Religion, Secularism and Politics

A Mediterranean View

Jeffrey Haynes, Guy Ben-Porat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138017658
• eBook ISBN: 9781317695226
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

Political debates in many Mediterranean countries today are increasingly framed in dichotomous terms, highlighting divisions between religious and secular worldviews. The role of religion in public life or, put another way, the 'public return of religion', is a pertinent and controversial political question everywhere in the Mediterranean region. How do we explain this phenomenon? On the one hand, we can point to both economic and demographic changes, while, on the other, we can trace the impact of continuing secularisation. Together these two sets of developments produce new challenges to existing political arrangements.

This book examines the contemporary interaction of religion and politics in the Mediterranean region with a specific focus on democratization and democracy and the role in this context of selected religious actors. Individual contributions focus on several European countries (France, Italy and Turkey), while others are concerned with states in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Israel, Morocco, and Tunisia). Among European countries, France is widely regarded as a highly secular country, with over 50% of people regarding themselves as 'without religion'. Morocco, on the other hand, is a much more religious country, measured by the fact that an estimated 94.5% of Moroccans self-identify themselves as Muslims. The specific country studies were selected because, whether they are 'religious' or not, each case has current controversies involving both religious and secular actors which impact upon key political relationships, centrally involving religion, secularization and democratization/democracy.

This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

Religion, Secularization and Democracy in the Mediterranean Region: Problems and Prospects

JEFFREY HAYNES* & GUY BEN-PORAT**

* Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, London Metropolitan University, UK, ** Department of Public Policy and Administration Guilford Glazer, Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

ABSTRACT Political debates in many Mediterranean countries today are increasingly framed in dichotomous terms, highlighting divisions between religious and secular worldviews. In some countries, for example Israel, the issue is so contentious that it is described as a ‘culture war’. While Israel struggles to balance its commitment to a Jewish state and a democracy, it does not seem to matter if the countries in question are democracies or non-democracies, or what their majority religious faith is. Instead, the role of religion in public life or, put another way, the ‘public return of religion’, is a pertinent and controversial political question everywhere in the Mediterranean region. How do we explain this phenomenon? On the one hand, we can point to both economic and demographic changes, while, on the other, we can trace the impact of continuing secularisation. Together these two sets of developments produce new challenges to existing political arrangements.

Introduction

This special issue examines the contemporary interaction of religion and politics in the Mediterranean region¹ with a specific focus on democratization and democracy and the role in this context of selected religious actors.² Individual contributions focus on several European countries (France, Italy and Turkey), while others are concerned with states in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Israel, Morocco and Tunisia). Among European countries, France is widely regarded as a highly secular country, with over 50 per cent of people regarding themselves as ‘without religion’. Morocco, on the other hand, is a much more religious country, measured by the fact that an estimated 94.5 per cent of Moroccans self-identify themselves as Muslims.³ We have selected the specific country studies because, whether they are ‘religious’ or not, each case has current controversies involving both religious and secular actors which impact upon key political relationships, centrally involving religion, secularization and democratization/democracy. In the contributions that follow, we shall see that while there are country-specific factors, in each case the relevant issues involve a focus on struggles around the position of religious traditions and actors in relation to both democratization and democracy in the context of secularization.

The aim of this introductory article is to introduce the main themes of the special issue and to indicate the similarities and differences of the constituent articles in relation to their region, case studies and regime types. To focus on these issues, the contributory articles collectively examine contemporary interactions between religion and politics, especially in relation to democratization and democracy, in selected states in the Mediterranean region.

Democratization is a contested term. We use it in this introductory article in two related ways. Briefly, we understand ‘democratization’ as a process and not a discrete event, which theoretically occurs in four not necessarily discrete stages: (1) political liberalization; (2) collapse of authoritarian regime; (3) democratic transition; and (4) democratization consolidation (for discussions of the theoretical aspects of democratization, see Haynes, 2001a, 2001b). Political liberalization is the process of reforming authoritarian rule. Collapse of the authoritarian regime stage refers to the stage when a dictatorship falls apart. Democratic transition is the material shift to democracy, commonly marked by the democratic election of a new government. Democratic consolidation is a longer-term process of entrenching both democratic institutions and perceptions among elites and citizens that democracy is the only legitimate way of ‘doing’ politics. As the individual case-study articles illustrate, some of the countries on which we focus are fully-fledged democracies (Israel, France, Italy), Turkey is well on the way to achieving that status, while the others (Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia) are more towards the non-democracy end of the spectrum, although one of the key issues we look at in relation to this latter group is the extent to which the Arab Spring/Arab Uprising events are encouraging political movement in a pro-democracy direction (see http://www.freedomhouse.org/ for 2012 ratings of all countries in terms of their ‘level’ of democracy).

