The Routledge Handbook to Religion and Political Parties

Jeffrey Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138500464
• eBook ISBN: 9781351012454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As religion and politics become ever more intertwined, relationships between religion and political parties are of increasing global political significance. This handbook responds to that development, providing important results of current research involving religion and politics, focusing on: democratisation, democracy, party platform formation, party moderation and secularisation, social constituency representation and interest articulation.

Covering core issues, new debates, and country case studies, the handbook provides a comprehensive overview of fundamentals and new directions in the subject. Adopting a comparative approach, it examines the relationships between religion and political parties in a variety of contexts, regions and countries with a focus on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Contributions cover such topics as:

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• religion, secularisation and modernisation;

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• religious fundamentalism and terrorism;

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• the role of religion in conflict resolution and peacebuilding;

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• religion and its connection to state, democratisation and democracy; and

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• regional case studies covering Asia, the Americas, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa.

This comprehensive handbook provides crucial information for students, researchers and professionals researching the topics of politics, religion, comparative politics, secularism, religious movements, political parties and interest groups, and religion and sociology.

PART I

Core issues and topics

1

THE NEXT MIDDLE AGES

Religion and political culture

Manlio Graziano

Defining ‘political cultures’ is at least as difficult and controversial as defining religions. It is therefore necessary to begin by abandoning all claims to objectivity and declare unambiguously how religion and political culture are addressed in this short chapter. By ‘political cultures’ we mean, in a broad sense, the codification of politics, both from an intellectual perspective and from an administrative, juridical and institutional point of view. Religion – that is, popular beliefs in a higher (or divine) reality which determines and dominates the lower (or human) reality – is essentially considered herein as a social fact.

The relationship between religion and political culture typically follows a chronological order: the latter necessarily comes after the former; but, as we shall see, the intervention of political culture almost always influences and modifies religion, triggering an interaction mechanism that is characteristic of all natural processes. However, the ability of political culture to influence and modify religion has been wrongly assumed as a universal law by those who believe that politics can dominate religion: these so-called secularists ignore the third law of political dynamics, according to which religion in turn influences and modifies politics.

Thus religion and political culture enjoy a dialectical relationship, that is, that of reciprocal influence, insomuch that one sometimes assumes the appearance of the other and vice versa. If religion emerges as a social fact, and political culture (a code or philosophical principle) is only its intellectual and/or juridical reflection, the latter may also assume the forms and contents of the former: the Reformation is an example of how the intellectual contestation of the religious form of feudal society (Catholicism) was transformed into religion. The same is true of Buddhism, which emerged as a contestation of Vedic Brahmanism; for Islam, which emerged as a protest against Arab polytheism; but also for the successive metamorphoses of Judaism in a process of internal dispute, evidence of which can be found in different layers of the Tanakh – beginning with its progressive transformation into a monotheistic religion.

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Religion is a social fact: it emerges – or develops, or regains popularity – for a variety of reasons, but they are all generally connected with the need to give meaning to certain facts that are apparently meaningless. This ability to provide consolation (albeit imaginary) in the face of inconsolable reality (not in the least imaginary), gives religion the status of faith, that is, of a belief based on feeling and not on reason and thus unquestionable and unappealable. The more the surrounding reality is disordered and incomprehensible, the more acutely the need for order is felt and the more the religious feeling becomes central to the existence of those human beings – generally perceived as a sum total, a mass, rather than as individuals.

This mechanism appears clearly in the correlation between social religiosity and social wealth: it is empirically demonstrated that the less affluent a country is, the more religious it is, and the wealthier it is, the less religious. If we compare ten countries with the highest per-capita GDP¹ to ten countries with the lowest per-capita GDP setting them in descending order along the horizontal axis of a graph, while on the vertical axis we set the ‘religiosity rate’,² this fact becomes clearly visible: eight out of ten richest countries have a religiosity rate equal to or less than 40 percent, and three of them equal to or less than 20 percent; conversely, nine out of ten of the poorest countries have a religiosity rate of 90–100 percent, and the ‘least religious’ (Zimbabwe) has the rate of 88 percent.

Obviously, religiosity cannot be measured only in quantitative terms. On the contrary, it is evident that the religious feelings of those who maintain their faith in a social environment where religion has lost much of its relevance are qualitatively more intense and solid than the feelings of those who practice to conform to collective norms.

