenomena which overlap with religion that are worthy of note. Many of them have ethical elements. For example, the issue of human and religious rights is increasingly becoming an international issue. Human rights, in general, has become an important element of the foreign policies of many Western states. Also, the issue of religious rights is included in a number of international treaties and documents including the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, the 1981 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination based on Religion or Belief, the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom, the American convention on Human Rights, the 1969 African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, and the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, among others. Nevertheless, perceptions of the scope and application of these rights differ along religious lines. As human rights violations are increasingly being considered justifications for international intervention, this issue is becoming increasingly important in the international arena, particularly because violations of religious freedoms are becoming increasingly common (Fox, 2020). Similarly, the issue of women’s rights is becoming an increasing source of tension between secular and religious actors. States governed by religion place restrictions on women that are incongruent with the ideas of equality for women. Religion is often used to justify many of these restrictions. Not all of these ethical sources of tension are inter-religious. One such issue is the issue of family planning. In this case the tension is between those with a more secular orientation and those with a more religious orientation as family planning, and especially abortion, is to varying degrees restricted or banned by most interpretations the Abrahamic religions. The issue of stemcell research also has caused tensions along similar secular versus religious lines (Mohamed, 2018). Interestingly, ethical issues are not completely foreign to classical realism. Niebuhr (1941, p. 2), for example, emphasized the “ethical consequences of interdependence” arguing that it is impossible to think of a nation and its interests in a narrow manner. In fact, Niebuhr “defended the use of force against Nazis in terms of morality and justice” (Patterson, 2007, p. 3). Such actions can also be defined in terms of national interest as expansionist dictators who engage 324

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in human rights abuses can often become threats to the stability of the state system. Also, as we noted earlier, national interest and security can be ambiguous. A state can define an environment with other states which behave ethically as in its national interest. Another major international issue is holy places. Holy places constitute critical symbols and hence, threats to sacred sites can lead religious groups to mobilize (Isakhan, 2020). When discussing holy places, one of the first cases that comes to mind is the contention surrounding the holy places in Israel. This contention includes competing territorial claims between the Jews and the Muslims, among the Christians for the control of the Christian holy sites, and tensions between Christians and Muslims over holy sites in Nazareth. All of these disputes have led to the political involvement of a number of states. Another prominent international case regarding holy sites was when the Taliban-controlled Afghan government decided to destroy two giant statues of Buddha in Bamiyan Afghanistan. In addition to the Buddhist governments and scholars, there was also involvement by UNESCO and even several Muslim states in the unsuccessful efforts to stop the destruction of these statues (Fox and Sandler, 2004, pp. 77–79, 108–113). State behaviour in these instances demonstrates that the safety and control of these holy places are linked to their national interest. Control of them can also be seen as a form of power, in that access to them is a commodity desired by other states.

Identity One of religion’s many facets is identity. The concept of religious identity overlaps with most of the other ways religion influences international relations that we discussed earlier in this chapter, but it deserves to be identified and discussed separately. The fact that international relations is influenced by various identity issues is probably accepted by many international relations scholars. The debate over Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory (1993, 1996) illustrates this point well. Huntington essentially argues that the national and ethnic identities which were prominent during the Cold War are becoming less relevant, and in the post–Cold War era more macro-level identities, which he calls civilizations, will become the primary form of identity which drives international politics and the primary basis for international conflict. Huntington (1993, p. 24) defines a civilization as the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of what distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined by both common language, history, religion, customs, institutions and by the subjective self identification of people. This definition is essentially the same as most definitions of ethnic and national identity. The primary difference is that the identity groupings he describes are much larger. In fact, Huntington’s concept of civilizations is an amalgamation of more narrowly defined ethnic and national identities into a broader identity group based on more generally defined common traits. These amalgamations are largely along the religious lines. Most of the civilizations on Huntington’s list of civilizations – the Western, Sino-Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and “possibly” African civilizations – include at least some aspect of religion in their definition and even are named after religions. Other than the African civilization, they are largely religiously homogeneous. Thus, in essence, Huntington argues that religious identity will be the basis for international relations in the post–Cold War era. This approach was among the most controversial theories of the late twentieth century in international relations. A number of criticisms emerged to counter the theory. However, few 325

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of these criticisms directly denied that identity in general and religious identity in particular now influence international relations, sometimes significantly. In fact, many argued that identity would remain important, but it would be the national and ethnic identities which were the primary forms of identity in the Cold War era – not religious identities per se – which would remain the dominant forms of identity in the post–Cold War era (Gurr, 1994). Thus, to the extent that religion plays a role in national and ethnic identities, religious identity will play a role in international politics. Due to the wide-ranging nature of the debate over Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, it is impossible fully to discuss the critiques of the theory here; however, a brief listing of the types of criticisms is in order. First, many argue that the previous bases for conflict will remain the bases for conflict in the post–Cold War era. The argument that national and ethnic identities will remain important fit into this category. Second, the world is becoming more interdependent, and a single world identity will form that will make all previous subidentities irrelevant. This criticism has the distinction of being one of the few that directly argues against the relevance of religious identity. Third, many argue that Huntington ignored or missed some essential factor which makes his theory irrelevant. These factors include conflict management techniques, population and environmental issues, the importance of military and economic power, the processes of modernization and secularization, and the desire of many in the non-West to be like the West. Fourth, many point out that Huntington’s description of the facts is inaccurate or even intentionally distorted. Fifth, every quantitative study, which when combined include nearly every domestic and international conflict since World War II, consistently find that “civilizational conflicts” are a minority of conflicts, civilizational conflict did not increase with the end of the Cold War, and more traditional explanations for conflict have better explanatory power than civilizational factors. Sixth, some argue that Huntington himself does not believe his theory and the reason he presented it was to influence US foreign policy. Seventh, many attach Huntington’s methodology for various, and often contradictory reasons. Finally, several critics note that Huntington’s predictions are potentially self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, if foreign policy-makers come to believe his predictions, especially his prediction of a Muslim versus West conflict, this will help to make those predictions come true (Fox, 2004, pp. 161–165).1 In short, there is room for the concept of religious identity in classical realism. Just as religious ideology can be the basis for alliances, so can religious identity. On a deeper level both Morgenthau and Niebuhr emphasized “human nature” in their thinking. Human nature includes the human desire for belonging.

Conclusions There is a growing realization that IR theory’s blind spot for religion is one of the greatest failings of that body of theory. Many like Samuel Huntington argue explicitly or implicitly that religion has returned to the international scene after having been gone for some undefined period of time. Yet, does it really make sense that religion disappeared then reappeared? Or is it more likely that religion was always present and international relations scholars were blinded by their paradigms to its existence? The influence of many of religion’s individual facets waxes and wanes over time. It is also certain that the influence of religion evolves over time. The rise of religious fundamentalism is one example of this. Yet religious fundamentalism’s influence on international relations is a new manifestation of an old influence. The idea that religion should guide the state and the desire to spread the influence of one’s religion are not new to the relations between states. In fact, 326

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these influences of religion can be described as ancient. What is new in this case is the specific form of religious ideology. Thus, the content of religious ideologies may change over time, but how they interact with international relations remains more constant. This is true of most of religion’s influences on international relations. Religion is used to legitimize and de-legitimize actions and policies. It influences the worldviews and actions of policy-makers and their constituents. Religious institutions can both mobilize their members for political action and discourage political action. Religious conflicts cross borders (Zellman and Fox, 2020). And there exist several transnational phenomena and issues related to religion. These general patterns remain constant, but their specific manifestations can vary over place and time. Put differently, the specifics of religion’s influence on international relations may change over time, but no matter the evolution of these specifics, the general pattern remains relatively constant. While some would argue that we need to create entirely new theories of international relations to deal with these realizations, we argue that existing theories can account for religion. We demonstrate here that classical realism, a theory many would consider to be incompatible with religion, can in fact account for many of religion’s influences on the relations between states.

Note 1 For a full review of these critiques of Huntington’s theories see Fox (2004, pp. 161–165).

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23 RELIGION AND FOREIGN POLICY Nukhet Sandal

The role of religion in the making and practice of foreign policy has been at the center of heated debates. We can attribute this interest to two main factors. The first is the rise in the number and prominence of religious actors in the international arena, and an increasing awareness on the part of the policy circles that religion is here to stay. In a message to State Department diplomats in Washington and overseas, the former US Secretary of State John Kerry said, “In every country, in every region of the world, and on nearly every issue central to U.S. foreign policy, religious institutions and actors are among the drivers of change” (Casey, 2015). The second is the rise in the number of academic publications on the issue of religion and international relations that goes beyond the relationship between religion and violence. Philpott (2002, p. 67) argued, “with few exceptions, international relations scholars have long assumed the absence of religion among the factors that influence states”. This long-term neglect has recently transformed into a vibrant research agenda within the past two decades. Political science scholars have written about religion and its connections to international relations theory (Sandal and Fox, 2013), military (Hassner, 2013), peacebuilding (Philpott, 2012, Sandal, 2017) and international organizations (Haynes, 2014). This renewed interest in the study of religion and politics spills into the field of foreign policy as well. Before analyzing the linkages between religion and foreign policy, we should pay attention to how we define “religion” since there is no single definition of the concept, and how we define “foreign policy”. As Buzan and Little (2001) assert, international relations thinking should shift from mutually exclusive interpretations to an interlinked set of perspectives that complement each other. Religion indeed should be seen from such an inclusive perspective, and the lack of one single definition should not deter the foreign policy scholars who are ready to define carefully the aspect of religion used in an academic investigation. The same religion can have different policy manifestations in different settings; therefore, it is critical not to take religion as a monolithic concept (Sandal, 2012). In the study of foreign policy, religious phenomena can be investigated as an independent (as a cause), intervening (as a link between the cause and the resulting observation) and dependent variable (as the “product” of non-religious causes). Even when religion is captured as an independent variable, it is not assumed to be the single cause of any event. When it comes to defining “foreign policy”, the picture is clearer, although there are still multiple ways to approach the definition. This chapter takes the traditional understanding of foreign policy as a state’s strategy towards dealing with other states 330

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and international actors. However, it also recognizes that foreign policies are not just made in vacuum, and they are influenced by transnational actors, local interest groups and the beliefs of individual policy-makers. Similarly, a state’s foreign policy is not only about actions towards other states; it includes the state’s strategy towards international organizations and transnational networks, including terrorist groups. Following these conceptual clarifications, we can study religion and foreign policy from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels. There are examples of the theoretical approaches towards religion and foreign policy that take into account the diverse linkages. Warner and Walker (2011), for example, propose a framework of religion and foreign policy that allows multiple causal explanations that include linkages among power, interests, institutions, ideas/ culture and agents. This chapter reviews such possible linkages and influences under four main titles, reflecting four analytical levels: (1) religion’s influence on individuals (individual level); (2) domestic actors, local politics and foreign policy (sub-state level); (3) states, foreign policy and religion (state level); and (4) transnational actors and foreign policy (international/transnational level). These categories are not mutually exclusive, and there are inevitable overlaps among them. For example, it might be difficult to separate the influence of the local churches on foreign policy from the overall influence of the Vatican, or the World Council of Churches. Despite this overlap, these categories help us evaluate contemporary questions of religion and foreign policy in a more systematic manner.

Religion’s influence on individuals and foreign policy Individuals might define themselves through religion, either because they believe in the ideologies a religion has in itself, or for pragmatic reasons. Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, called himself God’s spokesperson and created a political theology that is a combination of Acholi nationalism and Christianity. The motivation behind the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks, and the attackers’ worldviews, was based at least in part on an extreme version of Wahhabi Islamic worldview. Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, Hindu nationalists in India and ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel believe that it is their duty to behave in line with their traditions, and they have a special political mandate. Religious actors do not have to be the very decision-makers who make foreign policy to have an impact. They can influence policies through public opinion and activism. Haynes (2008b, p. 143) addresses this dynamic when he states, “If religious actors ‘get the ear’ of key foreign policy-makers because of their shared religious beliefs, the former may become able to influence foreign policy outcomes through the exercise of religious soft power”. Religious identity shapes how individuals perceive other countries and their policies as well. Ciftci and Tezcur (2016) show that religious identity at the individual level affects favorability ratings of and the projection of soft power by Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. These views might put constraints on the policy options of foreign policy decision-makers even if these decision-makers do not share the same views. Religion can influence foreign policies directly through the decision-makers who make them. Guner (2012, p. 219) argues that “state leaders and decision makers can ascribe meanings to reality by assessing foreign policy through their religious lenses”. Thus, religion can influence how they “identify causes of global problems, allies, enemies” as well as how they assess national interests. The Tibetan national movement and foreign policy have been influenced by the Dalai Lama and his Buddhist beliefs (Dorjee, 2019). US presidents have used religious imagery to legitimize their foreign policies. Carter’s conciliatory religious discourse enabled him to bring different worldviews to the table, especially within the context of the Middle East peace process. 331

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Bush’s worldview and the legitimacy of his policies have been challenged numerous times, even from a Christian perspective (Laaman, 2006). Albright (2006, p. 17), the US Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, drew attention to the religious worldviews of the American presidents and how they helped create an exceptionalist American political culture. Inboden (2008, p. 259) highlights Eisenhower’s religious framing of the Cold War, noting his famous words, “when God comes in, communism has to go”. Religion was a critical factor in the Trump administration’s foreign policy, partly due to the influence of the evangelicals among his electorate (Ülgül, 2021; Haynes, 2021). Religious individuals might also play significant roles in foreign policy and peacebuilding initiatives. The concept of faith-based diplomacy builds on the faith-based conflict resolution literature (Abu Nimer, 2001; Gopin, 2000). Its proponents argue that religion can facilitate reconciliation between enemies, solidarity with the poor and the overturning of unjust structures. There are also prominent religious figures who played the role of mediator in sensitive situations. One such example is the Anglican churchman Terry Waite, who was an assistant for Anglican communion affairs to the archbishop of Canterbury. Waite negotiated hostage releases with post-revolutionary Iran, Libya and Islamic Jihad (Lloyd, 2011, p. 229). Religious institutions and individuals play a crucial role in defusing crises and restoring stability. While much of this literature focuses on grassroots efforts, faith-based diplomacy also covers state-to-state interactions (Cox and Philpott, 2003; Fahy, 2018). In her book, The Mighty and The Almighty, the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright explained how the US had not understood the motivations of religious states well enough. At the same time, Albright counts instances of how and where faith has played a key role in successful initiatives in American diplomacy. A famous example of faith-based peacemaking was orchestrated by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978, which would not have happened if Carter had not had the ability to “understand and appeal to the deep religious convictions of President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin”, Albright (2006, p. 77) argued.

Domestic actors, politics and foreign policy Domestic actors, such as religious organizations, lobbies and local interest groups, can have an impact on foreign policy. This influence can happen through creating a strong public opinion on issues or connecting with transnational organizations to create pressure on decision-makers. Due to the changing scope of governance thanks to the advance of technology, religious actors also take part in civil society, transcending the distinction between the domestic and the international (Haustein and Tomalin, 2021; Rivlin, 2018). Individuals who share the same religious conviction around the world come together to challenge the premises of the traditional state structure. Religious institutions connect with each other to realize their local and transnational objectives. Local religious actors can influence national and international politics, and they have access to resources. Religious organizations often have most of the organizational resources necessary for political mobilization. These resources include meeting places in which people regularly congregate. While these meetings are usually religious and social meetings, using those meetings to announce the details of a political mobilization campaign requires very little additional effort. Religious institutions also have communication networks. Active members of religious organizations tend to develop organizational and leadership skills that can also be applied to political activities. Religious institutions also often have considerable economic assets and good access to the media. In this vein, Kalyvas (2000, p. 393) argues that “religious entrepreneurs” are better able to initiate collective action and intense conflict. Ozdamar and Akbaba (2014), for 332

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example, show that religious discrimination is an important predictor of initiating and becoming involved in international crises. Basedau, Pfeiffer and Vüllers (2016) also find that the overlap of religious and other identities, religious groups’ grievances and religious leaders’ calls for violence are factors that will likely fuel armed conflict. Local religious organizations and groups also create and consolidate religious myths in the political sphere which might also have implications for foreign policy. Hindu nationalists make speeches for the liberation of Lord Ram’s birthplace and the phraseology is imbued with religious imagery (Shani, 2021). The Bharatiya Janata Party’s fierce stance led to an aggressive foreign policy and a faster development of nuclear weapons, not to mention harsher positions vis-à-vis Kashmir and Pakistan. In another case, Thaksin Shinawatra, former Prime Minister of Thailand, being aware of the strong Buddhist values of the society, employed religious rhetoric and made references to an influential ascetic monk and philosopher, Buddhadasa, in his political speeches (Phongpaichit and Baker, 2005, p. 137). Ironically, it is argued that his downfall was partly due to the spiritually informed Buddhist public opinion, which expected him to live up to the Buddhist standards he highlighted in his speeches (Kitiarsa, 2006). Local politics and gestures can have foreign policy implications based on past traumas and experiences. The Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to the spirits of those who died when fighting for Japan, has been at the center of political controversies since noted war criminals were also named among the spirits that are to be revered. The former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the shrine had angered the Chinese and the South Koreans as they signaled an aggressive form of Japanese nationalism that was proud of both its nationalist and Shinto heritage, even the most violent episodes. Local religious organizations, in conjunction with their transnational counterparts, might also use the soft power of religion in foreign policy and conflict resolution. Johnston and Sampson (1994) show how religious organizations have played a major role as mediators in ending conflict or facilitators of democratic change with case studies including Nicaragua, Nigeria, East Germany, the Philippines and South Africa. Religiously inspired lobbies and interest groups might have an impact on foreign policy too. Walt and Mearsheimer (2006, p. 6), in their study of the influence of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy, note, “interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion” among other actions. Ziv (2021) states that regardless of the state of the armed IsraeliPalestinian conflict, the rising number of evangelicals in Latin American countries is correlated with these countries’ increased support for Israel. Amstutz (2013) argues that in the US, evangelicals translate their belief that humans were created in God’s image into a core principle of American foreign policy and took action on issues ranging from global poverty to foreign policy towards Israel. Ross (2013) explores how Muslim interest groups influence US, Canadian and UK foreign policies. Haynes (2020, p. 490) discusses how right-wing populist parties that claim to be representing Judeo-Christian culture in Norway, Denmark, and other European countries “place emphasis on gender equality, human rights, freedom of speech, individualism, and gay rights” in their discourses for both domestic and international audiences. As the examples presented already indicate, one can observe the increasing influence of religious actors, including religious political parties, in secular settings. In an officially secular country, Turkey, the ruling party (AK Party) came to power due to its Islamic credentials. Although the party did not prove to be as “radical” as the secular circles expected, it challenged the conventional power politics wisdom from time to time, relying mostly on the Muslim public support. For example, in March 2003, the majority of the members of the parliament from the AK party voted against a resolution authorizing the deployment of the forces of its NATO ally, the US, to Turkey to open a northern front in a war against Iraq, a fellow Muslim-majority 333

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country. Taydas and Ozdamar (2013, p. 13) report that then deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener remembers that it was especially difficult “to convince the [AK] party’s pro-Islamist deputies, who were being seriously pressured by the Islamist conservative media, intellectuals, and constituencies not to participate in the war”. This is a case that shows how local religious actors ranging from media to pundits can directly influence critical foreign policies. Even nationalist groups that condone violence might have strong ties with religious institutions. EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston), a Greek Cypriot nationalist movement that employed paramilitary activities to reach its goals, had ties with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Cypriot Orthodox Church (French, 2015; Novo, 2013). Groups or establishments that are strongly affiliated with religious institutions might represent themselves as alternatives to the traditional state. Some transnational religious groups that seek to take over states or territories within states and possibly transform them into religious states can have a considerable impact on international politics. In some states, this claim to political power is regarded as the primary security threat, coming before the threats that are posed by other states.

States, foreign policy and religion Religious states are directly influenced by and also actively shape transnational religious ideologies, which we touch upon later. As Thomas (2005, p. 106) argues, Zionism is a transnational idea as is Pan-Islamism, each having its own symbols and “prophets”, yet both these ideas have contributed significantly to the interest formations and power definitions of individual state actors. In their foreign policy dealings, the leaders of religious states might make references to different understandings of world order, which they might perceive as natural and commonsensical. To illustrate, for Ayatollah Khomeini, the 1979 revolution in Iran that transformed the country into a religious state was only the first phase of a world Islamic Revolution. According to Khomeini, the revolution was to be spread by non-violent means because it was “self-evident” and thus, did not require enforcement (Hashmi, 1996, p. 23). Yousuf and Hussain (2022) show how religion continues to influence Iranian strategic culture and attitude towards nuclear hedging. Religious states usually have leadership claims, which might have a direct impact on their foreign and domestic policies. For example, Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shi’a) regard themselves as the champions of the Islamic societies, but the competition goes beyond the faultline of Sunni-Shi’a actors. Commenting on the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, Gause (2017) reckons that “the real underlying conflict is not about Iran, but about very different understandings of how political Islam should relate to the state among the Sunni powers of the Middle East”. This intra-religious ideological competition, in short, has significant local and transnational implications, and shapes foreign policy accordingly. It would be a mistake to conclude that a religious state or leader plays only by religious rules in foreign policy-making. Wainscott (2018), for example, notes that Morocco’s religious foreign policy was successful because it was paired with economic coordination. Basrur (2017) states that contrary to expectations, Modi’s foreign policy does not reflect Hinduism. Sharp (2003, p.  486) explains how the ambassador-designate of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Mullah Zaeef, operated as a link between the Islamic vision of the world and Western international society, and how the Taliban worked for international recognition as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. These dynamics have not changed after the re-establishment of the Taliban rule in Kabul in 2021. In its most recent reincarnation, the group still tries to reach out to other states – including the Western powers – for recognition and establishment of diplomatic ties. 334

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When analyzing the influence of religion on foreign policy, it is crucial to recognize the history of the political ideologies and power struggles that empowered religious ideologies and states. The colonial experience has had a tremendous impact on the perceptions, fears and attitudes of the developing world. For example, Shahin (1998, p. 70) asserts that “many leading [Egyptian] Islamists have explicitly declared their commitment to democracy, but they frequently distinguish between democracy as a system of values and democracy as a policy instrument”. Some Islamists think that “the West has betrayed the modern humane ideals in its connection with the Muslim world, and the betrayal is best exemplified by colonialism and its lingering political and economic impacts” (Mentak, 2009, p. 119). In such cases, religious ideology and foreign policy decisions might be manifestations of resistance to the imperial and colonial interventions. Religion can also be influential in foreign policies of the secular states. Nationalism, by itself, carries elements of religious ideologies. Nationalist perspectives are constantly renegotiated in the light of religious frameworks. Brubaker (2012) criticizes the understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon, stating that one can treat religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena; religion might help explain the features of nationalism; religion can be part of nationalism; and there can be forms of religious nationalism. Saat (2012), for example, shows how Malay identity is refashioned towards a tolerant Islam and the unwillingness of the ulama to define national identity independent of religion. In the Christian Orthodox world, the Serbian religious elite “developed their theological concepts on the basis of the idea that Serbian orthodoxy forms the heart of the Serbian national identity and that from a historical perspective the Serbia nation is under constant threat” (Van Dartel, 1992, p. 281). Ozturk and Sozeri (2018) demonstrate how Turkey is using Diyanet (Presidency of Religious Affairs) as a foreign policy tool in countries where there are significant Muslim populations. Carol and Hofheinz (2022) similarly demonstrate how Friday sermons in Germany link religion and homeland for the Turkish diaspora. When national identity is influenced by religion, there will be inevitable yet subtle manifestations of this underlying religious identity in foreign policy. Another such manifestation is the political discourse that has religious references, and the employment of religious narratives in foreign policy. Brown and Theodossopoulos (2002) illustrate how Byzantine and Orthodox narratives prevail in the worldviews of the Greeks with regard to international relations. Similarly, Marsden (2011, p. 328) draws attention to the “city on a hill” image (from Matthew 5:14) and “manifest destiny” that has become “deeply ingrained within the American psyche”. Sandal (2021) illustrates how in the minds of Turkish citizens and officials, the ideal citizen is constructed as Sunni, emphasizing the difficulties of challenging the religious narratives that are rooted in the worldviews of regular citizens, and showing the foreign policy implications of such constructions, especially during times of crisis. As these examples show, national and communal narratives might carry strong religious overtones; through education, upbringing and other social interactions, prevalent narratives and discourses shape worldviews. These worldviews translate into public and foreign policies. Kraus (2009), for example, reports that many Washington-based advocacy groups use religious language to influence the public agenda. Studies have found that countries which intervene in ethnic conflicts tend to intervene primarily on behalf of minorities which belong to their religion (Zellman and Brown, 2022; Fox, 2004). This shows that in order for religion to be influential in foreign policy decisions, a state does not have to be religious. Existing repositories of national identity and social capital already have significant religious content. When we look at religious narratives that shaped even secular nationalisms, it is common to come across references to sacred lands. Almost all religious states and even some secular states have attachment to their territories, which they see as vital to their identity. The importance 335

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of holy places to the followers of a religion also makes acquiring or keeping sacred territories under one’s control a matter of security. Smith (2000, p. 805) argues that such covenantal ideas of election and attachment to the territory exist in a number of societies, including Armenia, Russia, Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, India, Iran, and even in the US, among the Protestant revivalists. For such communities, the defense of these sacred lands is a matter of supreme national interest. The King of Saudi Arabia has the formal title of “The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (Khaadiim al-Haramain al-Sharifain), which indicates the responsibility for the protection of Mecca and Medina. Many states, even the secular ones like France and Germany, have had their sacred claim to the land, which shaped their national identity (Smith, 2004). These attachments and understanding of sacred land shape security conceptions and foreign policies. Hassner (2009) uses the concepts of divisible and indivisible conflicts to understand conflicts over holy spaces such as the ones in Jerusalem. Similarly, Svensson (2007) uses data on the primary parties’ religious demands and identities as well as all intrastate conflictdyads in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 1989–2003, and finds that if the sides in a conflict make demands that are explicitly anchored in a religious tradition, they will come to perceive the conflicting issues as indivisible, and the conflict will be less likely to be settled through negotiations. Many states, religious or secular, have also explored the soft power of religion or spiritual traditions. The soft power of an entity entails three resources: culture, political values and its policy (resting on legitimacy and moral authority) (Nye, 2004, p. 11). Chinese policy-makers, among others, recognized this “soft” power of religion, and since 2004, they have begun to establish Confucius Institutes around the world intended to promote friendly relationships with other countries. Cho and Katzenstein (2011) report that Korea also caught up with China in terms of reclaiming Confucianism as an asset. Wüst and Nicolai (2022) show how Morocco capitalizes on Islamic and Jewish religious and cultural policies to increase its soft power globally. Ozturk (2021) argues that Turkey exercises significant religious soft power in the Balkans. The US was late in recognizing the importance of religion in diplomacy and foreign policy, which is surprising since it is arguably the world’s most powerful “modern” society with a high proportion of apparently highly religious people. Especially the increasing visibility of political Islam caught US and European foreign policy by surprise. Hurd (2007) criticizes the epistemological underpinnings of European and American foreign policy toward political Islam, and she argues that “secularist epistemology produces an understanding of ‘normal politics’ that lends a particular coloring to the politics of Muslim-majority societies”. Albright (2006, p. 177) also criticized the Bush administration for its lack of recognition of religion’s influence in nonChristian contexts: “One of the many ironies of U.S. policy is that the Bush administration, for all its faith-based initiatives, is far more comfortable working with secular leaders than with those Iraqis for whom religion is central. This is true even when the religious leaders are moderate in orientation and generally accepting the U.S. goals”. Things have changed since Albright wrote her treatise. Jenichen (2019) finds that although the US foreign policy discursive structure is still secular, it is now more accommodative toward religion than the European Union. The US now has offices and institutions that facilitate religious engagement especially in foreign policy. The White House has an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that was established in 2001. Another office, the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, advises the Secretary of State on policy matters as they relate to religion and is a “first point of entry” for those who would like to engage the State Department in Washington on matters of religion and global affairs. Bettiza (2019) studies such offices, their functions and religious foreign policy frameworks, or “religious foreign policy regimes”, under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. In particular, he identifies four religious foreign 336

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policy regimes (i.e. explicitly religious foreign policy frameworks): International Religious Freedom, Faith-based Foreign Aid, Muslim and Islamic Interventions and Religious Engagement. The institutional changes, as well as personal leadership motives, show that religion is now recognized as a significant factor in shaping international relations and foreign policy, and it is up to states to use this influence to their advantage by careful communication and engagement.

Transnational actors and foreign policy Ideas generate material conditions, and religious ideas have indeed played a transformative role throughout political history. Religious actors usually do not recognize national borders as natural (Mendelsohn, 2005, p. 55). Horowitz (2009, p. 192), in his study of the crusades and the importance of religious ideologies, maintains that “the Crusading case is the importance of new religious ideas in generating shifts in theological systems over time and the strong resistance of ingrained religious ideas to changes in material conditions – even very powerful conditions”. Strong religious ideologies have the power to restructure not only the international system and its rules but also the terms of discourse and competition. Using religious outbidding frames, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and al-Qaeda have competed both with each other and other Islamic organizations with a claim to authenticity in the international arena (Sandal, 2021). Evangelical Christians have significantly affected foreign policy-making and execution, particularly in relation to democratization, human rights, and religious freedom (Haynes, 2008a). Hertzke (2004) states that since the mid-1990s evangelicals have been the most important part of a new human rights movement. Similarly, Kayaoglu (2012) traces Islamic activism and dialogue of civilizations, which was initiated by the former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami. Bettiza and Dionigi (2015) follow up on this particular research area, investigating the dynamics of religious-based norms, promoted by non-Western norm-makers, within the institutional structures of the international liberal order. Secular ideologies and concepts, such as nationalism, and their applications by the Western world can also change the terms of religious ideologies and foreign policies when they diffuse to the rest of the world; emphasis on “patriotism” intertwined with Islam and Hinduism in many groups’ and states’ foreign policies is a product of the diffusion of nationalism (Cesari, 2022). Transnational religious ideologies and organizations might have different manifestations and influence in different countries. Gill (1998), for example, asks the question of why the Catholic Church supported the governments of some Latin American states but supports the opposition in others. He finds that historically in most Latin American states the church had benefited from a religious monopoly supported by the government, undermining any interest in opposing the government in favor of social economic and political change. In many Latin American states, citizens were disillusioned with the church support for unpopular governments. This alienation from pro-establishment churches has contributed to conversions away from Catholicism to North American–style evangelical denominations. There are many other examples of religious institutions having strong influence on shaping foreign policy and regional politics. The Serbian Orthodox Church, which was initially disappointed at the disinterest of Slobodan Milosevic in consolidating the social and the financial status of the clergy, strongly backed Serb nationalist parties in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Perica, 2004, p.  144). The church is geographically located in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Republic of Macedonia and Croatia, and it has been politically active in furthering policies that have been in accordance with the Serbian interests. Its influence has been coupled with the public religious expressions of the Orthodox leaders in the Balkans. Radovan Karadic 337

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and Ratko Mladic (respectively the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs) “made great play of their Orthodox faith” (Bruce, 2003, p. 50). The Polish, Lithuanian and Ukranian Catholic Churches challenged the spread of the communist ideologies, mostly subscribing to the Vatican II premises that emphasized individual freedoms (Mojzes, 1995, p. 294). Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russian Orthodox Church was already active in Ukraine, rallying support for Russian policies in the region leading Ukraine’s Orthodox Church seeking independence of Moscow (Zinets, 2018; Shestoplates, 2020). As we have indicated, religious actors might have different understandings of community that go beyond national borders. The influence of such actors on foreign policy would reflect this perception of community and its interest. Shani (2008) discusses two conceptions of universality that the Western international relations theory has ignored: one is the Umma constructed by the Islamist discourse that is simultaneously critical of imposed elite secularism and the neofundamentalism of Salafis; the other one is Khalsa Panth, the Sikh transnational community of believers. There are also institutions that bring together states and individuals under a religious identity. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is one example. Established in 1969, the OIC has 57 member states, and it defines itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world”. Religious networks can also play established roles due to their practices and traditions. Religious actors can, for example, encourage peace and reconciliation. Sandal (2017), for example, shows how religious epistemic communities, with their transnational linkages, contribute to both domestic and foreign policy changes. Another prominent example of a link between religious identity and a universally recognized niche is the case of Quakers and mediation practices. Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends, are known for their social activism and pacifism. Quakers believe that there is no justification for the use of arms even when someone is confronted with evil. Traditionally, this basic premise has led the Quaker organizations like American Friends Service Committee to play the role of mediators in conflicts including the Israeli-Palestinian case (Gallagher, 2007). The Catholic Church and its relationships with its local networks directly affect “domestic political developments, intergroup conflict or alliance, and cultural and symbolic meanings” (Vallier, 1971, p. 490). In short, the interplay of transnational and local religious dynamics might influence foreign policy.

Conclusion: prescriptions for an effective foreign policy The works mentioned under the four levels described earlier investigate the dynamics of religion and foreign policy. Most of these books and articles have concrete foreign policy implications. Given the centrality of religion to contemporary international affairs, practitioners cannot afford to ignore the academic studies that study critical links between religious phenomena and policy. One common recommendation of this recent body of literature is to take religion seriously. The Westphalian state system has been predominantly secular, so religion has not attracted much attention in state dealings. The Cold War dynamics did not change this trend either. However, many issues that currently occupy the foreign policy agendas have religious dimensions. Farr (2008, p. 15) highlights these religious issues surrounding the US ranging from the surge of religion in China to the changing dynamics of the Islamic world and argues that US diplomacy should “treat faith as much as it does politics or economics”. Similarly, Patterson (2011, p. 105) states that religious literacy should be integrated into the “training, planning and execution of foreign policy”, and he calls for “a political strategy that ranges from presidential engagement to a major investment in holistic public diplomacy”. Learning the principles and 338

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history of religious traditions will likely lead to more informed decisions. However, knowing is not enough by itself. It is also crucial to communicate with “the other” and to try to find common interest areas. Johnston (2011), based on his policy world experience as the president and founder of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, recommends deeper cultural engagement and even employing religious attachés to understand how others view the world. It is also critical to have what Joustra (2017) calls “principled secularism” and avoid specific definitions of what is religious and what is not. There are other foreign policy recommendations in the literature on religion and politics. One is embracing the religious circles in local and transnational politics that are playing constructive roles in conflicts and development. After explaining the increasing activism of the evangelicals in American foreign policy, Mead (2006) recommends that “those concerned about US foreign policy would do well to reach out” to these groups even though they are likely to focus on US exceptionalism and “care more about US foreign policy than most realists prefer”. It is also important to support more inclusive public theologies rather than the violent ones. Religious texts can be helpful in that regard. Rees (2004) argues that the use of religious texts in international affairs may counter “reactionary traditionalism (the seedbed of religious fundamentalism) and traditionless individualism (the seedbed of economic exploitation)”. This usage is not without its challenges, especially when extremist groups selectively interpret sacred texts to their own advantage in their domestic and foreign policies in light of new existential challenges (Macdonald and Lorenzo-Dus, 2021; Hamming, 2020). Freedom of religion has also been a significant concern, and it is increasingly evoked by foreign policy circles of multiple countries. Miles (2004), for example, states that the goal of American international policy on religion must be to ensure the security of all religions in every nation. Here, there is a need to merge the local and transnational understandings of human rights. Kilinc (2014) argues that the implementation of international norms on religious freedoms depends on the existence of strong domestic actors who support the reforms due to either their material interests or normative commitments. A constructive foreign policy would aim to strengthen the domestic and international actors who pay special attention to these freedoms, even if the ideologies and the goals of these actors are not in perfect alignment with narrow state interests.

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Nukhet Sandal Bruce, S. (2003) Politics and Religion. Cambridge: Polity. Buzan, B. and Little, R. (2001) ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do about It’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30 (1), pp. 22–39. Carol, S. and Hofheinz, L. (2022) ‘A Content Analysis of the Friday Sermons of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs in Germany (DİTİB)’, Politics and Religion, pp.  1–24. doi: 10.1017/ S1755048321000353 (Accessed 12 April 2022). Casey, S. (2015) The Future of Religion and Diplomacy. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ blog/2015/03/24/future-religion-and-diplomacy (Accessed 18 March 2022). Cesari, J. (2022) We God’s People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cho, I.H. and Katzenstein, P. (2011) ‘In the Service of State and Nation: Religion in East Asia’, in Snyder, J. (ed.) Religion and International Relations Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 168–199. Ciftci, S. and Tezcür, G.M. (2016) ‘Soft Power, Religion, and Anti-Americanism in the Middle East’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 12 (3), pp. 374–394. Cox, B. and Philpott, D. (2003) ‘Faith-Based Diplomacy: An Ancient Idea Newly Emergent’, Bradywine Review of Faith and International Affairs, 1 (2), pp. 31–40. Dorjee, T. (2019) ‘Foreign Policy and Religion: Tibetan Independence Movement’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-837 (Accessed 5 April 2022). Fahy, J. (2018) ‘International Relations and Faith-based Diplomacy: The Case of Qatar’, The Review of Faith and International Affairs, 16 (3), pp. 76–88. Farr, T.F. (2008) World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, J. (2004) Religion, Civilization and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium. Lanham: Lexington. French, D. (2015) Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959. New York: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, N. (2007) Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Dilemmas of NGO Humanitarian Activism. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press. Gause, F.G. (2017) ‘What the Qatar crisis shows about the Middle East’, The Washington Post. www. washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/27/what-the-qatar-crisis-shows-about-themiddle-east/ (Accessed 16 April 2022). Gill, A. (1998) Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gopin, M. (2000) Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guner, S. (2012) ‘Religion and Preferences: A Decision-Theoretic Explanation of Turkey’s New Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 8 (3), pp. 217–230. Hamming, T.R. (2020) ‘The Al Qaeda–Islamic State Rivalry: Competition Yes, but No Competitive Escalation’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 32 (1), pp. 20–37. Hashmi, S.H. (1996) ‘International Society and Its Islamic Malcontents’, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 20 (1), pp. 13–31. Hassner, R.E. (2009) War on Sacred Grounds. London: Cornell University Press. Hassner, R.E. (2013) Religion in the Military Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press. Haustein, J. and Tomalin, E. (2021) ‘Religion, Populism, and the Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals’, Social Policy and Society, 20 (2), pp. 296–309. Haynes, J. (2008a) ‘Evangelicals and a Human Rights Culture in America’, The Review of Faith and International Affairs, 6 (2), pp. 73–82. Haynes, J. (2008b) ‘Religion and Foreign Policy Making in the USA, India and Iran: Towards a Research Agenda’, Third World Quarterly, 29 (1), pp. 143–165. Haynes, J. (2014) Faith-Based Organizations at the United Nations. London: Routledge. Haynes, J. (2020) ‘Right-wing Populism and Religion in Europe and the USA’, Religions, 11 (10), pp. 490–518. Haynes, J. (2021) Trump and the Politics of Neo-Nationalism: The Christian Right and Secular Nationalism in America. New York: Routledge. Hertzke, A. (2004) Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Religion and foreign policy Horowitz, M.C. (2009) ‘Long Time Going: Religion and the Duration of Crusading’, International Security, 34 (2), pp. 162–193. Hurd, E.S. (2007) ‘Political Islam and Foreign Policy in Europe and the United States’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 3 (4), pp. 345–367. Inboden, W.C. (2008) Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenichen, A. (2019) ‘A Transatlantic Secular Divide? The Representation of Religion in EU and US Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 15 (4), pp. 451–469. Johnston, D.M. (2011) Religion, Terror, and Error: US Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Johnston, D.M. and Sampson, C. (1994) Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft. New York: Oxford University Press. Joustra, R.J. (2017) The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom: Why Foreign Policy Needs Political Theology. New York: Routledge. Kalyvas, S. (2000) ‘Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Religious Parties’, Comparative Politics, 32 (4), pp. 379–398. Kayaoglu, T. (2012) ‘Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics: A  Case of Global Islamic Activism’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 23 (3), pp. 129–147. Kilinc, R. (2014) ‘International Pressure, Domestic Politics, and the Dynamics of Religious Freedom: Evidence from Turkey’, Comparative Politics, 46 (2), pp. 127–145. Kitiarsa, P. (2006) In Defense of the Thai-style Democracy. Singapore: National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute. Kraus, R. (2009) ‘Thou Shall Not Take the Name of Thy God in Vain: Washington Offices’ Use of Religious Language to Shape Public and Political Agendas’, Journal of Media and Religion, 8 (2), pp. 115–137. Laaman, P. (2006) Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. Boston: Beacon Press. Lloyd, R.B. (2011) ‘Christian Mediation in International Conflicts’, in James, P. (ed.) Religion, Identity and Global Governance: Ideas, Evidence and Practice. Toronto: Toronto University Press, pp. 220–243. Macdonald, S. and Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2021) ‘Visual Jihad: Constructing the “Good Muslim” in Online Jihadist Magazines’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 44 (5), pp. 363–386. Marsden, L. (2011) ‘Religion, Identity and American Power in the Age of Obama’, International Politics, 48 (2), pp. 326–343. Mead, W.R. (2006) ‘God’s Country’, Foreign Affairs, 85 (5), pp. 24–43. Mendelsohn, B. (2005) ‘Sovereignty Under Attack: The International Society Meets the Al Qaeda Network’, Review of International Studies, 31 (1), pp. 45–68. Mentak, S. (2009) ‘Islam and Modernity: Islamist Movements and Politics of Position’, Contemporary Islam, 3 (2), pp. 113–119. Miles, J. (2004) ‘Religion and American Foreign Policy’, Survival, 46 (1), pp. 23–37. Mojzes, P. (1995) Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans. New York: Continuum. Novo, A.R. (2013) ‘The God Dilemma: Faith, the Church, and Political Violence in Cyprus’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 31 (2), pp. 193–215. Nye, J. (2004) Soft Power. New York: Perseus Books. Ozdamar, O. and Akbaba, Y. (2014) ‘Religious Discrimination and International Crises: International Effects of Domestic Inequality’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 10 (4), pp. 413–430. Öztürk, A.E. (2021) Religion, Identity and Power: Turkey and the Balkans in the Twenty-first Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Öztürk, A.E. and Sozeri, S. (2018) ‘Diyanet as a Turkish Foreign Policy Tool: Evidence from the Netherlands and Bulgaria’, Politics and Religion, 11 (3), pp. 624–648. Patterson, E. (2011) Politics in a Religious World: Building a Religiously Informed U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Continuum. Perica, V. (2004) Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States. New York: Oxford University Press. Philpott, D. (2002) ‘The Challenge of September  11 to Secularism in International Relations’, World Politics, 55 (1), pp. 66–95. Philpott, D. (2012) Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press. Phongpaichit, P. and Baker, C. (2005) A History of Thailand. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rees, J. (2004) ‘‘Really Existing’ Scriptures: On the Use of Sacred Text in International Affairs’, The Brandywine Review of Faith and International Affairs, 2 (1), pp. 17–26.