Our focus is on regional countries’ efforts to maintain, introduce or develop democracy in a context where religious actors are everywhere enjoying renewed voice. The individual contributions to this special issue cover three different religions – Islam, Judaism and Christianity (Catholicism). In each case, the concern is with these religious faiths’ interactions with secular entities in the context of actual or putative democratic politics. This enables us, inter alia, to review these religious traditions’ attitudes towards democratization and democracy in specific countries in the Mediterranean region.

The contributions that make up this special issue each examine two central questions:

• Why are many religious actors from different religious traditions now collectively involved in political issues, including democratization and democracy? The contributions to this special issue agree that this is likely to occur when religious actors of various kinds agree that political changes are necessary and where they accept that existing authorities are unlikely to deliver these changes without consistent pressure from civil society, including that emanating from religious actors.

• How widespread is the phenomenon of religious actors with political goals linked to democratization and democracy in the Mediterranean region? The starting assumption is that it is widespread, although case-by-case study in the contributions that follow will help verify or falsify this conjecture.

Overall, the main aim of this special issue, one of the first comparatively to examine a variety of religious actors in various Mediterranean countries in relation to democracy and democratization, is to explain and account for contemporary political relationships, between the state, secular actors and selected religious actors. Case studies focus on the following regional countries: Egypt, France, Israel, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. In the European countries we focus upon, Catholicism and Islam are the religions in the spotlight, while in the states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Islam and Judaism are analytically central.

In the Mediterranean region, economic, political and demographic changes among both established democracies and (potentially democratizing) authoritarian regimes have an increasing impact on the role of religion in public life. The consequence is that both religious believers and secular individuals now have to face difficult questions about how one accommodates both religious and secular demands and commitment to genuine democratic pluralism and adherence to a good standard of civil liberties. Sometimes, as in France and Turkey, secularization processes guided by the state are met with sustained popular religious opposition. In other cases, as in Israel, the long-established authority of religious actors, regimes and institutions is resisted by secular sections of society, already affected by significant economic and demographic changes. In short, both religious and secular interest groups have much to say about individual rights and liberalism in the context of secularization, religious authority and continuing political development. In particular, it seems quite obvious that, while it was not always the case, mainstream interpretations of monotheistic religions, including Islam and Christianity (especially Catholicism), now accept the validity of the democratic process to govern societies. Today, the real struggles are over the extent of liberal rights and the role of ‘individualism’ – versus collective rights – in society. What this means is that while democracy-as-procedure is accepted by most official interpreters of mainstream religious traditions in the countries of the Mediterranean region, both democracies and democratizing states, there nevertheless remains a controversy about the nature and extent of individual rights and how democratic processes can also be used to enhance or curtail such individual rights. However, it is important to note that the acceptance of democracy as procedure does not guarantee the practice of the protection of individual rights. For example, in Morocco, secular political actors only achieve their goals when allowed to by authoritarian royal intervention. In addition, suspicion towards the liberal – that is, individualistic – aspects of democracy is often shared by some religious and non-religious individuals.

The Secularization Thesis and its Application to the Mediterranean Region

The case-study articles in this special issue include at most a limited discussion of secularization. To provide a necessary discussion of this issue, this section of the introductory article examines what secularization is, especially in relation to a leading figure in this debate, Jose Casanova, including his idea of ‘sub-theories’ of the overall secularization thesis. Our aim is to ‘deconstruct’ the concept of secularization in order to help to analyse the validity of the secularization theory, given the continuing interaction between religion and politics in the Mediterranean region, including in the countries focused upon in this special issue. This section of the article also provides a working definition of secularization for more general use in the special issue, although this is not to assert that all contributors necessarily see secularization in precisely the same way.

