The Role of Religion in Struggles for Global Justice

Faith in justice?

Peter J. Smith, Katharina Glaab, Claudia Baumgart-Ochse, Elizabeth Smythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367650636
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351138802
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Struggles for global justice are being fought by civil society groups across the globe, addressing global inequalities, challenging neoliberal market driven globalization and demanding to remedy its negative implications. This book examines the roles religious communities and organizations in particular play in the struggles for global justice, roles too often ignored by scholars of the Global Justice Movement (GJM). It has two central themes:

- the role religion and religious actors play in global justice struggles, and

- the idea that justice is a contested concept among both religious and secular actors which requires some sort of 'faith' from its proponents.

These chapters transcend simplistic either/or binaries highlighting the difficulties of clearly distinguishing between religious and secular, progressive and conservative, or rational and irrational motives and norms in struggles for justice. Challenging the secularization paradigm that marginalizes the role religious actors play in public life these chapters show how these actors engage with a broad range of justice issues, how deeply contested justice is, and how its meaning may vary and change among religious actors as a result of the social or political context within which an injustice is encountered.

The chapters originally published as a special issue in Globalizations.

‘Power Differences’ and ‘the Power of Difference’: The Dominance of Secularism as Ontological Injustice

ERIN K. WILSON

ABSTRACT Recent religious studies and international relations scholarship has highlighted secularism as a critical element in dominant modes of identity, power, and exclusion in global politics. Yet, the implications of these insights for global justice theory and practice have rarely been considered. This article suggests that the current dominance of secularism within global justice theory and practice risks undermining the global justice project. Specifically, I argue that secularism’s dominance constitutes an ontological injustice, where both alternative non-secular visions of the world and visions of alternative non-secular worlds are subordinated to secular ontologies. However, this argument raises a crucial question: if, despite secularism’s claim to neutrality and universality, the dominance of secular ontologies contributes to rather than ameliorates injustice, the question that remains is: what are the alternatives? The article concludes by exploring some preliminary responses to this question.

Introduction

Recent religious studies and international relations (IR) scholarship has questioned the applicability of secularism as an analytical and policy framework in global politics (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 2011; Gutkowski, 2014; Hurd, 2008; Lynch, 2011; Mavelli, 2012; Wilson, 2012). This scholarship has argued not only that secularism is a critical structuring element in prevailing modes of identity, power, and exclusion (Gutkowski, 2014; Hurd, 2008), but also that it prescribes a particular understanding of what ‘religion’ is—something clearly identifiable and distinguishable from other domains of human activity, private, individual, and largely irrational, or at least non-rational—ignoring or marginalizing alternative conceptualizations (Asad, 2003).

Global justice theorists and practitioners have been slow to acknowledge secularism’s dominance and its implications for the pursuit of global justice. By ‘global justice theorists’, I refer to philosophers, economists, political theorists, and ethicists exploring questions of justice across state borders. By ‘global justice practitioners’ I mean the vast array of organizations and movements concerned with economic inequality, food insecurity, indigenous rights, climate change, human rights, amongst others. Daulatzai (2004) argues that the dominance of a ‘particular secularistic vocabulary, grammar and culture’ at the World Social Forum (WSF), a pivotal site of the global justice movement (GJM), limits possibilities for developing alternative forms of anti-imperial dissent, producing forms of politics that are exclusionary towards religious actors in a space otherwise celebrated for its tolerance and diversity. Similarly, Conway (2013) suggests that secularism’s prevalence amongst key actors in the GJM, especially the WSF, contributes to pushing already marginalized perspectives of indigenous communities further to the periphery by ignoring or devaluing their cosmologies.

Such a situation is, I argue, antithetical to the commitments and goals of global justice theory and practice. By employing predominantly secular modern political traditions, such as liberalism and socialism, global justice actors arguably undermine the pursuit of greater global material equality by marginalizing religious and indigenous perspectives on how core global justice issues should be responded to, but also how such issues should be identified in the first place (Conway, 2013; Daulatzai, 2004). It contributes to what De Sousa Santos (2005, 2014) has called ‘epistemological or cognitive injustice’, subordinating ‘alternative views of the world’—forms of knowledge and evidence different from scientific rationalist knowledge that is privileged in Euro-American perspectives. In addition, however, I suggest that the dominance of secularism in global justice theory and practice constitutes a form of injustice previously under-explored—ontological injustice, the subordination and exclusion not just of ‘alternative views of the world’, but ‘views of alternative worlds’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2013).

All three forms of injustice—material, epistemological, and ontological—are entangled and contribute to inequalities in contemporary approaches to global justice. Global justice theory and practice have to date primarily focused on material and, more recently, epistemological injustices, material injustice being concerned with the distribution of resources and opportunities (Steger, Goodman, & Wilson, 2013), while epistemological injustice focuses on forms of knowledge, frameworks for analysis and types of evidence considered ‘acceptable’ or ‘reliable’ in global justice (Bennett, 2007; De Sousa Santos, 2014). In both instances, there is an assumption that a single reality exists, and the disagreements that arise surrounding global justice theory and practice are the result of conflicts over how to interpret that reality. I argue, however, that if we are to pursue a truly just global community, we must also address ontological injustices, that is the devaluing and exclusion of different ‘theories and understandings about what exists’ (Pedersen, 2001, p. 413).