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Nukhet Sandal Rivlin, B. (2018) ‘Thoughts on Religious NGOs at the UN: A Component of Global Civil Society’, in Hajnal, P.I. (ed.) Civil Society in the Information Age. London: Routledge, pp. 155–174. Ross, L.R. (2013) ‘Muslim Interest Groups and Foreign Policy in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom: Identity, Interests and Action’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 9 (3), pp. 287–306. Saat, N. (2012) ‘Islamising Malayness: Ulama Discourse and Contemporary Authority in Malaysia’, Contemporary Islam, 6 (2), pp. 135–153. Sandal, N. (2012) ‘Clash of Public Theologies? Rethinking the Concept of Religion in Politics’, Alternatives, 37 (1), pp. 66–83. Sandal, N. (2017) Religious Leaders and Conflict Transformation: Northern Ireland and Beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sandal, N. (2021) ‘Framing Religious Outbidding: Al-Qaida, Islamic State, and Intra-Religious Competition’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, 22 (3), pp. 461–480. Sandal, N. (2021) ‘Solidarity Theologies and the (Re) definition of Ethnoreligious Identities: The Case of the Alevis of Turkey and Alawites of Syria’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 48 (3), pp. 473–491. Sandal, N. and Fox, J. (2013) Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities. New York: Routledge. Shahin, E. (1998) Political Ascent: Contemporary Islamic Movements in North Africa. Colorado: Westview Press. Shani, G. (2008) ‘Toward a Post-Western IR: The Umma, Khalsa Panth, and Critical International Relations Theory’, International Studies Review, 10 (4), pp. 722–734. Shani, G. (2021) ‘Towards a Hindu Rashtra: Hindutva, Religion, and Nationalism in India’, Religion, State and Society, 49(3), pp. 264–280. Sharp, P. (2003) ‘Mullah Zaeef and Taliban Diplomacy: An English School Approach’, Review of International Studies, 29 (4), pp. 481–498. Shestopalets, D. (2020). ‘Church and State in Ukraine after the Euromaidan: President Poroshenko’s Discourse on Religion, 2014–2018’, Politics and Religion, 13 (1), 150–179. Smith, A. (2000) ‘The Sacred Dimension of Nationalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29 (3), pp. 791–814. Smith, A. (2004) Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Svensson, I. (2007) ‘Fighting with Faith: Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 51 (6), pp. 930–949. Taydas Z. and Ozdamar, O. (2013) ‘A Divided Government, an Ideological Parliament and an Insecure Leader: Turkey’s Indecision about Joining the Iraq War’, Social Science Quarterly, 94 (1), pp. 217–241. Thomas, S.M. (2005) The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ülgül, M. (2021) ‘Faith Abroad: How Religion Shapes Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy’, International Relations, 35 (4), pp. 551–573. Vallier, I. (1971) ‘The Roman Catholic Church: A Transnational Actor’, International Organization, 25 (3), pp. 479–502. Van Dartel, G. (1992) ‘The Nations and the Churches in Yugoslavia’, Religion, State and Society, 20 (3), pp. 275–288. Wainscott, A.M. (2018) ‘Religious Regulation as Foreign Policy: Morocco’s Islamic Diplomacy in West Africa’, Politics and Religion, 11(1), pp. 1–26. Walt, S. and Mearsheimer, J. (2006) ‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’, The London Review of Books, 28 (6), pp. 3–12. Warner, C. and Walker, S. (2011) ‘Thinking about the Role of Religion in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 7 (1), pp. 113–135. Wüst, A. and Nicolai, K. (2022) ‘Cultural Diplomacy and the Reconfiguration of Soft Power: Evidence from Morocco’, Mediterranean Politics. doi: 10.1080/13629395.2022.2033513 (Accessed 20 April 2022). Yousuf, S. and Hussain, S.J. (2022) ‘Culture, Religion and Strategy: The ‘Islamic’ Contours of Iran’s Nuclear Thinking’, Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs. doi: 10.1177/23477970221076715. Zellman, A. and Brown, D. (2022) ‘Uneasy Lies the Crown: External Threats to Religious Legitimacy and Interstate Dispute Militarization’, Security Studies, 31(1), pp. 152–182. Zinets, N. (2018) ‘Ukraine Moves to Split Church from Russia as Elections Approach’, Reuters. www. reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-church/ukraine-moves-to-split-church-from-russia-as-electionsapproach-idUSKBN1HQ1ZA (Accessed 2 April 2022). Ziv, T. (2021) ‘ “I  Will Bless Those Who Bless You”: Evangelicalism and Support for Israel in Latin America’, Politics and Religion, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.1017/S1755048321000316 (Accessed 20 April 2022).

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24 TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS ACTORS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Giorgio Shani1

This chapter focuses on the role which transnational religious actors play in international politics. Conventionally, international relations (IR) has been organized around the principle of state sovereignty since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Peace of Westphalia secularized IR by undermining religion as a mode of legitimacy (Teschke, 2003) and enshrined the territorially bounded sovereign state as the basic unit of IR. In the late twentieth century, globalization called into question the claims of the state to unconditional sovereignty, thereby creating space for the (re)emergence of transnational religious actors in global politics. The 11 September 2001 (hereafter 9/11) attacks attributed to the al-Qaeda network of radical Islamist terrorists signaled the ‘return of religion’ to IR which had been heralded almost a decade earlier by Samuel P. Huntington in his influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis (Huntington, 1993, 1996). Attempts by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (al-sham in Arabic) to restore a Sunni Islamic Caliphate2 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been seen as an example of the challenges posed by transnational religious actors to the Westphalian order. However, as I previously argued in the second edition, the Islamic State cannot be seen as a transnational religious actor since it aspired to state sovereignty, territorializing the transnational aspirations of the Umma, and subordinating them to the defense of homeland or watan. This aspiration to territorial sovereignty ultimately led to its defeat as, unlike al-Qaeda, it could be militarily defeated on the battlefield as it was successively by both the Russian-backed Assad regime and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces between 2015 and 2019. The transnational aspirations of ‘global’ religious actors have been furthermore recently called into question by the resurgence of the nation-state and the emergence of authoritarian populism as an alternative to neoliberal globalization. Authoritarian populism refers to the centralization of power by the state in the name of the people against an ‘elite’ and/or a stigmatized minority. Although its critics regard it as fundamentally undemocratic in that authoritarian populist regimes frequently exceed the power given to the executive through constitutions and often break the law, authoritarian populism rests on the support of the ‘people’, and authoritarian populist regimes have been democratically elected, often with landslide majorities, as seen in the case of India, Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Turkey and, arguably, the US under former President Trump. In such circumstances, religion plays a key role in legitimizing authoritarian populism regimes (DeHanas and Shterin, 2018). This can be seen in the case of Russia where the Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kiril has supported the regime of President Vladimir Putin DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-27

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and has blessed its illegal military actions in the Ukraine considering it a ‘holy war’ (Leustean, 2021). Consequently, it could be argued that we are witnessing a re-nationalization of transnational religious actors. A transnational religious actor may be defined as any non-governmental actor which claims to represent a specific religious tradition which has relations with an actor in another state or with an international organization. In this chapter, the activities of transnational actors working from within two different religious traditions will be examined: Roman Catholicism and Sikhism. Using the case studies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC)–Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) nexus, it will be argued that, despite differences in size, scale and objectives, actors operating from within these two religious traditions have attempted to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by globalization to articulate a transnational identity which, potentially, challenges the international order of territorialized nation-states which dates back to the Peace of Westphalia. It is hoped that the choice of these actors will serve to refocus the debate from an excessive attention to Islam to the relationship between transnational religious actors and IR in general. For, while it is undeniable that some transnational Islamic organizations, such as al-Qaeda, pose a direct and often violent challenge to the international order, others, such as the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), work to further ‘Islamic’ interests or goals within it (Haynes, 2012). In contrast to the post- 9/11 conventional wisdom in Western policy circles, it is argued that there is nothing particularly subversive about Islam per se but that there is a fundamental contradiction between the cosmopolitan, universal ideals espoused by some monotheistic transnational religious actors and the realpolitik of the Westphalian order. This tension between the universal and particular dimensions of Islamic identities accounts for the difficulty which ‘political Islam’ faces in establishing itself within the Westphalian order. However, other religions experience the same difficulties, given the Westphalian order’s Protestant roots, as is illustrated through our case studies of Catholic and Sikh transnational actors. The foundational principles of the Westphalian order which, it is argued, have been legitimized by the development of the hegemonic realist paradigm of IR, will first be outlined before accounting for the ‘global religious resurgence’ (Thomas, 2005). Contemporary processes of globalization, it is argued, are central to the ‘return of religion’ to IR theory (Petito and Hatzopoulos, 2003). Their impact on transnational religious communities in general will be analyzed before examining how they have transformed the role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy in particular. The subsequent section looks at how globalization – and its forerunner, colonial modernity – have transformed Sikh identity by facilitating its institutionalization both in India and the ‘diaspora’. This has led transnational religious actors representing Sikhism into conflict with territorialized nation-states committed to secularizing civil society. Finally, it will be argued in the conclusion that transnational religious actors have the potential to collectively constitute an embryonic globalized transnational civil society – an alternative both to the Westphalian international order and the secularized liberal model of global civil society (Kaldor, 2003) . According to Lipschultz (1992, p. 390) a transnational civil society is a result of the ‘self-conscious constructions of networks of knowledge and action, by decentred, local actors, that cross the reified boundaries of space as though they were not there’. Transnational civil society comprises groups and organizations in different states that work together to create cross-border communities that pursue common goals. According to Haynes who differentiates the term from ‘global civil society’ since the latter implies a universal reach that some transnational networks do not have, the concept has three main components. First, transnational civil society encompasses non-state actors motivated by social or political goals rather than economic goals, as is the case with transnational corporations. Second, these actors interact with each 344

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other across state boundaries and do not necessarily promote the interests of state actors. Finally, they take a variety of forms; prominent transnational actors include ‘secular’ international nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace as well as those with a more explicitly religious mission (Haynes, 2012, p. 7). Following Haynes, it is argued that transnational religious communities, such as Christendom, the Umma or, as argued here, the Khasa Panth, may be seen as transnational civil societies (Haynes, 2007, pp.  45–46, 150). However, they are implicitly postsecular in orientation. For Jürgen Habermas (2008), the term ‘post-secular’ refers to the inclusion of religious-based world views, translated into a language accessible to all, into the public sphere so as to guarantee its neutrality.3 Consequently, the term ‘post-secular’ transnational civil society refers here to a network or coalition of non-state actors representing the interests of different transnational secular or religious communities, sharing a common interest in working together to overcome the challenges posed by globalization and the Westphalian states system. However, in recent years, we have seen simultaneous processes of de-globalization taking place and the return of the nation-state to its role as the most important actor in IR. The rejection of the elite-led neoliberal project of globalization can be seen by the abandonment of the states that did much to promote it in the late twentieth century: the US and UK. The decision of the UK to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 foreshadowed the election of Donald J. Trump as president on an explicitly nationalist agenda. A billionaire populist, Trump promised to ‘make American great again’ by putting its own interests first, and under his leadership, the US withdrew from multilateral agreements to combat climate change, imposed and raised tariffs on imports and started building a wall on its border with Mexico to keep illegal migrants out. This represented an uncompromising rejection of globalization. Although the People’s Republic of China attempted to fill the vacuum in global leadership with its ambitious Belt and Road initiative which sought to recreate the Silk route in a global era, the discovery of the Covid-19 virus in Wuhan led to an unprecedented lockdown which is still in place in parts of the People’s Republic of China at the time of writing. The Covid-19 pandemic represented the most significant challenge to globalization with most states imposing travel restrictions and full lockdowns of their populations in order to stem the global pandemic. It also impacted on the global economy resulting in high rates of unemployment and rising costs of living. Confronted by economic collapse, states attempted to revive their economies through stimulus packages which many commentators saw as the end of the globalization of neoliberalism. However, the resurgence of state control of economies and restrictions on freedom of movement, even in the EU where freedom of movement was guaranteed by Article 50, does not mean that globalization per se is ‘dead’. Rather, it is argued that globalization has been transformed and taken on a disembodied form; that is, instead of the circulation of objects and peoples across borders, it has taken the form of the exchange of ideas, images, texts and programs digitally (Steger and James, 2020). This has allowed transnational religious actors to communicate and, in some cases, mobilize their followers online despite the restrictions of the pandemic.

Beyond Westphalia? Globalization, transnational religious communities and international relations The Peace of Westphalia has been described as a ‘constitutive foundational myth’ of modern IR (Teschke, 2003, p. 3). Conventionally, the contemporary international order is understood to have its origins in the 1648 agreements which brought the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) to an end and gave rise to a European system or society of sovereign states, which subsequently ‘expanded,’ through imperialism and decolonization, to encompass the non-Western world and 345

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therefore form an embryonic ‘international society’ (Bull and Watson, 1984). The Westphalian settlement ‘secularized international relations by undermining religion as a mode of legitimacy’ (Teschke, 2003, p. 3, italics added). It achieved this through institutionalizing the principles of firstly, rex est imperator in regno suo (that ‘the King rules in his own realm’), and cujus regio, ejus religio (‘the ruler determines the religion of his realm’). This had the effect of dividing the political from the religious community, temporal from spiritual authority. According to Haynes, there are ‘four pillars’ of the Westphalian system of IR. Firstly, states are considered the sole legitimate actors in the international system. Secondly, governments do not seek to change relations between religion and politics in foreign countries. Third, religious authorities legitimately exercise few, if any, domestic temporal functions, and even fewer transnationally. Finally, religious and political power, or church and state, are separated (Haynes, 2007, p. 32). The Westphalian world order has been ‘legitimized’ or ‘naturalized’ within the discipline of IR by the emergence of first ‘realism’ and later ‘neo-realism’ as the dominant perspective in international political theory after World War II. Although the hegemony of realism has recently been eroded by the perceived triumph of liberal values following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which some commentators saw bringing history to an end (Fukuyama, 1992), most conventional theories of IR are anchored in the same ‘realist’ assumptions. First, conventional theories view the state as both the key actor in IR and as the legitimate representative of the collective will of a community/nation. Second, state leaders’ primary responsibility is to ensure the survival of their state in an international system characterized by anarchy, defined by Wendt as ‘the absence of authority’ (Wendt, 1995, p. 52). Third, conventional theories of IR share the neo-realist assumption that a strict separation of domestic (intrastate) and international (interstate) relations is possible. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the Westphalian international order, predicated on the territorialization of political communities and the privatization of religion, has come ‘under siege’ from deterritorialized faith-based communities. In much of the Islamic world, political Islam or ‘Islamism’, has replaced the discredited forces of secular nationalism as the main oppositional ideology to Western cultural, political and economic hegemony (Sayyid, 1997). Although some, primarily French, scholars consider political Islam to be a declining force in global and regional politics since the onset of contemporary processes of globalization (Roy, 2003; Kepel, 2004), the influence of Islamism from the time of the Iranian revolution to the present day is undeniable and can be seen in recent regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iraq, Kashmir, Kosovo, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Thailand. Indeed, the violent manifestation of Islamic radicalism as exemplified by 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ has been seen by many as a vindication of Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis which depicts Islam as a largely homogenous, violence-prone ‘civilization’ with ‘bloody borders’ (Huntington, 1993, p. 43). In India, the emergence of the ‘Hindu right’ under the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party, largely accomplished through strategic regional alliances, has challenged the previously hegemonic ideology of Nehruvian secular nationalism as espoused by the Indian National Congress. India’s democratic structures, rather than resulting in the demise of religious identities as predicted by India‘s postcolonial leaders, led instead to the emergence of a pan-Indian Hindu cultural nationalism, albeit with local variations. In light of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s re-election in 2019 with an increased majority, and its abrogation of Article 370 which provided autonomy to the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir within India, it has been argued that the Bharatiya Janata Party has successfully ‘re-branded’ India as a Hindu ‘Rashtra’ or state (Shani, 2021). The global religious revival is not, however, confined to the Global South. After 9/11, Christianity has once again become an important component of Western identity. In the US, 346

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Samuel P. Huntington (in)famously argued that American identity has founded upon a common ‘Anglo-Protestant’ cultural heritage which (non-Protestant) immigrants were expected to adopt as their own and defend against an increasingly radicalized Islam (Huntington, 2004). Social issues featured prominently in the 2004 elections which saw the incumbent, George W. Bush, re-elected for a second term with a conservative agenda including opposition to stem-cell research, same-sex marriages and the further extension of abortion rights. The Christian Right, and evangelicals in particular, also played a key role in the election of President Trump in 2017 despite his professed lack of faith. Many saw in Trump an instrument through which to redefine America’s national culture along Christian lines (see Haynes, 2021) and, through his appointment of Supreme Court justices, to overturn Roe v. Wade which guaranteed the right of abortion. In an increasingly culturally diverse Europe, religion has become a faultline along which contemporary conflicts over national security and multiculturalism have been fought. The presence of an increasingly assertive Muslim ‘diaspora’ (Modood, 2005) in Europe has provided opportunities for a re-politicization of Christianity, in opposition to both the secularization and perceived ‘Islamization’ of Europe. The result has been a rediscovery of the continent’s Christian roots, even among those who have long disregarded it, and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity (Jenkins, 2007). The global religious resurgence has been sustained by the processes associated with the contemporary phase of globalization. As a result of globalization, faith has ‘obtained greater significance as a non-territorial touchstone of identity in today’s more global world’ (Scholte, 2005, p. 245). Three developments in particular have provided a context for a religious resurgence on a global scale. In the first place, globalization – through economic restructuring programmes which necessitate reduced public expenditure – has impacted upon the relative power of the secular state, decreasing its capacity to impose its secular vision of the nation to the exclusion of other identities. Increasingly national identities co-exist and compete with other forms of collective identities on an individual level. As a result, the assertion of a national identity no longer necessitates a rejection of pre-national, communal identities, particularly those based on ethnicity and religion. Secondly, globalization has decreased the salience of territory in the construction of individual and collective identities. Identity is no longer exclusively defined in terms of place: where one is from no longer allows us to define who one is. As Scholte points out, ‘territorialism as the previously prevailing structure of social space was closely interlinked with nationalism as the previously prevailing structure of collective identity’ (Scholte, 2005, p. 225). However, one of the significant consequences of contemporary globalization has been to sever the connections between the state – a coercive apparatus of governance defined in terms of its monopoly of organized violence – and the nation – an ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson, 1991) – to the point where ‘many national projects today no longer involve an aspiration to acquire their own sovereign state’ (Scholte, 2005, p. 228). The deterritorialization of nationalism has created space for the reassertion of transnational religious identities. Indeed, religious identities seem particularly suited to the needs of a rapidly globalizing world since, despite the attachment to a territorially defined ‘holy land’ which is often the site of pilgrimage, the core tenets of most religions are in principle universal and can be embraced and practised anywhere on earth. Finally, globalization has, through the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution in particular, facilitated the dissemination of these universal core beliefs and tenets on a global scale. Most religious organizations maintain websites to introduce non-believers to the faith and to provide spiritual guidance to the faithful. ICT has provided followers of transnational religious communities with the opportunity to communicate across the boundaries and transcend the limitations of the territorially defined national community (Shani, 2020). 347

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Whilst for Benedict Anderson it was the development of what he termed ‘print capitalism’ that made the imagination of the nation possible, it can be argued that ICTs have facilitated the (re) imagination of transnational religious communities. Print capitalism, for Anderson, refers to the creation of mechanically reproduced secular, ‘print languages’ capable of dissemination through the market. These ‘print languages’ laid the basis for national consciousness first in Europe then elsewhere by creating fixed, unified fields of communication below sacred language and above the spoken regional vernaculars. Books and newspapers, written in these ‘print languages’ were the first mass market commodities in capitalism, designed for consumption in the new ‘domestic’ market. Speakers of regional dialects within a particular territory became capable of understanding one another through articles in newspapers, journals and books, even though they might find it difficult or even impossible to comprehend each other in conversation. In the process, they became aware of the hundreds or thousands, or even millions of people, who could read their language. These fellow readers formed, for Anderson (1991, p. 44), ‘the embryo of the nationally imagined community’. As print capitalism helped produce the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, digital or ‘informational’ capitalism (Castells, 1996) has encouraged the formation of transnational networks involving individuals and groups sharing background and/or interests. ICTs ‘offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 3). ICT has provided the ability to communicate across the boundaries and transcend the limitations of the territorially defined national community, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside, the virtual (or ‘imaginary’) and the real (Shani, 2020). ICTs also provide transnational religious actors with an opportunity to articulate narratives which both simultaneously reinforce and challenge hegemonic power structures within their traditions. In this section, it has been argued, following Scott Thomas, that we have experienced a ‘global religious resurgence’ in recent years. Globalization has facilitated the re-emergence of transnational religious actors in IR by, firstly, eroding the capacity of the state to impose its secular vision on society; secondly, by decreasing the salience of territory in the construction of identities; and, finally, by facilitating the dissemination of these central beliefs and tenets of religions on a global scale. In the next section, we examine how contemporary globalization has empowered both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic transnational religious actors representing two transnational religious civil societies: Catholicism and Sikhism. The choice of examples is dictated by cultural familiarity and a desire to avoid generalizing from the experience of contemporary militant political Islam which is stigmatized as constituting a threat to the international order.

The Roman Catholic Church According to José Casanova, ‘ongoing processes of globalization offer a transnational religious regime like Catholicism, which never felt fully at home in a system of sovereign territorial nation-states, unique opportunities to expand, to adapt rapidly to the newly emerging global system, and perhaps even assume a proactive role in shaping some aspects of the new system’ (Casanova, 1997, p. 121). Indeed, as its very name suggests, Catholicism posits an alternative, more universal or even global vision of international society, than that represented by the Westphalian system. The Roman Catholic Church traces its origins to Peter, the ‘rock’ upon which – according to Matthew – Jesus first built his church, and to Paul, without whom Küng asserts there would have been ‘no Catholic Church’ (Küng, 2001, p. 27). However, its historical roots lie in the ‘Imperial Catholic Church’ of the fourth century. The recognition of Christianity by the 348

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Emperor Constantine in 313 paved the way for the eventual conversion of the transnational Roman Empire to the message of Christ and, significantly, the hierarchicalization of the early Church of Peter and Paul along the lines of the Roman Empire. The ecclesia catholica incorporated many of the features of the old Roman Empire, notably its central command structure with the Bishop of Rome at the apex, its mystification of authority, legalism, bureaucracy and intolerance of dissent. Biblical injunctions – most notably expressed in the Ten Commandments and the New Testament – prohibiting the use of force were quickly forgotten as in ‘less than a century the persecuted Church had become a persecuting Church’ (Küng, 2001, p. 45). The ‘Roman’ Catholic Church, however, outlived the Empire and was able to survive the various ‘barbarian’ invasions, the changing constellations of power in European politics, and the transition to ‘modernity’. In so doing, it asserted, through its rigid, monotheistic universalism, the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal, church over state, and was able to provide the religious, political, social and cultural framework though which Europe, and subsequently, the ‘West’ could be imagined. The ideology of papal absolutism, however, was only completed with the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council (hereafter Vatican I) in 1870. Described as the ‘Council of the Counter-Enlightenment’ (Küng, 2001, p. 168), the council confirmed the church’s opposition to ‘rationalism, liberalism and materialism’ and asserted that when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, he possesses, ‘by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals’. Therefore, Vatican I declared the ‘definitions’ of the pontiff to be ‘irreformable’ (Holy See, 1870, p. 9). The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), convened almost a century after Vatican I between 1961 and 1965, did much to reconcile the Catholic Church with modernity. In Nostra Aetate, the declaration on the relation of the church to non-Christian religions, passed by an overwhelming majority of bishops at the council and proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on 28 October 1965, the church condemned ‘as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, colour, condition of life, or religion’ (Holy See, 1965a, p. 5). This seemed to (belatedly) affirm a commitment to universal human rights which the Papacy had steadfastly opposed since the French Revolution. Furthermore, in Dignitatis Humanae (7 December 1965), the right of individuals and communities to religious freedom was affirmed (Holy See, 1965b, p. 1). It was recognized that, although the Vatican Council believed that Roman Catholicism remained the ‘one true religion’, there were, in principle at least, other paths to salvation. After Vatican II, the church could claim to be global in at least two different ways. In the first place, it was no longer an exclusively Roman or European institution. Whereas only onetenth of the assembled bishops who attended Vatican I were from outside Europe, Europeans no longer formed a majority at Vatican II. This may explain their unwillingness to rubber stamp the recommendation of the curia and redefine the church as the ‘light of nations’. Furthermore, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy facilitated the ‘indigenization’ of the church and allowed it to reach a younger and wider audience outside of its traditional European heartland. This has been reflected in the sharp increase in the number of Catholics globally – from 600 million to 1.2  billion (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/02/13/the-global-catholicpopulation/) – with a clear shift from north to south. This shift was reflected in the ordination of the first non-European Pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the name Francis I, on 13 March 2013. Furthermore, the church’s centralized hierarchy, centred on the pontiff in Rome, allows it to articulate a coherent and consistent ‘ideology’ or vision of God, Man and the World, affirmed 349

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in its Constitution, transnationally. Since Vatican II, there has been a homogenization and globalization of Catholic culture at the elite level throughout the Catholic world. This process of globalization and homogenization finds expression in three directions. Firstly, it finds expression in the ever-widening publication of papal encyclicals dealing not only with doctrinal matters but also with secular issues affecting all of humanity. According to José Casanova (1997, p. 112), these pronouncements have consistently presented the protection of the human rights of every person as the moral foundation of a just social and political order, the substitution of dialogue and peaceful negotiation for violent confrontation as the means of resolving conflicts and just grievances between people and states, and universal human solidarity as the foundation for the construction of a just and fair national as well as international division of labour and a just and legitimate world order. The second direction in which it finds expression is in the increasingly active role of the papacy in issues dealing with IR, as can be seen in the opposition of Pope John Paul II to communism and the Iraq War and his championing of democracy in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe in the 1980s. The Pope’s encyclical of January 1991 (Redemptoris Missio) which stressed the church’s duty to ‘relieve poverty, counter political oppression and defend human rights’ may in particular be seen as a statement of the transnational political aspirations of the church and its effects were felt throughout the developing world, particularly in Africa where senior Roman Catholic figures became centrally involved in the transition to democracy (Haynes, 2007, p.  139). Finally, globalization has generally increased the public visibility of the person of the pope ‘as the high priest of a new universal civil religion of humanity as the first citizen of a global civil society’ (Casanova, 1997, p. 116). Lauded as ‘the people’s Pope’ by Time magazine who made him their ‘person of the year’ in 2013 following his consecration as Pope (Time, 11 December 2013), Pope Francis I has attracted widespread support from Catholics and non-Catholics alike for his ‘progressive’ stance on sexuality, opposition to war and concern with poverty and the environment. However, the views articulated by the pontiff are rooted in his faith and as such do not represent a growing secularization of traditional Catholic values arising from the globalization of secular liberalism but their re-articulation in a rapidly globalizing world. Indeed, the present pontiff remains implacably opposed to abortion, same-sex marriages and the ordination of women priests. In contrast, however, to Pope Benedict’s concern with contesting the hegemony of secular enlightenment universalism, the current pontificate emphasizes the need to look outside of the traditional Catholic heartland of Europe and to look outward to a world in need of salvation, particularly in the Global South where endemic poverty and rising inequality arguably pose a greater threat to Catholic values than same-sex marriage. The present pontificate may therefore be seen as apostolic rather than ‘self-referential’ and to favour the work of evangelization over administration (www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=1084). This emphasis on evangelization is significantly influenced by the present pontiff’s training as a Jesuit, an order of the Catholic Church founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, which seeks to find ‘God in all things’ through active service in the community, particularly in education (http://jesuits.org/spirituality). Recently, this has taken the form of calling for an ‘ethical and economic revolution’ in order to address the pernicious effects of climate change in his Encyclical Laudato Si (Holy See, 2015). His most recent Encyclical, Fratelli tutti, has called for a global solidarist ethic based on a united and indivisible humanity in which every man 350

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and woman is each other’s brother or sister, in order to deal with the challenges posed by Covid-19. Implicit in the Encyclical is a critique of the Westphalian order: Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident. For all our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. (Holy See, 2020) The hegemony of the papal orthodoxy within Roman Catholicism has, however, not gone uncontested, and other counter-hegemonic transnational theologies have evolved within the church since Vatican II. Perhaps the most influential has been liberation theology which the present pontiff opposes and the previous pontiff had earlier claimed to constitute a ‘fundamental threat to the faith of the Church’ (Ratzinger, 1984, p. 2). Liberation theology developed in Latin America in the 1970s and aimed to use a politicized reading of Christianity to further the emancipation of the Third World peoples from authoritarian governments and neo-imperialism. It was profoundly influenced by certain forms of neo-Marxism and by dependency theory in particular. Although liberation theology is not as influential as it once was, it played a key role in facilitating the transition to democracy in many developing societies, and it lives on through the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT): a non-denominational organization independent of the Roman Catholic Church which is committed to the re-interpretation of the gospels ‘in a more meaningful way’ and the promotion of ‘the struggle for the liberation of Third World peoples’ (http://eatwot.net/). In conclusion, the Roman Catholic Church may be seen as a global transnational religious actor exercising a considerable degree of ‘soft power’4 which potentially challenges the Westphalian order through its assertion of the transnational nature of the church, of the right of the pontiff to make pronouncements on spiritual issues which are considered binding on all Catholics, and in particular, in its affirmation of the universal dignity and rights of man. Since Vatican II, the church has been active in the promotion of human rights, democracy and the elimination of poverty throughout the world, most notably in Communist and developing societies. This has brought it into conflict with repressive state structures which derive their legitimacy from the division of the world into territorialized, sovereign states by the Peace of Westphalia. Recently, the tensions between the Westphalian order and the papacy can be seen in the efforts of the pontiff to mediate in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The pontiff’s offer to mediate in the dispute, in which both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches have played key roles in legitimizing the actions of their governments in the eyes of God, appears to have fallen on deaf ears (www. vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2022-03/cardinal-parolin-holy-see-mediation-offer-warukriane-russia.html). This illustrates the limits of the power which the papacy, as a global transnational actor, wields in a territorialized, international order. The attitude of powerful state leaders such as Vladimir Putin may not be all that different from that of his Soviet predecessor who allegedly dismissively inquired how many divisions the Pope had. This will be further illustrated in our discussion of Sikh transnational religious actors who have neither a pope nor divisions.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee Whereas the Roman Catholic Church can be termed a global religious actor commanding the allegiances of more people than any nation-state other than arguably India and China, with a budget to match, the same cannot be said of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC). The SGPC controls all Sikh temples, called gurdwaras, in the India state of Punjab where the overwhelming majority of the world’s 26 million Sikhs live (Singh and Shani, 2021, 351

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p. 1). However, since its inception in October 1920, the SGPC has been central to the articulation of a transnational religious identity. It has done so by institutionalizing the orthodox Khalsa definition of Sikh identity through The Sikh Rehat Maryada and providing Sikhdom with a central institutional structure within which to make pronouncements on issues concerning Sikhs globally. Together with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the main Sikh political party which has traditionally controlled it, the SGPC forms part of the ‘Sikh political system’ (Singh and Shani, 2021) The term ‘Sikh’ refers to the learners or disciples5 of the first Guru of the Sikh Panth, Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Nanak developed during the course of his life a religious and social philosophy which, although deeply influenced by both Hinduism and Islam, was distinct from both. The Sikh religious tradition is centred on a reading of a holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, written in a sacred script particular to the Sikhs (jathedar), in a Sikh place of worship, gurdwara. Anybody can become a Sikh, as long as one is baptized and conforms to the established practice of the Khalsa Rahit (code of conduct): baptized (amritdhari) Sikhs following the edicts of the tenth Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708) are enjoined to keep their hair, including facial hair, long (kes); carry a comb (kanga); wear knee-length breeches (kachh); wear a steel bracelet on the right hand (kara); and carry a sword or dagger (kirpan). Those who embody these five symbols of Sikh identity, known as Kes-dhari Sikhs, constitute the Khalsa, or ‘community of the pure’, whilst Sahajdhari Sikhs, ‘slowadopters’, may eventually progress towards full participation in the Khalsa. These five symbols of Sikh religious identity, developed in opposition to prevalent ‘Hindu’ cultural practices, have been institutionalized by the SGPC and serve to construct boundaries between Sikhs and other communities, making Kes-dhari Sikhs an easily identifiable group in both an Indian and diaspora context. According to the Rehat Maryada, a Sikh is defined as Any human being who faithfully believes in   i   ii iii iv v

One Immortal Being, Ten Gurus, from Guru Nanak Sahib to Guru Gobind Singh Sahib, The Guru Granth Sahib, The utterances and teachings of the ten Gurus and the baptism bequeathed by the tenth Guru, and who does not owe allegiance to any other religion, is a Sikh. (SGPC, 1994, p. 1)

Although this definition is wide enough to include different Sikh sects, it firmly draws the boundaries between Sikhism and other religions. Religious boundaries between Sikhs and other religions are reinforced by Article II of the Rehat which states that a Sikh’s life has two aspects: ‘individual or personal and corporate or Panthic’ (SGPC, 1994, p. 1). Whilst the personal life of a Sikh is devoted to meditation on Nam (the ‘Divine Substance’) and to following the Guru’s teachings, the corporate life of a Sikh entails a commitment to the panth. A single, corporate entity which includes all Sikhs, the panth is envisaged as an essentially democratic and egalitarian polity, with the SGPC acting as its Parliament, its Constituent Assembly. The SGPC affords the Sikhs a forum to legislate on all issues concerning the community and its headquarters in the Akal Takht inside the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, is the site of all temporal power within Sikhdom. A comparison, therefore, between the SGPC and the Vatican can be made, although the SGPC is, unlike the Vatican, an organisation open to all Sikhs. Like Roman Catholicism – and unlike Islam – Sikhism has its own spiritual leader, the jathedar or leader of the Akal Takht. Although answerable to the SGPC and neither possessing the gift of infallibility nor temporal authority of the Roman pontiff, the jathedar can, however, make pronouncements on behalf of the panth which, although not binding, have a normative status within Sikhism. 352

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Globalization has influenced Sikhism in two main ways: first, it has brought opportunities for migration from the Punjab; and secondly, improved communications, and the development of the Punjabi-language print media and, subsequently, ICTs in particular, have enabled the construction of a ‘diaspora’ consciousness (Axel, 2001; Shani, 2008; Singh and Shani, 2021). Although migration from the Punjab to Southeast Asia, East Africa and North America first took place during the colonial period, it was only after the partition of the subcontinent – and the Punjab – into two independent nation-states of India and Pakistan, that large-scale migration took place. The first destination for Sikhs from West Punjab (now Pakistan) displaced by partition was India itself as they replaced Muslims from East Punjab and the capital, New Delhi, going in the opposite direction. Subsequently, labour shortages in the West caused by the adoption of a Keynesian ‘full employment’ economic model, combined with the underdevelopment of Indian society after two centuries of colonial rule, convinced many Sikhs from mainly agricultural backgrounds to leave their ‘homeland’ and settle overseas. Initially, the vast majority settled in the UK which was more willing to accept them given the shared Anglo-Sikh colonial heritage (Singh and Tatla, 2006). However, particularly after the storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984 which led to a ‘national war of self-determination’ in the Punjab, Sikhs began to move elsewhere, with North America their preferred destination. The growth of a sizeable Sikh ‘diaspora’ settled mainly in the West and numbering over a million, has posed new challenges for nation-states and the maintenance of Sikh identity. Unlike most other religious identities, Sikh identity is embodied, and Sikhs have, therefore, found it more difficult to negotiate membership of the ‘national’ community while retaining the external symbols of the faith (Shani, 2008). In Britain, the 336,000-strong Sikh community has ‘played a crucial role as a bridgehead community which has “pioneered” British multiculturalism’ and in so doing has also ‘expanded its remit to include greater public recognition of the culture and traditions of other ethnic minority communities’ (Singh and Tatla, 2006, p. 210). Although Sikhs have also consistently, and increasingly after 9/11, faced legal challenges to the maintenance of the five symbols of Sikh identity, as well as employment and educational and legal discrimination, in North America, it is in continental Europe, and particularly France with its Jacobin traditions, that Sikhs have encountered the most difficulties. In March 2004, the French state passed a law which bans conspicuous religious symbols and attire in public schools in order to uphold the principle of laïcité, which promotes the active promotion of secularism in the public sphere. Although the law does not explicitly target the Sikh community, Sikh schoolchildren are most affected by the ban since the wearing of the Five Ks is an integral part of Kes-dhari Sikh identity and is arguably more important to the maintenance of the Sikh faith than the cross is to Christianity, the skull-cap is to Judaism or the head scarf is to Islam. Consequently, many of the 5,000-strong Sikh community in France have been faced with a stark dilemma: either cease wearing the religious symbols which are the very embodiment of their faith or face exclusion from state schools. French (and other European) Sikhs have thus been forced to choose between ‘faith’ and ‘nation’. The inability of the SGPC to influence French government policy, despite the election of a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, as Indian Prime Minister, demonstrates the limits of the committee’s ‘soft power’ outside the Punjab qualifying its transnational aspirations. It has also created space for the emergence of other transnational actors representing the interests of Sikhs outside of the Sikh ‘political system’ centred on the Akal Takht. The proliferation of Sikh TV channels, radio stations, news outlets and websites in Punjab and the diaspora, and the unprecedented expansion in social media, has created opportunities for imagining the Sikh panth on a global scale in real time. In previous work, I termed this a ‘global Sikh quam’ (Shani, 2008, Singh and Shani, 2021). In the global Sikh qaum, sovereignty is asserted not exclusively over the territorially 353

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defined homeland of the Punjab but over the entire Sikh global community, with calls for, among other things, special Vatican-like status for the Golden Temple. However, Sikh identity remains predominately territorialized in a Punjabi ethnie (Singh and Shani, 2021). Therefore, there are territorial limits to the imagination of a ‘global’ Sikh qaum.

Conclusion In conclusion, the global activities of religious actors have exposed the ‘secular conceit’6 of the Westphalian order which made transnational religious and cultural traditions subject to the disciplinary power of the sovereign state. In the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics, I suggested that transnational religious actors will become increasingly more important in our ‘global age’. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and the resurgence of territorial nationalism in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has called globalization into question. The territorial nation-state remains the basic unit of IR and places limits on the activities of transnational religious actors and their capacity to reimagine the communities which they represent as illustrated by our case studies of the Roman Catholic Church and the SGPC. Given its global reach, highly centralised and hierarchical structure, its membership of the UN and diplomatic activities, the Roman Catholic Church still can exert enormous influence over their billion and a half followers worldwide. However, the absence of state power means that the pontiff is unable to carry out the agenda for a global spiritual renewal in order to combat the effects of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. The absence of any (military) ‘divisions’ also inhibits the ability of the Roman Catholic Church to mediate in international disputes or bring them to a successful end. The limit of the power of the SGPC to legislate on issues concerning Sikhs outside of Punjab also constrains its ability to act as a transnational religious actor and represent a ‘global Sikh qaum’. One way in which transnational religious actors could effect change within the Westphalian system would be to collaborate in trying to steer the global political agenda beyond the parochial interests of states towards that of humanity, and the planet, in general. A recent example is the meeting of global religious leaders in the Vatican before COP26 in 2021 in which Catholic and Sikh religious actors participated.7 Their participation points the way towards an emerging globalized ‘post-secular’ transnational civil society which may co-exist, yet not yet replace, a world of territorialised nation-states.

Notes 1 The author wishes to thank Jeff Haynes for the invitation to contribute to the third edition. 2 The term ‘caliphate’ derives from the Arabic Khalifa, a term denoting a series of Islamic states that were formed following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 (Haynes, 2012, p. 7). 3 Critical scholarship in IR has cast doubt on the extent to which translation from religious into secular language is indeed possible without transforming the meaning of faith-based claims or whether the term is indeed applicable to non-Judeo-Christian cultural contexts (see Mavelli and Petito, 2012; and Shani, 2014). 4 ‘Soft power’ is defined by Joseph Nye as the ‘ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (Nye, 2004, p. 12). See Haynes (2012) for its application to the analysis of religious transnational actors in IR. 5 The term ‘Sikh’ has its origins in Sanskrit (sisya) meaning disciple or student (Singh and Shani, 2021, p. 1). 6 See Connolly (1999, pp. 19–47). 7 Forty religious leaders gathered in the Vatican. Among them was the Sikh non-governmental organization EcoSikh which represents a Sikh perspective on the environment. The meeting was hosted by His Holiness Pope Francis who addressed the participants by calling for greater dialogue between religion and science (see Holy See, 2021).