The continued validity of the secularization thesis is now strongly questioned. Critics allege that its explanatory power is comprehensively undermined by, inter alia, what is widely understood to be a public return of religion in the Mediterranean region and in many other parts of the world. (We shall address the issue of religion’s public return below.) In general terms, the secularization thesis posited that religiosity would everywhere become a private affair, an outcome of a universal modernization. As a result, religion would necessarily retreat from public life, with attendant loss of influence, status and prestige. Recent years have however demonstrated emphatically that such expectations were not plausible or, ultimately, realizable. Instead, in many countries around the world, including those in the Mediterranean region, religion did not emphatically or explicitly fall out of the public realm. Instead, religion continued to perform important social and, in some cases, political functions, areas of endeavour which went beyond narrowly defined ‘religious affairs’. For instance, the 1978–79 Islamic revolution in Iran, with its major international ramifications among neighbouring Muslim countries, the contemporaneous impact of the Roman Catholic Church on moves from authoritarian rule in Spain and Portugal from the mid-1970s and the contemporaneous involvement of the Orthodox church in Greece’s shift from dictatorship all serve to underline the political participation of religious actors in selected countries in the Mediterranean region. Finally, the recent, more general, re-emergence of religion as a key political factor within many countries in the Mediterranean region, as well as internationally, serves to emphasize further that modernization does not necessarily amount to secularization, implying a linear trajectory away from tradition, where religion inevitably gets marginalized.

It is also clear that the religious and the secular are not mutually exclusive, as was once widely thought. In many countries a demonstrable measure of secularization did occur and may indeed still be taking place (Bruce, 2009). In these contexts, secularization can be measured by the decline of traditional religious authority, the increasing clout of secular institutions and the growing popular adoption of secular practices, including by many individuals who would nevertheless still identify themselves as religious people or refuse to identify themselves as ‘secular’. These developments are met by counter-pressure from religious leaders, organizations and institutions that continue to be societally significant for many people. The overall result is that interactions of religions (often involving a perceived or real religious resurgence), religious institutions and actors with secular actors are controversial, central to many issues affecting both society and politics in democracies and democratizing states in the Mediterranean region, with the result that dividing lines between the religious and the secular are often blurred. The blurred lines are especially important in regard to questions of freedom and rights. Thus, in some cases it is religious actors who seek to shape and lead the debates, necessarily employing new – secular – political language, highlighting human rights, democracy, rule of law and civil society, which in turn influence local debates and practices.⁴ Secular regimes, conversely, in the Mediterranean region (and elsewhere), in past and present, often fall short of the secular liberalizing ethos.

Secularization is presented by its advocates as a process that leads towards a clear separation of ‘church’ and state by a solid ‘wall’, which protects both individual liberties and equalities among both men and women and groups, including minorities (Waltzer, 1984). Secularization secures individual rights, respect and tolerance, and is the perceived hallmark of a democratic, free society. In Sartori’s (1995: 104) words,

Secularization occurs when the realm of God and the realm of Caesar – the sphere of religion and the sphere of politics – are separated. As a result, politics is no longer reinforced by religion: it loses both its religion-derived rigidity (dogmatism) and its religious-like intensity. Out of this situation arise the conditions for the taming of politics. By this I mean that politics no longer kills, is no longer a warlike affair, and that peacelike politics affirms itself as the standard modus operandi of a polity.

Sartori’s rather general comment on secularization and its ‘necessary’ relationship to democratization and then democracy is not the last or only word on the topic. More recently, Casanova (2006: 7) has usefully highlighted that if one is to speak ‘meaningfully of “secularization”’, it is helpful to break down the blanket term into separable, constituent parts. First, there is secularization in the sense of a ‘decline of religious beliefs and practices’ in modern societies, which, as noted above, was once widely understood as part of a universal trajectory from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. Second, secularization is the privatization of religion’, which, following Casanova (1994) is both a general, modern historical trend and a normative condition, necessary to achieve a liberal, modern democratic politics (along the lines of what Sartori suggests). Third, secularization implies ‘differentiation of the secular spheres (state, economy, science)’, which also implies freedom from erstwhile authoritative religious institutions and norms. Casanova (2006: 7–8) explains that the third ‘is the core component of the classic theories of secularization, which is related to the original etymological-historical meaning of the term within medieval Christendom’.

