An Introduction to Religion and Politics

Theory and Practice

Jonathan Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351729178
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This fully revised edition offers a comprehensive overview of the many theories of religion and politics and provides students with an accessible, in-depth guide to the subject's most significant debates, issues, and methodologies.

It begins by asking the basic questions of how social scientists see religion and why religion remains relevant to politics in the modern era. Fox examines the influence of religious identity, beliefs, institutions and legitimacy on politics, and surveys important approaches and issues found in the literature on religion and politics. Four new chapters on religious policy around the world, political secularism, and religious freedom and human rights have been added to fully revised content covering religious identity, rational choice approaches to religious politics worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, ideologies, institutions and political mobilization, fundamentalism, secularization, and religion and conflict.

This work will be essential reading for all students of religion and politics, comparative politics, international relations, and security studies.

1 Introduction

Religion and politics have been interconnected throughout history. For every ancient political entity for which we have records, religion was intimately connected to politics. This is true of ancient Egypt and Greece as well as the Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. This practice continued in the feudal states which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. This is true even of pre-history. The Old Testament records a time when separation of religion and state was unheard of. Each city or nation had its own god. People sought the approval of their gods when they went to war and brought these gods, or symbols representing their gods, with them. When one side was victorious their national religion was often imposed upon the vanquished. The political leaders of some states, such as the pharaohs of Egypt and pre-Christian emperors of Rome, were themselves considered gods.

However, even in the countries described in the Bible, theocracies were rare, and while political and religious power were usually interconnected, they were embodied in separate entities. That is, the political class and the priestly class were strongly dependent upon each other and significantly influenced the other’s decisions, but they were usually separate classes. The religious authorities would support the legitimacy of the temporal authorities and the temporal authorities would support the religion both financially and through enforcing the religion’s dogma with the power of the state.

In a number of ways things have not changed. Many states still support official religions but in most cases the state and religious institutions are separate entities. Wars are fought over religion, though in recent decades most of them have been civil wars or wars taking place in failed states rather than international wars. While with the possible exception of North Korea, leaders no longer demand to be worshiped, some do claim to be the representatives of their god on earth. Also, the clergy and religious institutions are often involved in politics, at least at the level of lobbying governments to influence political decisions. While separation of religion and state and freedom of religion are prominent in much of the world as an ideology, as demonstrated in Chapters 10 through 13, these interrelated ideologies are arguably more often expressed as an ideal than practiced, even in the Western liberal democracies where the concepts of separation of religion and state and religious freedom originated. Wars between states are also less often overtly about religion, though religious language is still used to justify war.

In fact, all countries support religion in some manner and all but three restrict it in some manner. Given this, it is difficult to tell whether governments are more involved or less involved with religion than they were in the past. In either case religion is certainly sufficiently intertwined with politics that the role of religion in politics is worthy of extended discussion, research, and debate.

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION AND POLITICS

This book is intended to explore the intersection between religion and politics in modern times. I provide a discussion of what I consider to be the most important intersections between religion and politics as well as the important bodies of theory on religion and politics in the political science literature and the relevant literatures from other disciplines. I also provide a more practical description of the nature and roles of specific governments in religious politics. I seek to do so in a comparative global context, both providing examples from the four corners of the earth and a theoretical framework that can be applied in a global context.

This book is firmly within the field of comparative politics and places a heavy emphasis on state religion policy. This has two implications. First, the focus is on the actual role religion plays in politics rather than the role it ought to play. For example, political philosophers such as Rawls and de Tocqueville, among many others, discuss the role they believe religion should play in democracy. These philosophies are certainly relevant to questions of how religion influences politics, both because they influence those who practice politics as well as because they help us theorize about how religion does influence politics. However, the question of how religion ought to influence politics is addressed here only in the context of how these theories can help us understand the actual role of religion in politics.

Second, religion’s influence on politics manifests through multiple and sometimes overlapping agencies. These include how governments address religion, the political activities of all sorts of religious groups and organizations, and religion’s influence on society in general. While this book addresses all of these, the major comparative focus is on state religion policy. This is not intended to imply that these other influences are less important. Rather, no book can include all possible examples. This simply reflects the author’s choice of focus.

There are two possible approaches to the comparative study of religion and politics. The first is to focus on theories and trends—that is the general ways in which religion can influence politics. This approach is intended to provide a theoretical toolbox that will give a student of religion and politics the means to analyze religion’s intersection with politics in any setting. The second is to examine the facts on the ground and explore the connection between religion and politics in particular places. This volume combines both approaches.

In most of the book I explore theories and important literatures in religion and politics, though two chapters (Chapters 10 and 11) focus on government religion policy in practice. While in the more theory-based chapters, I focus on the theory and trends approach, each of them includes numerous concrete examples which are intended to illustrate these theories and trends. Chapter 2 explores the history of the study of religion and politics—a history that is overshadowed by a long period of time when social scientists mostly ignored religion as a significant political and social factor. I explore how and why this occurred and how it influences our understanding of religion and politics today.

Chapters 3 to 6 explore what I consider to be the four most important avenues through which religion influences politics. Chapter 3 examines religious identity and theories which posit that some religious groups are different or behave differently than others. This type of theory, while limited and problematic in many ways, is also the most common in the political science literature. Accordingly, it provides a good starting point for a discussion of how religion influences politics. Chapter 4 examines how religious beliefs influence political behavior. Its central thesis is that religious worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, and theologies provide a lens through which people can understand the world around them as well as including explicit instructions on how to behave. All of these qualities of religion can potentially have profound influences on political behavior. Chapter 5 looks at how religion is used to justify and legitimize political actions and policies. At its most basic level, religion can lend legitimacy to governments, political parties, opposition movements, institutions, leaders, policies, and just about any other political actor or phenomenon one can list, as well as undermine their legitimacy. Chapter 6 explores the influence of religious organizations and institutions on how people organize for political activities. While religious institutions are rarely, if ever, built primarily to organize for political activity, they are commonly put to this use. Chapter 6 explores the dynamics of this phenomenon.