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References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Axel, Brian K. The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora”. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Bull, Hedley “The Revolt against the West”, In The Expansion of International Society, edited by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, 357–369. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Casanova, José. “Globalizing Catholicism and the Return to a ‘Universal’ Church”, In Transnational Religion and Fading States, edited by Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, 121–143. Boulder: Westview, 1997. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age, Vol.1: The Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Connolly, William E. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. DeHanas, Daniel Nilsson and Marat Shterin. “Religion and the rise of Populism”, Religion, State and Society, 46(3) (2018): 177–185. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Haynes, Jeffrey. An Introduction to International Relations and Religion. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. Haynes, Jeffrey. Religious Transnational Actors and Soft Power. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. Haynes, Jeffrey. “Transnational Religious Actors and International Politics”, Third World Quarterly, 22(1) (2001): 143–158. Haynes, Jeffrey. Trump and the Politics of Neo-Nationalism.  The Christian Right and Secular Nationalism in America. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Holy See, The. Address of His Holiness Pop Francis to the Participants in the Meeting Faith and Science: Towards COP26, 2021. Online. Available at: www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/october/ documents/20211004-religione-scienza-cop26.html Holy See, The. Dignitatis Humanae, 1965b. Online. Available at: www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html (accessed 20 March 2007). Holy See, The. Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home, 2020. Online. Available at: www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html (accessed 30 April 2022). Holy See, The. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home, 2015. Online. Available at: www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html (accessed 30 April 2022). Holy See, The. Nostra Aetate, 1965a. Online. Available at: www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html (accessed 20 March 2007). Holy See, The. The Decrees of the First Vatican Council, 1870. Online. Available at: www.dailycatholic.org/ history/20ecume3.htm#Chapter%204.%20On%20the%20infallible%20teaching%20authority%20 of%20the%20Roman%20pontiff (accessed 20 March 2007). Huntington, Samuel P. ‘The clash of civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72(3) (1993): 22–49. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2004. Jenkins, Peter. God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kaldor, Mary. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. Küng, Hans. The Catholic Church (trans. J. Bowden). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001. Leustean, Lucian. N. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: The First Religious War in the 21st Century”, LSE Religion and Global Society Blog, 2021. Online. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ religionglobalsociety/2022/03/russias-invasion-of-ukraine-the-first-religious-war-in-the-21st-century/ (accessed 3 March 2021). Lipschultz, Ronnie. “Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 3(21) (1992): 389–420. Mavelli, Luca and Fabio Petito. “The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview”, Review of International Studies, 38 (2012): 931–942.

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Giorgio Shani Modood, Tariq. Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 2004. Petito, Fabio and Pavlos Hatzopoulos (eds). Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. Preliminary Notes on Liberation Theology, 1984. Online. Available at: www. christendom-awake.org/pages/ratzinger/liberationtheol.htm (accessed 25 June 2007). Roy, Olivier. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia: University Press, 2003. Sayyid, Bobby S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books, 1997. Scholte, Jan. Arte. Globalisation: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Shani, Giorgio. “Identity Politics in a Global Age”, In The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies 2e, edited by Anthony Elliott, 405–424. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Shani, Giorgio. Religion, Identity and Human Security. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Shani, Giorgio. Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Shani, Giorgio. “Towards a Hindu Rashtra: Hindutva, religion, and nationalism in India”, Religion, State and Society, 49(3) (2021): 264–280. doi: 10.1080/09637494.2021.1947731 Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) The Sikh Rehat Maryada. Amritsar: SGPC Publications, 1994. Singh, Gurharpal and Darshan Singh Tatla. Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community. London: Zed Books, 2006. Singh, Gurharpal and Giorgio Shani. Sikh Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Steger, Manfred and Paul James. “Disjunctive Globalization in the Era of the Great Unsettling”, Theory, Culture & Society, (2020): 1–17. Teschke, Benno. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso, 2003. Thomas, Scott M. The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Wendt, Alexander. “Identity and Structural Change in International Politics”, In The Return of Culture and Identity in International Relations Theory, edited by Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995.

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25 FIGHTING THE FOSSIL-FUEL PHARAOH American Jews and climate action David Krantz Introduction The most important story in Jewish history is God’s redemption of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt at the hands of the Pharaoh, about 3,300 years ago according to Jewish tradition. Today, environmentalists in the United States are leading the Jewish effort to free society from a newly emerged pharaoh: fossil fuels. We may no longer be enslaved in Egypt, but today our bondage takes the form of an addiction to the burning of coal, gas and oil – a connection most famously made explicit by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who has warned of “Carbon Pharaohs” (Waskow, 2014a), “Climate Pharaohs” (Waskow, 2014a), “Corporate Pharaohs” (Waskow, 2014a), “Pharaohs of Our Day” (Waskow, 2010), “Institutional Pharaohs” (Waskow, 2008) and “Pharaohs of Global Scorching” (Waskow, 2004) for the past two decades after railing in the early 1970s against “Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate” and their air pollution from burning gasoline (Waskow, 1971). [Inspired by Waskow, I started referring to the “Fossil-Fuel Pharaoh” in 2012 (Krantz, 2012).] Jewish climate-focused initiatives have grown into what some call the Jewish climate movement, a multi-stakeholder-populated subfield of the Jewish environmental movement (although the distinctions between the overall field and its handful of subfields have long been blurred). Much of the growth can be attributed to the all-volunteer efforts of two leaders – Rabbi Katy Allen and Mirele Goldsmith – coupled with the institutional efforts led by Dayenu,1 one of the newest entrants to the movement, and Hazon, the largest and one of the oldest Jewish environmental nonprofits. The growing prominence of climate action among U.S.-based Jewish organizations reflects climate change as an increasingly important political concern for American Jews. Indeed, recognition of the severity of environmental problems such as climate change has been higher among Jews – regardless of the degree of one’s religious commitment (Arbuckle and Konisky, 2015) – than it has been among Americans of every other faith (Jones et al., 2014). This chapter first provides an overview of some of the earliest examples of Jewish climate activism and the subsequent boom in Jewish climate groups before proceeding with largely chronological highlights of the Jewish climate movement over the past dozen years and concluding with a call to action.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-28

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Pioneers of Jewish climate activism Early U.S.-based Jewish environmental groups that took on climate as an issue include Aytzim (founded in 2001), the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (commonly known as COEJL, founded in 1993), Hazon (founded in 2000), Jews Against Hydrofracking (now defunct, founded in 2011), Kayam Farm (established at the Pearlstone Center in 2006) and The Shalom Center (founded in 1983). However, aside from Hazon’s Jewish Climate Change Campaign, the work was not always labeled as climate activism, but rather the groups addressed climate from other vantage points, such as by promoting renewables and energy efficiency and working against fossil-fuel exploitation. For example, Aytzim joined with Israeli groups in opposing fracking and in-situ retorting of oil shale in Israel (Krantz, 2011a). Jews Against Hydrofracking formed specifically to fight fracking in the New York metropolitan area (Krantz, 2023). And in 2012, Kayam Farm included a trip to Washington for a day of advocacy and lobbying on climate and the Farm Bill as part of its two-day summit on shmita, the biblical sabbatical year (Kayam Farm, 2012; Krantz, 2016). Still, there was a divide between Jewish environmental groups that saw climate action as essential to their missions and those that saw it as political and outside their purviews. An ad hoc climate quartet of COEJL’s Sybil Sanchez, NeoHasid’s Rabbi David Seidenberg, The Shalom Center’s Waskow, and I (representing Aytzim, then known as the Green Zionist Alliance) emerged within the Green Hevra – a former network of 16 Jewish environmental initiatives – to encourage our fellow Green Hevra members to take stronger stances on climate. We were only moderately successful. When Sanchez and Seidenberg, citing that “Jewish texts and traditions highlight the importance of caring for the world”, authored a Green Hevra letter opposing the alignment of some Jewish groups with gas and oil companies, only 12, or three-quarters, of the Green Hevra groups signed (Sanchez and Seidenberg, 2013). Similarly, when a group of Green Hevra leaders wrote a letter saying that because the Hebrew Bible “calls for deeper gentleness toward the Earth” that Jews should oppose construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, only 13 Jewish groups overall signed – including only eight members, or only half, of the Green Hevra (Green Hevra, 2014b). The differing emphasis on climate also can be seen in print. A Green Hevra 2013 study of the Jewish environmental movement resulted in a 16-page report in 2014 that mentions climate once (Green Hevra, 2014a). At about the same time, Hazon was conducting a study of immersive Jewish outdoor, food and environmental-education programs (nicknamed JOFEE2), and its corresponding 59-page report mentions climate twice (Informing Change, 2014). By comparison, the 100-page Jewish Energy Guide, a 50-article book co-published in 2014 by Aytzim and COEJL, mentions climate 104 times (Krantz, 2014). The conflicting viewpoints between groups that embraced climate activism and those that eschewed it or were not quite ready for it was a source of friction between Green Hevra members, ultimately contributing in part to the network’s demise.

The rise of Jewish climate activism Where the Jewish environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s consisted primarily of educational, food and agricultural groups (Green Hevra, 2014a), the Jewish environmental movement of the past decade increasingly has marked a shift toward a Jewish communal focus on climate. The spike in Jewish climate groups (see Table 25.1) has included the founding of the Jewish Climate Action Network (Boston) and the Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet project (launched jointly by The Shalom Center and Interfaith Moral Action on Climate) 358

Table 25.1  Jewish climate-focused initiatives in the United States Initiative

Founded Original Focus

The Shalom Center 1983

Anti-nuclear proliferation Education and interfaith Sustainability

Hazon

2000

Biking and food

Aytzim: Ecological Judaism Jewish Climate Change Campaign Jews Against Hydrofracking Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign Jewish Climate Action Network (Massachusetts) Move Our Money/ Protect Our Planet

2001

Location

Education and advocacy National

Legal Status

Affiliated Groups

Staffing

Operationality

501c3 nonprofit

N/A

Paid

Active

Education and advocacy National

Sustainability

Project of the Jewish None Paid Council for Public currently Affairs Education and advocacy Greater Formerly independent; N/A Volunteer Washington, DC current project of Aytzim Education and National 501c3 nonprofit N/A Paid networking Education and advocacy National 501c3 nonprofit N/A Volunteer

Active

2009

Climate

Education

Dormant

2011

National

Intermittent

Intermittent

Active

Project of Hazon

106

Mixed

Energy and water Education and advocacy New York

Unincorporated

N/A

Volunteer Dormant

2012

Energy

Education

National

2013

Climate

Advocacy

Massachusetts

Project of the Coalition 53 on the Environment and Jewish Life Unincorporated N/A

2013

Climate

Advocacy

National

Project of The Shalom N/A Center and Interfaith Moral Action on Climate

Paid

Dormant

Volunteer Active

Mixed

Intermittent

(Continued)

Fighting the fossil-fuel pharaoh

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Coalition on the 1993 Environment and Jewish Life Jews of the Earth 1999

Type

Table 25.1 (Continued) Founded Original Focus

Type

Location

Legal Status

Affiliated Groups

Staffing

Operationality

Shomrei Breishit: Rabbis and Cantors for the Earth Higher Ground Initiative Jewish Climate Action Network (New York City) Jewish Climate Action Network – DMV

2014

Climate

Advocacy

National

Project of Aytzim and GreenFaith

N/A

Mixed

Intermittent

2016

Climate

Education and advocacy Florida

Project of Temple Solel 4

Volunteer Active

2016

Climate

Advocacy

New York

Unincorporated

19

Volunteer Active

2018

Climate

Advocacy

N/A

Paid

Active

Jewish Climate Coalition

2019

Climate

Networking

40

Mixed

Intermittent

Jewish Earth Alliance Jewish Youth Climate Movement Riverdale Jewish Earth Alliance

2019

Climate

Advocacy

Greater Project of Interfaith Washington, DC Power and Light (Washington, DC; Maryland; northern Virginia) New York Project of Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan National Unincorporated

41

Volunteer Active

2019

Climate

Advocacy

National

Project of Hazon

39

Volunteer Active

2019

Climate

Advocacy

New York

2020

Climate

Advocacy

National

Unincorporated Jewish N/A Earth Alliance affiliate Fiscally sponsored by 69 Social Good Fund

Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action

Volunteer Intermittent

Paid

Active

David Krantz

360

Initiative

Founded Original Focus

Type

Location

Legal Status

Affiliated Groups

Staffing

Jewish Action Team of Citizen’s Climate Lobby Jewish Climate Action Network (Georgia) Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest Bay Area Jewish Earth Alliance

2020

Climate

Advocacy

National

Project of Citizen’s Climate Lobby

N/A

Volunteer Active

2020

Climate

Advocacy

Georgia

3

Paid

Intermittent

2021

Climate

Education

National

110

Mixed

Dormant

2021

Climate

Advocacy

California

N/A

Volunteer Active

Bronx Jews for 2021 Climate Action Colorado Jewish 2021 Climate Action Pennsylvania Jewish 2021 Earth Alliance

Climate

Advocacy

New York

Project of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light Fiscally sponsored by Darim Online Unincorporated Jewish Earth Alliance affiliate Unincorporated

N/A

Volunteer Active

Climate

Advocacy

Colorado

8

Volunteer Active

Climate

Advocacy

Pennsylvania

N/A

Volunteer Active

Climate

Advocacy

California

N/A

Volunteer Active

Climate

Advocacy

National

N/A

Volunteer Active

Education and advocacy National

48

Paid

Advocacy

New York

Unincorporated Dayenu affiliate Unincorporated Jewish Earth Alliance affiliate Unincorporated Jewish Earth Alliance affiliate Project of the Workers Circle College Network Project of The Shalom Center Unincorporated

N/A

Volunteer Active

Networking

National

Project of Hazon

20

Paid

Southern California 2021 Jewish Earth Alliance Young Jews for a 2021 Green New Deal Exodus Alliance

2022

NY Jewish Clergy Students for Climate Action Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition

2022

Climate and interfaith Climate

2022

Climate

Source: Data contained in the chapter and the author’s personal experience

Operationality

Active

Active

Fighting the fossil-fuel pharaoh

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Initiative

David Krantz

in 2013; Aytzim and GreenFaith’s jointly run Shomrei Breishit: Rabbis and Cantors for the Earth in 2014; Temple Solel’s Higher Ground Initiative in 2016; Jewish Earth Alliance, Jewish Climate Coalition and Hazon’s Jewish Youth Climate Movement in 2019; the Jewish Action Team of Citizen’s Climate Lobby and Dayenu in 2020; Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest and Bronx Jews for Climate Action in 2021, the same year that the Workers Circle College Network launched Young Jews for a Green New Deal; and NY Jewish Clergy Students for Climate Action, The Shalom Center’s Exodus Alliance and Hazon’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition in 2022. Like L’OLAM, Shomrei Adamah and COEJL in the 1980s and 1990s, the Jewish Climate Action Network (founded by Allen), Jewish Earth Alliance (co-founded by Goldsmith), Hazon (founded by Nigel Savage) and Dayenu (founded by Rabbi Jennie Rosenn) in turn have inspired a slew of independently run affiliates, including the Jewish Climate Action Network in New York co-founded by Goldsmith in 2016; Jewish Climate Action Network in the greater Washington, D.C., metro area co-founded by Goldsmith in 2018; Jewish Climate Action Network in Georgia in 2020; Colorado Jewish Climate Action in 2021; Riverdale Jewish Earth Alliance in 2019; Bay Area Jewish Earth Alliance, Pennsylvania Jewish Earth Alliance and Southern California Jewish Earth Alliance in 2021; at least 39 (as of 1 May 2022) local chapters, or what Hazon calls kvutzot (community groups), of the organization’s Jewish Youth Climate Movement; and at least 69 (as of 1 May 2022) locally run affiliates of Dayenu, or what Dayenu calls Circles, many of them housed in synagogues and other mainstream Jewish communal institutions. Thanks mostly to the efforts of Dayenu and Hazon, at least 120 new Jewish climate groups have been founded in the United States since 2019.

Highlights of Jewish climate action: 2009–2022 Where the early U.S.-based Jewish environmental initiatives working on climate – such as Aytzim, Hazon and The Shalom Center – initially focused more broadly on sustainability or more narrowly on topics such as biking and anti-nuclear proliferation, the first significant initiative to form with climate as its raison d’etre was Hazon’s Jewish Climate Change Campaign, led by Jessica Haller. The project started in the lead-up to 2009’s COP15 in Copenhagen – the much-hyped 15th meeting of the Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and also the first attended by Aytzim representatives – and a preceding event at Windsor Castle hosted by the U.K.-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation, which invited Hazon and the Jewish Climate Initiative (a project of the Jerusalem-based Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development) to participate on behalf of the Jewish community. In the summer leading up to the Windsor Castle event and COP15, the Teva Learning Center – using one of the more eye-catching devices employed in the history of the Jewish environmental movement – sent the Topsy Turvy School Bus across the United States to call for climate action as part of the Jewish Climate Change Campaign (Krantz, 2011b). The bus – “imagine two stacked school buses glued together at their roofs, so that wheels touch both the ground and the sky” (Krantz, 2016) – originally was designed by graphic artist Stefan Sagmeister for Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in 2002 and modified by the late art-car maker Tom Kennedy in 2007 “to create its current topsy-turvy form, representing the topsy-turvy nature of the U.S. military budget and U.S. spending on education, health care and the environment” (Krantz, 2011b). Teva educator Jonathan Dubinsky modified the bus to run on biofuel in advance of the trip to raise awareness about climate change (Krantz, 2016). At the Windsor Castle event, representatives of the Jewish Climate Change Campaign presented a 44-page report detailing a seven-year sustainability plan as a “call to build a movement”, 362

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a “call upon the Jewish people – as individuals and families, as institutions, and as a wider community – to take determined steps to live more sustainably, and to act and advocate to create a more sustainable world for all” (Haller et al., 2010). The document also set four ambitious goals for the global Jewish community to accomplish by 2015: •

•

• •

“To play a distinct and determined role in responding to climate change, and fostering sustainability, between now and September 2015; both the Diaspora Jewish communities and the state of Israel shall be widely seen – and we shall see ourselves – as being at the forefront of education, action and advocacy responses to the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. For each Jewish organization, small and large, to create a sustainability committee by September  2010. The sustainability committee can be a green team, a climate change task force; it can be professional or volunteer. To integrate education, action and advocacy in addressing the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability. That Israel will be a renewable light unto the nations powered lowered [sic] by clean energy sources, and Jerusalem will become a model green city”. (Haller et al., 2010)

None of those goals was accomplished – neither by 2015 nor by 2022 – which is not surprising, given the audacity of their scale and scope. In hindsight, the value of the goals and the report may have been more in its vision than in the blueprint it offered. The Jewish Climate Change Campaign was beginning, ever so slowly, to shift the Overton window (Russell, 2006) of what the Jewish community would see as within the realm of possibility. In 2012, COEJL launched the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign, aka the Jewish Environmental and Energy Imperative. Citing the Jewish responsibility for Earth stewardship as well as concerns for the well-being of the United States, Israel, nature and humanity, the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign set goals for adopting climate advocacy, increasing philanthropy to Jewish environmental organizations, incorporating Jewish environmental education into Jewish communal life, carrying out comprehensive energy audits, and reducing the carbon emissions of the Jewish community by one-seventh,3 or 14%, by 2014, and by 83% of 2005 levels by 20504 – commitments made by 53 leaders from some of the most significant organizations in American Jewish life, including the Academy for Jewish Religion, American Jewish World Service, American Zionist Movement, Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs, Hadassah, J Street, Jewish Labor Committee, Jewish Theological Seminary, Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, National Council of Jewish Women, Orthodox Union, Rabbinical Assembly, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Union of Reform Judaism (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, 2014). The Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign was, and likely remains, the most significant attempt to focus mainstream American Jewish organizations on climate action. Unfortunately, a lack of funding led to a lack of follow-up, and it is unclear what, if any, actions signatories took to follow through on their commitments – and it was another 10 years before another organization tried anything similar at the same scale. Serving as a leadership fellow at COEJL at the time in addition to my role leading Aytzim, I edited the Jewish Energy Guide as part of the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign. Contributors included Rabbis Nina Beth Cardin, Fred Scherlinder Dobb, Steve Gutow, Jill Jacobs, Seidenberg, Lawrence Troster, z”l5, and Waskow; other prominent Jewish leaders such as Goldsmith, Jakir Manela, Evonne Marzouk, Joelle Novey, Sanchez and Alon Tal; and allies such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben (Krantz, 2014). 363

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A year after 350.org’s 2012 launch of its carbon-divestment campaign, Waskow brought a divest-reinvest plan to the Jewish communal agenda in the form of the Move Our Money/ Protect Our Planet (“Mom and Pop”) project, launched jointly by The Shalom Center and Interfaith Moral Action on Climate in 2013, resulting in two major outputs in 2014. The first was a handbook compiled by Miriam Joffe-Block that offered climate-friendly options for banking, credit cards and investing (Joffe-Block, 2014). The second was the “Rabbinic Call to Move Our Money to Protect Our Planet”, a letter signed by 425 rabbis and calling for Jews, as individuals and as a community, to stop purchasing fossil fuels and instead utilize renewable energy; to switch banking services from institutions that lend money to “Big Carbon” to community banks and credit unions; to divest from fossil-fuel stocks and bonds and invest instead in renewable-energy and community-health enterprises; and to utilize synagogue congregations to lobby for local and state governments do similarly with their pensions and for the federal government to reallocate the money it uses to subsidize the fossil-fuel industry to instead support the further development of renewable energy (Waskow, 2014a; Waskow, 2014b; The Shalom Center, 2015). Again, due to a lack of funding and follow-up, it is unclear what, if any, actions signatories took to follow through on their commitments. Simultaneously, Aytzim and GreenFaith also were gathering rabbis, cantors and clergical students for the launch of their joint project, Shomrei Breishit: Rabbis and Cantors for the Earth, led by Troster. The initial Shomrei Breishit letter – which, compared to the Mom and Pop letter, garnered less attention but was more international in scope – attracted more than 100 signatures, including the chief rabbis of some countries, calling for a new global climate treaty by 2015, for a transition to 100% renewable energy in the world by 2024, and for “Jewish institutions to advocate for strong national and international climate legislation; to become carbon neutral through conservation and the purchasing of carbon offsets; and to review investment portfolios and redirect funds to sustainable energy investment” (Shomrei Breishit: Rabbis and Cantors for the Earth, 2014). Once more, due to a lack of funding and follow-up, it is unclear what, if any, actions signatories took to follow through on their commitments.

Jewish participation in climate protests On a bitter cold day in Washington in February  2013, an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people attended the Forward on Climate rally organized primarily by 350.org, the Hip Hop Caucus and the Sierra Club to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and the lack of action on climate change in what was to that point the largest climate protest in American history. Of the event’s 160 cosponsors, about a dozen were Jewish, including Am Kolel and its Buber Youth Network, Aytzim, COEJL, Hazon, Jewish Farm School, Jewcology, Kayam Farm, NeoHasid, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, The Shalom Center and the Teva Learning Alliance (formerly the Teva Learning Center). Kayam and Teva coordinated transportation from the Pearlstone campus in suburban Baltimore to Washington following Kayam’s annual Beit Midrash weekend of Jewish environmental learning. Teva and Eden Village Camp educator Jonah Adels, z”l, joined on a bus from Yale University. As a handful of Jewish environmental leaders, we found each other and formed a small contingent within the interfaith section, organized by Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, Interfaith Power and Light, and Sojourners. From the rally’s stage on the National Mall, Waskow invoked the shehecheyanu prayer before we marched from the Washington Monument to the White House (Seidenberg, 2013; Svoboda, 2013; Jewcology, 2013). The Forward on Climate rally effectively served as a warm up for both the organizers and Jewish environmental groups in planning the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York, which drew an estimated 311,000 people, obliterating the 2013 rally’s record for largest climate protest 364

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(Foderaro, 2014). At least 106 Jewish groups – largely assembled by the Jewish Climate Change Campaign and The Shalom Center – formally or informally endorsed the march, including at least four rabbinical schools as well as the organizational bodies of the Conservative and Reform movements (Jewish Climate Change Campaign, 2015), the two largest affiliated Jewish sects in America. Synagogues from across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic sent busloads of congregants to attend the march in New York. Thousands of Jews attended, with perhaps 100 or more of us blowing shofarot, Jewish ritual horns, as a call for climate justice. The People’s Climate March marked an inflection point for American Jews. Climate action was at the very beginning of entering the Jewish organizational mainstream.

Mushrooming of Jewish climate groups In the wake of the Forward on Climate rally, Allen’s 2013 founding of the Jewish Climate Action Network (JCAN) in Boston served as the inspiration for the Jewish environmental shift to focusing on climate. Independently operated, locally organized and largely volunteer-run Jewish Climate Action Networks blossomed in New York, Washington, Atlanta and Denver, each sharing only a name, logo – featuring a blue-and-green Earth at the center of a green magen David, or Jewish star – and a mission to educate and organize Jews regionally for climate action. The flagship JCAN’s actions have included hosting three Jewish Climate Action Conferences, a webinar series, a weekly narrative-writing workshop with author Thea Iberall, and a collaboration with MassEnergize to help JCAN members reduce their carbon and environmental impacts. JCAN has played a pivotal role in raising climate activism within both the Jewish environmental movement and the wider Jewish community. JCAN’s biggest accomplishment, though, is that it inspired Jewish environmentalists across the country to replicate its activity. Using lessons learned from her time running Jews Against Hydrofracking, Goldsmith cofounded the next two JCANs, in New York and Washington, buttressed by relationship building through in-person meetings (Krantz, 2023) – in pre-Covid times, with a transition to Zoom meetings after the Covid-19 pandemic began. The New York group, going by JCAN NYC, has met with legislators; worked in coalition with a range of partners, including Dayenu, Hazon, NY Renews and the Jewish Earth Alliance; and developed climate-focused booklets for congregational use during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And across the city, JCAN NYC has made itself a fixture at climate and environmental protests, where you are bound to see members holding banners and placards with the group’s logo. The Washington-area group, run by the local chapter of Interfaith Power and Light, hosts webinars, networks local Jewish environmentalists, and supports the work of Jewish Earth Alliance. Goldsmith’s idea in co-founding Jewish Earth Alliance in 2019 was simple and potent: Organize Jewish communities to write letters to their legislators about environmental issues on a monthly basis. With 41 partners (as of 1 May 2022), including independently run Jewish Earth Alliance groups in Riverdale (in New York City’s Bronx borough), Pennsylvania and two in California, Jewish Earth Alliance has been delivering hundreds of letters a month from environmentally minded Jewish voters to members of Congress (Goldsmith, 2022), one of the most-powerful volunteer-run efforts in the history of the Jewish environmental movement. Letters have addressed a range of issues – from calling for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies (Jewish Earth Alliance, 2020) to endorsing ratification of the Kigali Amendment that would phase-out hydrofluorocarbons, aka HFCs (Jewish Earth Alliance, 2021b), to supporting protection for threatened and endangered species (Jewish Earth Alliance, 2022) – and generally have focused on climate. To push for passage of Pres. Joseph Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, the Jewish 365

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Earth Alliance sent a letter, signed by 37 Jewish groups, to members of Congress urging support for the plan – noting that, as Jews, we have a responsibility to care for our neighbors, especially ethnic minorities who are on the frontlines of climate change (Jewish Earth Alliance, 2021a). Additionally, the Jewish Earth Alliance hosts regular webinars featuring Jewish environmentalists, scientists and legislators. Importantly, both Jewish Earth Alliance and the Jewish Climate Action Network, as well as most of their respective affiliates, are unincorporated all-volunteer groups. They are capacity limited in that nearly everyone involved does so effectively as their second or third priorities after their families and paying jobs. In that sense, everything they do – without paid staff and largely without funding and other resources – is already an over-achievement. Lack of finances has long been a challenge for most of the Jewish environmental movement, with the majority of initiatives relying solely on volunteers (Green Hevra, 2014a), including even decades-old organizations such as Aytzim, while the financial constraints of others – such as COEJL and The Shalom Center – have kept staffing small and/or intermittent. Successful projects such as Jewish Farm School and Hazon’s Jewish Greening Fellowship even shut down for lack of enough ongoing financial support. Longtime Jewish environmental leaders have dreamed of what could be possible if a Jewish group would have both the desire and the financial resources to address climate on a national scale. In the last few years, Hazon and Dayenu have begun answering that call.

The Jewish climate group boom In 2019, Hazon launched the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, the largest-ever effort to organize Jewish middle- and high-school students on climate. The national initiative is run by a board of 33 students and its 39 kvutzot (as of 1 May 2022) are locally run. The youth group asks Jewish institutions to commit to seven climate commitments for the seven-year shmita cycle: adopting a climate-justice plan; appointing a climate-crisis coordinator or committee; incorporating climate into the organization’s regular messaging; supporting local and federal climate legislation; building partnerships with Indigenous peoples and other climate-frontline communities; starting a kvutza and/or empowering youth within the institution; and providing the Jewish Youth Climate Movement with regular updates on the institution’s progress on the commitments (Jewish Youth Climate Movement, n.d.). A list of organizations that have made commitments is not publicly available. The Jewish Youth Climate Movement has participated in public actions as well, including co-organizing a 2021 event in New York with Hazon and GreenFaith outside one of the offices of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, to protest the $100 billion company’s financial support of the fossil-fuel industry. The protesters said that BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, who is Jewish, should divest the company that he leads from fossil-fuel investments in order to comply with the Earth-stewardship values of his Jewish faith. Six teenagers and three rabbis were arrested (Jewish Youth Climate Movement, 2021; Gergely, 2021). In 2020, Rosenn founded Dayenu, meaning “it would have been enough for us”, i.e., we have had enough of unabated climate change and we have had enough of a lack of adequate response to it because all the carbon already in the atmosphere is more than enough for us. “It also means, we have enough”, Rosenn said. “We have what we need – the resources, science, and innovations – to bring about a livable, sustainable world, so that everyone can have enough” (eJewish Philanthropy, 2019).

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Dayenu launched with $1.4 million in funding, including support from director Steven Spielberg’s Genesis Prize (Chernikoff, 2021). Most Jews are probably more familiar with the song by the same name sung during the Passover seder, but Dayenu is making an impact, exciting people both inside and outside of the American Jewish community. Dayenu already has developed at least 69 locally run Circles. And Dayenu’s all-star and fast-growing staff is, as of this writing, up to a dozen and includes Jewish Farm School co-founder Nati Passow, longtime Jewish environmental educator Rabbi Laura Bellows, 350.org co-founder Phil Aroneanu, and Dahlia Rockowitz, who previously planned activist trainings for Gore’s The Climate Reality Project. Dayenu’s first major project was called Chutzpah 2020, a get-out-the-vote effort in advance of the U.S. presidential elections of November 2020. As audacious as its name implies, Chutzpah 2020 engaged 43 partner Jewish groups and 1,615 volunteers to reach out via phone and text message to 803,078 climate-concerned voters of all faiths in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, resulting in 21,515 voters making or confirming their plans to vote (Dayenu, 2020). The scale of the campaign’s output was unprecedented in the Jewish environmental movement. In Elul – the month during which Jews blow the shofar daily, except for Shabbat, in the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – of 2021, Dayenu held its Hear the Call campaign. In Elul, one is supposed to hear the call of the shofar and take action to better oneself and society. Following prior calls for Elul to be the month for climate action (Krantz, 2018), Dayenu challenged Jews in Elul to hear the call to fight for climate action and that legislators, in turn, should hear their calls. At rallies in 16 cities and 13 states across the country, Jews blew the shofar and gathered with religious leaders of other faiths to call for climate action. A few months later, as Americans hunkered down during the delta variant’s wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dayenu held an online “Time to Deliver” rally to support Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. In the wake of the 2022 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change unequivocally saying that we must stop building fossil-fuel infrastructure (Pathak et al., 2022), Dayenu turned its attention to institutions that finance carbon. During the week of Passover, Dayenu, the Jewish Youth Climate Movement and The Shalom Center’s newly formed Exodus Alliance co-organized 20 protests across the country, and one in Toronto, Canada, at branches and offices of seven financial institutions: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo – the “Big Four” American banks that are responsible for a quarter of fossil-fuel financing (Kirsch et al., 2022) – the Royal Bank of Canada, BlackRock and Vanguard (The Shalom Center, 2022; Dayenu, 2022a; MacDonald, 2022; Waskow, 2022a; Dayenu, 2022e; Dayenu, 2022d; Dayenu, 2022f), forming what they were calling the “Schmutzy Sheva”, or the Dirty Seven. Dayenu originally had been planning for State Street – the fifth-largest asset manager in the world, behind BlackRock, Vanguard, UBS and Fidelity – to be the seventh target, but ultimately the protest locations were chosen by local organizers (Cohen, 2022; Dayenu, 2022b; Dayenu, 2022c; Keeling, 2022), with the national offices of Dayenu, the Jewish Youth Climate Movement and The Shalom Center serving more of a facilitator role. The protests included what Waskow called “street seders”, utilizing an interfaith haggadah – the seder’s prayer book – that he wrote “for street and table, challenging the Carbon Pharaohs to end climate plagues” (Waskow, 2022b). Based on the haggadah that he wrote for the interfaith and interracial Freedom Seder – organized by Jews for Urban Justice and led by Waskow on the third night of Passover in 1969 on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin

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Luther King, Jr. – the 2022 haggadah is a modern take on the Exodus story. For example, the biblical 10 plagues are replaced by 10 climate plagues:  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10

“Wildfires Heat Strokes Melted Arctic and Antarctic Ice Disappearing beaches, disappearing waterfronts Flooded subways, flooded cities Acidic Oceans Asthma and cancer epidemics in targeted neighborhoods Darkness so deep and thick that no one could see or touch her neighbor Mass Extinctions of plants and animals Death of humans” (Waskow, 2022b)

More than 1,000 people attended the 2022 street seders – or an average of about 50 people per protest (The Shalom Center, 2022; Dayenu, 2022a). Protesters held up matzah – baked unleavened dough eaten on Passover – while instructing the financial institutions to “move their dough” away from carbon investments that support the Fossil-Fuel Pharaohs (MacDonald, 2022; Fisher, 2022).

Mainstream Judaism takes on climate Increasingly, since the People’s Climate March in 2014, Jewish organizations that previously were hesitant or uninterested in engaging on climate have been adopting the issue. For example, climate has become a regular topic of discussion at meetings of the JOFEE Network, which has grown to include dozens of organizational leaders, helping to partially fill a hole lost by the Green Hevra’s dormancy. And in 2021, the Workers Circle College Network – the collegiate division of the Workers Circle, a nonprofit founded as the Workmen’s Circle in 1900 – launched Young Jews for a Green New Deal. Even the Jewish Federations of North America – the umbrella nonprofit for Jewish communal life in the United States and Canada – is boarding the climate-action train. The 2022 edition of the Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest – the second online conference focused on a Jewish response to climate change – featured a panel titled, “Why Climate Change Must Be a Central Moral Issue of the Jewish Community”, with Rosenn, Savage, former American Jewish World Service president Ruth Messinger, and Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America (Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest, 2022). And the Jewish Federations of North America is joining the Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition, a newly formed group organized by Hazon – now run by Manela – with membership featuring the largest organizations in Jewish life, not just the Jewish Federations of North America but also Birthright Israel, the Central Conference of America Rabbis, Foundation for Jewish Camp, Hillel International, Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Community Centers Association of North America, Jewish Funders Network, Jewish National Fund, Moishe House, Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies, Rabbinical Assembly, Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Union for Reform Judaism and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. All are committing to complete climateaction plans by Passover of 2023 (Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition, 2022). Knowing Manela, I am sure that climate-action plans are just the start. Like the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign before it, the Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition has the potential to scale Jewish climate action nationally and internationally to the point that when people think of Jews, they think of us as the people fighting the Fossil-Fuel Pharaoh. With at least 78% of American Jews considering climate 368

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to be either a major problem or a crisis (Jones et al., 2014), Jewish organizations embracing climate action finally have begun to catch up with the sentiments of their constituency.

Conclusion Historically, Jewish action on the environment and climate has been slow to reflect Jewish environmental values – which are a core part of Jewish ethics, law and tradition – but there has been massive growth in the Jewish environmental movement in the past decade, and newly formed groups like Dayenu, Jewish Climate Action Network, Jewish Earth Alliance, Hazon’s Jewish Youth Climate Movement and perhaps especially Hazon’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition offer much promise for future Jewish climate action. With only about 15 million Jews worldwide, we make up less than two-tenths of a percent of the global population. Our small population has its challenges, but it also offers an opportunity, in that it can be relatively easier to pivot than it would be for larger groups. We could be a green light unto the nations – not just the People of the Book, but the People of Earth Stewardship. After all, the Hebrew word for human, adam, comes from the Hebrew word for Earth, adamah. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates the first trees and the first animals, including the first human, but it is the Earth from which we are formed; God breathes life into us, but it is the Earth that births us all (Genesis 2:7, 2:9, 2:19). We would be wise to recall the words our sages attribute to God at that time: “Observe how beautiful is the work of Creation. Take care not to destroy it, for no one will repair it after you” (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13). About 3,300 years ago, God released our people from Pharaoh’s bondage. Now we must take care of Creation and free the Earth from the Fossil-Fuel Pharaoh that threatens us all.

Acknowledgements David Krantz thanks Evan Berry for his wise guidance, and Mirele Goldsmith, Paul Hirt, Orr Karassin, David Seidenberg and Alon Tal for their inspiration. He is also grateful to his colleagues and friends in the Jewish environmental movement for their steadfast work to save our planet and species. And he thanks all others who have helped and encouraged his learning over his academic and professional career.

Notes 1 Not to be confused with the Jewish LGBTQ+ group of the same name founded in Australia in 2000. 2 Sometimes farming is added, making it a network of Jewish outdoor, food, farming and environmentaleducation programs – but still JOFEE with one F. 3 One-seventh is significant as representing shmita, the biblical sabbatical year that occurs every seven years. Shmita years began on Rosh Hashanah of 2014 and 2021. 4 Goals informed by scientific and government targets at the time. 5 An honorific for Jews who have passed, z”l is the abbreviation for the Hebrew phrase zichronah livracha for women and zichrono livracha for men; it is basically the way that Jews say “of blessed memory”.

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Fighting the fossil-fuel pharaoh Jewish Youth Climate Movement. 2021. JYCM Newsletter- 10/8/21. Jewish Youth Climate Movement: Hazon. Available: jewishyouthclimatemovement.org/post/jycm-newsletter-10–8–21 [Accessed 26 April 2022]. Jewish Youth Climate Movement. n.d. Sign On Your Jewish Institution to Our 7 Commitments for the 7-Year Shmita Cycle! Jewish Youth Climate Movement. Available: jewishyouthclimatemovement.org/ shmita-pledge [Accessed 26 April 2022]. Joffe-Block, M. 2014. Move Our Money: An Action Handbook. The Shalom Center. Available: theshalomcenter.org/content/move-our-money-action-handbook. Jones, R.P., Cox, D. and Navarro-Rivera, J. 2014. Believers, Sympathizers,  & Skeptics: Why Americans Are Conflicted About Climate Change, Environmental Policy, and Science. Washington: Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion. Kayam Farm. 2012. Shmittah Summit 2012. Constant Contact. Available: events.r20.constantcontact.com/ register/event?oeidk=a07e5fwatbff5ec6443&llr=4tuxmucab [Accessed 26 April 2022]. Keeling, A. 2022. Local Jewish Leaders Call for Chase Bank to Divest from Fossil Fuels: ‘Move Your Dough!.’ Evanston RoundTable. Available: evanstonroundtable.com/2022/04/20/local-jewish-leadersprotest-for-chase-bank-fossil-fuel-divestment-move-your-dough/ [Accessed 12 May 2022]. Kirsch, A., Marr, G., Disterhoft, J.O.A., Frijns, J., Beenes, M., Saldamando, A., Johnson, M., Rees, C., Tong, D., Gracey, K., Stockman, L., Faul, C.M., Lentilhac, M., Cooper, R., Louvel, Y., Shraiman, A., Cushing, B., Dubslaff, J. and Ganswindt, K. 2022. Banking on Climate Chaos: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2022. Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club and Urgewald. Krantz, D. 2011a. Israel: The New Saudi Arabia? Aytzim: Ecological Judaism. Available: aytzim.org/ resources/articles/165. Krantz, D. 2011b. Topsy-Turvy World: Environmental Campaign Relaunched. Available: aytzim.org/resources/ articles/151. Krantz, D. 2012. Breaking Free from the Fossil-Fuel Pharaoh. Aytzim: Ecological Judaism. Available: aytzim. org/resources/articles/238 [Accessed 11 Feb. 2022]. Krantz, D (ed). 2014. Jewish Energy Guide. New York: Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Green Zionist Alliance. Krantz, D. 2016. Shmita Revolution: The Reclamation and Reinvention of the Sabbatical Year. Religions, 7, 1–31. Krantz, D. 2018. Elul: The Month for Climate Action. In Allen, K.Z. (ed.) Earth Etudes for Elul: Spiritual Reflections for the Season. Medfield: Strong Voices Publishing. Krantz, D. 2023. Is Fracking Kosher? A Case Study of the Jewish Response to Novel Fossil-Fuel Extractivism in the Marcellus Shale. In Krebs, A. (ed.) Rethinking Theology in the Anthropocene. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaf. Macdonald, L. 2022. Passover Message: Big Banks, Move Your Dough! Medium. Available: medium. com/@LMacDonaldDC/passover-message-big-banks-move-your-dough-79a8f6b6b05e. Pathak, M., Slade, R., Pichs-Madruga, R. N., Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Shukla, P.R., Skea, J., Abdulla, A., Al Khourdajie, A., Babiker, M., Bai, Q., Bashmakov, I., Bataille, C., Berndes, G.R., Blanco, G., Cabeza, L.F., Carraro, C., Clarke, L., De Coninck, H., Creutzig, F., Dadi, D.K., Denton, F., Dhakal, S., Dubash, N.K., Garg, A., Grubb, M., Guivarch, C.L., Halsnaes, K., Jaramillo, P., Jung, T.Y., Kahn Ribeiro, S., Kilkiş, S. I., Koberle, A., Kreibiehl, S., Kriegler, E., Lamb, W., Lecocq, F., Lwasa, S., Mahmoud, N., Masanet, E., Mccollum, D., Minx, J.C., Mitchell, C., Morita, K., Mrabet, R., Nabuurs, G.J., Newman, P., Niamir, L., Nilsson, L.J., Okereke, C., Patt, A., Portugal Pereira, J., Rajamani, L., Reisinger, A., Riahi, K., Roy, J., Sagar, A., Saheb, Y., Schaeffer, R., Seto, K., Smith, P., Some, S., Sovacool, B., Steg, L., Tavoni, M., Toth, F.L., Van Diemen, R.E., Vyas, P., Wei, Y.M., Whitehead, J., Wiedmann, T. and Winkler, H. 2022. Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change – Working Group III Contribution to the WGIII Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Russell, N.J. 2006. An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities. Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Available: mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7504. Sanchez, S. and Seidenberg, D. 2013. Jews Should Work to Reduce Fossil Fuels, Not Ally with Gas and Oil Companies. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Available: jta.org/2013/03/28/opinion/op-ed-jews-shouldwork-to-reduce-fossil-fuels-not-ally-with-gas-and-oil-companies. Seidenberg, D. 2013. Battling Climate Change, the Jewish Way. The Forward. Available: web.archive.org/ web/20141103105825/https-//blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/171708/battlingclimate-change-the-jewish-way/.