The overall – and highly important – implication of this paradigmatic shift is an intellectual and physical movement of both personnel and institutions from religious to civil control. For Casanova, examination of the validity of the three propositions independently of each other should be a fruitful way to judge the extent of secularization in a given society. To do so, he avers, should refocus the ‘often fruitless secularization debate into comparative historical analysis that could account for different patterns of secularization, in all three meanings of the term, across societies and civilizations. Yet the debate between European and American sociologists of religion remains unabated’ (Casanova, 2006: 8).

The disaggregation of the concept of secularization opens up the possibility of a more nuanced and empirical study of both the declining role of religion in society vis-à-vis other systems (political and economic) and the role of religion in individual lives (beliefs, practices and values). In addition, it blurs the lines between religious and secular, allowing their study as ideologies, institutions and political actors in politics in general and in processes of democratization in particular.

Recent years have seen Christian churches in Europe, as well as Islamist entities in the MENA and Jewish bodies in Israel, articulating political viewpoints, including in relation to democratization and democracy, increasingly readily and openly. Does this necessarily imply that, linked to Casanova’s second point, this means a liberal, democratic politics and commitment to liberal values of equality and freedom? Ben-Porat would reply a definite ‘no’ in relation to Israel, while other contributors would probably feel queasy about replying with a definitive ‘yes’ in relation to their own case-study countries. This is not to say that such religious actors are anti-democracy or even democratically apathetic. What it does imply is that religious actors generally do not feel the need to abide by continued ‘privatization’ of religion. This is often in response to state attempts to side-line or marginalize religion and its dedicated institutions. In addition, religious actors not only openly resist state attempts to sideline them but also in many cases strive to articulate and pursue agendas of social and political renewal and development. Several of the case studies in this special issue, for example, in relation to Egypt and Morocco, exemplify this point. This suggests that, again using Casanova’s terminology, religions, assumed by the secularization thesis necessarily to lose their public role and with attendant responsibilities shifted to secular entities, have instead been revitalized and ‘de-privatized’, no longer accepting a marginal societal role. These struggles to include religion in the democratic process present theoretical and practical challenges for both religious and secular entities.

These developments overall reflect a widespread process of religious ‘deprivatization’ which generally affects the countries of the Mediterranean region. The result is that, as already noted, many religious actors in the region now openly pursue a variety of public and political goals, increasingly in the context of democratizing or democratic politics in individual countries. According to Casanova (1994: 6), religious deprivatization began three decades ago, when ‘what was new and became “news” … was the widespread and simultaneous refusal of religions to be restricted to the private sphere’. Religious deprivatization implies that religious actors are no longer willing to accept their place in the private sphere assigned to them by the state during secularization and modernization. Instead, they seek to be champions of alternative, confessional options that inevitably impact upon the state’s claim to unchallenged legitimacy and autonomy. Religious actors are often raising questions about, inter alia, interconnections of private and public morality and claims of states and markets to be exempt from extrinsic normative considerations.

In addition, such religious actors frequently share a desire to change their societies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Religion, Secularization and Democracy in the Mediterranean Region: Problems and Prospects
• 2. The ‘Arab Uprising’, Islamists and Democratization
• 3. Secularizing Islamism and Islamizing Democracy: The Political and Ideational Evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers 1984–2012
• 4. Re-emerging Islamism in Tunisia: Repositioning Religion in Politics and Society
• 5. Democracy, Civil Liberties and the Role of Religion after the Arab Awakening: Constitutional Reforms in Tunisia and Morocco
• 6. Are We There Yet? Religion, Secularization and Liberal Democracy in Israel
• 7. The Debate on the Crucifix in Public Spaces in Twenty-First Century Italy
• 8. Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?
• 9. The ‘Europeanization’ of the Religious Cleavage in Turkey: The Case of the Alevis
• Index