The greater is the social relevance of religion, the greater political relevance it acquires. It is clear that in order to be able to acquire social relevance, a given religion needs legs on which to march, that is, people in flesh and bone who would act as its promoters and propagators: if the need for religion (that is, a fantastic explanation of a rationally incomprehensible or unfathomed fact) is a fact that imposes itself objectively, the type of explanation offered – that is, the choice of religion – depends subjectively on the specific belief of those who promote it. If we imagine for a moment that these heralds of religion are completely immune to any political contamination and that their unique and exclusive role is spiritual in nature, in this case we have a clear separation between politics on the one side and religion on the other. In this theoretical case (hypothesised as is hypothesised the absence of friction in the first principle of dynamics), it is the political culture that will not be able to remain extraneous to religious culture at length: since politics is the art of seizing and preserving power, all social factors likely to favour seizing and preservation inevitably end up falling into its sphere of interests. So that is how – in a world bereft of friction – the religion that has social relevance inevitably ends up acquiring political relevance.

Figure 1.1 Religiosity by country

Source: The author

However, friction is present in the real world. With the exception of certain particular cases, from the very moment a given religion acquires social relevance, it is rare that its heralds remain insensitive to the appeal of political sphere, that is, to the struggle for power (and when they do remain extraneous, it is precisely because their religion has no social relevance, as in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses). In general, they initially enter this sphere to negotiate from the position of force such and such favour for their religion, that is, to exchange their influence on the masses into political currency; from that moment on, religious boundaries with politics also become more and more blurred.

It is at this stage – when we get to the level of reciprocity – that we can talk about the relationship between political culture and religion. Yet in the real world, reciprocity often results in intertwining and hybridisation of fields, or, to be precise, into the shift of the realm of the divine to the domain of humans: when the divine is annexed by the human; when the divine has invaded the field of the human; or, finally, when the human and divine coincide (as in the case of theocracy or of many divinised political functions, from Roman to Japanese emperors).

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The reaction of political culture to the social relevance of religion depends on both the strength of this relevance and the level of the political culture’s self-confidence. Usually – with the exception of theocracies and other forms of consubstantiality of the divine and human – the process is quite regular: at first, political culture tends to ignore or underestimate an emerging (or re-emerging) religion; when the latter becomes socially perceptible, politics usually reacts with annoyance and, in extreme cases, with various attempts at containment; finally, when the weight of religion is sufficient to influence social stability, political culture tends to lose confidence in its abilities and therefore moves from repression to co-optation. Bearing in mind that the social relevance of a religion does not necessarily concern its popularity, this process is crystal clear in the case of the first diffusion of Christianity and Islam.

During the first century CE, Christianity was first ignored, then confused with one of the many Jewish sects, and finally, starting from the second century, attacked by political culture. Pliny the Younger (112 CE) spoke of it as a ‘superstitio prava, immodica’, a depraved and excessive superstition (Letters to Trajan, X, 96); Tacitus presented Christians as ‘per flagitia invisos’, hated for their abominations (Annales, XV, 44); for Suetonius, they were ‘genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae’, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition (De vita Caesarum, Nero, 16). Only in the following centuries there was some sporadic persecution to punish their obstinatio and amixia, their obstinate refusal to perform the rites of civil religion and take part in public life;³ but the most frequent attitude of the authorities was indifference (Moreschini, 2013: 45–48; Crossan, 1999: 3–4). Only between the late third and the early fourth centuries, in the part of the empire where Christianity had really taken root (the eastern provinces and Egypt under the control of Diocletian), did the persecution become official.

According to Rodney Stark, at the end of the first century there were 7,530 Christians throughout the Roman Empire, i.e. 0.012 percent of the population; at the end of the second century there were 217,795 (0.36 percent), while at the beginning of the fourth century between 5 and 7.5 million, about 10 percent (Stark, 1997: 6–7).⁴ For all they are worth, these figures confirm what has been said: the social relevance of a religion depends not only on the number of its followers but also and above all on their quality. The true authors of significant turning points in the human existence are so-called creative minorities, according to the definition of Arnold Toynbee: those few who are capable of finding innovative solutions to the challenges of time and who, therefore, become a source of inspiration for growing sectors of society. Between the late third and the early fourth centuries, political culture was confronted with a choice between an extreme attempt of the eradication of the Christian ‘creative minority’ (which was Diocletian’s policy) and its cooptation (which was the policy of Constantine).