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PART IV

Religion, security and development

26 THE AMBIVALENCE OF RELIGIOUS SOFT POWER Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

Introduction On 24 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin began attacking Russia’s eastern neighbour, Ukraine. This attempt, which Russia described as a ‘special military operation’, was a dangerous invasion attempt. Although many aspects of the war had been discussed beforehand, the religion-based separation behind the war and how it was used as a legitimacy tool by Russia was realised relatively late. In this context, this conflict can be considered as the first religion-based war of the twenty-first century, as Lucian N. Leustean (2022) states, since it contains the policybased division of the Orthodox Christian Church behind it. One of the most fundamental reasons for this assumption is that, as Peter Mandaville (2022) stated about two weeks before the war, Russia stopped using religion as a soft power propaganda tool against Ukraine and started using it as a sharp power shield, employing both authoritarianism and aggression. Using this example, and regarding the role of religion in global politics and discussions of its power position, one can ask the following questions: (1) If religion is used as a soft power resource, how can we define it? (2) What are the sources of religious soft power? (3) What are the tools of religious soft power? (4) What are the limits of religious soft power? This chapter tries to explain the concept of religious soft power, widely used in both academia and policy-making processes, and seeks to answer these four questions. Religion’s use of soft power followed a widespread understanding that its role in political and social life had never disappeared. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many scholars, adhering to the secularisation thesis, claimed that religion’s influence would be erased from the public and political sphere and confined to the private domain (Haynes, 1997, p.  711; Wilson, 2012, p.  19). Scholars also stated that the outcome would be to contribute to the secularisation of both politics and international relations, which had been ongoing since the Westphalia Peace Treaties in 1648 (Hurd, 2009). However, the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the fact that religion did not disappear from public view; contrarily, it continuously exerted influence on outcomes in many parts of the world (Haynes, 2005; Hatzopoulos and Petito, 2003; Fox, 2001). The most striking of these events was undoubtedly the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Subsequently, the strengthening of Christian parties in Europe (Kalyvas, 2018), the emergence of religion-based conflicts and cooperation in the Balkans, and finally the 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda attack on the USA underlined that religion is a DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-30

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significant factor in world politics. This led to the study of religion in both domestic and foreign policy, as well as in economics (McCleary and Barro, 2006), conflict resolution (Gurses, 2015), terrorism (Henne, 2019) and immigration policy (Warner, 1998). This relatively new yet diverse field of study also sought to explain where and how religion was positioned in politics, becoming an important issue in the world’s changing and transforming issues (Sandal and Fox, 2013; Haynes, 2014; Warner and Walker, 2011). To arrive at an understanding of what has happened, it is useful to start by accepting that religion’s role in politics is ‘ambivalent’ (Philpott, 2007; Appleby, 1999), leading to varied outcomes. There is one indisputable fact: religion has re-emerged on the world stage, playing a decisive role in different ways in many contexts, while acting as an important tool for many actors, both state and non-state. For some, religion is power. Religion is not however an example of potential ‘hard’ power, such as military resources or financial instruments. On the contrary, religion is soft power, like culture, history and other normative structures. The concept of soft power does not remain static but undergoes changes and transformations. The concept of religious soft power, which emerged from a merger of religion and (secular) soft power, is a concept that is difficult to define and has led to much discussion. It is however widely agreed that ‘soft power’ was a concept first identified with the American foreign policy analyst, Joseph S. Nye, at the beginning of the 1990s. However, as Yang and Li (2021) note, it is still difficult to theorise authoritatively, as there are clearly varying definitions, tools and limits to its analytical use. To examine this, this chapter focuses on various countries, religious groups and events as examples, while unpacking the ‘ambivalent’ nature of religious soft power.

Combining the soft power concept with religion Soft power is one of the most widely used concepts in politics and international relations. The concept is widely used, especially in the early 2000s, when the world seems to be in phase of ‘calm’. So, what exactly is soft power? Soft power was first described by Nye as follows: ‘When one country gets other countries to want what it wants’ (Nye, 1990, p. 167). In this context, what Nye means is that countries have an influence on the politicians and public opinions of other countries by using their culture, education, language and similar normative powers without resorting to ‘hard’ power. Although Nye himself revised the concept over the years, scholars who followed him often sought to expand its meaning. Many scholars, including Nye, use the concepts of soft power and public diplomacy synonymously. In addition, the analytical use of soft power is used widely, and its definition expands with the use of different examples. Before moving on from Nye’s use of the term, we can note that the founder of the concept of soft power barely mentions the word ‘religion’ in his numerous writings on the topic, briefly noting that religion can be an example of soft power which can create both normatively positive and negative effects. In other words, while today the concept of religious soft power is shaped by Nye’s concept, he himself did not play a decisive role in its analytical development. Henne (2022), focusing on the examples of Saudi Arabia and Russia, claims that from time to time the concept of soft power, combined with material – that is, hard – power, becomes ‘smart’ power. Examples include China’s access to the interior of Africa using its economic power (Kurlantzick, 2009), Turkey’s dominance in the Balkans with its historical and cultural influence and Qatar’s global penetration via lucrative sports sponsorships. These are all examples which expand the definition by going beyond Western-centred approaches to soft power. In addition, Great Britain still maintains its influence in the world by using the power of language (Rose, 2005), and Sweden’s soft power is bolstered by its human rights discourse (Villanueva, 2007). However, apart from some exceptions, mainstream 376

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theory in political science and international relations generally treats soft power as a statecentred approach via a neo-realist perspective, or in an identity-based way, such as its use by the so-called ‘English school’ of international relations and, more widely, the social constructivist perspective (Rudolph, 2005; Barbato, 2010). In today’s world, characterised for many by its multidimensional complexity, religion is widely accepted as one of humanity’s oldest identities, serving both to keep societies together and to separate them (Ben-Porat, 2013, p. 6), and is widely accepted as containing significant elements of soft power. Both religious and secular countries, as well as non-state religious groups, may act as soft power practitioners. In addition, global actors, such as the Vatican, as well as some other religious and cultural structures, employ soft power (Chong, 2009). As mentioned earlier, the notion of perceiving soft power and religion together entered the literature relatively recently. The main reason for this was the coexistence of religion with other normative power elements, and the definition of soft power itself being somewhat unclear. In this context, Thomas indirectly mentioned religious soft power for the first time with the following sentences: ‘popular beliefs, perceptions and attitudes of particular constituencies and it – directly and indirectly – influences the behaviour of states in world politics’. We can say that Thomas implicitly refers to religious soft power in this definition, without expressing the notion explicitly. He avoided using the word religion by saying ‘popular beliefs’ and talked about a normative concept – just like his own definition of soft power. This leaves the definition rather abstract. Expressing how the concept can be evaluated without defining it fully, Steiner (2011) claims that interfaith summits contain within themselves religious soft power and that the participants of such meetings somehow maintain their presence in foreign policy through religion. However, this explanation still does not tell us exactly what religious soft power is. Neither do Sandal and Fox explain this in their 2013 discussion of religion in foreign policy. Sandal and Fox contend that (secular) soft power that uses religion is not a substitute for other ‘hard’ power elements. Finally, they also argue that religion has the capacity to try to establish international unity, via a common purpose and a network of solidarity (Sandal and Fox, 2013: 96–98). Jeffrey Haynes was the first scholar to take religious soft power out of an abstract definition and put flesh on its bones. Focusing on the subject with various examples in several studies since the early 2000s, Haynes states that actors in foreign policy, whether they are secular or religious, seek to use religion as a force to pursue certain goals. Haynes (2008, p. 143) said that: ‘If religious actors “get the ear” of key foreign policy-makers because of their shared religious beliefs, the former may be able to influence foreign policy outcomes through the exercise of religious soft power’. In later studies, Haynes argues that not only states but also some non-state religious actors use religion as a multidimensional and different power resource, providing examples of some entities that seek to apply religious soft power. Haynes refers to the use of religious soft power by various actors, including the pope and the Holy See; the governments of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the USA during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021); as well as various non-state actors, including American evangelists, Roman Catholics and Sunni radical groups, such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (Haynes, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016). Overall, Haynes claims that no matter how and for what purposes the soft power of religion is used, the party that seeks to use religion in this way tries to be visible first by bringing religious arguments to the fore, then by trying to apply their wishes in relation to the groups and other actors they target. A second group of thinkers has sought to improve the concepts developed by the first group. Such scholars are led by Peter Mandaville, who, in 2018 carried out a project called The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power under the umbrella of the Brookings Institute and Georgetown 377

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University Berkley Center. Mandaville, together with Shadi Hamid, tried to explain how religious soft power is used by different actors for geopolitical purposes in their study ‘Islam as statecraft: How use religion in foreign policy’ (Mandaville and Hamid, 2018). However, before this explanation, they tried to define what religious soft power is. I say they tried to define it because they, just like Haynes, accepted that the concept is indefinite in itself and that it somehow has limits. In this context, according to them, religious soft power is a type of power that countries use together with sharp power from time to time in the new world order, and they use it towards structures that they can affect geographically first and then in groups. In this context, structures that use the same religion as a soft power element in different geographies may enter into a struggle with each other, a common occurrence in the new world order. Thus, according to Mandaville and Hamid (2018), increases in both global conflict and cooperation suggest religious soft power can appear in various forms. When viewed from this perspective, the return of religion to world politics and the discussion since the 1990s about religious soft power imply that we are focusing on something new. Following Mandaville and Hamid’s project, Peter Henne’s study (Henne, 2019), which focuses on the use of religion in the foreign policies of the US and Russia, argues that religious soft power is often a factor in some of today’s foreign policy struggles, and is a tool which some governments and non-state groups use to compete with each other. In this context, Henne contends that classical foreign policy readings are incomplete because they exclude religion, even though religious soft power is sometimes a tool of ‘conventional’ – that is, secular – foreign policy. In addition, and also among the second generation of religious soft power writers, perhaps the most radical change in discourse, or in other words, the use of religious soft power, Gregoria Bettiza (2020) states that religion is a power factor in foreign policy on its own, a concept that he calls ‘sacred capital’, which can be an effective foreign policy tool in some contexts. In addition, Bettiza contends that certain states use religion very effectively in foreign policy, thanks to some of their characteristics, and this falls within the definition of soft power. Following our brief discussion of some of the ways that religious soft power is understood, we can note that we are currently informed by a second generation of scholars interested in religious soft power. Yet, it is not possible to say that this generation is very different from the first generation, except to diversify the examples and make the concept more popular. Although they make very valuable contributions and definitions, we are not far beyond what Haynes said in the definition of soft religious power two decades ago. However, talking about religious soft power on a global scale today, we can also say that it has turned into a resource in the hands of different regimes, including both democracies and non-democracies, similarly trying to spread their influence. Before moving on, it is necessary to underline one final point, related to the definition of soft religious power. As already mentioned, for nearly 20 years it has not been clearly stated what religious soft power is, or rather there has been no full agreement on any of the different definitions put forward. The main reason for this is that a concept that is difficult to measure, whether by normative or positivist methods, emerged as a new concept. It should be noted that religious soft power is ‘ambiguous’ in nature, and this uncertainty is reflected in both the resources and limits of religious soft power, as discussed later.

Sources of religious soft power, and those who use it Of course, the most indisputable and fundamental source of religious soft power is religion. However, the fact that a country, an organisation or a non-state group is linked to a religious faith does not necessarily indicate that it has the capacity to use religious soft power productively. 378

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In addition, additional and very strong support is needed, including historical connections. What we mean by historical connections is that the government or non-state actor that seeks to use religious soft power must have an organic-historical connection with a certain religion in some ways, and must have led or pioneered this religion at some point in history, either on a regional or a global scale. Bettiza (2020) calls this historical bond event ‘Historical Entanglements’, and states that symbolically it is very important. Yet, if one can use a religious reference historically, this can go far beyond being symbolic in foreign policy. What I mean here can be explained by the following example. The main centre of Bektashism, an Islamic Sufistic movement, is located in Tirana, the capital of Albania. This organisation does not have great financial or network-based activity. However, the Bektashi leader, Baba Mondi, based in Tirana, is able to influence Bektashi and Alevi groups in many countries, not only in Albania or the Balkans, but also in Turkey and the rest of the world (Doja, 2006). A larger-scale example is the Vatican, which is also a state but does not as a state wield conventional great power. Yet, both the pope and the Vatican more generally can be important voices in debates about conflicts and pandemics around the world, thanks to their historical importance and because the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic church, the pope, is also a head of state, the Vatican. Of course, we do not compare the influence of the two, Baba Mondi and Pope Francis, but we can say that they both have religious soft power stemming from their history, and other factors. Religious soft power that comes from historical foundations is so important that even if the ideology of a country with a certain majority religion changes, then it may still seek to use religion as a soft power in foreign policy. One example is Turkey. Anatolia, which hosted the caliph as the leader of the Islamic world during the Ottoman period, became officially a secular state with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. This restructuring transformed Turkish society, and compared to many other Muslim-majority countries, Turkey has a looser social structure in terms of its religious affiliations. However, especially since 2010, the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has sought to use Islam as a religious soft power tool in both domestic and foreign policy, angling for the ‘leadership of the Muslim world’, similar to many other governments, including those of Iran and Saudi Arabia (Ozturk, 2021). In this context, Turkey seeks to change the dimensions of its relations with different countries with the claim of serving Muslims and defending their rights in various parts of the world, including the Balkans, North Africa and the Turkic populations and states in both Asia and parts of continental Europe. In this context, religion does not remain ‘just’ religion, nor does history remain ‘only’ history. This is to note that culture and language are common yet highly important values which often augment the use of religion as soft power. For example, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran have different sects and different readings of Islam. Therefore, they cannot be at equal distance to every Muslim group in terms of culture, religion and understanding, and they cannot approach them in the same way. In fact, this shows us that history on its own is not always enough for foreign policy to succeed when using religious soft power. In order to use religious soft power effectively, history, culture and teaching are required. In this context, the dissemination of the doctrine by an institutional or semi-institutional structure is beneficial for the use of religion as more effective soft power. At this point, three different examples will be illuminating. One of them is the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, trying to spread Shiism via the teachings of the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (Wastnidge, 2015). Another example is the Egyptian university of Al-Azhar, trying to ‘guide’ Muslims throughout the world via its own imams and Islamic scholars, along with the Egyptian government that controls Al-Azhar university (Barraclough, 1998). A final example is China and India’s use of the Dalai Lama and Buddhism for their political interests, especially in South Asia (Ranade, 2017). As can be understood from these different 379

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examples, different structures, different religions and different interests use religion as a soft power in different ways, albeit based on similar historical teachings. These entities and/or structures are actors that seek to use religious soft power and, as a result, they need institutions to spread it, along with cadres to produce discourse for those institutions, as well as political will. For these institutions to use religion as a soft power resource, they require financial capital and tools to spread their discourse. For example, Iran has supported the spread of the Islamic Revolution and its activities around the world for 40 years (Haynes, 2021, p. 328), Turkey’s religious communities are followers of Sunni Islam, which has organic ties with the state, and an important state structure, the Diyanet (that is, Presidency of Religious Affairs); both are important institutions and structures (Ozturk, 2016). Similarly, Russia’s use of the Orthodox church as a means of legitimacy during its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and its dissemination through the Sputnik news agency are further examples of how religion can be employed as a soft power. At this point, the question can be asked: how does religion arise as a soft power and who uses it? Three different actors use it, and while they are in cooperation from time to time, each can also use religion as a soft power tool on its own. As we have said from the very beginning, states can use religion as a soft power resource in foreign policy via religious organisations, national and transnational state apparatuses, and religious communities that seek to control. In addition, national and transnational religious organisations that are not directly related to the state but are in close contact with it can also operate internationally via religious soft power. For example, the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation or the International Christian Association seek to be influential in the field of foreign policy by carrying out global activities, including foreign aid and health care initiatives. A third group comprises religious organisations or communities. While some may have direct or indirect relations with certain states, others may be opposed to them. For example, the Gülen Movement, originating in Turkey, has carried out dialogue and educational activities but is also a para-political organisation (Watmough and Ozturk, 2018). It was cited as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish state after a 2016 coup attempt. Despite this, in the 2000s, the Gülen Movement has been very active, together with the Turkish state, in the international arena, exemplifying attempted use of religious soft power. However, whether it is a state, an international organisation or a national religious community, the use of religious soft power depends on having a regional, national and/or international network, as well as sufficient financial capital for its activities. The task of providing capital is dependent on countries and their legal systems. For example, American evangelists, or Mormons based in Salt Lake City, Utah, influential supporters of former president, Donald Trump, were also effective in identifying supporters outside the USA by forming transnational associations and soliciting donations (Haynes, 2021). In other countries, things work differently. For example, India’s nationalist and populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, uses his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, as a religious tool inside India (McDonnell and Cabrera, 2019) and in the international Hindu diaspora outside of the country. In doing this, Modi shows himself to be a leader who seeks to use Hindu nationalism both in India and outside among diasporic Hindus. Another example is Turkey’s President Erdoğan, who uses the power of the state and affiliated religious communities, but not the power of his party, in a similar manner to Modi. In this context, by building the largest local mosques in the history of the Balkans, America and continental Europe, Erdoğan presents himself as the protector of Muslims, and uses this in Turkey’s foreign policy. Terrorist organisations that use religion are other actors that Haynes (2012) shows in his studies as an example of entities that use religious soft power. Although we mention this subject once again in the section on the limits of religious soft power, it is necessary to underline a 380

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couple of points here. If religious soft power is to influence the masses solely through religious ideas, we can note that terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria find supporters not only in the Muslim world but also in the West, via effective use of religious soft power. This shows us that religion is not always a means of influencing in a positive way and reflects religion’s ambiguity as noted earlier. As a result, religious soft power can also be used by the smallest-scale religious organisation, as well as states. However, it is not easy to use it. Because there is a need for both normative and material resources. History, partnership, human resources, culture, language unity, organisational capability and structure, a specific plan and purpose are the most important requirements. However, some ‘sharp’ power – that is, a mix of hard and soft power – attributes may be necessary for effective use of religious soft power, including, most importantly, financial capital. Although social media and internet are very important tools today, there is still a need for financial capital in order to have an impact on the world and to convey messages. When all this is combined, the question of how effective religious soft power is on its own arises, and this once again reveals its ambiguous side.

Limits of religious soft power Religious soft power is one of the most effective policy tools in today’s world, but it is not suitable for use by all policy actors. One of the main reasons for this is that religious soft power is very narrow, although this has not stopped people, states and organisations from trying to utilise it in various ways. For example, Putin, who could not reach his goals in the first month of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and was in a relatively difficult situation, began to use a lot of religious discourse, trying to convince the Orthodox Christian world that the invasion – or ‘special military operation’ as he called it – was necessary. In addition, leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were making statements supporting Putin, and this can be seen as the use of religion in politics. At this point, although even this can be seen as a religious soft power application at first glance, it is very difficult to define it as soft power when we consider the connection of the subject with authoritarianism and aggression. However, the use of religious soft power at one point does not have a very wide area of influence. Religion undoubtedly has a unity and a unifying power between individuals, societies and countries. Religion also has a distinctive power. However, one of the big question marks is how much individuals, groups and countries try to stay together because of religious partnerships or religion. Here, I am not saying that religion has re-entered the private sphere or that it is not so important in international relations; on the contrary, I am trying to emphasise that it is still very important but still cannot be used as the only explanatory concept. At this point, one of the most important issues is that religious soft power has a limited scope and effect. In short, this tool cannot directly or indirectly lead to solving problems or gaining goals in foreign policy. Yet, it can be a co-actor for certain policies. In both politics and international relations, states are the main actors. In this context, of course, states are not the only and main decision maker, but their existence is still an undeniable fact, an expression of power. Here, too, other power resources may merge, including military capacity, energy resources, geopolitical position and capacity to impose economic sanctions, to augment influence and power. At some point, these combined powers may have a decisive influence on the extent to which religious soft power is used or not used, as well as on its limits. In this case, religious soft power becomes a kind of supporting actor rather than a dominant actor on its own. The main reason for this is that it may be dependent on sharp power resources. 381

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Another reason why religious soft power is limited, quickly crosses these limits and finds itself in the field of ‘sharp power’ is that religious soft power depends on the user. Who the user is or the user’s other activities determine how the religious soft power will be perceived by other parties. For example, Egypt’s recent transition to a dictatorship, especially after the Arab Spring and a brief democratic interregnum, leads to doubts among many Western Muslims, where it is influential. Similarly, there is the use of religion by the Erdoğan administration, which is getting tougher by the day in domestic politics. Although it may seem like religious soft power at first glance, it is viewed with suspicion by many Muslims, some social groups and among Balkan countries and, in addition, in other parts of the world. Here, of course, there are situations such as bringing internal problems to the outside by instrumentalising religious soft power, crossborder authoritarianism, or meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. A final point is that soft religious power practices are somehow intertwined with public diplomacy and diaspora groups, as we noted earlier in the work of Joseph Nye. Here, too, it is difficult to determine what the religion-oriented policies of many countries are.

Conclusion When we look at general studies on religious soft power, we note that most such studies are either commentary, journalism or policy papers, not scholarly treatments. The main reason for this is that although religious soft power is used very frequently and visibly, it is also very difficult to define; there is no consensus as to what it means. On the other hand, the fact that religion is increasing in importance in both national and international politics heightens interest in the subject, which makes defining the concept authoritatively very important. This adds even more ambiguity to the already ambiguous nature of religion. In this regard, the phenomenon known as religious soft power does not always remain soft to the extent necessary or is intended to be presented when states enter the purview of the issue, because state configuration employs economic and other sanctions in the name of power through instruments that utilise religion. This situation suggests that states cannot use religion as a unidimensional soft power. Second, religion or the extremist instrumentalisation of religion as a means of oppression at the hands of a political regime can prompt changes in the state identity. These changes can spread rapidly and alter the behaviour formation of states due to their consideration for foreign policy. This is inarguably influential on topics such as the leader, state system, institutional capacity and areas of influence. Finally, we see once again that the changing identities of states do not relate merely to domestic policy.

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Ahmet Erdi Öztürk Watmough, Simon P., and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk. “From ‘diaspora by design’ to transnational political exile: The Gülen Movement in transition.” Politics, Religion and Ideology 19, no. 1 (2018): 33–52. Wilson, Erin K. After secularism: Rethinking religion in global politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Yang, Zikun and Li Li. “Positioning religion in international relation: The performative, discursive, and relational dimension of religious soft power.” Religions 12, no. 11 (2021): 940.

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27 WHEN POLITICAL RELIGION IS A ‘GOOD THING’? Feminist storytelling around less-heard understandings of ‘political religion’ Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor Introduction This chapter is a reflective essay that offers a new theorisation informed by feminist non-hierarchical thinking to interrogate the idea of political religion, which is itself a layered term that may be understood in a myriad of ways. Here I postulate that current theorisations of political religion that emerged as way of explaining the use of religion and/or religious structures by fascist groups in the early twentieth century have significant gaps. Current theorisations are arrived at from Eurocentric and Western intellectual lenses. In this chapter, I present new understandings that while still Eurocentric, draw largely on the experiences of minoritised religious migrants to the UK. These understandings will contextualise and include within theorisations of political religion, the ways of thinking and being of minoritised religious groups who arrived in the UK in the 1960s and who had to engage with British and European political and social structures. This chapter demonstrates how as they sought to build homes in their adopted countries, they foregrounded their religious social capital in their negotiations with political structures to garner rights for themselves and their communities. As they did so they negotiated spaces for themselves within British civil society from where it was possible to be heard in political and societal structures. In this regard, I provocatively ask whether political religious activism can ever be a ‘good thing’? I thus add to the debate about understandings of political religion about which Gentile declares that it is “not necessary to have the gift of prophecy to predict that the question of political religion is the one which will never be resolved to the satisfaction of all scholars” (Gentile, 2005). I aim to add a new perspective to this ongoing debate – a perspective that is shaped by the voices and experiences of those who were previously not heard in intellectual ruminations on political religion.

A brief note on my positionality I write this chapter as a religious intellectual, a product of Eastern and Western forms of thinking, who lives and works in both zones, simultaneously an outsider and an insider. In writing this chapter and being transparent about my positionality drawing on Rose (1997) and Sultana (2007), I encourage intellectual production: DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-31

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That is transparent about who researchers/scholars/authors/thinkers are and the impact of their identity on their intellectual production Which acknowledges the existence of deeply held unconscious biases that shape how we think about various concepts, experiences and ideas Which recognises the intellectual opportunities that emerge when researchers from different positionalities think and write

Thus, writing this chapter is a form of personal and intellectual political action, undertaken with the aim of demonstrating the unique intellectual lens that I and intellectuals with positionalities similar to mine have.

Terms of reference: political religion and a feminist approach In this chapter, politics is used in a wide and interdisciplinary sense aimed at capturing the diversities, contradictions and porous boundaries within its conceptualisation. Politics can be about the structures of government. It is also about the hierarchies within everyday life and ‘ordinary’ people’s negotiations with these hierarchies, often motivated by a need to realise their agency. For this chapter, ‘politics’ includes the myriad ways in which people galvanise to secure equality and rights through critical engagement with structures of government, through challenge of prejudicial attitudes within their communities and through transformative consciousness-raising of their own selves. Within the discursive intellectual space that is ‘politics’, this chapter is particularly concerned with ideas and theorisations of ‘political religion’. It is clear from various texts that the term ‘political religion’ (as well as the term ‘totalitarianism’, which this chapter is not focussed on) emerged in the period between the two World Wars, as scholars sought new vocabulary to make sense of Nazism and other forms of fascism as they emerged in Europe and beyond, and in relation to which ‘previous notions of dictatorship and tyranny no longer seemed appropriate’ (Burrin, 1997, p.  321; Gregor, 2012; Maier, 2007; Stowers, 2007; Gentile, 2005, 2004; Gentile and Mallett, 2000). The concept ‘political religion’ is often used as a synonym for civil religion, secular religion, public religion, politicised religion and religious politics (Gentile, 2005), although theorists distinguish between these terms. In relation to civil religion (again a term that this essay is not focussed on), it is important to point out seminal work by Bellah in which he draws upon the political histories and experiences in the USA to define civil religion. He describes this as a reified but nevertheless all-pervasive, elaborate and well-institutionalised system of rites, morals and values that influences and in turn determine social and political experience in the USA (Bellah, 1967). Coming back to political religion, this term has its roots in the separation of religion and state in European contexts and the rejection of any form of divine basis for secular power. During this time, Europe also witnessed its acceptance of modern understandings of political governance and ideas such as democracy, liberty and agency, which culminated in the modern political religions. Political religion as a term conceives modern despotisms as surrogates for religion (Maier, 2007; Payne, 2008) and ‘depends upon highly criticized expressive-symbolist theories of religion and an implied opposition to the religion of genuine [sic] Christianity’ (Stowers, 2007, p. 9). Nazism, fascism, communism and other forms of totalitarianism were the peak of plurisecular developments in Europe (Burrin, 1997). The use of the term ‘political religion’ did not flourish (as opposed to the word ‘totalitarianism’ which caught on in both academic and media circles) and suffered from the lack of interest in religion in the then largely secular academic milieu (Burrin, 1997).

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Two aspects of Burrin’s discussion of the evolution of the term are critical to the new theorisation that this chapter postulates. Firstly the early theorists of ‘political religion’ used this term to describe what were essentially secular phenomena that were rooted in a secular European rejection of religion. There was a sense that these new ‘modern religions’ would replace or at least compete with the traditional ‘world religions’. Gentile describes this as the ‘sacralisation of politics’: The sacralisation of politics is manifest in the way the ideal of politics was conceived, experienced and represented by its supporters, in their style of life as well as in their attitudes towards the adversaries and opposing ideals. Modern political movements are transformed into secular religions when they: (a) define the meaning of life and ultimate ends of human existence; (b) formalise the commandments of a public ethic to which all members of these movement must adhere; and (c) give utter importance to a mythical and symbolic dramatisation in their interpretation of history and reality, thus creating their own ‘sacred history’, embodied in the nation, the state or the party, and tied to the existence of a ‘chosen people’, which were glorified as the regenerating force of all mankind. The sacralisation of politics occurs all the time by virtue of the fact that a political entity, for instance, the nation, the state, race, class, the party, assume the characteristics of a sacred entity, that is, of a supreme power, indisputable and untouchable, which becomes the object of faith, of reverence, of cult, of fidelity, of devotion from the side of the citizens, up to and including the sacrifice of life; and as such it lies in the centre of the constellation of beliefs, of myths, of values, of commandments, of rites and of symbols. (Gentile, 2005, p. 29) While these theorisations relied on comparisons with the structures of religions – deeply held beliefs, passionate adherence to shared norms and rules and a sense a larger goal – what is missing from these is any acknowledgement of the political and social agency of those who within these secular norms in Europe, continued to believe in one or more of the traditional world religions. In this regard, Maier questions the legitimacy of ‘political religion’ as a concept, asking whether it can truly be used to explain or illuminate political phenomena without distorting the basic idea of religion in the process (2007). This leads to my second reflection on Burring’s commentary – that this term was employed, albeit hesitantly, by a largely secular academic milieu, which was suspicious of religion. I wonder whether an inherent suspicion of religion led to an unconscious effacing of the political agency of religious groups and individuals. This is the gap or indeed the opportunity that this chapter addresses – how can current theorisations be extended to be inclusive of religious groups? Maier (2007) and others share my concerns about this category or concept, with Maier asking: We have to ask whether all this is permitted: is it permissible to describe political phenomena in terms of religious categories? Does one understand what one is doing? Does one not draw religion into a questionable sphere, into an area of double meaning and ambivalence? Are the boundaries between religion and criminality not finally blurred? If one wishes to apply religious terminology, should one not speak of anti‐ religion, pseudo‐religion, religious ersatz or ersatz‐religions?

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Having asked these questions, Maier reflects on what may be understood about political movements like fascism and Nazism, from the metaphorical use of religion and political religion, including the fervour of believers/adherents and the resilience of religions that do not go away but return in different forms. This is perhaps what is apparent in the current growing visibility populist movements across the globe. I seek to go in a different direction, aiming instead to understand and uncover the political agency and politics of religious people, whom I position as lesser heard at least in the study of politics.

Why a feminist approach? Feminism is important to this chapter as it provides an intellectual framework through which voices at the margins of European intellectual discourse can be heard and included. This chapter has already alluded to the challenge of trying to define ‘politics’ or ‘political religion’. Definitions of the term ‘feminism’ similarly fail in gaining any form of consensus, with some women (of all ethnicities) embracing it as a ‘label’ for their struggles and other women eschewing it as a white Western construct that is of no relevance to women from other ethnicities. A key criticism of feminism is that it privileges histories of white Western women’s struggles – starting with the suffragettes, 1890s onwards (Holton, 1995) – and overlooks women’s struggles for rights prior to the 1890s. The historical activisms of women of colour are ignored including for example by anti-slavery female activists (Watkins et al., 1992) who prior to the 1890s spoke about diverse women’s rights. For example black activist Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) demanded equality and rights for women but did not call herself a feminist. Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam (1838–1901), ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Bhopal (now in India), did not call herself a feminist. Yet she used her political power to reform women’s education and to institute political and marital rights for women in India (Lambert-Hurley, 2007). Although feminism may be a recent word, throughout history women have challenged their marginalisation in ways that reflected their local contexts. In their struggles for equality and rights, feminists realised that there was a need to question and disrupt existing sources of knowledge that were created by and for dominant social groups (namely white middle-class men) and which were biased towards the interests of these groups. As they attempted to reclaim systems of knowledge and governance for women, feminists realised that the tools they developed could be used to further the cause of any marginalised group (not just women) who, like women, remained under-represented or mis-represented in traditional discourses of knowledge. For some thinkers, feminist thought has evolved to advocate emancipation and rights for any ‘othered’ group within society, who may be marginalised on account of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or age (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2012). According to Flax, Feminist philosophy thus represents the return of the oppressed, of the exposure of particular social roots of all apparently abstract and universal knowledge [p. 249]. . . . Feminism is a revolutionary theory and practice. It requires simultaneously an incorporation, negation and transformation of all human history, including existing philosophies. (Flax, 1983, p. 271) Feminist thought may best be understood through its deconstruction and interrogation of traditional conceptualisations and constructs of truth, objectivity and neutrality (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2012; Cohen et al., 2000; Webb, 2000). For this author, and others who use a feminist 388

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standpoint, the intellectual influence of feminism now extends beyond a celebration of women’s social contributions. It includes for example the work of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt who has written among other things on revolution, human rights and political action (Arendt, 1967, 1966); Saba Mahmood who is critical of secular liberal politics and liberal feminisms which she considers inadequate to explore the lived experiences of religious women (Mahmood, 2005); and Michelle Le Doeuff who interrogates the politics of knowledge production (Le Doeuff, 1998). In this chapter, I draw on a discursive feminist approach to challenge dominant secular Eurocentric narratives of political religion. Instead I seek to hear those who are at the margins of European society but who nevertheless engaged in political activism.

A different story political religion? Methodologically, the idea of narrative and stories, particularly those that remain unheard or less heard is important for this chapter. From the narrative enquirer’s perspective, a story captures the complexity and subtleties of human experience. Stories are constantly being reconstructed to reflect the ongoing personal, cultural and communal narratives (Webster and Mertova, 2007), and here I tell a story that showcases the significance of religious belief to the political activisms of certain individuals and communities. The story I tell in this paper represents a critical connection between the personal subjective experience and the larger political action, between individual and the collective (Lambert, 2002): People tell stories not just to work out their own changing identities, but also to guide others who will follow them . . . telling one’s story is a responsibility to the commonsense world. . . . Storytelling is for another as much as for oneself. In the reciprocity that is storytelling, the teller offers herself as a guide. . . . The other’s receipt of that guidance not only recognises but values the teller. The moral genius of storytelling is that each, teller and listener, enters the space of the story for the other. (Frank, 1995, pp. 17–18) This story draws upon ethnographic and interview data conducted as part of various sociology of religion projects that I have been involved with. The main story revolves around an interview that I conducted in 2011 with a retired Sikh male police officer. The story is then embellished and built using narratives from more than one individual, from relevant literature and from my tracing of the evolution of human rights law from the Magna Carta to present times (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2019). All three quotes used are from the original interview with the retired Sikh police officer. Personal details and any other identifying information have been modified to mask the identities of participants. The research was conducted after receiving ethical approval from the University of Derby where this project was based.

Kam’s religion and politics I met Kam, as part of a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) & Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Religion and Society programme on discrimination and equality on the basis of religion or belief, which was led by Professor Paul Weller (Weller et al., 2013). When I met him, Kam was in his late 70s. He was a retired police officer who arrived in the UK in the late 1960s. He was a Sikh of Indian heritage but had lived in eastern Africa all his life. His ancestors had been moved by the British government from India to eastern Africa to manage plantations, creating a class of India managers between a 389

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class of black African labourers and the white British plantation ‘owners’. Kam was a qualified a police officer and worked as an officer in the British police. He had to flee his home country in the 1960s, when a wave of politics known as Africanisation meant that non-indigenous communities were no longer welcome in East Africa. Kam considered going to India, but he and his community were told they were not Indian and despite being British citizens, they were initially told that they could not come to Britain. However, as subjects of the former British Empire, Kam and others like him had the right of entry, work and settlement in the UK. After much bureaucratic negotiations with the British government, Kam and his community were able to move to the UK, where they settled in various locations across the Midlands of the UK and beyond. Kam and his community were different from the other South Asian–heritage migrants. They were British citizens prior to coming to the UK, they were knowledgeable of the processes and systems of British civil society, most spoke English and they were generally well-qualified. This created a societal hierarchy within British South Asian communities. There was also another hierarchy at play – although Kam was a qualified and experienced police officer, when he initially applied for police jobs in the UK, he was told that South Asians could not be police officers. Yet within a few years of his initial application and when White British officers realised that they lacked sufficient cultural understanding to work with migrant British South Asian communities, he was approached and was appointed a police officer. This was a moment of great pride for Kam, and he recalls how his appointment made him one of the first Sikh police officers in the UK. It bought agency for South Asian communities in his city across faith community groups. He was able to explain to local government the religious and ethnic needs of South Asian communities, which had been previously treated with suspicion because they were unfamiliar in British contexts. He was a police officer but also became a negotiator and a representative of his and other cultures and faiths. Kam’s story continues. The turban that he wore for religious reasons became a bone of contention. He was not allowed to undertake certain duties as he was told that his turban posed a ‘health and safety’ hazard. He faced discrimination at a personal level too. He recalled how none of his colleagues would eat with him in the cafeteria and would get up from a table if he sat at it. They told him his food ‘smelled’. With a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle he reflected how attitudes to Indian food have changed: I remember 20–25 years ago when my wife used to cook an Indian meal, Punjabi meal, and our kitchen windows used to be on the road side, open, and over the weekend when she is cooking, and people used to pass by. Because I was the only Asian family living there and you can see them make the faces, what is this stinky smell over there, but after a few years when they started to experience the food and eating the food in the Indian restaurants, those very people started coming to the window asking her what are you cooking? What a lovely smell! At work, he continued eating Indian food despite his colleagues’ disdain, then he says someone sat with him and tasted a bit. That he says was the beginning of a new story. Food can be of great significance to migrant communities as they build a semblance of familiarity and normality. As they share food they build new social bonds with indigenous communities (Abdelhafid, 2023). It is important to note that these experiences occurred before the Race Relations Act (1976), which aimed to prevent discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, nationality, ethnic and national origin in the fields of employment, the provision of goods and services, education and public function. The Race Relations Act is important as many minority groups sought legal 390

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recourse against discrimination using the provisions of the Race Relations Act. In due course, this act in part led to the recognition of Jews and Sikhs as ethnic groups. Kam remembers this act well. He remembered in his own way supporting and lobbying for this act and then being involved in educating his communities on the significance of this act. For him to be able to support minoritised faith groups of South Asian Heritage – Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus – was an important act of solidarity with those whom he shared aspects of his identity. He recognised that his faith and ethnicity gave him insights into the cultural nuances of these communities that his White peers lacked and so he sought to use his agency as a police officer in a secular force and as a religious Sikh man to enable socio-political change at a local level. In 1976 and 1988 Sikhs successfully campaigned for turbaned Sikhs to be allowed an exemption, on religious grounds, from the requirements of the Road Traffic Act 1972 for motorcyclists to wear safety helmets. This was enshrined in law in the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act 1976 and the Road Traffic Act 1988. This had personal ramifications for Kam. Although the ruling was in relation to motorcyclists, Kam recalls that lived experience of the law for him was that his turban was better accepted in the workplace. Media and local community discourses meant that people around him better understood the significance of the turban for Sikhs. His colleagues realised that the turban was not just a sartorial choice, but something that he wore out of deep religious conviction. With this recognition came acceptance and, to a certain degree, respect. According to Kam, another enduring debate about religious communities’ sartorial choices is evinced in media debates about the hijab or headscarf that Muslim women wear. It was also interesting how historical tensions around the turban re-emerged after the tragic events of 11 September 2001 (9/11) and the growing visibility of the Taliban, who incidentally also wore turbans. The Taliban turbans were different in style and purpose to Sikh turbans, but this was not apparent to those who lacked cultural understanding. As Islamophobia rose in British streets, a number of Sikh men experienced verbal and physical violence. A young Sikh man had stones thrown at him – ironically he was an interfaith practitioner who worked towards understanding between different communities. Kam says that this did not dampen the young man’s passion to forge brides of dialogue across faiths and cultures. Kam spoke about the unprecedented growth in Islamophobia post-9/11 and how this affected not just British Muslim communities and Muslim communities the world over, but how it also had an impact on the lives of those who were not Muslim, but who in Britain looked like them. The leader of a Hindu temple once told him about a chat he had to have with a young white male with far-right leanings who would regularly call the temple phone number and leave Islamophobic hate messages. One day the temple leader was able to answer the phone and managed to catch the attention of this young person. He then explained to him that the temple had nothing to do with Islam. Kam also described how life in the UK had changed significantly for migrant ethnic and religious communities. When he first arrived in the UK, it was not possible to buy ‘ethnic’ ingredients easily. One funny memory was of him and his wife on a holiday back from India, packing their bags with fresh Indian vegetables, spices and Indian pickles – they were stopped by a bemused customs officer at the airport but were allowed to take home all the produce they had bought. But through what he claims was the socio-political agency and business acumen of Indian-heritage traders, most ingredients are now easily available, with the big supermarkets also selling South Asian goods. There are clearer examples of the civic agency of these migrant communities, for example in ensuring provision of culturally and religiously appropriate food in hospitals for patients of South Asian and other migrant backgrounds. He remembered the sad story of an elderly Hindu woman who had died in hospital after brief illness. Her bereaved 391

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family discovered that the life-long and religiously committed vegetarian had been fed nonvegetarian food in her last days. In her semi-conscious state, she had not realised. Less poignant but perhaps equally important was that many South Asian–heritage convalescents in hospitals could not eat the ‘bland’ (!) British food. These and other occurrences led Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities to work with the National Health Services in the UK to ensure that hospital menus met the religious and cultural needs of the community. Another civil society ‘win’ was around funeral processes. Most South Asian communities prefer to bury or cremate their dead as soon as possible after a death has occurred (usually within 24 hours of the death). However, funerals in the UK typically take weeks to organise. Again these minoritised communities engaged a process of slow and careful negotiation with various local authorities to ensure the paperwork after a death is expedited so that funerals can be expedited in line with their religious and cultural preferences. Then there were also negotiations with planning departments of local governments so that places of worship were allowed to have architectural features like domes and embellishments that were not in standing with local architectural norms in the UK. Over and over again Kam described various ‘everyday’ struggles that were addressed through consistent political action and lobbying with local and central government: Even in the police headquarters we have got the prayer room established. So I think that things have moved on but if you think that 100% we have achieved this goal, no it can never be achieved even by any strict rules or regulations or any legislation. It is participation of both sides, we cannot expect somebody to be coming along and alright everything is done. And it also depends upon us, a minority community, how are we going to think about giving this trust and the confidence to the country we are living in. [. . .] So these are the things within which we have to be playing a very important role ourselves to making this country. If we have made this country our home, we have to be true citizens of this country. We should be raising the issues if we are having the flexibility and also the rights and also the acceptance we have got here. To conclude Kam’s story, we look at his reflections on his current role within the community. He has retired from the police force but continues to play an active role in his community via the local Gurudwara. He speaks about his work with young people on interfaith dialogue. Post the Salman Rushdie affair, there was a cleavage in South Asian groups along faith lines (Weller, 2008). Following political tensions between India and Pakistan, these lines of separation have hardened. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities compete with each other for resources socially and politically (Weller et al., 2013). In his interfaith educational work, he likes to remind young people of times when South Asian migrant communities worked together to raise funds for each other’s places of worship: I think it doesn’t matter how many laws and legislation you are going to create they are not going to work. Always the community is getting together to work together, to sit together, to communicate with each other, and also going into each other’s religious centres.