As theories about what exists, ontologies possess specific assumptions about the world, human beings, their relationship to one another, to nature, to the supernatural (if it exists), and to themselves (Viveiros de Castro, 2013). These assumptions are contextually specific, and do not necessarily make sense from one context to another. While this has long been recognized about ‘religious’ or spiritual ontologies, secular ontologies retain their claim to universality and continue to position themselves as superior to non-secular ontologies. Destabilizing secular ontologies, concerned with the immanent and material, and particularly their division of the world into unstable categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is a crucial part of addressing existing epistemological and ontological injustices in global justice theory and practice.

I begin with an overview of emerging literature on secularism’s dominance and the effects of this on global justice. I then develop the concept of ontological injustice, drawing on the recent ‘ontological turn’ in cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology has been described as ‘the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009, cited in Holbraad, Pedersen, & Viveiros de Castro, 2014), a science committed to recognizing, understanding, and honouring alternative views of the world and views of alternative worlds, not just studying them as quaint and somewhat primordial precursors to secular modernity. This commitment is consistent with the goals of global justice actors (Bello, 1999; De Sousa Santos, 2005, 2014; George, 2004; Tarrow, 2005), suggesting that useful synergies may be found across the two disciplines. Following this, I highlight ways in which secularism may be considered a distinct ontology that dominates global justice theory and practice, contributing to the marginalization and exclusion of views of alternative non-secular worlds. I conclude by exploring possibilities for addressing the ontological injustice of secularism’s dominance. This is not to replace or destroy secularism, but rather encourage alternative modes of interaction across ontologies that do not privilege secular ways of being and knowing and exclude non-secular voices and perspectives.

Secularism and Its Discontents

Secularism has arguably been the dominant model for liberal statecraft and a powerful worldview/ideology structuring Euro-American political communities since the Enlightenment. A key distinction is that secularism as worldview or ideology makes normative assumptions about the value of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’, whereas secularism as statecraft is concerned with laws and institutions that manage relationships between religious and secular authorities and domains (Casanova, 2011). While the two do not necessarily overlap in theory, in practice, secular statecraft is frequently underpinned by variations of secular ideology (Casanova, 2011). Given that this article is concerned with global justice theory and practice, phenomena that transcend the boundaries and institutions of the state, I focus on worldview/ideological secularism, rather than secularism as statecraft.

The term ‘secularism’ has been traced back to 1850s England, first articulated by George Holyoake, and emerging out of ideas of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ (Asad, 2003; Weir, 2015). The distinction between the secular and the religious originally emerged as a theological one, but has since become more widely acknowledged (Casanova, 2011), most notably, Weir (2015, p. 11) suggests, in 1840s England amidst a debate over national primary education. Worldview/ideological secularism was positioned as ‘one competing creed’ amongst others, though its association with science, governed by reason, rationality, and neutrality, gave it an advantage in the education debate (Weir, 2015, pp. 11–13). Even this early in its conceptual career, multiple and competing assumptions were associated with ideological secularism. Some variants of worldview secularism were (and are) sympathetic to, even protective of religion (Kmiec, 2015, p. 41; Stepan, 2012), while others were (and are) openly hostile and anti-religious (Hurd, 2008; Kuru, 2007). Both types, however, assume that secularism provides the best possibility for neutral and equitable public debate, as opposed to religious worldviews. It is this assumption that contributes to the entanglement of secularism with liberal political philosophy and the pursuit of public reason (for detailed discussions of this relationship, see Eberle, 2002; Habermas, 2006; Rawls, 1999; Wilson, 2012).

Since the early 2000s, scholars in religious studies, philosophy and IR have argued that no version of secularism provides a neutral, universal basis for public reason, contrary to long-held liberal assumptions (Casanova, 2011; Connolly, 1999; Eberle, 2002; Hurd, 2008; Kuru, 2007; Mavelli, 2012; Taylor, 2009; Wilson, 2012). Rather, secularism represents ‘fundamental shifts in conceptions of self, time, space, ethics, and morality’ (Mahmood, 2016, p. 3). Secularism is a highly specific, culturally embedded model for managing the relationship between religion and politics that emerged in Euro-American contexts as part of the Enlightenment, but which has become influential across diverse regions of the world (Gutkowski, 2014, p. 6). In other words, secularism is a distinctive ontology, or theory about what exists (Pedersen, 2001, p. 413). It ‘redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion’ (Asad, 2003, pp. 21–22); constitutes particular practices and ideas along the natural/supernatural binary, positioning some practices within the category of the natural or the secular, while others are placed in the category of the supernatural—religion, superstition or fetishism. Furthermore, secularism attributes particular characteristics to these practices—irrational, violent, chaotic, and divisive (Wilson, 2012). These inherent assumptions have come to dominate how we analyse practices constructed as ‘religious’ and how they intersect with and affect politics and public life. Secularism’s origins within the Euro-American context contribute to its association with colonialism and binary oppositions between not only ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, but also ‘modern/primitive’, ‘reason/emotion’ and ‘Western/non-Western’ (Wilson, 2012) that continue to affect power relations in global politics.