The rest of the chapters concentrate on more focused literatures, theories, and issues on religion and politics. Chapter 7 examines a body of theories in political science and sociology which posit that religious politics can be understood as the outcome of rational calculations. While arguably this theoretical discussion might be better placed before Chapter 3, I argue that it is best understood in relation to several of religion’s influences on politics and, accordingly, I placed this chapter after my discussion of these influences. Chapter 8 focuses on the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. While in many ways a unique manifestation of religion, fundamentalism’s influences on politics manifest through the four avenues described in Chapters 3 to 6. Chapter 9 uses the theories of the seven preceding chapters to examine how religion influences conflict, war, violence, and terrorism. Religious conflict is one of the most important current issues in the religion and politics literature. This chapter is intended to both examine how religion can influence conflict and provide a concrete example of how the theories and literatures on religion and politics can be applied to aid understanding of a more specific aspect of religion’s influence on politics.

Chapters 10 and 11 focus on government religion policy in practice. Chapter 10 examines how governments deal officially with religion and how governments in practice support religion. Official policy refers to the general framework of a government’s religion policy and addresses issues like whether a government declares an official religion. Yet the devil is in the details, and all governments in the world provide at least a minimal level of support for religion whether or not they designate an official one. Chapter 11 examines how governments limit religion. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first addresses how governments regulate, control, and restrict the majority religion. The second examines how governments restrict the religious practices and institutions of minority religion. Both types of limitations are common to the extent that they are the norm rather than the exception.

Chapter 12 examines political secularism—the ideology that religion ought to be in some manner separated from some or all aspects of politics and government. While such separation is rare, many political actors subscribe to this ideology. Yet there is little agreement on what this term actually means in practice. Chapter 12 explores this debate, both in theory and in practice.

Chapter 13 provides a similar examination of the concept of religious freedom. Like political secularism, there is no agreement on how the term should be defined or even on whether “religious freedom” is the proper term in the first place. Chapter 13 examines multiple interpretations of this concept and the extent to which governments live up to these multiple and often contradictory standards.

Chapter 14 diverges from the realm of comparative politics and examines the role of religion in international relations. While international relations is considered a separate sub-discipline in political science from comparative politics, I argue that the same concepts which can help us understand religion’s influence on politics within states can also help us understand its impact on the relations between states.

Finally, Chapter 15 provides some final thoughts on the role of religion and politics. This includes how the issues discussed earlier in this textbook, especially in Chapters 3 to 6, can be used to build a more comprehensive theory of religion and politics.

Overall, the approach in this volume is intended to give the reader the theoretical tools to understand the intersection between religion and politics anywhere in the world at any point in modern history. I then reinforce this theoretical approach with a discussion of a number of more focused topics in religion and politics, especially government religion policy. Much of the information on government religion policy comes from the Religion and State (RAS) project which, as is discussed in more detail later in this chapter, has collected information on government religion policy for 183 countries and territories.

A SOCIAL SCIENCE APPROACH TO RELIGION

There are many possible perspectives that can be applied to the academic study of religion. It is a topic studied by political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians, among others. Each of these disciplines has its own particular set of approaches to understanding the topic of religion, and a particular set of questions around which most research and inquiry revolves. Many of these approaches are not compatible or reconcilable with each other. When studying religion, one must select from them. This book uses a social science approach, relying most heavily on the methodologies of comparative political science and sociology and the questions asked particularly by political scientists, though the insights and queries of other disciplines can also be found in these pages.

What does this mean? Basically, I begin with the assumption that religion is a social institution or phenomenon which strongly influences human behavior. The primary goal of a social scientist is to understand human behavior. Political scientists and sociologists focus on the behavior of groups, with political scientists emphasizing political behavior and sociologists emphasizing social behavior. While the central goal of this book is to understand religion’s influence on political behavior, often this is not possible without an understanding of the role of religion in influencing social behavior. In addition, as is seen especially in Chapter 2, the insights of sociologists into religion are essential to understanding its political role because of the interconnections between the social and political. Furthermore, sociological theory on religion is considerably more developed than that of political science. Be that as it may, the central question asked in this volume is how religion intersects with and influences the political.

This approach has some important implications. The first and foremost is that the truth of religious claims is not a question I address. Whether or not a particular religion or belief is true is an important question to theologians, some philosophers, and billions of believers. In contrast, for a social scientist, as long as a belief influences behavior, the truth of the belief is unimportant. That is, social scientists are not equipped to judge which religion is the true religion, and the answer to this question, assuming a definitive answer is even possible in this world, does little to answer the questions we wish to ask. Rather I limit my inquiry in this volume to the question of how religions influence behavior. For the purposes of answering this question, whether or not a religion is in some existential or epistemological sense the one true religion does not matter as long as a person or group believes that it is. It is this belief which influences their behavior, not the truth or untruth of this belief.

Thus, for the purposes of the exercise of applying a social science perspective to understand religion’s influence on politics, we must set whatever beliefs we have regarding religion aside. It is not important whether we believe in a religion or believe all religions are no more than social constructions that have no truth to them. That is, one can believe that one’s religion is the one true religion or that all religions are false. However, these beliefs are not relevant to social science inquiry. Rather, we must objective...