Reflections on this one man’s story As I write and tell the story of a single Sikh migrant to the UK, I aim to humanise the story of all migrants, as individuals who with resilience and fortitude engaged with the political systems of their adopted land. This enabled transformative change, in policy and practice, for themselves

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and their families. As the story demonstrates, these people relied on religious and cultural social capital, both tangible and intangible, to enable their work, yet current commonly accepted theorisations of political religion present largely pejorative readings of the role of religion in individual and social lives, thus doing a disservice to those for whom religion is an important aspect of their lives. Secondly, for these people religion is a motivator for ‘doing good’. Kam was pleased that he was appointed as a police officer because it allowed him to lobby for his own faith community, as well as for other faith communities he was familiar with due to his ethnic heritage. The religious freedoms that people from minoritised backgrounds take for granted in Britain today were hard-fought wins that individuals like Kam negotiated. They worked with various forms of government and within accepted social hierarchies of their time (for example racism, religious prejudice and anti-migrant sentiment) to enable positive societal changes for their own communities and, through their interfaith dialogue work, for wider society. This engagement is political in everyday sense, and also through its engagement with governmental structures. Yet current definitions of political religion do not have a space for experiences such as Kam’s. In relation to ‘religious’ political religion, there is much written about political Islam and more recently around political Hindutva groups in India, yet this literature emphasises violent and/or fundamentalist groups. From Kam’s story, it is apparent that his political activism (if we can agree to call it that) was ordinary and everyday, in the sociological sense. He lobbied for more inclusive hospital menus, faster paperwork for funerals, more resources for diverse places of worship and respect for his family meals. But his articulation of political and personal agency in the most mundane of contexts is an exciting opportunity to transform how political scientists understand the category of political religion. This is an opportunity for theorising new ideas and perhaps new language that is inclusive, that is more egalitarian and which privileges the voices of the ordinary and the lesser heard in the annals of politics. This is also an opportunity to start reflection on the impact of living in a postsecular age. Weller et al. write about religion or belief contours of Britain being less Christian, more plural and more non-religious (Weller et al., 2013). Religion has not declined, it has simply taken on more diversity, bringing different flavours, tones and willingness to engage or not with state political systems. However, coloured by vestiges of secular intellectual suspicions of religion, there has been significant interest, indeed fetishisation, of the more fundamentalist ways in which religion engages with the state. Ordinary, peaceful and arguably more impactful voices need more inclusion in theorisations of political religion. Through their peaceful and everyday political negotiations, Kam and others like him achieved many political ‘wins’ for their communities including representation in local and national government as well as political forums where they could be heard (see for example the work of the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims). Through such grassroots work, communities secured what I describe elsewhere as the right to be human, by articulating their needs in a voice that was both religious and political (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2018). Far from emerging at the separation of religion and state, this ‘political religion’ thrives on the interconnections it forges. Furthermore, rather than rigid adherence to structural forms of authority, Kam’s form of political religion is less didactic and more dialogic. Its political goals are achieved through reflection on shared values, part of which is to challenge and address prejudice and unfairness but underpinned always by a philosophy that in Galtung’s sense seeks to establish positive peace (1986).

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Conclusion At the start of this chapter, I quoted Gentile’s assertion that, “the question of political religion is the one which will never be resolved to the satisfaction of all scholars” (Gentile, 2005). To the quandary that is ‘political religion’, this chapter aims to add a new critical insider perspective that recognises the significant positive societal impact religious people can have through their religio-political activism. At the start of this chapter, I also provocatively asked whether political religious activism can ever be a ‘good thing’? This question I shall refrain from answering. However, what I hoped to have achieved in this chapter is to provoke further reflection and theorisation on the topic of political religion. By writing and sharing Kam’s story, I hope to have muddied the waters sufficiently for a different kind of thinking within political religion.

References Abdelhafid, Meryem. (2023). Beyond Integration: Diverse Lived Experiences of Algerian Women in the UK. Unpublished thesis to be submitted to Coventry University. Arendt, Hannah. (1967). On Revolution. London: Faber and Faber. Arendt, Hannah. (1966). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bellah, Robert. N. (1967). ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus, 96(1), pp. 1–21. Burrin, Phillipe. (1997). ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History and Memory, 9(1–2), 321–349. Cheruvallil-Contractor, Sariya. (2012). Muslim Women in Britain: Demystifying the Muslimah. London: Routledge. Cheruvallil-Contractor, Sariya. (2018). ‘The Right to Be Human: How Do Muslim Women Talk about Human Rights and Religious Freedoms in Britain?’, Religion and Human Rights 13(1), pp. 49–75. Cheruvallil-Contractor, Sariya. (2019). Magna Carta 1215 to the Present Day: Charting the Development of Legal Frameworks around the Freedom of Religion or Belief in the United Kingdom (London: Freedom Declared Foundation) http://freedomdf.wpengine.com/magna-carta-1215-to-the-equality-act-2010-and-beyond/ Cohen, Louis, Manion Lawrence and Morrison, Keith (2000). Research Methods in Education. London: Routledge Falmer. Flax, Jane. (1983). ‘Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A  Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics’, in Harding, Sandra and Hintikka. Merril (eds) Discovering Reality – Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (2nd Edition). London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 245–282. Frank, Arthur. (1995). The Wounded Storyteller – Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galtung, Johann. (1986). Peace Theory – An Introduction. www.transcend.org/galtung/papers/Peace%20 Theory-An%20Introduction.pdf Gentile, Emilio. (2004). ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an Interpretation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(3), pp. 326–375. Gentile, Emilio. (2005). ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics – A Critical Survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6(1), pp. 19–32. Gentile, Emilio and Mallett, Robert. (2000). ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1(1), pp. 18–55. Gregor, A. James. (2012). Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Holton, Sandra. (1995). ‘Women and the Vote’, in Purvis, June. (ed) Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 – An Introduction. London: Routledge, pp. 277–306. Lambert, Joe. (2002). Digital Storytelling – Capturing Lives, Creating Communities. Berkeley: Digital Diner Press. Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan. (2007). Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal. London: Routledge. Le Doeuff, Michèle. (1998). The Sex of Knowing (translated by Kathryn Hammer and Lorraine Code (2003)). London: Routledge.

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When political religion is a ‘good thing’? Mahmood, Saba. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Maier, Hans. (2007). ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Limitations’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8(1), pp. 5–16, Payne, G. Stanley. (2008). ‘On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and Its Application’, in Griffin, R., Mallett, R., and Tortorice, J. (eds) The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics. London Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21–35. Rose, Gillian. (1997). ‘Situating Knowledges: Positionality, Reflexivities and Other Tactics’, Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), pp. 305–320. Stowers Stanley. (2007). ‘The Concepts of ‘Religion’, ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42(1), pp. 9–24. Sultana, Farhana. (2007). ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(3), pp. 374–385. Watkins, Susan; Rueda, Marisa and Rodiguez, Marta. (1992). Introducing Feminism. Cambridge: Icon books. Webb, Sue. (2000). ‘Feminist Methodologies for Social Researching’, in Burton, Dawn. (eds) Research Training for Social Scientist. London: SAGE. Webster, Leonard and Mertova, Patricie. (2007). Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method – An Introduction to Using Critical Event Narrative Analysis in Research on Learning and Teaching. London: Routledge. Weller, Paul. (2008). Religious Diversity in the UK: Contours and Issues. London: Continuum. Weller, Paul, Purdam, Kingsley, Ghanea, Nazila and Cheruvallil-Contractor, Sariya. (2013). Religion or Belief, Discrimination and Equality: Britain in Global Contexts. London: Continuum.

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28 FAITH-BASED ORGANISATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT Emma Tomalin

Introduction The study of faith-based organisations (FBOs) and development has attracted rising levels of attention since the mid-noughties, as an element of the emergence of religion and development studies as a ‘sub-discipline’ (Bompani, 2019). This has resulted in studies that aim to define what an FBO is and to develop typologies to understand the range of organisations captured by this label, as well as research on examining the operations of FBOs and the work that they do (e.g. Berger, 2003; Hefferan et al., 2009; Clarke, 2008; Tomalin, 2012). The study of FBOs is part of a broader ‘turn to religion’ in development studies, which reflects shifts within international development1 policy and practice. This follows decades of neglect of religion in international development efforts that emerged in the aftermath of World War II (Tomalin, 2013; Deneulin and Banu, 2009). The engagement of faith actors in the delivery of services such as health and education, as well as advocacy on behalf of the poor and marginalised, is not new, with Christian missionaries playing a key role in service delivery in European colonies from the nineteenth century. What is new is the formalisation and NGO-isation2 of the faith response to addressing poverty and inequality with the construction of a novel type of faith-based development organisation (FBDO).3 This type of FBO has become situated as the preferred faith partner for multilateral and bilateral donors in terms of receiving funding and being invited to take a prominent place in decision-making processes, such as the consultations surrounding the Sustainable Development Goals, alongside their secular counterparts (Tomalin and Haustein, 2018). While this is heralded by some as evidence of the desecularisation and decolonisation of development spaces, others are critical that this ‘turn to religion’ is limited by its narrow assimilation into neoliberal development forms where religion is instrumentalised to serve the political interests of Global North states and institutions (Jones and Peterson, 2011; Tomalin, 2018). I begin by tracing the emergence of this distinctive type of FBDO, mostly represented by Christian organisations, that had taken shape by the 1990s. As a construction of international development institutions and processes, I examine how its rise was shaped by political structures and interests that have dominated world affairs since the 1940s. In the second section, I critically examine definitions and typologies of FBOs to better understand where this NGO-ised FBDO sits within the broader category of ‘faith-based organisation’ and how different types of FBO are positioned vis-á-vis international development cooperation. In the final section of the chapter, 396

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I draw attention to a limitation of existing typologies of FBOs where they have paid insufficient attention to the role of the local faith actor (LFA), including indigenous or traditional ‘religions’, and I propose a new typology of ‘faith actors’ that takes the local as a key point of reference. A focus on the ‘local’ has gained renewed significance in development and humanitarian studies, policy and practice in recent years with the strengthening of localisation discourses since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. Despite this, LFAs continue to be poorly represented in formal development cooperation as well as academic studies, even though they are amongst the most important actors for those affected by poverty, inequality and humanitarian crises.

The making of the faith-based development organisation From Christian missionaries to international development The contribution of faith actors from Europe to serving the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America was well established and professionalised through missionary activity by the end of the nineteenth century (Haustein and Tomalin, 2018, p. 79). The argument that missionaries played a key role as precursors to later international development NGOs has been discussed by several scholars, with the proviso that the main goal of the missionary was to ‘save souls’ and of the NGO to ‘bring development’ (Burchardt and Swidler, 2020, p. 339; Manji and O’Coill, 2002; Deacon and Tomalin, 2015). Others have drawn out similarities between missionaries and development NGOs for ‘their related deployment of power’ seeking to impose Western norms upon other countries and cultures (Burchardt and Swidler, 2020, p. 337). Although the NGOisation of development was not entrenched until the 1990s, in the aftermath of the so-called Washington Consensus,4 which opened up a greater role for NGOs to fill the gaps left by state failure, government rollback and decentralisation, the international development processes that set this in motion can be traced to the period following the end of World War II (Pieterse, 2001, p. 166). As the USA sought to put in place measures to help Europe recover from the social and economic devastation wrought by World War II, through the Marshall Plan, these efforts were extended to ‘developing’ poorer countries in the Global South. Many of these countries were in the throes of decolonisation, at a time that coincided with the start of the Cold War, which from the perspective of the USA ran the risk that newly independent nations might turn to communism (Macekura, 2013). These commitments to European reconstruction and the ‘development’ of poorer nations were initially met through the setting up of the Bretton Woods Institutions5 in 1944 and the UN in 1945 and led to the emergence of a discourse of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ or ‘under-developed’ nations, creating new binary that replicated the power relations of the colonial era. The Second Inaugural Address of President Truman in 1949 is often taken as establishing this new international development paradigm where he enjoins that ‘we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ (Truman, 1949). It is clear then that the emergence of ‘international development’ or the ‘foreign aid business’ was rooted in political interests from its inception, where the pledge to help the poor and reduce inequality masked a range of other agendas.

Separating religion from international development Another area where the politics of international development has been apparent is in the adherence to a theory of modernisation that takes the Western experience as normative, including the assumption that as societies embark upon the path to modernity they will secularise (Clarke, 397

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2013; Deneulin and Banu, 2009). This secular development paradigm assumes that in the process of becoming ‘developed’, religion will lose its influence as a public force and likely also as a source of meaning making for individuals (Tomalin, 2013). Religious language did not, however, completely disappear from the articulation of international development discourse, and with the US dominance in this field the tropes of American ‘civil religion’ have made their presence felt (Bellah, 1970). For instance, Truman in his inaugural speech, after outlining his ‘bold new programme’, invoked the Biblical Sermon on the Mount (‘Our allies are the millions who hunger and thirst after righteousness’ [Truman, 1949, cf. Matthew, 5:6]), one of the two Biblical texts he had rested his hand on when taking the oath of office and his closing remarks exhibited strong providentialist language where ‘With God’s help, the future of mankind will be assured in a world of justice, harmony, and peace’ (Truman, 1949; Haustein and Tomalin, 2018, p. 82). Despite ‘civil religion’ enduring as a theme in US foreign policy up to the present day (Marsden, 2011), this is not evidence that religion has been more broadly considered in development in a way that corresponds with what Marshall et al. (2021) have called the adoption of ‘strategic religious engagement’. This necessitates taking account of the role that religion has continued to play in ‘developing’ settings, including building in attention to how religious values and identities contribute towards shaping development problems and solutions, as well as partnering with faith actors to define and reach development goals. Instead, this underlying invocation of ‘civil religion’ is another example of the power politics of international development, where such religious tropes are taken for granted as foundational to the efforts of Western-led development and not seen as threatening to the secularity and neutrality of development, or indeed the US Establishment Clause. Within development agencies, there has been an unease about engaging with faith actors from fear that they would jeopardize progress because of their conservative views, that they would inevitably combine development activities with proselytization and that they could not be trusted to treat beneficiaries fairly if they did not share their faith position. This secular bias within the Western development trajectory was also reflected in scholarship, where apart from the publication of a special issue of the journal World Development in 1980, development studies was largely silent on the topic of religions and development, until the 2000s. For instance, Ver Beek carried out a content analysis of the three leading development studies journals between 1982 and 1998, finding only ‘scant reference to the topics of spirituality or religion’ (Ver Beek, 2000, p. 60).

The emergence of contemporary faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) Although in the decades following World War II religion did not feature as a relevant factor in international development discourse, policy and practice, this does not mean that faith-based development actors, such as missionaries, disappeared or did not develop and adapt their practices during this period. To return to the example of Christian missionaries, with decolonisation in the post–World War II period, ‘key missionary industries, especially in education and health, were nationalised rapidly or gradually’ (Haustein and Tomalin, 2018, p. 83). Nonetheless, they did manage to retain a significant presence and have continued as important development actors to this day. However, as Smith demonstrates, they have been ‘working in a parallel space to development workers, clearly distinguishable from development actors and even other faithbased organizations’ (Smith, 2017, p. 65). While there continues to be an ‘uncomfortable relationship between missionaries and development scholars and practitioners’ (Smith, 2017, p. 63), where they are viewed as prone to ‘coercive and insensitive proselytization’ (Smith, 2017, p. 63), there is little evidence from the current era to support this position. 398

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While organisations that retained their missionary identity have remained outside the international development mainstream and have resisted processes of NGO-isation, other faith actors developed and established themselves in the World War II period as ‘legitimate’ development partners as they gradually loosened their commitment to missionary activity. Their development mirrored the growth of global civil society and the rise of the ‘non-governmental organisation’, itself a construction of the UN system, appearing for the first time in Article 71 of the UN Charter, and prior to this being termed ‘private international organizations’ (Davies, 2014, p. 3). By the 1980s a formal and professionalised cadre of NGOs had emerged as the foot soldiers of international development cooperation, and some of these were faith-based, mostly Christian. For those organisations, including, for instance, World Vision International (WVI) and Tearfund, that shifted away from a focus on missionary activity to a more secular engagement with development action, conversations about how to maintain a faith identity as they have become professionalised and NGO-ised have accompanied this journey (King, 2019; Freeman, 2019). As King writes, WVI began life in 1950 as an ‘agency to raise funds for missionaries and orphans’ (King, 2019, p. 1). While it has never hidden its Christian identity, by the 1970s it had become more ambitious in its vision to help the world’s poor, children in particular. To secure government funding, as well as its place as a professional humanitarian actor, it was compelled to move away from supporting overt evangelism. By the 1980s, at a time when Western governments had turned to NGOs to carry out their development and humanitarian work, WVI had ‘evolved from an American mission agency to the world’s largest Christian humanitarian organization’ (King, 2019, p. 191). A similar story can be told for Tearfund, which, as Freeman writes, was formed in 1968 ‘as a small evangelical organisation that made grants to overseas missionaries to alleviate material poverty and physical suffering’ (Freeman, 2019, p. 11) and today ‘is the UK’s largest and most influential evangelical development NGO’ (Freeman, 2019, p. 2). As with WVI, reflecting the growth of the professional NGO sector, by the 1990s Tearfund had moved away ‘from being an organisation that simply gave grants and sent expatriate staff to overseas church and mission agencies, to become a professional, coherent development organisation that worked with a network of increasingly professional partners to carry out high-quality work overseas’ (Freeman, 2019, p. 70). Questions about what the implications are for evangelism as Tearfund signed up to humanitarian standards have continued to shape internal debates about the kind of organisation it aspires to be (Freeman, 2019, p. 74). Debates within both organisations about how they could become mainstream development organisations and maintain their Christian identity reveal an unease with the perception that as they professionalised, they were by default becoming more like secular development actors. While the field of FBDOs is dominated by Christian organisations, other faith traditions are represented. For instance, Islamic Relief is the largest Muslim NGO, founded in 1984 ‘by a group of medical doctors and activists’6 in the UK in response to the famine in Sudan. It was the first Muslim NGO to receive funding from the UK government7 and is the only Muslim member of the UK government’s 15-strong Disaster Emergency Committee, alongside four other FBOs – Christian Aid, CAFOD, Tearfund and WVI.8 Nonetheless, Christian organisations are over-represented in the field of international FBDOs compared to those from other faith traditions. A study by Carrette and Miall (2012) identified three-quarters of the approximately 320 FBOs affiliated to ECOSOC at the UN as Christian as well as northern (Haynes, 2013). Carette (2017, p. 215) argues that there is a ‘hidden Judaic-Christian and Western-bourgeoise assumption’ shaping the historical ‘secular structures and discourse of the UN and civil society’, explaining why there are many more contemporary Christian FBOs than those from Hinduism or Buddhism. Moreover, the missionary experience of Christian 399

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groups arguably gives them an advantage in organising their activities globally compared to those from other faith traditions.

The global resurgence of religion and welfare reform: shifting relationships between faith actors and the state The rise of FBDOs during the 1990s, which as Freeman notes were mainly linked to evangelical Christianity (Freeman, 2019, p. 114), reflects shifts in the configuration of development processes, where NGOs had come to play a major role, and purely economic and technological understandings of development had been dislodged to also consider a broader conception of ‘human development’, influenced by Amartya Sen’s capability approach (Tomalin, 2013). While NGOs have increasingly focussed on a broad range of social issues including human rights and gender equality, not all faith actors have been willing to address gender inequality in particular, for fear that it will compromise religiously sanctioned values about men and women’s roles, and the sanctity of the family. Alongside these shifts, the ‘global resurgence of religion’, theorised in terms of the ‘post-secular’ or the ‘deprivatisation of religion’, has also been instrumental in the rise of the FBDO (Habermas, 2008; Casanova, 1994). The certainties of earlier theories of secularisation have become weakened by clear evidence of the ongoing public manifestation of religious identities in both ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ contexts, with the USA showing higher levels of religiosity than European settings that debunks a linear relationship between secularisation and modernisation. While the extent to which there was an actual ‘resurgence of religion’ or if it was the case that public manifestations of religion could no longer be ignored is far from settled; what is clear is that globalisation was not leading to a universal weakening of public religious expression. Instead, it was giving rise to manifestations that were conservative and particularistic, underpinning rising forms of religious fundamentalism and violence, as well those that were liberal and ecumenical, seeking collective solutions to the global challenges facing humanity (Beyer, 1994). In response to the realisation of the resurgence/continuing role of public religion, by the late 1990s, faith actors became pulled into processes of welfare provision and development that had previously been largely secular domains and the concept of the ‘FBO’ gains currency within practitioner and scholarly circles. This reflects an era of neoliberal welfare reform, beginning in the USA and spreading to Europe from the 1980s, with the ‘rolling back of the state’ and an increased focus on the charitable and voluntary sector (Evans et al., 2005). In the USA, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996, through its Charitable Choice provisions, made it possible for religious organisations, including places of congregations (e.g. churches, temples or mosques) to compete on an equal footing for federal funding to provide publicly funded services (Chaves, 2003). Prior to this, FBOs had been able to receive federal funding to carry out services but usually did this via separately incorporated organisations, distinct from congregations where religious activities took place (Name Redacted, 2006, p. 10). This shift was then further entrenched when George W. Bush came into power and set up the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and Centers for FaithBased and Community Initiatives in 11 federal offices, including USAID, the US government’s international development agency.9 The aim of these initiatives was to facilitate processes that encouraged and enabled a broader range of FBOs to apply for grants, including for international development and humanitarian work. Although as Haynes indicates, ‘FBOs remain underrepresented among USAID grant recipients’ (Haynes, 2021, p. 600) compared to secular organisations. She demonstrates that faith actors are deterred from applying for grants due to their perception that they are likely to be discriminated against. 400

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Charitable Choice, not surprisingly, gave rise to significant backlash, with critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union arguing that this was a dangerous mixing of religion with public affairs that transgressed the Establishment Clause and that it could lead to ‘publicly funded proselytizing’ (Chaves, 2003). Although a stipulation of Charitable Choice was that public funds could not be used for religious activities and that religious activities had to be separate in time and space from publicly funded services, critics were concerned that this would be difficult to achieve in practice and that the boundaries between religious observance and professional service provision would become blurred.10 Although the term ‘FBO’ was already in circulation by 1996, it became more widely used after this period not least due to the proliferation of studies and commentaries responding to concern over which kinds of FBO should be eligible to receive government funding, including research that aimed to develop definitions and typologies of FBOs. This literature acknowledged that there was a lack of clarity over what counted as an FBO and the different types that existed. While the US government increasingly seemed to favour an inclusive and expansive understanding of FBO where congregations were included alongside separate faith-based nonprofits, through Charitable Choice, critics argued for a narrower conception that preserved the sanctity of the church-state separation (Jeavons, 2004).

The ‘turn to religion’ by international development and the rise of the faith-based organisation These debates in the USA shaped the discourse about FBOs in international development. In addition to faith actors becoming more prominent actors in US welfare provision from the early 2000s, this period also reflects what has been called a ‘turn to religion’ in development studies, policy and practice (Tomalin, 2013). Bompani (2019) charts the rapid rise in academic publishing on the topic of religions and development from around 2006, from within development studies as well as other disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, politics and human geography. Prior to this period there were literally a handful of academic publications and similarly few policy-maker/practitioner reports. This rise reflected shifts that were happening in development policy and practice (Marshall, 2021). Development actors were beginning to realise the importance of religion, with UNFPA taking a clear lead in this area reflected in a series of publications that explored the role of religion and culture in its work, including experiences of working with FBOs (e.g. UNFPA, 2005). A number of important initiatives emerged at this time, including the World Faiths Development Dialogue set up in 1998 by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn and former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton, today based at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University.11 In the UK, between 2005 and 2010, DFID funded a large £3.5 million research programme based at the University of Birmingham (Clarke, 2007; Stambach, 2005). The ‘turn to religion’ by development studies, policy and practice led to a remarkable shift in how FBOs were viewed with discourses about their comparative advantage compared to secular NGOs emerging by the mid-2000s (Tomalin, 2012). For instance, when George W. Bush created the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in 2001, he argued that FBOs were ‘the best, the most efficient purveyors of social services . . . since they often worked with low overhead and volunteer labor’ (Hefferan et al., 2009, p. 6; Chaves, 2002; Chambre, 2001). James similarly notes, with respect to the role of FBOs in international development, that ‘the donor context for faith is changing as donors recognise that many FBOs, even more than NGOs: provide efficient development services; reach the poorest; are valued by the poorest; provide an alternative to a secular theory of development; ignite civil society advocacy; and motivate action’ (James, 2009, p. 2). While it is likely that in some settings and with respect 401

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to certain issues faith actors may have a comparative advantage, claims that they are in general always more effective must be seen in terms of an enthusiastic embrace of FBOs to make up for their previous neglect as well as the search for new ways of making ‘international development more efficient, effective, and relevant than it is currently’ (Hefferan et al., 2009, p. 6). Moreover, it is similarly difficult to identify the extent to which a presumed ‘distinctive’ attribute of an FBO is a product of its faith identity. Many qualities that supposedly distinguish FBOs are also characteristics of some secular organizations, suggesting that the distinction may not so much be between ‘faith-based’ and ‘non-faith-based’ but, for instance, between organizations that are local and embedded in a community and those that are more distant and formal. One area where FBOs are distinctive compared to secular NGOs is with respect to their deployment of intangible assets, such as prayer, worship or ritual. However, these have tended to receive less attention than tangible assets, such as networks of trust, close links to the poor and low operating costs, that are commonly stated by international actors as reasons why FBOs make attractive partners. Secular development actors have tended to ignore these intangible dimensions as irrelevant to their goals and reasons for engaging with faith actors, FBDOs have tended not to draw attention to this aspect of their faith identity in order to conserve their image as professional development actors, and scholars have not prioritised this as an important area for research, mirroring instead the donor trend to focus on the tangible aspects. This ignores the fact that for many FBDOs, such as Tearfund, prayer and devotion play a key role across the organisation, from weekly prayer meetings to the integration of time for prayer in routine team meetings, including before strategic decisions are made (Freeman, 2019, pp. 12–13). Yet, existing studies provide few empirical insights into or theoretical tools to better understand the impact of the intangible dimensions of faith identity upon the activities of such organisations. Despite the general dearth of studies on this aspect of FBO distinctiveness, some scholars are beginning to address this gap (e.g., Schwarz, 2018). For instance, Rutledge et al. (2021) demonstrated that for the displaced Muslim women who took part in their study in Iraq, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey, prayer was seen as a primary need and survival mechanism, with faith practices central for creating meaning and routine during crisis. For these women, ‘informal and formal, female and male faith leaders’ (Rutledge et al., 2021) played a critical role not only in terms of the tangible practicalities of survival but also with respect to more intangible elements in their roles as leaders of prayer and worship, alongside their moral and spiritual legitimacy for affected communities. My aim in this section was to chart the making of the international FBDO as a particular type of FBO that had emerged by the 1990s. Bompani, in her article about the emergence of religion and development as a subfield, notes the proliferation of studies to define FBOs and that ‘this was mostly dictated by the need to produce a clear set of tools, categories and a comprehensible language for the mostly faith illiterate and sometimes faith-scared academics, development practitioners and donors’ (Bompani, 2019, p. 173). In the next section I explore this literature with the aim of better understanding the broader terrain of FBOs of which the FBDO is a part.

Definitions and typologies of faith-based organisations The term ‘FBO’ has become current in domestic and international policy circles to refer to the proliferation of organisations involved in forms of service delivery and advocacy that profess to have a faith identity. It is a term that has been constructed externally to many of the organisations that perform these roles, which do not necessarily recognise themselves as FBOs. There are several reasons for this. First, it is a term that communities and organisations may not have 402

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encountered. Those that use it are more likely to have been exposed to development discourses, using it strategically to identify their place in the international aid system. Second, the term FBO is sometimes avoided by organisations since religion is a sensitive and political topic, and could restrict their ability to obtain funding and acceptance. Third, in some settings, particularly those that are highly religious, the distinction between ‘faith-based’ and ‘secular’ organisations does not make sense, instead reflecting a world view that normalises the separation of the religious from the secular (Kirmani and Zaidi, 2010). Moreover, as noted by Smith and Sosin (2001), members of secular organizations may also be motivated by religious values. Finally, the term ‘FBO’ is sometimes considered problematic where the word ‘faith’ is more closely associated with Christianity and has a weaker resonance in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism (Tomalin, 2012). Within international development policy and practice, the term ‘FBO’ is mostly used as an inclusive umbrella term, reflecting, for instance, the UNFPA’s definition where: ‘Faith‐based organisations are religious, faith‐based groups, and/or faith‐inspired groups which operate as registered or unregistered non‐profit institutions’ (UNFPA, 2009). While Jeavons (2004) argued that congregations should not be included as FBOs, this exclusive understanding reflects the US context. In that setting, the Charitable Choice provisions had shaped discourses about what ought to be counted as an FBO by the US government when deciding who to fund. This consideration shapes Jeavon’s approach to outlining what an FBO should be rather than accounting for the different types of FBOs that exist more broadly. While international development policy and practice tends to use the term ‘FBO’ in a loose and inclusive sense, mostly not being clear which types are being referred to, scholars have attempted to use different labels to delineate the various types. Berger (2003), for instance, writes about ‘religious non-governmental organizations’ at the UN, while Bradley (2009) prefers the term ‘FBDOs’. Austin et al. (2022), by contrast, use several different terms in the same article, including those that delineate the specific focus of the FBOs they are interested in (i.e., ‘faith-based international humanitarian aid organizations’) as well as additional umbrella terms that are used instead of the term ‘FBO’: ‘organizations with religious expression’, ‘faith-based non-profits’, and ‘religious non-profits’. Thus, both the language used to describe FBOs as an overarching category, as well as to refer to the different types, is highly diverse and variable. Alongside attempts to define what is included in the category of FBO, typologies have been developed in two main directions: those that classify FBOs according to different sorts of organisations and those that focus on the ways in which faith is manifested within organisations. Clarke (2008) developed a typology that identified five types of FBOs that carry out development and humanitarian work. He argues that international development actors have tended to engage with FBOs of the second type, what I have been calling FBDOs, and that these are normally Christian and express their faith identity in a passive way (Clarke, 2008, p. 33). He urges that there is a need for other types of FBO to be recognised for the important development and humanitarian work that they deliver, even though these may not be the natural partners for international development donors. 1

Representative organisations or apex bodies of faith traditions (e.g. the World Council of Churches or the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) 2 Charitable or development organisations (e.g. WVI, Tearfund or Islamic Relief) 3 Socio-political organisations (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) 4 Missionary organisations (e.g. these are mostly Christian but also include Islamic groups carrying out da’wah, and others such as Hindu Nationalists in India seeking to extend their reach) 403

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5

Radical, illegal or terrorist organisations (while this is a subjective category, as what counts as ‘radical, illegal or terrorist’ is not fixed, it would include groups widely recognised as such, e.g., ISIS)

Another approach to classifying FBOs into typologies is according to how faith is manifest in different aspects of an organisation. On this basis, Clarke (2008, pp. 32–33) suggests four types (passive, active, persuasive and exclusive) according to how they deploy faith along a spectrum where faith as an underpinning factor becomes progressively more central. Sider and Unruh take a similar approach examining how faith is manifest within different elements of an organisation: its mission statement, founding, affiliation, controlling board, senior management, other staff and sources of support (financial and non-financial) (Sider and Unruh, 2004). At one end of the scale are ‘faith-permeated’ organisations, in which faith is manifest across all the dimensions of an organisation and its work, and at the other are ‘secular’ organizations. Although, Sider and Unruh focus on the US domestic setting, others have adapted their approach for international development FBOs (e.g., Hefferan et al., 2009). A further variation on this approach is Thaut’s (2009) taxonomy examining different types of Christian humanitarian organisations, which assesses the ‘influence of faith across four dimensions – the agency’s mission, its ties to a religious base or authorities, its staff policies, and its base of donor support’ (Thaut, 2009, p. 329). Where the ‘accommodative-humanitarianism’ is ‘more difficult to distinguish from secular humanitarian agencies’ (Thaut, 2009, p. 333), ‘synthesis-humanitarianism’ aims to ‘maintain its distinctive Christian character’ (Thaut, 2009, p. 336) and ‘evangelisitic-humanitarianism’ aims ‘to meet the needs of and expand the fellowship of Christian believers’ (Thaut, 2009, p. 341). While these efforts take a nuanced approach to understanding how faith manifests in an organisation is important to challenge the assumption that all faith-based organisations share similar orientations to how they express and operationalise their faith identity, I  argue that they are limited as they fix different FBOs along a spectrum. At one end they are virtually indistinguishable from their secular counterparts, and at the other end their overt evangelism and expressive faith identity can make it difficult for secular development actors to engage with them, particularly in forming partnerships that involve funding. Although Thaut allows that her ‘taxonomy is not static . . . That is, agencies may migrate across the taxonomy over time’ (Thaut, 2009, p. 346) it is also the case that organisations can simultaneously and strategically occupy multiple points on the spectrum at the same time according to the audience they are engaging with. As I have argued elsewhere, FBOs shift in register between secular modes of communication with global development actors to religious modes with local faith actors (Tomalin, 2018, 2019). This helps explain how Tearfund, for example, can appear as ‘faith permeated’ in terms of the centrality of prayer to it internal operations, while at the same time successfully bracketing its faith identity in its public interactions to suit the preference of secular donors for faith actors that are not expressive in the articulation of their faith position. This analysis is crucial to understanding development action and the role that faith identity plays from the point of view of FBOs themselves, an ‘actor-oriented approach’ (Long, 2001), rather than from the vantage point of international development institutions and processes. While the latter suggests that FBOs are passive constructions of the international aid business where their tangible assets are instrumentalised to serve neoliberal secular goals, an ‘actor-oriented approach’ indicates a more strategic engagement. Existing typologies of FBOs not only have failed to account for how FBOs shift register between the interfaces of secular international development language and the faith-inspired language of their local faith partners (Tomalin, 2018, 2019) but have also neglected explicit attention to the ‘local’ as a category of analysis. I suggest that this has become increasingly important 404

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following the ‘local turn’ in development and humanitarian action. This has gained momentum since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and its ‘Grand Bargain’ commitment towards the goal that at least 25% of international humanitarian funding should go as directly as possible to local and national actors by 2020 (World Humanitarian Summit, 2016, p. 5). Despite this ‘local turn’, attention to the role of LFAs has been a neglected area, both within localisation studies and the study of FBOs and development, reflecting the broader neglect of LFAs within development and humanitarian policy and practice. In the final section, I explore the implications of localisation discourses for the study of FBOs and development.

Localisation, faith-based organisations and development Some scholars and practitioners are beginning to draw attention to the marginalisation of LFAs in international development cooperation and argue that there is a need to intentionally include LFAs in classifications of types of FBOs, where earlier typologies have not paid specific attention to the local in their analysis (Wurzt and Wilkinson, 2020; Wilkinson et al., 2022). It is important to emphasise that a distinction between the local and the international does not necessarily neatly reflect the focus of organisations, with international FBOs often having local branches and LFAs having institutional links and leadership structures that might extend beyond the immediate locality. Moreover, in sticking with the word ‘faith’ neither does the new term ‘LFA’ address claims that it reflects Christianity more so than other traditions. This is particularly the case at the local level, where a focus on faith actors means that the great variety of traditional indigenous cultural systems, that are not normally viewed as ‘faith traditions’ alongside the Abrahamic and Indic religions, are overlooked. As with the term ‘FBO’, ‘LFA’ has been ‘created purely for international actors and the frameworks within which they operate’ (Wurtz and Wilkinson, 2020, p. 147) and is not used by LFAs themselves unless they have chosen to strategically adopt it and use it. While there are limitations to the term, and it should not be taken as a deterministic, essentialist and inherently inclusive category, it does serves as a useful heuristic device to bring additional nuance to the broad-brush term ‘FBO’ and to push for local actors, including those representing traditional indigenous worldviews, to be included within and to speak into the existing dominant FBO discourse. Another implication of the adoption of a local lens to examine faith-based development action is the realisation that an emphasis upon ‘organisations’ is a poor fit and is rooted in the NGO-isation of development rather than on an analysis of faith dynamics at the local level. In addition to organisations, religious leaders of various types play a key role in development action, from formal and recognised, usually male, leaders that represent faith traditions to their followers as well as the outside world, to informal leaders including women and youth. Moreover, for traditional indigenous cultural systems and the communities that follow them, a focus on organisations is further reason why they are not usually included in FBO typologies, despite the central role of indigenous world views and traditional religious specialists for development and humanitarian action. For this reason, the broader category ‘faith actor’ allows for a ‘broad understanding of a diverse group of actors that are commonly referred to in different ways, including local, national and international faith-based organisations (FBOs), religious communities, and religious leaders’ (Wilkinson et al., forthcoming). In Figure 28.1 I present a new typology for not only including FBOs beyond the FBDO, but that also takes the local as a key reference point for identifying who the relevant faith actors are. The typology also includes ‘regional/national’ faith actors, who sit between international and local in terms of their relative engagement with international development cooperation through organisations such as the UN. 405

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International

Regional/National

Local

Large, formal international FBDOs (e.g., World Vision International, Tearfund, Islamic Relief)

Formal FBOs and networks with a regional/national reach (e.g., national Christian Health Councils)

Formal FBOs and networks that operate at the local level

International religious councils representing faith traditions (e.g., Anglican Communion, World Council of Churches, Baha’i International Community) Faith leaders with an international reach (e.g., the best-known examples include the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but also others from nonChristian traditions)

Regional/national councils (e.g. African Council of Religious Leaders) Faith leaders with a regional/national reach Some regional/national faith actors engage with international development actors such as the UN

Smaller, informal FBOs and networks Local religious leaders and bodies (e.g., zakat committees, places of worship) including representation from traditional indigenous communities Local faith actors typically have low levels of engagement with international development actors such as the UN

Most likely to be in partnerships with international development actors such as the UN

Figure 28.1  Who are the faith actors? Source: Tomalin, Haustein, and Kidy (2019) and Wilkinson et al. (2022: 25).

