Religion and Politics

John T. S. Madeley, John T. S. Madeley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351758512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003. This subject area of this work cross-cuts conventional sub-disciplinary boundaries in the study of comparative politics. Connections between religion and and politics can be identified in all of the thematic areas covered by the articles within.

Part I
Religion and Regime

[1]
Religion and Politics in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Daniel H. Levine

Said Amir Arjomond, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985.

Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World, New York, Pantheon Books, 1982.

James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Reynaldo Clemena Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910, Quezon City, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979.

Thomas Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth Century France, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1983.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983.

David Zaret, The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Writing on religion and politics has become something of a growth industry in recent years. The renewed salience of religion in the politics of cases otherwise as distinct as Iran, Central America, southern Africa, Poland, and the United States has spurred an urgent search for information and understanding. Even setting aside the obvious shortcomings of much instant scholarship, which now attributes to religion all the decisive impact once reserved for Marxism or modernization, we still find a noteworthy body of empirically grounded, theoretically significant research on religion and politics. The books reviewed here provide a fair sample of recent scholarly work. They have something important to say about key issues in the everyday practice of religion and politics, and also about how best to explain their relationship and mutual impact now as in the past. Further, they shed light on basic social science concerns and help lay to rest, once and for all, a number of long dominant assumptions about the nature of social and political change and the role religion plays in these processes.

The research under review here is not just a reaction to current events. Most of this work was in progress long before the rush of public and official interest in religion and politics. Moreover, with rare exceptions those working on Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, on Catholicism, Islam, and Buddhism, conceived and carried out their studies innocent of the fact that scholars with similar interests were at work elsewhere. But despite barriers of discipline, regional concentration, and concern with specific cultural and religious traditions, the central questions turn out to be remarkably similar.¹ The following points, among others, help to make this a coherent literature: first, a stance which sees change in religion as normal and continuous; second, from this, a common attempt to grasp its impact on politics not as aberrant or irrational, but rather as a logical outgrowth of central religious themes and structures; third, a shared concern to reassess “popular religion,” placing it in the context of on-going links to dominant institutions of power and meaning; and finally, a commitment to reread history “from below” and thus to see the links between everyday life and the high politics of “state and church” (however defined in a particular society) in a radically new light.

At a general theoretical level, these themes reveal a shared focus on the sources of change in ideas and on their links to class, context, and institutional transformations. They also point to reassessment of religion’s role in social and political change. Why this concern with religion and politics, and why in these particular ways? Much of the answer lies in a reaction to long prevailing assumptions in the social sciences, which made religion secondary to supposedly more immediate, “real,” or rational social, economic, and political forces. Three assumptions are critical here. The first makes religion epiphenomenal; the second takes religious motives or groups as less evolved alternatives to politics, at best “prepolitical” way stations; the third awaits an inevitable secularization—here, religion appears mostly as a survivor from the past, doomed to privatization and disappearance. Much early work on “modernization” took these premises for granted. In contrast, the studies reviewed here stress the long-term character of religious movements and their continuing creative link to politics at all levels. From this vantage point, at issue in the link of religion to politics is less secularization (growth or decline in gross terms) than restructuring.

Assumptions of this kind hinder understanding by obscuring the sources and dynamics of change within religion. Religious ideas, structures, and practices have a logic of their own. Individual and group action may thus be governed as much by that logic as by adherence to related social or political agendas. Analysis which stays within the contours of conventionally defined political events is likely to misread the process. By focusing on immediate concerns, and then projecting current configurations into the past, it reifies a particular form of religious-political convergence, without regard for understanding how the issues came to take on their present character and structure. Moreover, an exclusive concern with outcomes (who wins or loses on a national scale) also makes it hard to identify and grasp the sources and long-term dynamics of motivation which empower popular groups in repeated efforts at organization and action, often against what seem to be impossible odds.