This is not to suggest that secularism is monolithic, homogenous or exclusively ‘Western’. Like ‘religion’, ‘secularism’ is not a singular entity. It is diverse, shifting, changing, unstable, and contextually specific (Daulatzai, 2004, p. 567). Indeed, while secularism emerged from local contexts and historical trajectories in Europe and the US, through globalization, it has merged to constitute a globalized agglomeration of ideas and practices that vary locally.¹ What secularism means in the Netherlands, for example, is very different from what it means in India, Bangladesh, France, Canada, and so on (Hurd, 2008; Kuru, 2007). Consequently, I adopt a constructivist understanding of secularism as a category that is defined in different ways in different contexts according to particular perspectives and agendas (Cavanaugh, 2009).

At the same time, while secularism does not mean the same thing from one place to the next, there are certain ‘family resemblances’ that characterize ideological forms of secularism across their different manifestations. These family resemblances, I argue, exist in the following basic assumptions:

(a) ‘religion’ is something tangible and identifiable, that can be clearly distinguished, defined and separated from the ‘secular’, which can also be clearly defined. Not only that but

(b) ‘religion’ should be clearly distinguished and separated from other areas of human activity, such as politics, economics, law, education and so forth, that are grouped under the ‘secular’ (Asad, 2002, p. 116), because

(c) ‘religion’ is subjective, particular, individual and irrational (Hurd, 2008; Wilson, 2012), as opposed to the ‘secular’ which is neutral and universal; and

(d) ‘religion’ is what people disagree about more frequently and violently than anything else (Cavanaugh, 2009), thus ‘religion’ is the fundamental cause of violence, intolerance and chaos; therefore

(e) ‘religion’ must be kept out of the ‘public’ sphere and relegated to the ‘private’ to preserve order and peace (Taylor, 2009; Wilson, 2012), meaning that the distinction between ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ is managed through the existence of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres (that are equally as unstable and problematic as categories of ‘religion’ and ‘secular’). Finally,

(f) ‘religion’ is always subordinated to the ‘secular’, in that, even if ‘religion’ is viewed as something that can positively contribute to politics and public life, its interventions should still be regulated by so-called secular authorities and institutions.

These six assumptions constitute what I shall refer to as the secular/religious binary, which is, I suggest, the essential defining feature of secular ontologies.

It is important to stress that critics of secularism are not arguing that it should be dispensed with, nor are they unconscious of the many important achievements that secularism has enabled. Secular approaches to public life are bound up with questions of justice and equality. As Mahmood (2016, p. 21) notes: ‘To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it; rather, by analysing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future.’ Critiques of secularism are an attempt to recognize the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of secularism, so as to contribute to the development of alternative, more inclusive futures.

Secularism in Global Justice Theory and Practice

The discussions raised by critiques of secularism reflect and are entangled with debates in global justice theory and practice. While there are many approaches to global justice, they can be crudely categorized into either cosmopolitan or communitarian positions (Nagel, 2005). Tensions between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism generally concern whether it is possible to have a universal standard of justice or whether justice can only be developed within specific national, cultural, historical, and political contexts. This mirrors the tension between ‘secularism’ and ‘religion’ within the religious/secular binary, where secularism claims to be universal in contrast to ‘religion’, which is constructed as highly specific. Global justice practitioners have resolved this tension in relation to justice in part by adopting a hybrid approach, with a universal commitment to strengthening local autonomy and emancipation (Steger et al., 2013). This hybrid approach has yet to be adequately theorized. A focus on ontologies can assist in this endeavour, since it upholds an overarching commitment to understanding ontologies, worldviews and values in their contexts (Blaser, 2013, p. 552).

On questions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’, global justice theorists generally fall into one of three approaches. The first and most common approach is to simply ignore ‘religion’ (see, for example, O’Neill, 2000; Sen, 2008). As highlighted above (assumption (f)), the secular/religious binary contains an inherent hierarchy whereby the secular is privileged over and above the religious (Wilson, 2012). This subordination of the ‘religious’ to the ‘secular’ resulted in Euro-American politics and scholarship ignoring ‘religion’, or viewing it as an antiquated relic, only relevant when analysing ‘pre-modern’ societies (Berger, 1967, 1999; Hurd, 2015)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Faith in Justice? The Role of Religion in Struggles for Global Justice
• 1 ‘Power Differences’ and ‘the Power of Difference’: The Dominance of Secularism as Ontological Injustice
• 2 Emancipation or Accommodation? Faith and Justice in a Globalized Africa
• 3 A Climate for Justice? Faith-based Advocacy on Climate Change at the United Nations
• 4 The United Nations Alliance of Civilisations and Global Justice
• 5 Faith Groups and Justice: A Source of Solidarity or Division in the Global Justice Movement? The World Social Forum and Occupy Wall Street as Case Studies
• 6 Keep the Faith: Progress, Social Justice and the Papacy
• 7 Claiming Justice for Israel/Palestine: The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Campaign and Christian Organizations
• Conclusion
• Index