Conclusion While FBOs have become increasingly important for international development cooperation over the past 20  years, I  have demonstrated how a particular type of FBO that resembles a secular NGO came to be the preferred partner for international development actors. Following decades of neglect, by the early 2000s there had been a ‘turn to religion’ in development, policy and practice. A key element of this ‘religious turn’ was a rise in publications that aimed to define what an FBO was as well as to outline the different types that existed. There have been two main contributions of this literature. First, it has demonstrated that there are a range of types of organisations beyond the formal FBDO that contribute to development and humanitarian action, from missionary organisations to religious political parties (Clarke, 2008), yet development donors rarely form partnerships with these organisations nor do they consider the contribution that they make to social welfare regimes of the countries they work in. Second, the literature on FBOs has developed typologies that locate different FBOs along a spectrum 406

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according to how strongly faith manifests in different aspects of their work. Sider and Unruh argue that classifying FBOs in this way could help funders choose appropriate organizations with which to work and also help FBOs to understand and describe their religious character – ‘for purposes of strategic planning, fundraising, and evaluation’ (Sider and Unruh, 2004, p. 132). Despite the contributions of these typologies, I identify two limitations. The first limitation relates to the fact that plotting individual FBOs along a spectrum as to how faith manifests in their operations overlooks the way that FBOs ‘shift register’ and strategically adopt different positions along such a spectrum according to their audience. The second limitation relates to the lack of an explicit focus on the ‘local’ in most existing FBO typologies, even though LFAs have been the most marginalised from dominant FBO discourses while being amongst the most important actors for those affected by poverty, inequality and humanitarian crises. I suggest a new typology of ‘faith actors’ that takes the local as a key point of reference.

Notes 1 By ‘international development’ I am specifically referring to institutions and processes of development that emerged after World War II, led by Western nations, in particular the USA. More broadly, the term ‘development’ can be used to refer to impulses and initiatives to generate social and economic change to improve people’s lives with reference to different benchmarks of progress. These can exist in support of the international development project, opposed to it or parallel to it, led by individual governments and civil society. 2 Where NGO refers to non-governmental organisation. 3 International development and humanitarianism are related fields with many organisations carrying out both types of activity. Development usually refers to goals and activities that refer to processes of change that take place over time. Humanitarianism usually refers to activities that involve immediate responses to disasters or conflict. 4 This is the name given to the set of neo-liberal economic policies introduced by international financial institutions, under the influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, to be applied to ‘developing’ countries to manage the ‘Third World Debt Crisis in the middle of the 1980s’ (Babb, 2013, p. 275). As Babb writes, it ‘specified both a goal and a policy instrument to achieve that goal. The goal was market-liberalizing reform in developing countries; the policy instrument was collaborative conditional lending by IFIs’ (Babb, 2013, p. 275). 5 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund. 6 www.islamic-relief.org.uk/about-us/ (accessed 22/4/22). 7 www.gov.uk/government/speeches/justine-greenings-speech-to-mark-30-years-of-islamic-relief (accessed 22/4/22). 8 www.dec.org.uk/member-charities (accessed 22/4/22). 9 https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/gover nment/fbci/president-initiative. html#:~:text=The%20Initiative%20in%20Action,FBCOs%20in%20providing%20social%20services (accessed 22/4/22). 10 https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/government/fbci/guidance/partnering.html (accessed 22/4/22). 11 https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/wfdd (accessed 22/4/22).

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29 RELIGIOUS TERRORISM IN GLOBAL POLITICS Mark Juergensmeyer

The rise of militant Christian nationalism in Europe and the US, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the brief reign of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East, the appearance of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, attacks by Buddhist extremists on minorities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka – these and many other acts of violence related to religion give the impression that the twenty-first century is the age of religious terrorism. Such acts have appeared through the centuries and in every religious tradition, though have been seen with increasing frequency in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. The reasons for this increase are matters of scholarly and public discussion. The hypothesis of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington that a “clash of civilizations” might be replacing the ideological confrontation of the Cold War has often been dismissed as too simplistic an explanation (Huntington, 1996). The suggestion of Benjamin Barber that there is competition between the centrifugal forces of tribalism and the centripetal spread of superficial consumer culture, two trends characterized as “jihad versus McWorld”, is the beginning point in identifying the forces of globalization as critical (Barber, 1996). Clearly the globalization of the economy, the easy demographic mobility across the world, and the global communications provided by the internet’s social media are forces that have reshaped public life in the current century and undermined traditional notions of secular nationalism. As a global response, new forms of religious nationalism and transnational politics have risen to claim authority over the secular state and provide alternatives to the homogenization of the global era (Juergensmeyer, 2008). It is in this context that violent movements of religious nationalism have emerged.

Religious terrorism around the world Radical political movements with religion as part of their identity and ideology have challenged the secular state in every part of the world, in every major religious tradition. There are some areas of intensity, however. In Latin America, for instance, there are relatively few instances of religious-related extremist movements in recent decades. The Middle East and South Asia tend to have more instances of religious-related violence than elsewhere. Why this is the case is the subject of debate. Some critics of religion have identified Islam as a more violent religious tradition than Christianity, though other observers point out that the violence is specific to DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-33

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those geographic regions where American and European culture and political power are being rejected, and hence point to political rather than religious reasons. Moreover, within Europe and the US there have been far more acts of terrorism and extreme violence related to Christianity than Islam. The startling assault on the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 was a disturbing demonstration of the power of a neo-nationalism that was based on ethnic and religious homogeneity privileging white Christians, especially evangelical Protestants who have served as the base for what may be regarded as an American nationalist revolt. Although the impact of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 remains as a reminder that the US can be the target of Muslim-related terrorism, US intelligence agencies in the second decade began to regard Christian militia groups as the major domestic threat. The following overview of extreme violence related to different religious traditions demonstrates that religious-related terrorism is not solely Muslim or Christian, Middle East or North American, but is a global phenomenon.

Christianity The tradition of Christianity has had an ambivalent relationship with violence. The proclamations of the New Testament affirm non-violence, and the early Christians were pacifists. But after Christianity became associated with Roman imperial rule in the fourth century, its religious authority was used to buttress political power – and also to challenge it, by giving religious legitimacy to the protests of political rebels (Armstrong, 2014; Buc, 2015). In the second half of the twentieth century, violence became a method of defending Christian communities, sometimes in internecine warfare. During the decades of the “troubles” of Northern Ireland, Roman Catholic activists identifying with the Irish state were pitted against Protestants who wanted to continue the region’s relationship with the UK. Though the struggle was essentially a political contest between ethnic groups, religious leaders and images were involved on both sides of the dispute (Dillon, 1997). In the US, a number of groups protesting against multiculturalism and the secular state arose in the 1990s, continuing into the twenty-first century. Some of these were related to the Calvinist Christian Reconstruction movement and others to the racist Christian Identity movements (Ingersoll, 2015; Barkun, 1996). Members of the movements were involved in bombing abortion clinics and in shootouts with the US government, including the standoff at Ruby Ridge in 1992. Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for his role in bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 – the largest act of terrorism on American soil prior to the September 2001 attack – was motivated by a religious ideology designed by the White Supremacist novelist, William Pierce, an ideology he called “cosmotheism”. Like many Christian Identity activists, McVeigh expected that his act of terrorism would initiate a widespread racial struggle and the advent of a guerilla war, hoping to liberate the US from what he regarded as its anti-Christian secular despotism. Another militant who had ties to the Christian Identity movement, Eric Robert Rudolph, was convicted of a bombing attack on Olympic Village in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996. Rudolph hid out in the Appalachian Mountains for years until his arrest in 2003. The election of Barack Obama as president of the US in 2008 was the occasion of a new burst of Christian militancy. In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered the preparation for a full-scale military assault on the US government by the Michigan-based Hutaree group. Though their name was invented, its followers claimed that it meant “Christian warriors”. Following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, new movements of nationalism emerged in the US, often privileging white supremacy and favoring evangelical Protestant 412

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Christianity. The conspiracy theories of the QAnon movement, while appearing secular, utilized the basic framework of the end-times apocalpyticism that appears in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible. These themes were apparent in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that displayed Nazi, anti-Muslim and antisemitic posters and that ended in violence and a car attack that killed a counter-protestor. QAnon symbols and other examples of White supremacy, antisemitic and anti-Muslim banners were on full display during the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that resulted in the invasion and vandalism of the Capitol and six deaths (Bloom and Moskalenko, 2021). Other attacks have been carried out by lone gunmen targeting Sikh gurdwaras, Muslim mosques and Jewish synagogues. In Europe, Christian activists opposed to multiculturalism and the acceptance of Muslim immigrants have been involved in a series of violent acts. One of the most dramatic was the mass killing conducted by Anders Breivik in Norway in July 2011. After exploding a bomb in downtown Oslo, he went to an island in a nearby lake where young people associated with a liberal political party were encamped and systematically shot them with automatic weapons. Over 70 were killed. Breivik’s manifesto proclaimed his intentions were to deter Norwegian politicians from following a path of multiculturalism that would, in his mind, allow Islamic civilization to dominate Northern Europe (Bangstad, 2014). In New Zealand in 2019, Brenton Tarrant imitated the Breivik attack with his own assault on two mosques in Christchurch, killing 50 people. And in Africa, a movement called “The Lord’s Resistance Army”, led by Joseph Kony, terrorized villagers in Uganda, claiming to protect Christian culture (Cline, 2013).

Judaism Since they constitute a minority religious community in most parts of the world, Jews have traditionally shied away from political activism. In Israel, however, an extreme form of Jewish nationalism has developed that has a violent side. Meir Ettinger, a young leader of the Hilltop Youth in the West Bank, was implicated and imprisoned in 2015 for his role in a firebombing attack on Palestinian homes in which a family was burned alive, including a young child. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time described him as a Jewish terrorist. Ettinger’s grandfather, Rabbi Meir Kahane, had been one of the leading exponents of anti-Palestinian activism in an earlier decade that has been the inspiration for many far-right Israeli activists. Kahane immigrated to Israel from the US in 1971 and founded the Kach (Thus) Party dedicated to the creation of an Israeli nation based on the Torah (biblical law) rather than secular principles. Kahane advocated a catastrophic form of Messianic Zionism that urged confrontation with Arabs, secular Jews and others perceived to be enemies of a Jewish religious state. Although Kahane was assassinated in New York City in 1990 by Muslims associated with the Egyptian al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, his movement continued to advocate violent encounters (Kotler, 1986; Mergui and Simonnot, 1987; Lustick, 1989; Nasr, 1997; Sprinzak, 1991, 1999). One of his followers, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, overcome with shame that Jews had been humiliated by Muslim hecklers near the settlement of Kiryat Arba at the edge of the West Bank city of Hebron, entered a mosque at the Shrine of the Cave of the Patriarchs where he massacred Muslims during their prayers in a savage incident in Hebron in 1994. Yigal Amir, propelled by ideas similar to Kahane’s and angered by the peace accords that brought Israel close to a concession with the Palestinian authority that would cede much of the West Bank to Palestine, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Supporters of this extreme Israeli Messianic nationalism resist any concession of territory to Palestinians and continue to be at the forefront of support for expanding Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory on the West Bank. 413

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Islam Like most religious traditions, the teachings of Islam praise non-violence, and the very name of the tradition means “peace”. Again, like most religious traditions, the teachings of Islam justify the use of military force in limited cases, primarily for defensive purposes. Terrorism or any killing of noncombatants is not approved by the Qur’an or by any mainstream Muslim authority. Despite this prohibition, however, some activist groups at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century have regarded terrorism as an instrument of protest and a tool in seizing political power that they assert is legitimized by Muslim teachings (Jansen, 1986; Kepel, 2003; Hiro, 1989; Abu-Amr, 1994). Some of these activists refer to the political writings of Pakistan’s Maulana Abu al-Ala Mawdudi, who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami (Islamic Association) in 1941, and Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna, who established the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) in 1928. These thinkers regarded Western imperialism as the enemy of Islamic society and called for an overthrow of Western influences, by force if necessary, in order to establish a political order based on Islamic law. They have been the forefathers of a host of radical Muslim-related movements in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. In Egypt, radical groups have exploited these Muslim political ideologies for political purposes. Extreme factions related to the Muslim Brotherhood have led to acts of violence within Egypt, including attacks on tourist boats on the Nile River and tourist groups at Luxor, as well as targeted political leaders. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by members of a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, in 1981. In nearby Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine, these Egyptian groups influenced a growing Muslim movement of Palestinian nationalism that eventually rivaled the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization. This Muslim movement was founded by Sheik Ahmed Yassin and other religious activists in 1987 and was named Hamas, an acronym for the phrase, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, “Islamic Resistance Movement”; the word hamas means “zeal”. In the 1980s, Muslim activists from around the world joined the Mujahidin struggle against the Soviet-supported government in Afghanistan. There activists from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere intermingled and created alliances. The Afghan struggle became a crucible in which a transnational jihadi collaboration was forged. From it emerged the al-Qaeda movement led by Osama bin Laden. The global jihadi movement was, however, a complex network of groups and leaders that allowed it to spread widely and adopt a variety of tactics. Its targets were usually secular political leaders and centers of American and European economic and military power, indicating that the primary concern of its leaders was Western political domination. An expatriate Pakistani activist, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and his nephew Ramsi Youssef, plotted a series of terrorist attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the more successful 11 September 2001 attack on the Pentagon and the twin towers that turned the tallest buildings in New York City to a cloud of dust and killed over 3,000 people (Gerges, 2014). In Afghanistan, a conservative political regime, the Taliban, allowed bin Ladin to base his operations there. As a result, the Afghan regime became targeted by the US military following the 9/11 attacks. After it was toppled, the occupation of the country by the US military created an extreme backlash both in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, where its own version of the Taliban attacked the Pakistani government as well as US military and political entities (Rashid, 2010). In 2021 the Taliban regained control of the country, and although some of the leaders proclaimed that it was a more moderate and conciliatory movement, many of the excessive acts against women, secularists and Shi’a Muslims continued. Those Afghans who 414

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had worked with Americans during the reign of the American-supported government were especially targeted. A similar anti-American extremist movement emerged in Iraq after the US-led ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, where religion became a factor in resurgent nationalist movements among both Shi’a and Sunni activists. Some of them, including the Jordanian-born militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had ties to al-Qaeda. Zarqawi was notorious for his savage anti-Shiite attacks and for decapitating Western and indigenous victims in gruesome displays aired on video over the internet. After he was killed by US forces, one of his successors was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who led a new movement in 2014 that solidified extremist groups in eastern Syria and western Iraq. In a remarkable blitzkrieg, it occupied major sections of territory, including Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, and several strategic oil fields. He named his newly seized territory “the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” [al-Sham refers to greater Syria, also called the Levant, so the acronym could be either ISIS or ISIL]. Later he changed the name simply to “the Islamic State”. Like Zarqawi before him, al-Baghdadi essentially ruled by terror, using public decapitations and burning his captives alive as a way of intimidating his followers and threatening his rivals and enemies (Weiss and Hassan, 2015). In 2018 Mosul and Raqqa, the largest cities held by ISIS were liberated, and in 2019 the last holdout of ISIS fighters in Baghuz on the Syrian-Iraqi border were defeated. Soon after al-Baghdadi was cornered and committed suicide in Syria. Elsewhere in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia – home of the largest Muslim countries in the world – relatively few acts of violence are related to Islam. Among the exceptions have been attacks in Delhi, Mumbai and Jakarta by small militant cells. The virulence associated with a large movement of Muslim separatism in the southern islands of the Philippines was muted by a peace agreement signed in 2014. In Africa, acts of violence have been associated with a group known as al-Qaeda in the Mahgreb, and with a Nigerian group, Boko Haram, whose name implies that Western-style book learning is forbidden. The group has savagely attacked Christian villages and schools, killing male students and abducting young women. Though the group claims to be defending Islam, it also lays claim to tribal-based power in the northern region of the country (Comolli, 2015).

Hinduism and Sikhism The Indic traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism have a reputation for honoring non-violence and subscribing to peace. Yet images of warfare are part of their legendary past. The Hindu epics, the Mahabharta and Ramayana are all about battle, and Sikh history celebrates the struggles against Moghul rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the martyrdom of two of its founding gurus. These legendary and historical battles of the past have been inspirations for militant Hindu and Sikh activists in recent years (Tambiah, 1997; van der Veer, 1994; Varshney, 2002). In 1992, a Hindu mob assaulted an old mosque in the North-Indian town of Ayodhya on the site of what was reputed to be the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama, rendering it to dust. In riots between Muslims and Hindus that followed this event, over two thousand people were killed. This momentum of Hindu activism brought the Hindu-leaning political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to a series of successful victories in state-level elections, and in 1998 it was able to establish a coalition national government that ruled India until 2004, when the Congress Party again regained control. In the 2014 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Narendra Modi, returned to power. Behind many of the clashes between religious communities in India, the central issue at stake has been the very idea of a multicultural state – whether 415

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India will be dominated by one tradition or incorporate a diversity of cultures. In other cases the very unity of India has been challenged: in these incidents religion has been fused with political separatism. The independence struggle in Kashmir is one example of religious separatism in India in which terrorism has played a role. The militant campaign to create a separate nation, Khalistan, for Sikhs in the Punjab region of North India is another where terrorism was an instrument of warcraft. Though Sikhism is related to Hindu culture, Sikhs have emerged as a separate religious community in the five hundred years since it was founded by Guru Nanak and a series of nine other gurus who followed in his lineage in northern India. When Pakistan was created out of British India to be a separate country for Muslims, many Sikhs thought that there should be a similar state in the Punjab for Sikhs. In the 1980s, a movement for Sikh separatism led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was aimed at creating a new nation that would privilege the Sikh community and honor its principles and tradition. Members of the movement became engaged in acts of terrorism, including hijacking airplanes and attacking busloads of Hindu pilgrims. Bhindranwale was killed in the Indian army’s assault on the Sikh’s Golden Temple in 1984, and thousands of Sikhs perished in the ensuing riots against the Sikh community (Mahmood, 2007; Nayar and Singh, 1984). By the early 1990s the movement had essentially been terminated (Juergensmeyer, 2022).

Buddhism Like Hinduism, the Buddhist tradition is regarded as non-violent and not political. Yet Buddhist societies have had their share of religious violence, and in some cases Buddhism has been a vehicle for political power and rebellion (Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, 2010). In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s independence movement in 1948, and in 1953 an influential pamphlet, “The Revolt in the Temple”, began a religious critique of secular nationalism and the claim that “Buddhism had been betrayed”. The demand for a Buddhist state resurfaced in the 1980s in part in response to the government’s attempts to appease the Tamil separatist movement of Hindus and Christians in the northern region of the island nation (Tambiah, 1991, 1992, 1997). In a series of assaults, scores of secular political leaders were killed or injured, and one of Sri Lanka’s Prime Ministers was assassinated by a Buddhist monk. In the twenty-first century cadres of radical Buddhist monks continued their protests again the secular government. A Buddhist group, Bodu Bala Sena, singled out the small Muslim community in Sri Lanka as somehow threatening to Sinhalese Buddhism. In 2013, activist Buddhist monks led Sinhalese mobs in attacks on Muslim shops and mosques. In Myanmar, the small Muslim minority is also the target of the wrath of angry Buddhists. The fiery monk, Wirathu, is said to have stirred up crowds of Buddhists in 2012, inciting them to attack Muslim shops, mosques and individuals in Mandalay and elsewhere in the country. Over 200 people were killed and thousands displaced. He was also instrumental in founding the “969 Movement” – a number referring to precepts of the Buddha – aimed at purifying the country of alien cultural elements, primarily Muslim. In Japan, the Buddhist-related Aum Shinrikyo movement was implicated in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995. The movement was one of Japan’s new religious movements and based its teachings on an eclectic pastiche of ideas from Buddhism to Hinduism and millenarian Christianity (Murakami, 2001). The prophetic teachings of the movement warned its followers about what was imagined to be an impending apocalyptical war, a third world war, in which poisonous gas and other weapons of mass destruction would be unleashed. The leader of the movement, Shoko Asahara, was tried and sentenced to death in 2004 for encouraging an 416

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elite corps of his own religious movement to use sarin gas in an attack on the Tokyo subways in an effort to show that Asahara’s dark prophecies were being fulfilled. In 2018, after lengthy reviews and legal attempts to overturn the conviction, the execution was finally carried out.

The global rise of religious terrorism Why have these violent movements related to religion arisen at this moment in late modernity? A plethora of studies have emerged to explain the resurgence of religion in public life (Juergensmeyer and Kitts, 2011; Juergensmeyer et al., 2013). Monica Toft, Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah survey the global rise of religious politics and extremism in God’s Century (Toft et  al., 2011). Jeffrey Haynes examines the emergence of transnational religious activists in Religious Transnational Actors and Soft Power (Haynes, 2012). Isak Svensson has confronted the challenge of how to bring religiously involved violent struggles to a close in Ending Holy Wars: Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars (Svennson, 2013). My own books, including Terror in the Mind of God and Global Rebellion, try to make sense of the religious dimensions of public violence both as a political creation of the post–Cold World War and as an ideological challenge to the secular state (Juergensmeyer, 2008, 2017). In these books and essays on the topic, I elaborate on the idea that religion may not be the problem – it does not cause violence – but it is problematic. It is problematic in two ways. One is the way that religious identities and ideologies have become aspects of a global rebellion against the European Enlightenment notion of a secular state, beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century. The other is the way that certain features of religious actions and images – such as the performance of religious ritual and the awesome notion of cosmic war – are appropriated by violent actors seeking to justify their savage attempts at power and cloak them in religious garb. Let me elaborate on both of these points.

The rise of anti-secularism In recent years there has been considerable discussion in American and European scholarly circles about the concepts of religion and secularism, how they emerged in modern history as opposing social ideologies. A task force of the Social Science Research Council in New York convened a multi-year project on “rethinking secularism”, involving theorists of secularism such as Talal Asad and Charles Taylor, as well as the president of the SSRC, Craig Calhoun, and myself (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, 2011). It concluded that secularism is itself something – not just the absence of religion, but also a world view laden with value assumptions about the nature of the self and its relationship to society. This means that the idea of secular society itself can be a challenge to traditional religious world views. The two are sometimes seen as competitive. In fact, the competition between secularism and religion was integral to the creation of these concepts. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, when the terms came into common use, secularism was thought to be an ideology of order that would replace religion as the central force in organizing society. Instead of religion informing public values and ideals, rational thought would be the only true measure of the worth of social goals. For this reason in France, England, the US, and elsewhere in the Western world, the role of religion was restricted to the rites and beliefs of churches, which were consequently relegated to the margins of public life. They were to be enjoyed on Sunday and forgotten for the rest of the week. This marginalization of religion never worked perfectly in the West. Religious societies embracing religious values in public life cropped up in small religious communities such as the New Harmony colony in nineteenth-century Indiana and the Mormon community that 417

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expanded in Utah and spread throughout the western United States and now across the seas. Elsewhere in the world, the secularization that came with European colonialization was never completely integrated. In these regions, communities of people have increasingly turned towards traditional religion to find a resource for thinking about the moral basis for social and political order when secular politics seems to have lost its moral bearings. This appears to be a global phenomenon: religion enters politics when the old secular politics seems corrupt or insufficient, and there is what I have described elsewhere as “a loss of faith in secular nationalism” (Juergensmeyer, 2008). When the secular nation-state has been weakened through challenges over who (or what group) should control or dominate it, or been made obsolete through the transnational forces of globalization, it is not surprising that religious identities and ideologies should rise up to be a part of the challenges to the old status quo. This global rebellion is not caused by religion (Juergensmeyer, 2008). But because the Western framework of secular nationalism is what is being contested, the attacks against it take on a religious hue. Extreme secularization can in fact provoke violence in the name of religion. Many activist groups related to religion – from the Christian activists in the US to al-Qaeda in the Middle East – claim that they are simply trying to defend religion from the forces of secularization. In these cases, secularism is imagined to be an ideology bent on the destruction of religion. It is thought to be not a neutral thing, but rather the hostile enemy of religious communities. Inadvertently, then, the promotion of secularism as a tolerant and moderating element in multicultural societies is sometimes perceived as an attempt to destroy the dominance of particular religious faiths. The controversies in Denmark and France over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad have pitted the secular principle of free speech against religious sensitivities. This clash of cultures is a contemporary inheritance of the dichotomy between secularism and religion that has been a pattern of thinking since the time of the European Enlightenment, and that has led to the politicization of religion in recent challenges to the secular state.

Religious justifications for violence At the same time that religion has been a part of the vehicle for challenging secular authority, certain aspects of religious tradition and practice make it useful for political activists. There are elements of religious language, ideas, ritual and symbols that are ripe for adoption by those eager to challenge the authority of the state. One of the reasons for this is that religious traditions often embrace positions of absolutism; they contain a repository of symbols of “ultimate concern”, as the theologian Paul Tillich put it (Tillich, 1958, p. 4). This means that a reliance on religiously inspired law can trump secular law, since it refers to a higher order of morality. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously challenged the unjust racist laws of the US in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Religious ideas also have the ability to sanction the taking of human life – though usually in rare cases, such as the defense of the culture or society of a religious community. In these cases, religious codes challenge the monopoly on morally sanctioned violence that is, according to Max Weber, the basis of state power. Without the state’s ability to threaten to kill – for reasons of military protection, policing, and punishment – anarchy would ensue. Thus, any act of religion-related violence is revolutionary, in that it challenges the state’s monopoly on the use of force. But in addition to the ideas that sanction violence in religious texts and sacred law, violent actors are excited by the powerful and enduring images of religiously related warfare that exist in virtually every religious tradition. This is the notion that I have called “cosmic war” (Juergensmeyer, 2020). Though every violent conflict and every military encounter contain a certain 418

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moral hubris about who is right and who is wrong, and such clashes tend to absolutize the evil of the opponent, cosmic war is an imagined contest of virtually metaphysical proportions. It is the idea or image of an ultimate encounter that is found in every religious tradition: a grand struggle between opposing elements of the human condition, between good and evil, right and wrong, order and disorder, religion and irreligion. The idea of cosmic war is different from the idea of holy war, which usually refers to a battle between worldly forces – two nations, perhaps – in which one side or the other thinks that religious values are at stake and that God is on their side. Cosmic war is a grander notion, one that need not be realized on a mortal plane; it is the metaphysical battle that occurs on a transcendental level. And yet it can be imagined to be taking place in an actual conflict on the mundane level of the real world. What is striking about the positions taken by violent activists who justify their actions through religion is that they invariably see themselves as soldiers in a dramatic, cosmic war. In my own interviews with activists in every religious tradition, as well as in case studies undertaken by other scholars, the image of cosmic warfare is pervasive (Juergensmeyer, 2017, 2020). Though they are perceived by the broader world to be terrorists, they do not think of themselves this way. They regard themselves as soldiers who have taken defensive actions in a great struggle. When questioned about the nature of the struggle, they usually deny that it is only about political power and social control but elevate the conflict to the cosmic level, a battle between good and evil, and right and wrong, but not about competing political forces – even when, from the observer’s perspective, the combat appears to be all about earthly power and social dominance. Seeing a worldly struggle as part of a cosmic war can give several benefits to those activists engaged in it. First of all, it allows them to see the enemy not just as a political opponent, but also as an agent of evil, an arm of the devil. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini described President Jimmy Carter as a “great Satan”; and during the troubles in Northern Ireland, Rev. Ian Paisley, a Unionist protestant leader, talked about the pope as an antichrist, using images of evil from the biblical book of Revelation. Imagining one’s enemy in satanic terms allows one to dismiss anything that they say as devious or irrelevant. There is no point, after all, of negotiating with an agent of Satan. The only thing one can do is to fight it and destroy it. Moreover, one has the moral license to carry out acts of unspeakable violence because the enemies are, after all, subhuman. They are not really human because they are part of the cosmic satanic army. Thus, the image of cosmic war provides the ethical basis for extreme violence. The image of cosmic war can also enable an activist to persist in the struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds, and for what may seem to be a hopelessly long period of time. A cosmic war is, after all, waged on a metaphysical plane as well as on an earthly one, where the usual odds and ordinary time are transcended. When I had the opportunity of discussing with the Hamas leader, Dr Abdul Azis Rantisi, about the strategy of using suicide terrorist attacks against an overwhelming Israeli military that was impervious to such a strategy, Dr  Rantisi appeared undeterred. I  pointed out that his Palestinian movement could not win with such methods, and he responded with concurring that perhaps in his lifetime, or his children’s lifetime, they would not prevail. Ultimately, however, he said they would succeed since the struggle in which they were engaged was God’s war, not theirs alone (quoted in Juergensmeyer, 2017, p. 165). If one believes that the struggle in which one is involved is a cosmic war, then it can persist beyond mortal timelines or earthly limitations. When acts of violence are conducted as a part of an imagined cosmic war, they may appear to someone outside the movement as terrorism. To those within the movement, however, they are salvos within a cosmic war. In most cases, the perpetrators use these acts of violence not to 419

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achieve territory or conquer their opponents but to bring their imagined war into reality, to act out the imagined war so that all can see it. Hence, they are performances of warfare, symbolic acts of violence meant to jar all who view it – even at a distance through television or the internet – into an acceptance of the reality of their imagined cosmic war. For this reason, religious-related acts of violence are calculated performances. Often the violence is exaggerated, done for dramatic effect. Suicide attacks, car bombs, public beheadings and other extreme acts are carried out in such a manner as to be both vivid and horrifying. Targets are often chosen because they are familiar and secure – such as shopping malls, marketplaces and centers of mass transit. On many occasions the events are timed to ensure that the maximum number of people are gathered at the target sites – such as New York City’s World Trade Center, US embassies in Africa, the Oklahoma federal building, the Tokyo subway system and Tel Aviv shopping centers. The explosive devices used are often aimed at wounding people rather than damaging buildings. Nails have been embedded in the bombs of Hamas suicide bombers, for instance, to increase their maiming capability. The Buddhist perpetrators of Tokyo’s sarin gas attack considered adding a floral scent to the deadly odors they were about to unleash to encourage more people to inhale it. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater. At center stage are the acts themselves – stunning, abnormal and outrageous murders carried out in a way that graphically displays the awful power of violence – set within grand scenarios of conflict and proclamation. The spectacular assaults of 9/11 were not only tragic acts of violence; they were also spectacular theater. In speaking of terrorism as “performance”, however, I am not suggesting that such acts are undertaken lightly or capriciously. Rather, like religious ritual or street theater, they are dramas designed to have an impact on the several audiences that they affect. Those who witness the violence – even at a distance, via the news media – are therefore a part of what occurs. Moreover, like other forms of public ritual, the symbolic significance of such events is multifaceted; they mean different things to different observers. This suggests that it is possible to analyze comparatively the performance of acts of religious terrorism. There is already a growing literature of studies based on the notion that civic acts and cultural performances are closely related (Bell, 1992; Fisher, 1996). The controversial parades undertaken each year by the Protestant Orangemen in Catholic neighborhoods of Northern Ireland, for instance, have been studied not only as political statements but also as cultural performances (Jarman, 1997). They are a form of public ritual. Public ritual has traditionally been the province of religion, and this is one of the reasons that performance violence comes so naturally to activists from a religious background. In a collection of essays on the connection between religion and terrorism published some years ago, one of the editors, David C. Rapoport, observed that the two topics fit together not only because there is a violent streak in the history of religion, but also because terrorist acts have a symbolic side and in that sense mimic religious rites (Rapoport and Alexander, 1982). The victims of terrorism are targeted not because they are threatening to the perpetrators, he said, but because they are “symbols, tools, animals or corrupt beings” that tie into “a special picture of the world, a specific consciousness” that the activist possesses. The street theater of performance violence forces those who witness it directly or indirectly into that “consciousness”, the alternative view of the world that the perpetrators possess (Rapoport and Alexander, 1982, xiii). When we who observe these acts take them seriously – when we are disgusted and repelled by them, and begin to distrust the peacefulness of the world around us – the purposes of this theater are achieved. These cases of terrorism and extreme violence conducted by activists in the name of religion in recent decades show a mixture of themes, motives and expectations. Most of them are related to political power and the defense of religious communities perceived to be in danger. Yet in 420

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virtually all of these cases, ideas, images, practices, social identities and organizational networks related to religion have played a role, in some of them a significant role, even though religion does not cause violence – few activists are motivated by religious beliefs alone. Yet when religious ideas, images and identities are embraced in a conflict situation, they often make matters worse. The practice of ritual performance when applied to violent encounter can turn killing into a dramatic and gruesome spectacle. The notion of cosmic war can provide an exhilarating image of the world caught up in cosmic struggle, elevating ordinary competition into the high proscenium of sacred drama. And the transcendent timelines of a cosmic struggle can permit fighters to soldier on despite rational calculations about the futility of their efforts. Thus, religion may not be the problem that causes people to turn to violence in social struggles, but its role in such encounters can often be deeply problematic.

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30 RELIGIOUS PEACEBUILDING Atalia Omer and Joram Tarusarira

Introduction: religion as a peacebuilding capital Religious peacebuilding as praxis has relied on (neo)liberal and secularist rationalities, even if over the past decades since 11 September 2001 (9/11), the “discovery” of religion as relevant and its inclusion in development and peacebuilding policies and praxis is often presented as a paradigm shift (e.g., Johnson and Sampson, 1994), disrupting an otherwise secularist myopia. Often this disruption presents itself as a critique of modernist assumptions concerning the public role of religion. However, we show that both in its utilitarian and reactionary modes, the praxis of religious peacebuilding is highly consistent with modernist ideologies and power structures. In what follows, we offer a brief genealogy of the field of religion and peace by focusing on religious peacebuilding as a mechanism designed to securitize “bad” religion and, inversely, to mobilize and engage with “good” religion. While knowledge production about religious peacebuilding presents itself with a characteristic “value-free” pretense, the subject of the adjectives good/bad is not scrutinized, and thus the question good/bad for whom is not interrogated. This overview explains how neither “religion” nor “peace” have self-evident meanings and how they need to be understood within their interlacing modern genealogies. Further, the same way in which the statement “religion causes violence” is not only unintelligible, but also normative and situated in a particular intellectual tradition, there is no relationship of simple and unmediated causality between religion and peace. Positioning religious leaders and actors as somehow having special access to morality is likewise problematic, especially considering how many religious actors have been complicit in atrocities, from systematic sex abuse to genocide. Still, it is hardly deniable that certain religious actors, institutions, and networks are wellpositioned to offer humanitarian, health, and other life-sustaining services, as they have done for centuries. Such capacities, most associated with “development” praxis, have increasingly become correlated with peacebuilding, as is clear from the UN Agenda 2030, which was touted by its authors as a framework for world transformation and sustainable development. Ratified in 2015, Agenda 2030 built on decades of partnering with religious networks, institutions, and other actors (Marshall, 2021) and identified them as necessary for the promotion and implementation of development agendas, the success of which means people will be less likely to introduce instability and violence (United Nations, n.d.). Sometimes such a capacity and institutional infrastructure directly connect to histories of missions in colonized lands (which DOI: 10.4324/9781003247265-34

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also involved a brutal level of violence and cultural erasures through “services” such as residential schools), revealing the intimate symbiosis between colonial and ecclesiastical forces in modernity. Claims to authenticity (“real religion is about peace”) make themselves useful in formal declarations where religious leaders with authoritative access to traditions counter perversion of such traditions by other actors. One such example is the Marrakesh Declaration of 2016 issued by over 300 Muslim scholars and politicians in an effort to combat the deployment of Islam to persecute minorities in Muslim-majority countries. The Marrakesh Declaration draws on the seventh century’s Charter of Medina to demonstrate consistency between Islam and the principle of equal citizenship. A report published by the US Institute of Peace and the Cambridge Institute on Religion and International Studies interprets the Declaration as “a powerful response to a pressing global human rights concern and a model for how religious tradition and international human rights law can be mutually reinforcing”. As a resource, this declaration’s “true test”, the report reads, revolves around “its implementation” or “the extent to which the ideals, principles, and actions envisioned in [it] can spread beyond its purview as an elite enterprise to ignite and mobilize a broad-based movement for social, legal, and political change” (United States Institute of Peace, 2016). Such declarations tend to reduce the vastness of traditions, along with their hermeneutically open horizons, to scripts about “authentic” essences and prescriptions. The “authentic” transhistorical exportable message of the Medina Charter and its apparent consistency with liberal norms renders this hermeneutical/textual move as a peacebuilding resource. Likewise, religious actors as service providers became increasingly pivotal partners for peacebuilding (intersecting with development praxis). From our perspective, it is interesting to note how the field of religion and peacebuilding/development at best brackets the deep histories that underpin the conditions of violence, global structural injustice, and the racialization of communities as well as their physical and epistemic erasures. Religion had a lot to do with all these processes, and it is telling that such legacies are often rendered irrelevant (or something assigned to a closed and resolved historical chapter) to the utilitarian discussion of religion’s role in peacebuilding. Both authentic authoritative claims and infrastructures become sites for religion and peace praxis. Both demonstrate the functionalist and utilitarian underpinnings of this conversation. We contend that only an intersectional approach can help us assess, with clarity, the religious dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding. Before we turn to this task, however, we provide a sketch of the religious peacebuilding field.

Peace, religion, and the neoliberal turn The UN 2030 Agenda reveals a recognition that indices of underdevelopment correlate with instability and war. It is within this framework that the question of religious peacebuilding is examined and researched where its “effectiveness” or “success” is more often than not feeding back in a loop into the neoliberal logic that sets the terms of the conversation. By “neoliberalism”, we refer, together with philosopher Wendy Brown (2015, 2019), to governing rationality according to which all facets of human life are economized, rendering humans themselves as “capital” to be leveraged, moved, cultivated, and harnessed toward certain desirable outcomes. The forces of neoliberalism shift communities away from concerns with democratic virtues. For Brown, neoliberalism is profoundly anti-democratic. Indeed, “interfaith”, “intercommunal”, and “interreligious” peacebuilding practices often operate with a thin conception of the “common good” as a space for lower common denominator types of cooperation, often framed as “economic” and intended to maintain the “peace” rather than a robust locus for a critical democratic political imagination. 424

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A prime example of this thin construction of peace is in Bosnia and Herzegovina where a superficial peacebuilding process has entailed, since 1995, communal separation where religious affiliations constituted the thresholds of belonging. This peace formula reflected a continuation of the logic of the war that violently disentangled the interwoven social fabrics of centuries of inter-communality. The segregationist logic informed ongoing peacebuilding work such as by way of the United Religious Initiative (URI) operative in the country. The URI is a selforganizing franchise called “circle”, consisting of at least three “faith traditions” associated with a global network of such “circles” established in 2000 and connected to a charter initiated by Bishop Swing who, upon an invitation to lead an interfaith service to mark the 50th anniversary of the UN in 1993, thought “if the nations of the world are working together for peace through the UN, then where are the world’s religions?” (URI, n.d.). An inclusive charter then offers a “set of principles for action on behalf of the common good, connecting people across religions and cultures in the service of peace and justice”. The URI’s Cooperation Circle of Bosnia and Herzegovina has performed interfaith for over two decades, but the lack of substantial change that indeed would disrupt the segregationist principle of the war has rendered the performativity of the URI “comical and superficial”, in the words of one anonymous observer one of the authors interviewed. Likewise, the resurfacing of violent outbursts in the second decades of the twenty-first century reveals the ultimate thinness of this interfaith peace paradigm in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What was a well-intentioned deployment of interfaith and inter-religious mechanisms as well as the gradual incorporation of analyses and expertise around the religious dimensions of various issues of concern, from diplomacy to development theory, resulted in the establishment of various official governmental and intergovernmental networks. They include, for example, the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy, which facilitate notes-sharing among North American and European diplomats on religion-related policy issues as well as supranational bodies and research centers and initiatives dedicated to religion. This proliferation of expert religion (Shakman-Hurd, 2015) is embedded within a neoliberal frame that interprets religion as a form of capital to mobilize or demobilize in the service of peace/ development/security, depending on which, what, and when. The field of religion and peace praxis has been preoccupied, especially since the violent events of 9/11, with obvious manifestations of violence associated with religious claims. This means that the scholarship and research informing policy have paid attention primarily to direct forms of violence at the expense of operating with a more capacious view of violence that will bring in a critical lens to illuminate cultural, structural, and other forms of violence and their contextual interactions in producing harm (Moore, 2017; Springs, 2015). A narrow approach to violence (including religion’s relevance to ideological, cultural, structural, and epistemic forms of violence) also entails narrow operative interpretations of peace and security. A leaf can be borrowed from the discourse of human security, which has gone beyond state-centric or hard military concerns. In traditional security studies, the state acted as the referent object mandated to preserve territorial integrity, domestic order, international affairs, and citizens from armed threats. The primary threat is the use of force by other states (Owen, 2004). Upon realizing that security means different things to different people in different contexts, the concept of human security emerged. Human security focuses on people’s lived and existential questions; hence, its distinguishing characteristic is its people-centeredness. This means that human security needs to be recognized at the micro-level in terms of people’s everyday experiences (Tadjbakhsh, 2005). Hence, Tarusarira (2020) introduced the concept of “lived security” to capture the subjectivity of security. The Pakistani economist Mahbub Ul Haq, in 1994, described human security as “a child that did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic violence that did not explode, a woman who was not raped, 425

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a poor person who did not starve, a dissident who was not silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed. Human security is not a concern with weapons. It is a concern with human dignity” (Tadjbakhsh, 2014). Even with interventions in peace research as early as Galtung (1969) and with the embodied experiences in broad-based social and political mobilization, such as in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the field of religion, violence, and peacebuilding praxis obscures the relevance of symbolic, epistemic, structural, and cultural forms of violence, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia to direct and acute modes of insecurity (but see Uvin, 2004; Omer, 2019). The anti-apartheid mobilization was religious (Muslim, Christian, Jewish) to the degree that it was also humanist and against an evil ideology and injustice. It is from this place that it was also an interfaith mobilization. Furthermore, the deployment of “interfaith” praxis often obscures epistemic violence, making it difficult to address underlying narratives, ideas, and ideologies that justified the wrongdoing in the first place and thus form its bedrock (Tarusarira, 2019). For instance, how religion is defined and applied in policy reflects the assumptions and interests of those who define it. This means religion can be defined in a way that makes it susceptible to mobilization for violence or peace. Clearly, the questions we ask unsettle the basic assumptions of the field. We ask: Whose peace? Whose security? And what does it mean to “do” religious peacebuilding, if this form of doing or practice is utilitarian rather than prophetic or reductive rather than intersectional? The field of religious peacebuilding praxis, as we show later, can be characterized over the past 20 years as fixated on instrumentalizing “good” or helpful religion and harnessing religion as capital, which also includes, of course, “correct” and codified interpretations of the sources of tradition. At the same time, “bad” religion became a target for policies of containment and securitization and often literarily was bombed out of existence. This framework thus presents violence and peace as inherent in “religion”, which explains calls for reforming religious traditions that are perceived as violent rather than changing policies that entrenched structural, ideological, and economic forms of violence globally. Beyond the utilitarian frame, the praxis of religious engagement also converges with theo-ideological forces seeking to retrieve, reclaim, and deprovincialize religious traditions as the organizing principle of society. We return to this point at the end of the chapter. For now, we further historicize and interrogate the modernist genealogies of religion and peacebuilding praxis.