Consider the case of millenarian movements, which as a matter of fact most often “fail.” To say they fail means, in common usage, that they do not “take power,” that they are defeated militarily and scattered politically. This is generally correct. But suppose that to this judgment we counter that of a peasant organizer quoted by Reynaldo Ileto to the effect, “No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction” (p. 7). The judgment cannot be lightly dismissed, nor should it be incorporated without a further reflection into a neo-Marxist framework of “inevitable revolution.” To say that no insurrection fails means that each contributes to nurturing an independent popular consciousness, thus making continued struggle possible. Moreover, as we shall see, Ileto shows how rereading Filipino history from below uncovers a stock of ideas, symbols, and forms of action derived from popular passion plays, the pasyon of his title. These undergird popular uprisings throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ileto establishes that analysis which rescues the centrality of religious themes and motives adds significantly to the understanding of change and conflict in the Philippines.

Like most of the authors considered here, Ileto denies that popular groups are mere clay, passive reflectors of the dominant culture. Instead, he details how they take images and messages from dominant institutions and rework these in accord with their own understanding of history and tradition, with a calculation of possibilities, and with an eye to what they see as urgent and immediate needs. The case of millenarian movements suggests that, when students of religion and politics abandon the confines of formal institutions and go beyond the relatively clear lines of systematic theology, doctrine, and law to the analysis of popular experience, they must be careful not to carry elite-focused categories with them. Popular groups may use other criteria of significance and put event, structure, and meaning together in different ways.

Careful attention to the dynamics of popular-institutional linkage is important, but there is a prior question. Why religion? Why should religion be a perennial source of political meaning and action? What conditions make for change in religion and combine to give religious ideas a ready audience at any given historical moment? Much analysis is content to follow Max Weber, noting the “elective affinities” between religious and political ideas, institutional forms, and practices. This perspective is enormously fruitful, but concern with elective affinities can hinder understanding by accepting conjuncture as an explanation in itself. Moreover, showing how particular ethical norms or organizational forms “fit” the life pattern of different groups is important, but it is too passive and gives too little place to the sources and pathways of change. By stressing conjuncture and fit so much, an unreconstructed Weberian analysis gives too much weight (albeit unwittingly) to equilibrium and homeostatic balance and not enough to dimensions of power, conflict, and change within religion and between religion and politics. It also ignores Weber’s own repeated concern to specify the conditions (especially the character of “crisis”) when religion changes and acquires special salience.² Finally, it fails to acknowledge religion’s tremendous consolidating power. I refer to the peculiar ability of religious metaphors, places, and rituals to sum up and intensify experience. They do this by joining everyday events to a sense of supernatural intervention and by reinforcing religious ideas with material resources and a net of repeated human interactions. This is what religious organizations and rituals do, and this is why they are so powerful at unifying behavior across social levels and in different arenas and walks of life.

How best to think about religion and politics and to find order in the variation of historical and contemporary experience? The main body of this essay addresses these questions as follows. An initial discussion of required theoretical reorientations is followed by a close look at the works under review, grouped for purposes of exposition by focus and region. I start with Ileto, Fields, Comaroff, and Tai, who share an interest in millenarian movements and in different ways address the significance (and the problem) of writing history from below. The next section looks at Zaret and Kselman, whose work on the Puritans and on nineteenth-century France sheds much light on the genesis and development of popular-institutional ties. The following three sections examine studies on Islam (Gilsenan and Arjomond), American fundamentalism (Hunter), and the implications of liberation theology (Wolterstorff). These four books share a concern with ideological and institutional change and with the way transformations in religion mediate and give special character to the links of everyday life with the high politics of culture and power. I close with a brief sketch of an agenda for future research.

A good place to begin theoretical reconstruction is with specification of some of the problems recent scholarship addresses and in large measure overcomes. Three in particular underlie the deficiencies of much conventional analysis: narrow definitions and inadequate concepts, overly intellectualized and elite-focused agendas, and disciplinary and regional parochialism.

Conventional concepts have confined our sense of the issues within unduly narrow limits. Scholarly attention has focused too much on explicitly political ideas or vehicles (parties, elections, and direct manipulation of religious events). Research thus latches on to the apparent political result of religious action, with little sense of how or why religion may have stimulated or sustaine...