The legalisation of Christianity was a building block of Constantine’s policy of unification of the empire. However, in order to complete its structure it was also essential to unify the very Christianity which was then divided into a series of communities, each with its own beliefs;⁵ the bishops at the head of each community were continuously at war with one another to such an extent that Constantine, in a letter to the Bishops at Tyre, accused them of ‘do(ing) nothing but that which encourages discord and hatred and, to speak frankly, which leads to the destruction of the human race’ (Drake, 2000: 311). To put an end to this state of affairs, in 325, he convened and presided over the Council of Nicaea, during which he dictated fundamental religious canons, which today are still recited in the Creed with minimal changes.⁶ As Graham Fuller said, ‘for the state, theology is too important to be left to the theologians’ (Fuller, 2010: 48).

Constantine is considered the prototype of ‘caesaropapism’, which is, according to the famous definition of Max Weber, a secular ruler who ‘exercises supreme authority in ecclesiastical matters by virtue of his autonomous legitimacy’ (Weber, 1968, II: 1160–1161). A particular but no less effective form of caesaropapism runs throughout the entire history of Islam too.

On its way to success, Islam followed the same steps as Christianity, although condensed within a much shorter period. At first derided, then expelled from Mecca, Muhammad extended his influence over an increasingly large and determined creative minority insomuch that he forced his former persecutors to allow him to return to the city and to grant the new cult the monopoly over the Kaaba, the traditional site for pilgrimage of merchants of all faiths. Islam’s founder possessed both religious and political authority; whereas the priority of his successors, caliphs, was dealing with a series of political and military problems, while ceding the management of religious affairs to a class of specialists – the ulema.

The ulema were trained to derive practical guidance from approximately two hundred commandments which, in the Quran, distinguish between what is lawful (halāl) and what is illicit (harām): ‘sharia law’. But, as Olivier Roy explains, in the ‘political society’ in which the Muslim community had been transformed, ‘no ruler could accept the complete autonomy of sharia’ (Roy, 2013: 114). As Richard Bulliet puts it, ‘rulers who were tempted to go beyond the law, and thereby achieve absolute power, had to devise ways of coopting, circumventing, or suppressing the ulema’ (Bulliet, 2004: 62). Examples are hard to find of the ‘learned’ men daring to stand up against the authority of caliphs, writes Sadakat Kadri, and they often paid for it with their lives. He then concludes, ‘The Abbasids had managed to turn God’s law to the service of their regime’ (Kadri, 2012: 58).

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When religion becomes instumentum regni, it in turn transforms political culture in instrumentum religionis, at least in part: in exchange for the support guaranteed to Constantine and his successors, Christians ensured that their religion was the only one recognised, protected and imposed by the state. However, the relationship between politics and religion is always unbalanced: usually the weight of the former tends to dominate but it is not always the case. Depending on the historical circumstances, and above all on how deeply entrenched and organised is the religion in question, power relations can be balanced or even reversed. This seems to be the case of the Catholic Church. Which, however – insofar as the Church has fused together in itself spiritual and temporal power attributes – somewhat strays from the subject of this chapter that deals with the relationship, and not the fusion, of politics and religion.

Yet there is a fundamental aspect that remains consistent with the purpose of this text: the Catholic Church’s unscrupulous use of its duality. As an institution of a political nature, it has interacted with other institutions of a political nature exploiting its religious nature, of which it maintained a monopoly. Its duality stems from its early experience in the western part of the Roman Empire, when the Church was immediately forced to fill the void left by deliquescent central and peripheral political powers, growing into a more political rather than a religious practice. The bishop of Rome did not attend the Council of Nicea, sending instead two of his legates who could at least understand Greek; yet the successors of the Greek bishops became anonymous servants of basileus, whereas the successors to the bishops of Rome became the leaders of the most powerful and enduring political-religious institution in human history. They became such because, due to their apprenticeship, they were capable of coping with other political authorities for at least the next thousand years, starting from the turbulent relationship with that emperor – sacred and Roman – that they themselves had invented and invested.

When the bourgeoisie began to challenge the feudal order, the first offensive was inevitably launched against the Catholic Church: progressively, and with increasing vigour, political culture had set the goal of circumscribing and then eliminating its influence. Given the total confusion between the spiritual and the temporal at the time of Christianity, this emancipation initially took a religious form, first with the medieval ‘heresies’ and then with the Protestant Reformation (which immediately became the instrumentum regni in a series of caesaropapist kingdoms of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Core issues and topics
• PART II: New debates
• PART III: Country case studies
• Index