Whose peace? Whose security? Indeed, peace (specifically the Peace of Westphalia of 1648) and subsequent political arrangements entailed the containment of religious forces or a particular arrangement whereby the “secular” itself constitutes a politico-theological configuration in the very anatomy of the international system. Demystifying this hidden theological grammar of the modern/secular has been the target of much of the critical scholarship on secularism and the presumption of “neutrality” vis-à-vis religion that the modern political construct of the nation-state holds. Such scholarship, which intersects also with a renewed interest in political theology, uncovers the power underlying the construction and policing of boundaries between the “political” or “social” and “religious” spheres (Asad, 1993, 2003; Shakman-Hurd, 2009; Mahmood, 2015). The presumption of secular neutrality as a site of rationality, enlightenment, peace, and tolerance constitutes normative mythology of modern secularity (Casanova, 1994) and has informed liberal secularist analyses of religion’s supposed complicity with violence. Such analyses are reductive either by assigning religion as epiphenomenal to violence (where the true causality of violence that appears “religious” is something material, such as poverty, with the “religious” constituting a 426

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mystifying form of false consciousness) or value reductionism, such as the one infamously popularized by Samuel Huntington. A reductive association of religion with violence obscures contextual, historical, sociological, and geopolitical analyses of the conditions of such violence. For example, one is misguided if one analyzes the emergence of al-Qaeda and the events of 9/11 as caused by Islam, as if what Islam is constitutes an uncontested proposition. In the same way, Islam does not cause young Palestinian people to perform acts of suicide attacks. Rather, with an understanding that monocausal explanations are reductive and thus flawed, the question of causality cannot be even examined without considering the brutal Israeli occupation over decades. Besides, the co-occurrence of the Islamic identity and the suicide attack does not necessarily establish a causal relationship. When two variables co-occur, we cannot just infer that there is a relationship between them. They could both be caused by a third unidentified thing.​​Furthermore, a shift to culturalist arguments, therefore, conceals responsibility, history, and material conditions. In “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” (Mamdani, 2004), Mamdani scrutinizes how “culture talk” obscures a robust analysis of geopolitics, in this case, specifically, the US investment in the mujahidin as allies in the Cold War. The obfuscating “culture talk” that Mamdani identified has, however, shaped policies known collectively as the “global war on terrorism”. Therefore, as the story usually goes, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 began to dispel secularist myopia, generating a cottage industry on “religious resurgence” that increased exponentially after the 9/11 attacks. The proliferation of interest in religion in global affairs reflects a policy concern with identifying mechanisms to securitize “bad” religion, but also, and here religious peacebuilding illuminates how the inverse works within the same reductive and orientalist logic, to mobilize “good” (i.e., helpful) religion. The global war on terrorism, therefore, reflects the familiar orientalism that has shaped the conversation about religion and secular modernity, singling out Muslims and other racialized communities that appear Muslims (Sayyid, 2013). The mythology of the modern secular is deeply entrenched in what Deepa Kumar refers to as “anti-Muslim racism”, which began to take shape during the erosion of the Muslim empires (2021). Reducing the “Muslim question” to a religious misunderstanding, intolerance, or “culture talk” is therefore opaque and amnesic of racism as well as colonial legacies. Other theorists (e.g., Puar, 2007; Farris, 2017; Scott, 2018) also illuminate the sexual orientalist politics underlying the global war on terrorism in securitizing Muslims at home and abroad, processes that directly relate also to the eventual consolidation of right-wing exclusionary forms of (Christian) populisms in euro-America (Brubaker, 2016). The study of terrorism (here with the presumption that a particular religion is closely associated with violence as a matter of culture), in anthropologist Darryl Li’s reflexive approach to violence, should “refuse to take for granted the globalized order of racial violence that the national security state aims to protect” (2019). This is, however, where the critical academic study of religion is in tension with knowledge production about harnessing “useful” and containing “harmful” religion through a feedback loop from data collections designed to provide evidence of the effectiveness of policies and programs to ensure the sustainability of these same programs and leave the ideological formations intact (Wilson, 2021). The knowledge production process is thus self-referential, a perpetuating self-fulfilling prophecy. Theoretical accounts of the consolidation of religion as a comparative category of analysis trace the racialized, antisemitic, and orientalist dimensions of philological classificatory schemes (Masuzawa, 2005). Others further locate religion as a racialized category complicit in colonialism and neocolonialism (Chidester, 2014; Maldonado Torres, 2014; Tarusarira, 2020). Grappling with this genealogy helps identify the ideological and normative underpinnings of reductive accounts of the relation between religion and violence as constitutive of European 427

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Christian modernity (Cavanaugh, 2009). A  genealogical analysis also traces its inverse that “authentic” and “good” religion is a cause of peace. The critical scholarship has fixated, however, on Islam and the logic of the securitizing of Muslims and Islam’s foundation in modernity. But often the analysis omits a full interrogation of the relationship between the so-called Jewish and Muslim Questions of Europe and their respective imbricated roles in the construction of European (Christian) modernity and conceptions of the secular/political. While there is scholarship that confronts this point centrally (Anidjar, 2014; Norton, 2020; Topolski, 2020; Jansen and Meer, 2020), most critics of religion in global affairs focus on Islam and Muslims, recognizing and tracing the orientalist motifs in the production of Europe as an intellectual and political project, and presume that the “Jewish Question” has been solved (ironically by Europe’s genocidal acts and ideological frames, such as nationalism, settler colonialism, orientalism, and antisemitism). This involves not only a tacit Zionist logic, but also a presumption of a construct of the “Judeo-Christian” as a stable and self-evident mode of secularity or a statement of normative and civilizational belonging (even if the “Judeo” is superseded and consumed by the “Christian”). It is astounding, indeed, that the “Judeo” became assimilated into the Christian and into a civilizational discourse that posits it as the cultural scaffolding of the West, as Huntington had done, relying on this “Judeo-Christian” construct (along with appeals to the tradition leading back to ancient Greece) to explain the cultural “essence” or “nature” of the “West” vis-á-vis the production of its ideal “other” in the orient. However, the Jews used to be Europe’s “barbarians” (Slabodsky, 2014). Likewise, both Jews and Muslims were targets of proto-racialized expulsions from Spain at the genesis of the western colonial era. Further, without centuries of antisemitism and theological supercessionism, the Nazi genocide against the Jews cannot be explained (though it also cannot only be explained through classical antisemitism). Indeed, the case of Nazi Germany’s “final solution” does offer an argument about the complex relation of causality between theological and genocidal violence and how this complex causality tells the story of modernity along with assimilation of the “Jewish barbarians” into European citizenship through emancipation and other developments associated with the Enlightenment. The assimilation of Jews into a civilizational discourse explains why Israel, while in the MENA region, is framed by the “international community” as a Western power and a part of Europe (Slabodsky, 2014). Revisiting the relationship between the Muslim and Jewish Questions and their participation in the production of the modern/secular illuminates how much the “secular” conceals in terms of the religio-cultural, ideological, and geopolitical arrangements that it denotes on a case-by-case basis. The camouflage happens not only on the level of securitizing, but also in terms of the neoliberal discourse of “religious engagement”. As we noted in our opening case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina, reducing discord and, the inverse, reconciliation to an “interfaith” exercise not only disguises historical, geopolitical, ideological, sociocultural, and economic variables, but also paradoxically extends the logic of, at times, a genocidal war to the realm of peacebuilding. When the sole principle of belonging is “religious” (itself reduced to a set of hermeneutically closed prescriptions), “peace” becomes an obscuring thin process of cooperation, preventing democratic horizons from articulating alternative political belongings underpinned by principles of equality, equity, and legality, which are, indeed, normative goods associated with modernist aspirations.

Peace as religious engagement As we anticipated in our earlier reference to the Marrakesh Declaration, in addition to works that sought to understand descriptively, historically, and theologically the violent potentials inherent in religious traditions and their scriptural, cultural, social, and historical texts (Juergensmeyer 428

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et al., 2015), a complementary set of discussions emerged focusing on the peace potential and sometimes the so-called “essence” of religious traditions. Regardless of the myopia defining the very specialized arena of religious peacebuilding, some scholars and practitioners who have inhabited this field for decades, such as Mohammed Abu-Nimer (2003), called for a theological and hermeneutical excavation of peace-promoting motifs and resources within religious traditions, thereby becoming experts in religion and peace. This is a useful body of work, offering a hermeneutical arsenal of a sort with which to combat violent interpretations of religious traditions. The key line of critique for such a hermeneutical excavation is its embeddedness within secularist and utilitarian accounts of traditions that reduce them to mere beliefs, sets of practices, and dogmas, and a discourse of “authenticity” that forecloses hermeneutical horizons and decontextualizes the causes of fatalistic violence, such as suicide attacks, and attributes, such violence, to “bad” religion. A global network of programs of “deradicalization” relies on such extractive hermeneutics, demonstrating over and over the securitizing frame within which the business of “religious engagements” has unfolded. This securitizing and racializing praxis has become a site of a relentless critique (Fadil et al., 2019). At the same time and within the field of religion and peace, the literature has mostly bracketed the critical study of religion (see Omer, 2011; Omer et al., 2015). Instead, it has focused on identifying exemplary religious actors who were promptly profiled as exemplars of religious peacebuilding (e.g., Tanenbaum and Little, 2007). However, in most instances, the “religious partners” utilized in the field of religion and peace praxis are professionals (sometimes even bureaucrats), leveraging their relative legitimacy within the community and the charisma/ authority of their offices for diplomatic outcomes, and mobilizing their networks, platforms, and institutions. Let us rotate briefly to highlight key motifs in the field. The religion and peacebuilding scholarship gained momentum with R. Scott Appleby’s book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred (2000). Influenced by the German Protestant theologian, Rudolf Otto, who characterized the sacred as simultaneously dreadful and fascinating to the subject, Appleby “defended” religion from outright attack by arguing that the “sacred” as cause could produce a variety of responses ranging from violent to non-violent forms of militancy. Appleby foregrounded “experience” of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans as a key cause for violent or non-violent militancy, which he termed “religious”. Desmond Tutu has argued along similar lines, saying that religion is like fire that you can use to prepare tasty food but that can also be used to burn someone, or like a knife that can be used to put butter on bread but that can also be used to stab someone in the back (Duke, 2006). Not only is the “religious experience”, as a special kind of experience, foregrounded, but also the individual (exceptional, prophetic, charismatic) constitutes the engine of change (see also Omer, 2021). Critics who come from a genealogical study of religion as a modern construct born out of European Christian history, theology, philosophy, and political projects specifically demystify such construction of religion as deeply biased and ahistorical (even if recognizing the historical morphologies of religious traditions and their internal plurality and contestability as Appleby does). The problem with the “ambivalence” that Appleby describes is not its recognition that religion cannot be theorized away as merely epiphenomenal, but that its account of religion’s causality in the world, especially pertaining to violence and peace, presumes an unmediated experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans at the expense of a structural and systemic analysis of ideology. In addition, the focus of religious peacebuilding on individual (charismatic or not) changemakers is problematic and itself reveals how the routinization of religion and the practice of peace have diverged from the initial account of prophetic disruption associated with Tutu, King, and Gandhi, all of whom were part of broader social movement mobilizations and contentious 429

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politics. In all of those cases, an experience of the sacred, in fact, was not and cannot be understood as a sui generis causality of peace or the prophetic act of speaking truth to power. Instead, religiosity becomes a currency for resistance to oppressive structures and ideologies where hermeneutical facility also exposes how religious traditions have participated in authorizing such violent ideologies as slavery, racism, and settler colonialism. These charismatic individuals were so effective because their grounding in religion also entailed a rootedness in history, a critique of racism and colonialism, as well as other sources and traditions such as, in the case of King, the US Constitution, Sigmund Freud, and Gandhi, among other sources. The field of religion and peace fixates on individual actors (prophets or social influencers) and brackets the social movements and critical theory that inform them. This, once again, exposes the field as myopic of its own discursive violence. Extracting the “religious” and articulating it as a separate and distinct site of praxis overlooks religion’s complicity and the violent structures shaping people’s lives. The process of racialization so central to modernity shares a genealogy with the construction of religion as a comparative anthropological category in the context of Western (Christian) colonial expansion. While the “ambivalence” thesis came at a good time to counter its inverse in the Huntington “clash” narrative and shows how religion can be both negative and positive, it nonetheless persisted with a sui generis account of religious experience that allows for bypassing the analysis of global structural, epistemic, cultural, and discursive forms of violence. The basic insight that Appleby articulated became the normative assumption of the industry of religion and the practice of peace, which asks at every turn how we can identify and support partners who will be helpful and good and contain those who will be disruptive and bad (see also Omer, 2021). This bad/ good axis echoes the orientalist underpinning of the securitizing religion discourse Mamdani dissects for its orientalism. The extraction of the “religious” as a distinct sector and a series of investments in religious and interfaith engagements facilitated some apparently positive symbolic and concrete outcomes, such as in brokering ceasefires as in Sant’ Egidio’s work (Haynes, 2009) or the consolidation and strengthening of a global “United Nations of Religions” body called Religions for Peace (RfP) as an international player (Bender, 2021). RfP does localized work on reconciliation and interfaith relationship building to ensure strong channels of communication and infrastructures for conflict management and redressing people’s needs. It is also undeniable that an institution such as the Catholic Church and the office of the pope can act symbolically yet causally in the world to effect peacebuilding outcomes, as in the case of the pope’s involvement with establishing US-Cuban diplomatic relationships and the Laudato Si’ encyclical that has generated many actions to respond to the global climate catastrophe. Occupying the papacy is, of course, no guarantee for constructive diplomatic or peacebuilding influence, as in Benedict XVI’s anti-Muslim speech in 2006 and in Pius’s XII rapid (first in line!) endorsement of Hitler, earning him the nickname “Hitler’s Pope” (Cornwell, 2008). But religious institutions and authorities have certainly also played constructive roles in processes of reconciliation and healing in the aftermath of mass atrocities. This, of course, depends on the degree of credibility and complicity such authorities and institutions inhabit in relation to such atrocities. Catholic peacebuilding emerged as a distinct site of peacebuilding (Hawksley, 2020), drawing on its wide and deep networks and institutional power and usually without accounting for the long legacies of Catholic violence vis-à-vis indigenous people, women, LGBTQI+ people, and other marginalized groups (Cooper, 2020). Even when grappling with its atrocities, the consolidation of a peacebuilding approach conveys an air of triumphalism grounded in the celebration of the unique positionality of Catholic institutions and foregrounding of social teachings as offering distinct ethical access to the burden and task of peacebuilding. 430

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This triumphalist celebration of the presumption of holding a “special key” to peacebuilding conveys a concern with the sustainability of the church’s ethical authority and influence as well as its functionalist dependency on human suffering and the abstract poor. So far, we have shown that much of the literature on religious peacebuilding has concerned itself with how religion can help put out an obvious fire or participate in peacebuilding as diplomacy, negotiations, symbolic performativity of unity, and a “counter-message” for bad religion in efforts toward “deradicalization”. In addition, some works have illuminated gendered and women’s perspectives in religious peacebuilding, a critical point considering how male and heteropatriarchal religious authorities and spaces tend to be and how gendered violence constitutes many of their articulations (Hayward and Marshall, 2015; Omer, 2021). Others have focused on reconciliation and forgiveness, a subfield that often reflects strong Christian biases and triumphalism (Philpott, 2015). Yet others also examined indigenous and traditional practices of reconciliation, cross-referenced with scholarship in peace studies that prioritize those most affected by violence and conflict (Lederach and Appleby, 2010). At the same time, religiosity comes into the peacebuilding and negotiation spaces through rituals and meanings-producing actions (Schirch, 2005). An overview of the field and its definitional texts point to how even figures whose religious agency can only be understood within a broader social movement mobilization against racism and oppression are then extracted from these matrices and presented as actors with special access to a sui generis experience of the sacred, which then works on them as a cause to act transformatively in the world and/or to become an identifiable representative of closed communities who then are invited into various programs and initiatives funded by interested centers of power (including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other non-US loci of geopolitical aspirations). What this bureaucratization and cooptation ultimately does is to extract the analysis of religion and peace praxis from an interrogation of how “religion” is also racialized and gendered and how people’s appeals to traditions have authorized the marginalization and pain of those affiliated with such traditions. Such concerns are often bracketed as irrelevant to the urgent matters of war and peace. Yet a simplistic deployment of religious resources might overlook the “dysfunctional relationships” that characterize violent conflicts between groups (Tarusarira and Ganiel, 2012). Such dysfunctional relationships might be heightened by deeper social and economic imbalances between groups and by structural political imbalances. This dysfunctionality also coheres with an undue presumption concerning religion’s special access to morality and celebration of religious values such as love, which may and often does obscure justice and truth (SteenJohnsen, 2020). Further, the aforementioned literature can mostly be characterized as utilitarian, driven by a question about how religion can be used for peace (but not always or necessarily socioeconomic and epistemic justice), development, and security. The main lines of critique of the consolidation of religious peacebuilding in routinized, institutional, and official spaces revolve around how religiocratic spaces reconstitute hegemony (Shakman-Hurd, 2015), reflect underlying orientalist securitizing agenda even under the pretenses of “engagement” (Wolff, 2021; Wilson, 2021), and prioritize useful rather than justice-oriented “religious actors” (Omer, 2021). These lines of critique point also to the consolidation of praxis around religion and “soft” (Nye, 2005; Haynes, 2008) or “sharp” power (Walker and Ludwig, 2017). According to Mandaville (2022), “Sharp power – as distinct from either the positive allure of soft power or the use of military force often associated with hard power-refers to the use of information, communication and technology tools to disseminate ideas and messages likely to sow discord and tension in target societies”. Sharp/soft power is available to a broad spectrum of actors, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Russia, and the US, where investment in interfaith dialogue, for example, 431

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by Saudi Arabia, proceeds without questioning Saudi’s violations of human rights, the ongoing war on Yemen, or the public executions of presumed or real dissidents. Indeed, “sharp power” is not just the softer side of hegemony; it is used to orchestrate violence, confrontations, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic imaginations, polarization, and the resulting opportune moments for expanding spheres of influence. Religion as soft/sharp power counts on the presumed innocence of intra- and interfaith engagement. What damage can getting together and getting to know one another or one’s tradition better do? The King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural dialogue or KAICIID (established in 2007) is an intergovernmental body underwritten by the Republic of Austria, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Holy See (in observant status). It bills itself as an interfaith framework dedicated to bringing together religious leaders and policy-makers, focusing on cultivating resources to combat “radicalization” and enhancing the peace potentials of communities. This intergovernmental initiative exemplifies the ways in which religious engagement and interfaith dialoguing can be deployed as a weapon or used to conceal, soften, and otherwise entrench autocratic regimes and violent geopolitical agendas. Another example where appearances of inter-religious dialogue and peace conceal multiple layers of violence is the Abraham Accords orchestrated by the US during the Trump administration. Even though there was no war between Israel, Morocco, and Bahrain or the Emirates, they have now signed “peace” agreements (that are widely interpreted as a series of economic and military deals), which have normalized Israel in the region in that it can now benefit from tourism and trade with these countries and persistently ensconce the system of the occupation not only with impunity but with dividends. This weaponization of interfaith peace among members of Abrahamic traditions in the MENA region unfolded under the cover of a simplistic and orientalist account of the “Middle East conflict” as one about religions, ancient hatreds, or a clash of civilizations between generic “Arabs” and “Muslims” and “Jews”. The Abraham Accords show how the deployment of vague and uninterrogated appeals to interfaith can violently erase and marginalize the Palestinians and their fight for political freedom and human dignity. The case of Palestine/Israel has especially generated a cottage industry on interfaith dialogue and religious peacebuilding, functioning more often than not to obscure the realities of settler colonialism and apartheid (Rouhana and Shlahoub-Kevorkian, 2021). We do not argue that religion does not matter for understanding Palestine/Israel or that it is not important to gain fluency in how conceptions of return to the land feature in the religious imaginations of various religious communities. Instead, we contend that interfaith as a peacebuilding praxis has functioned to decontextualize, dehistoricize, and depoliticize the ongoing realities of Palestinian depopulation, oppression, and control. Notably, while the securitizing of religion reflects the operationalizing of Appleby’s basic thesis, it departs from the best reading of this thesis that focused on the figure of the prophet as disruptive of the status quo rather than as an instrument for entrenching hegemonic scripts (see also Omer, 2021). The very construct of “deradicalization” presumes that “good” religion is not radical, which is certainly a departure from an account of the prophetic as a radical intervention. Jesus was a radical. Muhammad was a radical. At the same time, much of the business of “religious engagement” that consolidated in the wake of 9/11 sought to identify and enlist so-called “moderate Muslims” (Mandaville, 2017). Not only that, programs around “inter-civilizational dialogue” and Preventing Violent Extremism triangulated securitizing “bad” religion with mobilizing “good” religion, which also led to securitizing of aid, humanitarianism, and development policies (Lynch, 2015; Wolff, 2021). 432

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Religious peacebuilding, therefore, helps to gloss over the root causes of oppression. It glosses over how religion has participated non-reductively in consolidating and authorizing ideological violence. Still, religious language does play a part in articulating resistance, emancipatory visions for alternative futures, and solidarity, as it has done in South Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere. Recognizing the complex and differentiated role of religion in violence and resistance sheds light on how, more often than not, one needs to interrogate the political power and situatedness of those engaged in “religious peacebuilding” or sponsoring such programs that foreground “religion” in order to assess the degree to which the “peace” in question is not simply violence by a different name. We next go deeper into the modernist and co-constitutive genealogies of the two terms “religion” and “peace”.

Religion, liberal peace, and modernity Neither religion nor peace is easy to define. In fact, both terms are entangled with one another in that “peace” often denotes the assignment of something called “religion” to its proper place in the socio-political mapping of modernity. The very act of defining “religion” has been rendered inherently problematic in the academic study of religion, a field that has now for decades grappled with its complicity with Western (Christian) colonial legacies. In his genealogies of the secular, Talal Asad classically articulates the co-constitutive relations of the “secular” and “religious” to one another and to the project of modernity. His critique exposes that any attempt to define “religion” as an ahistorical, transcultural, and disembodied essence constitutes a form of epistemic violence implicated in Europe’s political and colonial projects. Asad demonstrates how provincial intellectual, theological, and political dynamics and contestations specific to Europe were projected as universal. One of the problems with such a static, ahistorical, and anthropological comparative religion revolves around the political projects that it has authorized. The sequestering of the “religious” at the level of the individual (autonomous) and cognitive spheres depoliticizes the “religious” and extracts it from the “secular” where peace and order depend on policing potentially disruptive transgressions. Indeed, peace in modernity is necessarily secular, though the secular does not mean the absence of religious meanings and thresholds. Indeed, this makes “peace” a specific mechanism to protect Western modernity. The “secular” itself emerges as a security discourse designed to produce, reproduce, and protect political spaces, modern conceptions of sovereignty and belonging, and individual freedoms and liberties from the intrusions of antidemocratic forces. The exclusionary axes of modernity, as noted, entailed forming a complex nexus between the two “others” of Europe, the Jew and the Muslim (Norton, 2020; Anidjar, 2014), the expansionist colonial project, and its reliance on dehumanizing and control of the natives. These axes constitute modernity’s scaffoldings and clarify the twin questions posed at the outset: Whose peace? Whose religion? Indeed, the analysis of religion’s relation to peace presumes a secular ontology and normativity in which the containment of religion and “comprehensive worldviews”, as in John Rawls, captures the meaning of the liberal peace, with Rawls persistently working within the Kantian tradition, albeit with some modifications reflecting Rawls’ distinctive historical location. The liberal peace tradition connotes certain assumptions regarding the economy, the operation of society, and the political structures as well as the meaning of citizenship and the autonomous individual as a choosing consumer of goods and politics. It also intimates certain assumptions concerning the proper location of religion and religious worldviews and prescriptions. The notion of secular ontology and normativity is constitutive of the construct of Europe as an ongoing ideological, intellectual, and theo-political project (Wolff, 2021). This is why “peace” 433

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is not necessarily the imposition of a “secular” antidote, which is itself not detached from religiocultural, linguistic, and historical specificities. The meanings of the two terms “peace” and “religion” are therefore inextricably interlaced with one another and with normative accounts of modernity. Historicizing the terms and their relations to one another foregrounds the constitutive processes that link the consolidation of the Westphalian settlement of 1648, the focus of the critical study of religion and international relations, to 1492 and the “doctrine of discovery” (Lynch, 2020), the focus of studies of modernity/ coloniality. The latter is an intellectual tradition that insists that the lofty ideals associated with modernity – individual liberties, freedoms, toleration, democracy, pluralism – are constitutive with the bloody realities of Western Christian colonialism (Wynter, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2014). Religion, as noted, was deeply implicated in such processes of dehumanization, exploitation, and genocide deemed “necessary” for the sake of development, progress, and civilization. Ramon Grosfouguel (2011) traces how initial universalizing claims shifted over time from appeals to conversion into Christian (Catholic) cosmology to other forms of “good news”, such as progress, civilization, democracy, and development. This points to the ongoing operation of epistemic violence and its packaging as peace messages always designed to placate, domesticate, and ensure stability/security for the modern West as a constellation of historical, political, cultural, and economic forces. The coloniality/modernity interventions clarify what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007, p. 51) meant famously by his notion of the “abyssal line”, a hallmark of modernity, which differentiates between the colonial and normative zones, or what Frantz Fanon influentially termed the “zones of being/nonbeing” (Fanon, 2008, xii; see also Gordon, 2005). In the post-colonial moment, however, “a neat divide between the Old and New World, between the metropolitan and the colonial is over” (Santos, 2007, p. 56). Nevertheless, abyssal lines still operate and dehumanize, echoing the old amity lines drawn in the mid-sixteenth century, which had permitted lawlessness, dispossession, liquidation, and slavery in the colonial zone. A much more “messy cartography” (Santos, 2007, p.  57), characterized by “social apartheid” (Santos, 2007, p.  59) within the metropolitan centers, results in “pluralistic fascism”, by which Santos means a condition in which “societies are politically democratic and socially fascistic” (Santos, 2007, p. 61). Indeed, scholarship in the study of religion (e.g., Masuzawa, 2005) has demonstrated how the consolidation of what Tomoko Masuzawa interprets as an ideology of religious pluralism in the late nineteenth century, looking specifically at the case study of the first convening of the World Parliament of Religion in 1893 in Chicago, coinciding with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which marked 400 years since the “discovery” of America, putting on display a newly formed category called “world religions” and a celebration of pluralism at the seat of empire. Observers of this monumental event reflected: “The word ‘universalism’ tolled like a bell through the halls of the Parliament. The world stood on the technological brink of global civilization, and the hope for the universal in matters of the spirit was just beginning to be voiced” (Pluralism Project, n.d.). This quote conveys the triumphalism at the scaffolding of the ideology of pluralism. It also shows the depoliticization of inter-religious engagement through appeals to sameness. Of course, the very logic of depoliticization is itself political and requires us to ask whose agenda it promotes and how, as well as who does it marginalize and confine. The ideology of pluralism, as reflected in the World Parliament of Religion in Chicago, reveals the consolidation of the imperial dimensions underlying universalizing constructions of religion. The politics of pluralism have persistently helped to maintain Christian Western hegemonies and the ontological and epistemological security of the project of the modern West was often conveyed through a civilizational discourse. The Parliament further offers an early glimpse of the performativity of religious peacebuilding. Pluralism “at home” became, 434

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however, a mechanism for navigating and subduing conflicts by policing the correct loci and forms of religious expressions and, relatedly, the thresholds of belonging and non-belonging to the “secular” political spaces and to normative accounts of citizenship. Indeed, “multiculturalism” as a discourse of citizenship and belonging in Euro-America has continued to camouflage (or not as gleaned from public declarations by notable European leaders such as Angela Merkel declaring, in 2015, that it had failed) orientalist motifs, singling out the supposed religiocultural incompatibility of Muslims with Western values of freedom of expression and women’s rights (Norton, 2020). The global war on terrorism, not surprisingly, unleashed exclusionary ethnoreligious nationalist forces that claimed a supposed lost white and Christian golden age. This is why Kumar is adamant to call the surveillance of Muslims in the US anti-Muslim racism. This is not about inter-religious intolerance or misunderstanding, she underscores; it is about racism, and thus “peace” will entail anti-racist policies rather than only inter-religious dialogue. This points once again to how “interreligious dialogue”, among other similar practices, offers a depoliticized praxis of cosmetic or symbolic peace at its best. That 1648 and 1492 are two dates in the same chronology also exposes the colonial dimensions of a multifaceted tradition of “liberal peace”, which has been under scrutiny in recent years within the scholarly and practitioner spaces known as “peace research” (Little, 2015; Sabaratnam, 2013). If the liberal peace tradition uncritically imposed liberal norms, the failure of such liberal peacebuilding operations in the 1990s led theorists to reassess the top-down logic and implementation of the liberal peace formulas (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Autesserre, 2014). This revision of peacebuilding praxis also underpins a trend called the “local turn”, that is, the recognition that “local” actors, rather than external experts, may have the right keys for implementing peace programs (Appleby, 2015). This “local turn”, which has been critiqued in the peace studies literature (e.g., Hughes et al., 2017; Paffenholtz, 2017), has also denoted the “discovery” of a category of actors, namely, “religious” actors, as especially beneficial in unlocking the supposedly elusive and seemingly static “local”. We surround the word “local” with scare quotes because this category presumes an “international community” that inhabits normative liberal secularity. Within this frame, a turn to the “local” recognizes that top-down impositions are not effective nor desirable and thus emphasizes the need to turn to “local actors” for their “ownership” in peacebuilding and development projects. Our use of “ownership” to highlight the need to cultivate “buy-in” from local communities also telegraphs the transmutation of the “liberal peace” into a neoliberal peacebuilding formation, which thrives on a devolutionary logic of the kind that the “local turn” offers (Omer, 2021). Indeed, the “harnessing” of religious “capital” central to the “engagement with religion” frame reflects a persistent topdown logic, if one interrogates sources of funding and investment. The liberal peace tradition, therefore, coalesces with and shares common roots with democratic (and economic) theory. Both theoretical foci can be traced back to Christian European modernity. Understanding this genealogy of religion and peace as it relates to modernity, the praxis of religious peacebuilding therefore reinforces rather than disrupts the ontological security of this project of modernity. At the same time, important distinctions exist between the instrumental approach to religion, seeking to promote peacebuilding/development outcomes that secure liberal and secular normativity, and what we have termed the “reactionary” register, which instrumentalizes the language of rights and liberties (especially the promotion of freedoms of religion and speech) to entrench ultimately anti-modernist and anti-democratic, civilizational, and theopolitical agendas. The weaponization of religious freedoms began to gain traction in the late 1980s and was institutionalized and mainstreamed especially into US foreign policy (Shakman-Hurd, 2015; Suh, 2016). Of course, religious freedom in itself is a desirable democratic good, but its weaponization reveals an anti-democratic and anti-humanistic agenda, as reflected by the 435

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capturing of legislatures and courts to challenge people’s reproductive rights, along with the humanity of LGBTQI+ people in the name of religious freedom and expression. The promotion of religious freedoms and liberties also has a long colonial history (Mahmood, 2015). The freedom of speech and expression often cross-fertilizing with orientalist appeals to sexual freedoms is another site where civilizational and culturalist policing occurs under the façade of democracy. The upshot is further other-izing and marginalizing of Muslims in the West. This “culture war”, which also veers into and converges more broadly with the policing of women’s bodies and LGBTQI+ communities and other vulnerable populations, manifests repeatedly in controversies, such as burkini bans in France, the sexualized torture in AbuGhraib, and the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed, as in the case of the Jyllands-Posen Danish cartoons of 2005. Critics of modernity/secularity and the politics of “religious engagement” zoom in on the instrumentalization of religion to ensure political hegemony. At the same time, the theo-ideological actors instrumentalize the critique itself, as well as the language of individual liberties and freedoms, to insert – through investment in research and knowledge production designed to inform policy outcomes and agendas – anti-democratic religious and ideological objectives, often coalescing with conservative and neoconservative/neoliberal economic agendas. It is thus not surprising that Brown understands the relations between right-wing exclusionary populist nationalisms, autocracies, and neoliberal policies and commitments as comfortable. The critique of modernity, therefore, takes two turns, both of which present themselves as disruptive of secularist myopias, but both of which reconstitute the modernist logic, either through a utilitarian deployment of religion as an asset or by reclaiming a supposed lost pre-modern Christian coherence, the presumed binary of the “secular”. This harkening back to “coherence” shares ideological elective affinities with racialized accounts of European civilizational superiority, as it unfolds in the various “controversies” that erupt on a regular basis around the question of Muslim belonging or non-belonging to Europe. This is why we conclude by gesturing toward an approach that interrogates the matrices of violence in all their forms. An intersectional approach clarifies why the anti-apartheid mobilization in South Africa constituted a moment of inter-religious peacebuilding because it was humanist and justice oriented. Operationally, this entailed unpacking how religion, peace, and conflict are defined, by whom, and in what context(s). Intersectionality resonates with decolonial thinking insofar as both engage in epistemologies from the margins (Mignolo and Walshe, 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Grosfouguel, 2011; Tarusarira, 2020). Through this prism, we have shown why and how justice concerns are bracketed out of the analysis of religious peacebuilding. This is why our task here has been to bring a robust analysis of the terms under scrutiny – “religion” and “peace” – and to locate them normatively and historically.

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439

INDEX

Note: Locators in italics represent figures and bold indicate tables in the text. 9/11 see September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) 92 Abbasid caliphs 98 Aberhart, William “Bible Bill” 34 abortion rights 29, 35, 44, 48, 52, 55, 57, 234, 261 Abraham Accords 432 Abu-Nimer, Mohammed 428 ABVP 92n1 Adhān 288 Adityanath, Yogi 23 Adivasis 90 Adler, Felix 285 Advani, L.K. 85, 88 Afghanis 250 Afghanistan 4, 9, 158 Africanisation 390 Agamben, Giorgio 310 Agganna sutta 14 aggressive nationalism 52 Agudat Yisrael 190 AIDS 52 Akhand Bharat (undivided India) 85 AK Party, Turkey 333 al-Assad, Hafiz 248 Alawis 248 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 98, 249 al-Bakri an-Namiri, Muhammad ibn Nusayr 248 al-Banna, Hassan 98, 101, 103 – 104, 106 – 107, 214, 414 Alberta’s Social Credit Party 34 Algeria 200 al-Hakim, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir 117 al-Jawziyya, Ibn Qayyim 106 Allen, Katy 357

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) 31 All India Hindu Mahasabha 83 al-Nabhani, Taqi al-Din 98 al-Qaeda 4 – 7, 9, 104, 118, 214, 216, 218 – 220, 249 – 250, 337, 343, 375, 380, 415, 418, 427 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 107 al-Sadr, Musa 120 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 226, 231 – 232 alt right 227 al-Wahhab, Muhammad b. Abd 105 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab 415 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 23, 84, 92n6 Ambedkarite Buddhist activism 23 Ambekar, Sunil 84 American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) 31 American Civil Liberties Union 401 American Ethical Union 285 American Friends Service Committee 338 American Humanist Association 293 American Religious Right 30 Amir, Yigal 413 Amstutz, M. 333 Anderson, Benedict 240 Angarika Dhammapala 20 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) 112 Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage 347 an-Nahda 214 Anthony, D. 201 anti-abortion issues 196 anti-beef eating 82 anti-conversion law 87 anti-discrimination support network 291 anti-gay propaganda laws 263 anti-globalisation activities 6

440

Index anti-immigrant movements and religion in western Europe and US 233 – 236 anti-immigrant parties 225 – 227; anti-Muslim, right-wing populist parties 174; Christian reactions and religion in western Europe and the US 233 – 236; religion and 229 – 233; socio-demographic roots 227 – 229 anti-immigrationism 227 anti-Islam strategy 9 anti-Muslim movements 19 anti-Muslim policies 171 anti-Muslim racism 427 anti-religious Communist state 275 anti-religious secular ideologies 272 anti-secularism 417 – 418 anti-slavery female activists 388 anti–World Trade Organisation protests 6 Appleby, R. Scott 428 ‘aqida 104 Aquino, Ninoy 59 Arab nationalism 216 Arab Spring 203 Aran, Gideon 129 Arato, Andrew 231 Arendt, Hannah 230 al Aridi, Yahya 247 Articles 370 and 35A 91 Arya Samaj 84 Ashin Wirathu 19 Asoka, emperor 14 assisted suicide 261 associational nexus 183 asylum seekers 307 Ateistene 288 – 289 Atheist Bus Campaign 290 Augustine, Saint 242 Aum Shinrikyo movement 416 Aung San Suu Kyi 19 Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) 230 authoritarianism 57 ayatollah 116 Ayodhya 86, 88, 235, 333, 415 Aytzim 358, 364 Azad Samaj Party 23 Baath Socialist Party 248 Babri Masjid demolition 88 – 89, 188, 245, 415 Baddegama Samitha 20 Badr Brigade 119 Baghdad 119 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 23 Bajrang Dal 92 Bancada Evangélica 32 Bannon, Steve 234 baptized (amritdhari) Sikhs 352 Barber, Benjamin 411 Bartholomew I, Patriarch 50

Basedau, M. 333 Basrur, R. 334 Basu, Rajnarayan 82 Battle of Kosovo, 1389 159 Bedouins of Sinai 5 Bell, Daniel A. 68 Bellah, R.N. 201 – 202 Benedict XVI 49 Ben-Gurion, David 126 “Berlin-Rome-Vienna” axis 171 Bettiza, Gregoria 378 – 379 Betz, H.G. 229 Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) 85 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 81, 92, 188, 190 – 191, 200, 244, 333, 346, 380; formation 81, 86; growth 93n17; victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections 89; victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections 89 – 91 Bharatiya Kisan Sangh 92n1 Bhikshuvage Urumaya 20 Bhim Army 23 Bin Laden, Osama 7 birtherism 31 BJP see Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) 19 – 20, 416 Boko Haram, Nigeria 6 – 7 Bolsonaro, Jair 32 Bommai 93n14 Bommai v. Union of India 88 Bompani, B. 401 Book of Genesis, The 311 Booth, William 34 borderland stability 143 Bornschier, Simon 185 Bourdieu, Pierre 305 Bradlaugh, Charles 284 Brahmin-Aryan supremacy 83 Brahmin-Bania phenomenon 85 Brazil’s conservative Protestants 33 Brexit referendum 175, 227 – 228 British establishmentarianism 197 British Humanist Association 290 British Union of Ethical Societies 285 Brouwer, Steve 30 Brown, K. 335 Brubaker, Roger 171, 174, 334 Bruce, Steve 33 Bryan, William Jennings 34 Buddhadasa 17 Buddha-dharma (Buddhist morality) 13 Buddha Issara 17 Buddha’s Light International Association 21 Buddhism and politics 68, 333; in Asia 15; in Australia 234; Cambodia 22 – 23; China 15 – 16, 25; future 24 – 25; India 16, 23; Japan 17 – 18; Myanmar 19 – 20; Pali sacred literature 13 – 14; past 13 – 15; present 15; religious terrorism

441

Index 416 – 417; South Korea 20 – 21; Sri Lanka 20, 24 – 25; Taiwan 21 – 22; Tawang Stupa 24; Thailand 16 – 17, 24; Theravada Buddhist tradition 14; Tibet 15 – 16; in UK 23; Vietnam 18, 25; visions 24; Western countries 23 – 24 Buddhists 15; Buddhist Brigade 20; by country in 2010 15; dalit 23; extremists 411; monastics 20; monks 17, 197; morality 16; nationalisms 255; reformers 17; social contract 17; socialism 189; Soka Gakkai organisation 17; temples and monasteries 16 Burgat, François 216 Burge, Ryan 36 Bush, George W. 318, 347, 400 Buzan, B. 330 Byzantine Empire 155 Byzantines 240 Caesari, Jocelyn 265 Cairo 105 Cakkavati-Sihanada Sutta 14 Cakkavatti (‘Wheel-Turning Monarch’) 14 Calvinist Christian Reconstruction movement 412 Calvinist notion of predestination 310 Campaign for Civil Disobedience (CDM) 19 Campbell, John 143 capitalism 310 Capitol riots, 2021 225 carbon pharaohs 357 Cardinal Ratzinger 54 Carey, William 34 Caritas 50 Casanova, José 230, 348 caste-bound Hindu system 82 Castro, Fidel 50 Catholic church and Catholicism 21, 48 – 49, 348; Africa, Catholic leaven in struggles 57 – 58; Asia, civil society 58 – 60; Catholic global activism 49 – 53; China 59; Europe, Christian roots and secularisation 53 – 54; Laos 59; Latin America, democracy and development 55 – 56; Middle East, crisis for Christianity 60; North Korea 59; Taiwan and South Korea 59; United States, robust presence 54 – 55; Vatican diplomacy 49 – 53; Vietnam 59 Catholic Relief Services 50 Cavatorta, F. 182 Central African Republic (CAR) 57, 145 Chan, Joseph 68 Chhatrapati Shivaji 84 Chih-yu Shih 77 China: Buddhism in 15 – 16, 25; China Labour Bulletin 71; Chinese Catholics 59 – 60; Chinese Communist Party 72; Chinese culture and Buddhism 16; Confucianism in 70 – 73; Muslim

and Christian populations 3; news media 71; protests and strikes 72 Choson dynasty 20 Christian Democracy in (West) Germany 200 Christian Democracy party 189 Christian(ity) 102, 117; civilizationism 177; Civilizationism in Western Europe 169; democracy 187; fundamentalists 30, 168; growth rate 2; Identity movement 412; modernity 428; nationalism 30, 255; neo-nationalism 255; religious terrorism 412 – 413; symbols 231 Chung-rae, Jung 21 churches 197; political mobilization 201 church-state relations 197 – 199 Chutzpah 2020 367 Cimbalo, G. 263 civil religion 195, 202, 398 Civil Rights Movement 306 civil society 1, 196; Arab Spring and 203 – 206; Catholic church and Catholicism in Asia 58 – 60; culture wars in USA 201 – 203; and religion 195 – 196 civil union 54 civil war in Mozambique 52 civil war in Syria 50 clash of civilizations 3, 177, 320, 346 climate change 6 climate pharaohs 357 Clinton, Hillary 235 Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) 358, 362 – 363 Cold War 219, 291, 324, 338 communalism 244 community-building Buddhist organisations 22 community of the center (umma wasat) 107 Comte, Auguste 285 Confucianism 16, 66 – 68, 336; China 70 – 73; elements of 68; and modern politics 69; political elites 69 – 70; as religion 68 – 69; scholars 75 – 76; Singapore 73 – 75; social 69, 76 – 78; societies influenced by 67; virtue of harmony 70 Confucius 66 Connolly, William 144, 314 Conservative Judaism 127 conservative Protestant 29 – 30; on abortion 38; Asia 39; Australia 39; Brazil 32 – 33; on Churches and religious organizations 42; classification 36; data and methods 35 – 37; eightpoint scale 36; findings and discussion 37 – 44; made in America 30 – 33; New Zealand 39; reflections 44; rejects someone of different religion 43; for religious leaders 41; right-leaning party vote 40; on same-sex relations 39; variations on theme 33 – 35 Constituent Assembly (1946–1950) 244 Constitution of Medina 102

442

Index constitutive foundational myth of IR 345 constructive engagement 143 constructivism 241, 317 constructivist 216 consumerism 54, 127 cookie-cutter fashion 146 Coordinating Council of Secular Organizations in Germany 282 Corby, Jermey 227 corporate pharaohs 357 Corrales, Javier 32 cosmic war 418 cosmotheism 412 counterinsurgency 9, 155 counterterrorism 155, 161 COVID-19 pandemic 6, 265, 313, 345 cow movement (1893–1894) 244 Cow slaughter ban 82, 85 Cragun, R.T. 292 crusades 155 cultural Christians 175 culturalisation 232 cultural Judaism 127 cultural populism 31 Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) 15 culture wars 3 Da Ci’en Pagoda 16 Dahl, Robert 271 Dalai Lama 16, 23 – 24, 319 dalit Buddhist 23 Dalits 90 Dallmayr, Fred 302 Daoism 68 dar al-islam 103 dasarajadhamma 14 Davie, Grace 127, 260 Davies, Thomas 175 Dawkins, Richard 290 dawla 198 Dayenu 366 – 367 de Bary, Theodore 68 decolonisation 200 decriminalization of marijuana 57 degree of secularisation 196 DeHanas, Daniel Nilsson 171, 174 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 274 democratisation 1, 199 Deng Xiaoping 70 de-privatization of religion 264 deterrence-driven policies 305 de Tocqueville, A. 201 development 1 dhamma 17 dhammayatra 22 dharma 13 – 14 Diamond, Larry 184, 186

Dignitatis Humanae 349 discrimination: religious 271; against the Rohingya 143 disenchantment 310, 312 Dittmer, L. 77 Diyanet 334 Djokovic, Novak 303 Doh Chull Shin 77 Doohwan, Chun 21 Dravidian nationalism 83 Druze community 247 Durkheim, Émile 311 Duverger, M. 188 East Timor 59 ecclesia catholica 349 Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) 351 Egypt 200 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood 101 Ekström, Mat 177n1 Emunim, Gush 129 Encarnación, Omar G. 32 English school 317, 377 Ennahda 206 entecostalism 57 EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston) 334 erroneous rationalism 311 ethno-cultural group identity 231 ethnopluralism 230 Europe, religion, politics and law 254; ethical and moral issues 260 – 262; Islamic exception 257 – 260; religion, legal definition of 256; religion, problem or solution 264 – 265; religious diversity, protection of 257; religious turn in public space 254 – 255; re-politization of religion 255 – 256; Ukrainian crisis 263 – 264 European Christianity 141; see also Christian(ity) European Commission against Racism and Intolerance 274 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 254, 256, 258 – 264 European culture 4 Evangelical Christians 337 evangelicalism 36 exceptionalism-debate 209 – 210; content versus function of religion 212 – 213; explanation 210 – 212; international relations (IR) 209; Islamism studies (IS) 209; Islamists 213 – 217; jihadist conflicts 209, 217 – 220; peace and conflict research (PCR) on Islamism and jihadism 209 – 210; religion and international relations 210; religion as religion 213 extreme right 227 factionalism 2 Faith-based actors 306, 399, 402, 406

443

Index faith-based diplomacy 332 Faith-based Foreign Aid 337 faith-based organisations (FBO) 396 – 397; Christian missionaries 397; definitions and typologies 402 – 405; faith actors and state 400 – 401; faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) 396, 398 – 400; international development 397 – 398, 401 – 402; localisation and development 405 – 406 Farage, Nigel 175 – 176, 227 far right 227 fascism 388 fascist political ideology 178n2 fatwa 9n1, 119 Fazzino, L.L 292 FBO see faith-based organisations (FBO) Fedotova v. Russia 263 feminism 385; feminist approach 388 – 389; political religion and 386 – 394; positionality 385 – 386 Fernández-García, B. 232 Fisher, Elaine M. 91, 94n18 Flemish Humanists 287 Flemish Secular Humanists 287 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 140 foreign policies 1, 330 – 331; domestic actors, politics and 332 – 334; prescriptions for 338 – 339; religion’s influence on individuals 331 – 332; states and religion 334 – 337; transnational actors 337 – 338 Forlenza, R. 259 Fortuyn, Pim 171 fossil-fuel pharaoh 357 Foucauldian concept of governmentality 241 Fox, Jonathan 68 – 69, 211 Francis 49 – 51 Fratelli Tutti 52 Freedom and Justice Party 206, 214 Freedom of religion 339 Freedom of Religion Bill 87 Freethinker gap in Germany 290 Freethinker tradition in Belgium 287 French mandate (1923–1946) 248 French Revolution in 1789 197 Freston, Paul 33 Friedland, R. 241 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia 32 Fumio Kishida 18 fundamentalism 97, 255 fundamentalist religious actors 196 Gaddafi, Muammar 204 Ganapati festivals 82 Gandhi, Indira 85; assassination 86 Gandhi, Mahatma 81, 83 Gandhi, Rahul 89 – 90 Gandhi, Rajiv 88

gau-rakshaks 82 Gay International 146 gay marriages 57; see also LGBTIQ+ rights Gaza settlements 130 Gaza Strip 161 Geetha, V. 83 Gellner, Ernest 240 gender 1 Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power, The 377 George, Cherian 175 German Freethinker Associations 285 German Humanist Association 289 German Zentrum 182 Geun-hye, Park 21 Ghana 57 Gill, Anthony 271, 321, 337 Giordano Bruno Foundation 290 global financial crise 313 globalization 2 – 4, 310, 347; Sikhism 353 Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) 220 God’s Century 417 Godse, Nathuram 84 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 83 Golden Light Sutra by Dharmaksema 13 Golden Temple 354 Goldsmith, Mirele 357 Goldstein, Baruch 413 Gould, William 81, 83 governmentality 241 Graham, Bruce 85 Great Depression 311 Greek Orthodox Church 274 GreenFaith 364 Green Zionist Alliance 358 Grenell, Richard 171 Grenfell, Wilfred 34 group religiosity 206 Guardian Council 117 Gujarat model of good governance 89 Gülen Movement 380 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 5 Gulf War in 1990 – 1991 118 Gunning, Jeroen 212 Gunther, Richard 184, 186 gurdwara 352 Guru Gobind Singh 352 Guru Granth Sahib 352 Gush Emunim 129 Habermas, Jürgen 299, 301 Habermasian approach 313 Habermasian postsecularism 309 HADATA 127 hadiths 98 – 99 HaIhud Haleumi 131 hakimiyya 106 hakimiyyat al-bashar lil-ba 106

444

Index hakimiyyat Allah 106 Hamas 216 Hamid, Shadi 378 HaMizrahi 129 Hanh, Thich Nhat 24 HaPoel HaMizrachi 131 haredi 128 Harris, Ian 14, 22 Harris, Paul 13 Hashanah, Rosh 367 al-Hashd al-Shaabi 119 Hassner, R.E. 336 Hayek, Friedrich 311 – 312 Haynes, Jeffrey 212, 377, 417 Hazon’s Jewish Climate 358 Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram 84, 92n5 hedonism 127 hegemonic Islam 246 – 247 hermeneutical excavation 428 Hertzke, A.D. 337 Hezbollah 121, 159, 323; Lebanese political system 122; Mobilization for Education Committee 122; social services, and education 121 – 122 hijra 106 Hindi-Hindu-Baniya-North-Indian entity 92 Hindu Code Bill 85 Hindu cultural nationalism 346 Hindu extremists 157 Hinduism 85, 197, 255; as modern religion 244; politicization of 243 – 244; religious terrorism 415 – 416; as Vedanta 245 Hindu Mahasabha 83, 85, 245 Hindu nationalism 81 – 94; Brahmo Samaj 82; exclusionary nationalism 82; Freedom of Religion Bill 87; Hindutva Case 87; incidental Hindu and inclusionary nationalism 82; public Hindu and exclusionary nationalism 82 – 83; public Hindu and inclusionary nationalism 82 – 83; South India response 83 – 84 Hindu revivalism 83 Hindus 240; nationalists 85; traditionalists 85 Hindutva 87 Hizb-ut-Tahrir 98, 104 Hobsbawm, Eric 240 Hochschild 231 Holyoake, George J. 284 – 285 Holy See 49, 51 homogenisation 246 Houthi rebels in Yemen 159 Hsing Yun 21 – 22 Hu Jintao 72 – 73 hukm Allah 106 human freedom 312 humanism 283 Humanist 284 Humanist Association in Flanders 287

Humanistische Lebenskunde 289 Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands 282 Humanist Leitkultur 290 Humanist News Service 282 Humanists International 283 human sexuality 52 human trafficking 50 Hun Sen 22 Huntington, Samuel 3, 157, 168, 170, 214, 320, 326, 347, 411 Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations 326 Husain, Tajamul 92n7 Hussain, S.J. 319 Hussein, Saddam 60, 118 – 119 Huysman, Jeff 175 Ibn Taymiyya 106 Ikhwan al-Muslimin 414 Imam Ali mosque bombing, Belgium 4 Iman 104 inclusionary pluralism 83 inclusion-moderation thesis 184 India 3; Buddhists in 23; Hinduism 82; Tibetan refugees in 23 Indianness 244 individualism 127 Indo-Chinese war, 1962 23 inequality, economic and developmental 2 information and communication technology (ICT) 347 institutional Hindu nationalism 81 institutional pharaohs 357 insular pluralism 91 integralism 97 integrism 97 intercivilizational conflict with Islamist violent extremists 167 International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, 339 international community 5 International Confucian Association 70 international development 407n1 international relations (IR) 1, 209, 299, 317, 330, 343; classical realism and religion 317 – 318; constitutive foundational myth 345; identity 325 – 326; institutions 320 – 321; legitimacy 318 – 319; non-state religious actors 321 – 323; religious states 323 – 324; transnational religious movements 321 – 323; transnational religious trends, issues, and phenomena 324 – 325; Westphalian system of 346; worldviews 319 – 320 international religious freedom 139 – 141, 337; believing in religious freedom 147 – 151; empowerment and exclusion 144 – 147; end of religious freedom 151; religious rights 141 – 144

445

Index International Religious Freedom Report for Guatemala 145 International Secular Humanism 283 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 30, 36 – 37, 40 internet-based communications technologies 4 inter-religious conflict 8 inter-religious tensions 2 inter-religious unity 50 intra-faith discord 3 intra-Islamic conflict 8 IR see international relations (IR) Iran: foreign interference 112; in Iraq 118 – 119; Islamic constitution and government 116; Islamic Revolution, 1979 111 – 112, 115 – 117, 120; Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IGRC) Quds Force 119; oil production 111; political instability 112; Shia Islam 111 – 112; Shia Islamic constitution 116 – 117 Iranian revolution, 1978 – 1979 2 – 3, 8, 167, 255, 427 Iraq 5 – 6, 9, 111 Irish Republican Army 216 irrational effusion 303 irrational egoism 320 Islamic Association 414 Islamic-Christian conflict 8 Islamic-Jewish conflict 8 Islamic law 99 Islamic others 226, 229, 232, 236 Islamic Relief 399 Islamic Revolution 322; 1983 117; 1979 119 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 4 – 5, 7, 9, 49 – 50, 60, 119, 214, 218 – 220, 249, 337, 411, 415; Iraqi Shia adversaries 119 – 120; style radicalisation 5; weakened 120 Islam(ism) 96 – 97, 104, 214; approximation 198; defined 96; extremism/terrorism 9; faith and works 104 – 105; Five Pillars of Islam 100; fundamentalism 4; growth rate 2; hajj 100; Hakimiyya, Ibn 105 – 106; ibadat 100; jahiliyya 105 – 106; jihad 103; moderation and centrism 107; Muslims and non-Muslims 102 – 103; as phenomenon 215; Qutb, Sayyid 105 – 106; religious authority 97 – 98; religious terrorism 414 – 415; revivalism 97; salat 100; sawm 100; shahada 100; Shi‘a and Sufis 103 – 104; Sri Lanka 20; as system 99 – 101; takfir 103; terrorism 229; as text 99; zakat 100 Islamism studies (IS) 209 Islamist movements 5, 158 Islamists, exceptionalism-debate 210, 213 – 214; exceptional other 215; like any other actor 215 – 216; like no other actors 214; similar but not same 216 – 217 Islamist terrorism 167, 177 Islamophobia 258

Israel, religion and politics in 125, 146; being Jewish 127 – 128; Jewish State 125 – 126; populism 132 – 135; religious-Zionism 128 – 131; rise of conservatism 131 – 132; secularization 126 – 127 Israel Defense Forces 131 Israel Democracy Institute 134 Israeli conservative movement 131 Istanbul 248 i‘tiqad 104 Jaffrelot, Christophe 90 Jamaat-i-Islami 414 Jammu and Kashmir 91 Janata Party 85 Jardina, A. 231 Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) 20 Jerusalem 320 Jesuit Refugee Services 50 Jewish Climate Action Network (JCAN) 358, 365 Jewish climate activism 357; 2009 – 2022 362 – 368; climate action 362 – 368; climate groups 365 – 368; climate protests 364 – 365; initiatives 358 – 361; Judaism 368 – 369; pioneers 358; rise of 358 – 362 Jewish Earth Alliance 365 – 366 Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign 363 Jewish Energy Guide 358 Jewish Environmental and Energy Imperative 363 Jewishness 127 Jewish Orthodoxy 125, 127 Jewish refugees 168 Jewish Statesmanship Center 131 Jewish Youth Climate Movement 366 – 367 Jews 102, 117 Jews Against Hydrofracking 358, 365 Jiang Zemin 71, 73, 77 jihad 97, 104, 411 jihadist conflicts 209 – 210, 217 – 220 jihadist Islamism 96 jihadist violence 107 Jogyesa Temple 21 John Paul II 49 – 50, 54 Johnson, Boris 171 Johnston, D.M. 339 Joppke, Christian 174 Judaism 125; religious terrorism 413 Judaism climate activism 368 – 369 Judeo-Christian values 169 – 170, 428 Juergensmeyer, Mark 319 Jugendweihe 289 Justice and Development Party in Turkey 190 – 191, 206 Kach (Thus) Party 413 Kadury, Yitzhak 133 Kahane, Meir 413

446

Index Kalmar, Ivan 174 Kalyvas, Stathis N. 163, 219, 332 Kamali, Seinitz 170 Kampfbegriffe 227 Kant, Immanuel 302 – 303, 310 Kantian-Habermasian cognitive tradition of secularity 314 Karadic, Radovan 337 Kashani, Ayatollah Sayyed Abol Qasem 112 Kaufmann, Eric 231, 235 Kayam Farm 358 Kellstedt, Lyman 234 Kennedy, Emmet 302 Kenya 57 Kes-dhari Sikhs 352 Khaadiim al-Haramain al-Sharifain 336 khalifat Allah 98 Khalsa 352 Khalsa Rahit 352 Khasa Panth 345 Khilafat Movement 98, 244 Khomeini, Ahmad 120 Khomeini, Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi 114 – 116, 118, 120, 214, 255, 334, 379 kibbutz movement 131 K’iche’ People’s Council’s (KPC) 145 Kiir, Salva 57 Kim Dae-jung 59 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 418 King, Steve 169 King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural dialogue (KAICIID) 432 Kippur, Yom 367 Kirchheimer, Otto 184 Kirill, Patriarch 263 – 264 Kiryat Arba 413 kitsch Christianity 232 Klein, Axel 18 Kohelet Policy 131 Kongfuzi (Confucius) 66 Kook, Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen 129 Kook, Zvi Yehudah 129 “Kookist” religious-Zionists 131 Koordinierungsrat Säkularer Organisationen 282 Koryo dynasty 20 Krause, Christian 232 Krishna Consciousness Movement 146 Kurtz, Paul 292 Kurz, Sebastian 171 Kyrgyzstan’s 2008 Law on Freedom of Religion and Religious Organizations 274 Labor Party 126 Labor-Zionist secular hegemony 129 Ladakh 91 Latin American Bishop’s Conference (CELAM) 56

Laustesen, C.B. 212 Law of Return 127 Lebanese Shias 122 Lebanon 111, 159 Lee Kuan Yew 69 Lee v. Ashers Baking Company 31 left-wing 177n1 legal abortion 54 Legalism 68 legitimacy 318 – 319 legitimation deficit 70 Leitkultur 283 Leustean, Lucian N. 375 Lewis, Bernard 214 LGBTIQ+ rights 29 – 30, 32 – 33, 35, 44, 234, 262, 264 – 265 Lia, B. 219 liberal Democratic Party of Korea 21 liberalism 317 Liberal Party 286 liberal secular model 199 Liberation Theology movement 189, 351 libertas ecclesiae 60 Likud party 131 – 134 Lipschultz, Ronnie 344 Lipset, S.M. 185 Little, R. 330 Livingstone, David 34 Lloyd, John 174 local faith actor (LFA) 397 Long, William J. 13 Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa 411 Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda 331 Love Makes a Way (LMAW) 306, 307 – 308 Lula, Luiz Inácio 33 Machar, Riek 57 Machiavelli, N. 318 MacKinnon, Donald 211 Macron, Emmanuel 170 Madan, T.N. 82 – 83, 91 Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act 86 Mahabharta 415 Maha-samata 14 Mahdi Army 119 Mahmood, Saba 389 Malacca Strait 143 Mali 7 Mamlachtiyut 126, 129 Mandaville, Peter 375, 377 Manicheans 102 Mao’s pathological anti-Confucian campaigns 69 Mao Zedong 77 MAPAI 125 – 126, 129 maqasid al-shari‘a 101 marginalization 90 Markell, Patchen 146

447

Index Marrakesh Declaration, 2016 424, 428 marriage rights 48 Marshall, K. 398 Marx, Anthony 241 Marxism 317 Marxist secular states 199 Massad, Joseph 146 massdenominational party 184 MassEnergize 365 mass-party model 187 materialism 54 Maududi, Abul A’la 99, 214 Mavelli, Luca 302 al-Mawardi, Abu l-Hasan 100 Mawdudi, Maulana Abu al-Ala 414 McKenna, Jarrod 306 McLaughlin, Levi 18 McVeigh, Timothy 412 McWorld 411 Mearsheimer, John 321 Mecca 102 Medina 102 Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth 234 Middle East, crisis for Christianity 60 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 2 – 8, 203 – 205; historical and structural characteristics 205 – 206; international community 428; Sunni Islamic Caliphate 343 Míguez, Néstor 312 mihna 98 Militant Sunni Islamists 104 milla 104 Milosevic, Slobodan 159 Min Aung Hlaing 19 – 20, 24 Minh Niệm 18 Mitchell, Claire 133 Mizrahi immigrants 128 Mizrahim 128 Mladic, Ratko 338 mobilization theory 320 moderate Muslims 432 moderation by inclusion thesis 191 moderation (wasatiyya) 97 modernism 241 Modi, Narendra 23, 31, 81, 84, 89, 171, 334, 380 Mohammad, Khalid Shaikh 414 Mondi, Baba 379 monotheistic diktat 243 Monte Cassino 162 Mookerjee, Syama Prasad 85 Morgenthau, Hans J. 211, 318 – 320, 323 – 324 Moroccan Jama‘at al-‘Adl wa-l-Ihsan 104 Morocco 200 Mosaddegh, Mohammad 112 – 113 Moscow 321 Mosul 59 – 60 Motherland Party in Turkey 190

Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet 358, 364 muhafaza 248 multiculturalism 176, 435 Muslim and Islamic Interventions and Religious Engagement 337 Muslim and Sikh insurgents in Kashmir 160 Muslim Brotherhood 97, 104, 215, 249, 414 Muslim Brothers 98 Muslim-Buddhist tensions 143 Muslim immigration 177 Muslim imperialism 155 Muslim League 83 Muslim-majority societies 336 Muslim politics 213, 217 Muslim secularists 206 Muslim versus West conflict 326 Myung-bak, Lee 21 Nag, Kingshuk 85 Nanninga, Pieter 163 National Democratic Alliance 91 National Democratic Party (NPD) 230 national Free-Religious umbrella organization 284 National Heritage Party 20 nationalism 240 – 241 nationalist-populist parties 260 National League for Democracy (NLD) 19, 142 National People’s Congress (NPC) 70 national populist 227 National-Religious Party platform 131 nation and dharma 244 nation-building in Muslim countries 246 nativist 227 Nazism 388 Nehruvian secular nationalism 346 neo-Confucianism 66 neofundamentalism 97 neoliberal modernisation 310 neoliberal rationalities of inequality 313 neo-pagan symbolism 226 neorealism 317 Netanyahu, Benjamin 133 – 135 Neuhaus, Richard John 255 Neumann’s model 185 – 186 New Christian Right (NCR) 202 New Clean Government Party 17 New Komeito Party (NKP) 17 – 18 New Testament 349 Nichiren Buddhist tradition 18 Niebuhr, Reinhold 211, 318, 320 Nigeria 7 Nightingale, Florence 34 Nilsson, Desiree 158 Nirmohi Akhara 245 – 246 Nixon, Richard 203 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 49 – 50, 396, 399 – 400

448

Index non-kosher meat 127 normalization of anti-Muslim sentiment 258 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation bombing campaign 204 Norwegian Humanist and Ethical Association 288 Norwegian Pagan Society 288 Nouvelle Droite 234 Obama, Barack 50 oil-boom, 1970s 216 OpenDemocracy 31 Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation 142 Orbán, Viktor 171 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 338, 344, 380 Orsi, Robert 146, 148 other backward classes (OBCs) 90 Ottoman Empire 246 out-group derogation 157 Ozdamar, O. 334 Ozzano, Luca 182, 184 Pacem in Terris 51 Pact of Umar 102 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza 112 – 115, 120 Pakistan 3 – 4, 334 Pal, Bipin Chandra 82 pancasila 198 Panchen Lama 16 Pandin Dharma Party 17 Pan-Islamism 334 papal absolutism 349 paradox of democracy 186 Patel, Sardar 81 Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the West 225 peace and conflict research (PCR) on Islamism and jihadism 209 – 210 Peace Brigades 119 Peace of Westphalia of 1648 317, 343 – 344, 426 peace research 435 Pelosi, Nancy 55 Pence, Mike 234 pentecostalism 255 Periyar 83, 85 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act 400 Pfeiffer, B. 333 pharaohs of global scorching 357 philosophical Sufism 104 Philpott, Daniel 330, 417 Pierce, William 412 Piñera, Sebastián 32 pluralism 282 – 283 pluralistic fascism 434 Pluralist political project of Humanism in USA 293 Polakow-Suransky, Sasha 175

Poland 54 political assertiveness 3 political beliefs 149 political Brahminism 83 political Confucianism 77 political Islam 97 political legitimacy 241 politically assertive religion 2 political mobilization 320 political polarization 254 Pope John Paul II 52 Pope John XXIII 52 Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) 119 populism 1 postsecularism 299 – 301; faith-based organization and migration 303 – 309; Habermas’ cognitive account 301 – 303; postsecular sacralization of market 310 – 313 postsecularism in IR 299 – 300 postsecular sacralization of market 301 Pot, Pol 22 Povinelli, Elizabeth 146 power of articulation 301 Prabhoo v. Kunte 87 Prayut Chan-o-cha 17 private international organizations 399 prophet Muhammad 98, 102 proselytizing, restrictions on 270 – 272; global patterns 272; illegal or banned 274 – 275; percentage of countries 273; types of 273 – 278 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 310 psycho-cultural traits 241 public space, religious turn in 254 – 255 Punjab Hindu Sabha 83 Putin, Vladimir 375 QAnon movement 413 Qing Jiang 68 Quakers 338 Qur’an 97, 99, 102, 214; see also Islam(ism) Qutb, Sayyid 214, 249 Rabbi 285 Rabin, Yitzhak 413 racism of intelligence 305 Raczynski, Katrin 282 radical Islamic terrorism 171, 175 radicalization processes 191 radical political movements 411 radical right 227 Rahula, Walpole 20 Raja-dharma 13 Rajadura, S.V. 83 Rajapaksa, Gotabaya 20 Rajapaksa, Mahinda 20 Raj-niti 14 Ramayana 415

449

Index Ramdas, Samartha 84 Ram temple in Ayodhya 86, 88, 245, 333, 415 Ranade, Jayadeva 83 Rantisi, Abdul Azis 418 Rao, Narasimha 89 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 81, 84, 92n1, 188 Rational Press Association 285 Ratzinger, Joseph 56 Ravan, Chandrashekhar Azad 23 Rawls, John 433 realism 319 Red Army Faction 216 refugee crises 313 regenerative power 301 Rehat 352 Rehat Maryada 352 religion: anti-immigrant parties and 229 – 233; Arab Spring and civil society 203 – 206; and battlefield 155 – 156; and civil society 195 – 196; content versus function 212 – 213; culturalisation of 226; culture wars and civil society in USA 201 – 203; democratisation 200; exceptionality in IR 210; explaining 210 – 212; multifaceted phenomenon 317; and political change 200; and political society 196; as religion 213; and state 197 – 199; as sui generis 213 religionalization see HADATA religion and conduct of war 160; discipline and unit cohesion 160 – 161; religious opportunities and constraints during war 161 – 163 religion and nation 240; Alawi community 248 – 250; dispute over sacred sites 245 – 246; hegemonic Islam beyond borders 246 – 247; Islam, transnational politicization of 249 – 250; nationalism 240 – 242; religion versus politics divide 242 – 245 religion and political parties 182 – 184; conservative type 187 – 188; dynamics of religiously oriented parties 190 – 191; fundamentalist parties 185 – 186; religious communities in pluralistic context 189 – 190; religious identity 184 – 185; religious left 189; religious nationalism and right-wing populism 188 – 189 Religion and State (RAS) dataset 272 religion as cause of war 156; identifying combatants 156 – 158; mobilizing combatants 158 – 159; organizing combatants 159 – 160 Religions for Peace (RfP) 430 religious: civilizationism 31; civil wars 158; cleavage 184 – 185; difference 1; discrimination 157; entrepreneurs 332; freedom 49; freedom misfits 146; fundamentalisms 6; grievances 157; immunity 234; individuals 332; intelligence 162; legitimacy 318 – 319; minorities 4; monopoly 271; morality 261; movements and terrorism 322; nationalism 258; nationalist

movements in India 255; neutrality 257; violence 212; violent extremism 1; warfare (jihad) 209 religious peacebuilding 423 – 424; modernity 433 – 436; peace, religion, and the neoliberal turn 424 – 426; Peace of Westphalia of 1648 426 – 428; religious engagement 428 – 433 Religious Right political movement 29, 31 Religious Society of Friends 338 religious soft power 375 – 378; limits 381 – 382; sources 378 – 381 religious terrorism 1, 7, 322, 411 – 412; anti-secularism 417 – 418; Buddhism 416 – 417; Christianity 412 – 413; Hinduism 415 – 416; Islam 414 – 415; Judaism 413; rise of 417; Sikhism 415 – 416; violence, religious justifications for 418 – 421 religious-Zionism 128 – 131, 135 re-nationalization of transnational religious actors 344 repolitization of religion 255 reproductive rights 261 revivalist Islam 255 Richard, Jackson 212 Rida, Rashid 98, 250 Rieger, Joerg 312 right-wing 177n1 right-wing Christian evangelicals 169 Right-Wing populism and religion 7, 32, 167 – 169; Christian civilizationism in the USA and Europe 169 – 176 right-wing populist parties 227 – 228 Right-wing populist politicians 167 right-wing populists 167 Robbins, T. 201 Roe v. Wade 32, 55 Rohingya 142 – 143; discrimination against 143 Rokkan, S. 185 Roman Catholic Churches 197, 284, 344, 348 – 351 Roman Catholicism in Italy 200 Roosevelt, Theodore 34 Rose, Richard 185 Rosenberg, E. 232 Rosenzweig, Rainer 282 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 201 Rowe, Paul 34 Roy, Olivier 232 Roy, Raja Ram Mohan 82 Ruby Ridge 412 Rushdie, Salman 9n1 Russian invasion of Ukraine 6, 51, 263 – 264, 375 Russian Neo-Imperialism 264 Russian orthodoxy 240 Russkii Mir 263 Russo-Ukrainian war 313 Rwanda 57

450

Index Sabbath 127 Sacks of Aldgate 243 sacralisation of politics 387 Sahajdhari Sikhs 352 Said, Edward 215 Saidian, critical or poststructuralist/colonialist 215 Saivite 91 Sako, Patriarch 60 Salafi-jihadism 250 Salafi movement in Iran 5 Salafist 5 Salafiyya 98 salaf salih 102 Salvation Army 34 Salvini, Matteo 225 same-sex marriages 54; see also LGBTIQ+ rights same-sex partners 53 same-sex unions 261 – 262 Sampurnanand 83 – 84 Sanchez, Sybil 358 Sandal, N.A. 335 Sanders, Bernie 227 sangha 14, 22 Sangh Parivar 92n1 San Suu Kyi, Aung 142 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 434 Saraswat, Dayanand 82 Sarkozy, Nicholas 171 Sarva Dharma Sambhava 92 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie) 9n1 SAVAK 114 – 115 Savarkar, V.D. 83 Schak, D. 22 scheduled classes (SC) 90 scheduled tribes (ST) 90 Schmitt, Carl 303 Schonthal, Benjamin 13 Schwörer, J. 232 Sect, Clapham 34 sectarian affiliation 96 sectarian conflicts 2 secular anxiety 257 secular fundamentalism 259 (secular) humanism 282 – 283, 285 – 286; in Britain 291; in Europe 286 – 291; roots of 283 – 286; in USA 291 – 294 Secular Humanist organizations in Belgium 288 secularism 85, 231, 244, 282 – 284 Secularist Societies in Britain 284 secularization 4, 57, 125 – 127, 196, 199, 240, 243 – 244, 305; paradigm 182 – 183; theory 229; thesis 211 secular nationalism 81 Secular refugee relief projects 288 secular religion 255 secular violence 212 secular Zionism 128 – 129, 135

Seidenberg, David 358 Seinitz, Kurt 170 Seljuq Empire 155 Sen, Nabinchandra 82 Sener, Abdullatif 334 Seon-dal, Bongi Kim 21 Separation of Sind (1919–1932) 244 September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks 1, 7, 107, 155, 167 – 168, 170, 209 – 210, 230, 319, 331, 343, 375 – 376, 414, 423, 425 Serbian Orthodox Christian and Bosnian Muslim communities 159 Serbian Orthodox Church 337 sex abuse of minors 48 sexual exploitation 50 sexual morality 48 sexual ontologies 146 sexual violence 163 Shah, Muhammad Reza 112 Shah, Timothy Samuel 34, 417 Shahada (Islamic testimony of faith) 103, 247 Shahin, E. 334 Shaivism 82 Shaktism 82 Shalom Center, The 358 Shamanism 68 Shaolin temple 16 Shari’a law 96, 99, 175, 205, 246 Sharify-Funk, Meena 175 Shepherd, Kancha Illiah 90 Shia Amal movement in Lebanon 120 Shia Islam 104, 111; Amal and Hezbollah 122; Hezbollah, social services, and education 121 – 122; Hezbollah’s origins and ideology 121; Iran 111 – 112; Iran in Iraq 118 – 119; Iran’s Shia Islamic constitution 116 – 117; Iraq 117 – 118; ISIS and its Iraqi Shia adversaries 119; ISIS versus Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps 119 – 120; ISIS weakened 120; and Kurdish forces 119; Lebanon 120 – 121; Mosaddegh, Mohammad 112 – 113; Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza 113 – 115; political mobilization in Lebanon 120 – 121; post-Mosaddegh period 113 – 115; revolutionary prospects 115 – 116; and Sufis 103 – 104 Shiite Islam 5, 9 Shiite mullahs 197 Shinawatra, Thaksin 333 Shinto 17, 68 Shinzo Abe 18 Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) 344, 352 Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) 344, 351 – 354 Shi Yongxin 16 Shomrei Breishit 364 Shterin, Marat 171, 174 Sikhism 197; religious terrorism 415 – 416 Sikh qaum 354

451

Index Sikhs (jathedar) 352 Sin, Jaime 59 Singapore, Confucianism in 73 – 75 Singh, Bhagat 81 Singh, Manmohan 89 Singhalese 20 Sinhalese Buddhism 416 Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists 331 Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism 16 Sistani, Ayatollah Ali 119 Sitagu Sayadaw 19 Sivaraksa, Sulak 17 slave labour 50 slave religion 231 Slavery Abolition Act, 1833 34 snap election 59 social cleavage 228, 236 social deprivation 4 social discontent 6 social mobilization 170 social polarization 254 social reformism 34 social secularization 170 soft power 1 Soka Gakkai movement 18 special military operation 375 Spinoza, Baruch 314 Sri Lanka: anti-Muslim violence 20; Buddhist monks 416; ethnic tensions 9; Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists 331; Tamil Tigers and 163 Stainislaus v. Madhya Pradesh 86 – 87 Stark, Rodney 271 state-church dichotomy 197 State Department diplomats in Washington 330 State-protection Buddhism 13 Steiner, Sherrie 377 Stepan, A. 195 Stichting voor Maatschappelijk Werk op Humanistische Grondslag 287 Sudan 57, 145 Sufis 101 Sufi shaykhs 98 Sufism 104 Sung, Jung Mo 312 Sunna 97, 99 Sunni Islamism 5, 9, 96 – 97, 100, 248; excommunication 97; exegesis 100; Islam, conception of 101; jihad 97; khalifat Allah 98; mihna 98; moderation (wasatiyya) 97, 107; religious authority 97 – 98; see also Islamism Sunni/Shia conflicts 3 – 5, 334 Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) 117 Sustainable Development Goals 6 Svensson, Isak 158 Swadeshi and the New Patriotism in Maharaja (1905–1910) 244

Syria 5 – 7 Syrian civil war 161 Syrian Democratic Forces 343 systematic Islamist terror 60 Tabatabai, Sadiq 120 Tahrir al-Sham, Hay’at 247 Tali, Abu Malik 247 Taliban 322, 411, 414 Tamil community of Sri Lanka 190 Tamils 20 Tamil Tiger movement 20, 163 Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka 163 Tandon, Purushottam Das 83 – 84 Taoism 16 tasdiq 104 Tawang Stupa 24 Taydas Z. 334 Taylor, Charles 242 Ibn Taymiyya 106 Tearfund 399, 402 Tel Aviv 159 Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock 188 Ten Commandments 349 Teresa, Mother 93n9 Thaksin Shinawatra 16 – 17 Thein Sein 19 theodicy 303 Theodossopoulos, D. 335 theological free-market ideology 311 theological-normative balance 130 Theravada Buddhist tradition 14 Thich Nhat Hanh 18 Thomas, Scott 212 Thomistic personalism 53 Tiananmen Square massacre 70 Tibetan Autonomous Region 15 Tibetan refugees in India 23 Tikvah Fund 131 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 82, 84 Tilakite Hindu revivalism 84 Tillich, Paul 418 Toft, Monica Duffy 158, 417 totalitarianism 386 trade-unionism 187 Transatlantic medical and relief mission 34 transnational activism 30 transnational corporations (TNCs) 6 transnational religious actors and international relations 343 – 345; globalization 345 – 348; Roman Catholic Church 348 – 351; Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee 351 – 354 transnational religious movements 321 – 323 Trinamool Congress 92 Triple Talaq Bill 90 Trump, Donald 24, 29, 32, 167, 169 – 171, 225, 227, 233, 345; anti-immigrant agenda 235

452

Index Truth, Sojourner 388 Turkey, Diyanet 334 Turkish political Islam 183 Turner, B.S. 259 Tutti, Fratelli 51 Tu Wei-ming 68 Tzu Chi Foundation 22 UDHR, Article 18 of 148 Uganda 57 UK Independence Party (UKIP) 4, 175 Ukrainian crisis 263 – 264 Ukrainian Orthodox clergy 264 ulama 98, 205 umma 104, 246, 338, 345 Ummah 250 UN Agenda 2030 423 – 424 UNESCO 325 Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam 18 Union of Freethinking Associations 287 United Religious Initiative (URI) 425 UN Security Council 60 Untouchable Reform (1932) 244 Upadhyaya, Deen Dayal 85 Urwin, Derek 185 USAID 400 US anti-Muslim racism 435 US Civil War 162 US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) 139 US International Religious Freedom Act, 1998 (IRFA) 139 usuliyyun 97 Uzbekistan’s 1998 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations 274 Vaishnavism 82 Vaishnavite 91 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari 85, 89 Vatican diplomacy 49 – 53 Verma, J.S. 87 Vietnamese Buddhist organisation 18 Vietnamese Buddhist Sangha 18 Vilayat-i Faqih 115 – 116 violence-prone civilization 346 virtue 16 virtuocracy 66 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) 81, 92, 245 Vivekananda, Swami 82 volonté générale 227 Vüllers, J. 333 Wæver, O. 212 Waever, Ole 167 Wahhabi Islamic worldview 331 Wahhabist Sunni movement 5 Wainscott, A.M. 334

Waite, Terry 332 Wald, Kenneth D. 202 Walker, S. 331 Walt, Stephen 321 Walzer, Michael 160 Warner, C. 331 war of icons 259 War of Independence, 1857 82 War of Religions in Europe 241 – 242 wasatiyya 107 Waskow, Rabbi Arthur 357 Weber, Max 305, 310, 312 Weltecke, Dorothea 149 Western Buddhism 23 – 24 Westernisation 3 Western secularism 314 Westphalian order 344 – 348 Westphalian system 212 Westphalian Treaty 241 Wheel-Turning Monarch 13 Wight, Martin 211 Wilberforce, William 34 Wilders, Geert 231 Wilson, Erin K. 196 Winton, Tim 307, 309 Wirathu, Ashin 19 Wirathu, U 142 Working Community for Ethics Teachers 287 World Union of Freethinkers 284 World Vision International (WVI) 399 Xi Jinping 16, 72 – 73 Xuanzang 16 Yasukuni Shrine 333 Yathrib 102 Year of Jubilee campaign 50 Yemen 6; Houthi rebels in 159 Yingluk Shinawatra 17 Yitzchak, Yaakov 129 Yom Kippur war 162 Yousuf, S. 319 Yugoslav Wars 159 Zaeef, Mullah 334 Zambia 57 Zan (legislative decree) 262 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 5 Zemin, Jiang 16 Zemmour, Éric 233 Zemni, Sami 176 Zionism 125, 129, 205, 334, 428 Zionist movement 126, 128 – 129 Ziv, T. 333 Zoroastrians 102, 117 Zúquete, J.P. 231

453