The Secular and the Sacred

Nation, Religion and Politics

William Safran, William Safran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135762100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

What is the place of religion in modern political systems? This volume addresses that question by focusing on ten countries across several geographic areas: Western and East-Central Europe, North America, the Middle East and South Asia. These countries are comparable in the sense that they are committed to constitutional rule, have embraced a more or less secular culture, and have formal guarantees of freedom of religion. Yet in all the cases examined here religion impinges on the political system in the form of legal establishment, semi-legitimation, subvention, and/or selective institutional arrangements and its role is reflected in cultural norms, electoral behaviour and public policies. The relationship between religion and politics comes in many varieties in differing countries, yet all are faced with three major challenges: modernity, democracy and the increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of their societies.

1
Introduction

WILLIAM SAFRAN

The place of religion in politics is at once a reflection of the extent of free choice of expression and the matrix around which a national culture and identity develop. Religion has functioned as a mechanism of social control, a rival to the welfare state and a brake to modernization. Many generations ago, religion and politics were inseparable; indeed, the state was, more often than not, a secular manifestation of the dominant faith. Many rulers of antiquity argued that they derived their authority and legitimacy from God, not from the people they ruled, and justified their absolute power on the basis of their divine right to rule. The Jewish nation and, subsequently, the Jewish state, were based on a contract with God, made through Moses, that committed them to obey revealed law; similarly, the Greek state’s security and prosperity depended upon the grace of the various gods.

During the Middle Ages, a distinction was made between the cross and the sword, that is, between the spiritual and the terrestrial power; yet the supremacy of the Church in Europe was unchallenged by a secular state, because the state in the modern sense did not yet exist. In fact, the early Christian churches insisted that their sovereignty was supranational. The Holy Roman Emperor was anointed by the Pope; during the Protestant Reformation later on, monarchs, basing themselves on the principle of cujus regio, ejus religio, decided which religion was to be ‘established’, and they became its heads and ‘defenders’. Certain nations were so deeply imbued with a collective religious faith that they came to be identified in terms of it. Spanish, Irish and Polish nationalisms were congruent with Roman Catholicism and equated with it. Until the Revolution of 1789 (and except for a brief interlude in the seventeenth century), ‘Frenchness’ was defined so thoroughly in terms of Catholicism that France was considered ‘the eldest daughter of the church’. Analogous situations are found in other countries: thus, Russian and Greek nationalisms have been closely associated with Eastern Orthodoxy; and the ‘Arab nation’ is difficult to imagine without Islam.

The coupling of religion and nationhood—and the role of religion in nation-building efforts in the past—applied largely to the pre-democratic age, and applies today to many non-Western societies that have not yet modernized (such as Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). How strongly, however, does it apply to modern polities? What is the relationship between nationalism and religion? To what extent is religion compatible with democracy? These are some of the basic questions that inform the essays that follow. The answers depend on what religion we are discussing as well as on the nature of the political system. When we think of modern democratic states, we refer to secularized societies to which religions, or rather, a plethora of competing and sometimes cooperating religious establishments, have accommodated to changes because they have been republicanized.

The relationship of religion to freedom and democracy has been a matter of controversy throughout history. The Bible calls upon Moses to ‘proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof’ (Leviticus 15:1). That call specifically applied to slaves, who were to be freed during the Jubilee year. Throughout the generations, Jews have thanked God for delivering them ‘from slavery to freedom’. Unfortunately, the linkage between religion and either freedom or democracy has been noticeably weak historically. Many religions—most prominently Christianity and Islam— have found ways to justify slavery; and to the extent that religions have been hierarchically organized, they have had little use for democracy. Until recently, Church establishments preferred monarchical forms of government as best suited to protect their privileges.

According to Locke, the typical religion, understood as an all-embracing Weltanschauung claiming a superior, if not absolute, truth, is not compatible with individual freedom, democracy and, above all, tolerance. In reality, however, the role of institutionalized religion in the promotion of democracy has been uneven. It is generally accepted that Protestant minority or ‘dissenter’ sects have played a significant role in economic and political development. We have been led to believe that Protestantism has been the major religious progenitor of democracy; according to Max Weber’s analysis, there has been a clear ‘developmental’ causal chain from the ‘Protestant ethic’ to individualism, capitalism and democratic governance.¹ Some observers argue that not all Protestants (not even all Calvinists and Puritans) shared that productivist ethic and identify it with other religions—R.H.Tawney with the Catholicism of Renaissance Italy and Werner Sombart with Judaism.² To Marx, Judaism was the religion of money and the embodiment of collective greed, and hence the religion of capitalism; to many anti-Semites, it was the faith that led to Bolshevism; to still others, the socioeconomic marginality of Jews forced them to foster economic innovations that led to capitalism; to others again, a secular translation of the divine commandment to do good deeds (mitsvot) led Jews to embrace socialism. To many contemporary observers, the ethic of hard work is incarnated in Chinese Confucianism—although there is uncertainty about the extent to which it is associated with democracy.

It should be noted that the Protestants’ original stress on the primacy of the individual as the interpreter of religious truth did not necessarily translate into political individualism, that is, the promotion of individual freedom. On the contrary, the German Evangelical Lutheran establishment was marked by its authoritarian character and was intimately associated with the Prussian autocracy; the Roman Catholic establishment was closely allied with the absolute monarchies in France, Spain and Portugal; and neither establishment had much difficulty in supporting Hitler and countenancing his massacre of the Jews. After World War II, both of these churches embraced democracy as well as the welfare state in Europe; furthermore, they were influential in promoting decolonization, land reform and grassroots democracy.

In short, some religions are the harbingers of democracy and progress, whereas others are not. It may be argued that in a number of countries neither capitalism nor democracy could develop because the beliefs associated with the religions that dominated there were incompatible with an autonomous and progressive civil society. For example, premodern Catholicism was marked by features that were not conducive to what is now called ‘democratization’; these included hierarchical institutions that regulated nonparticipant and highly inegalitarian societies and perpetuated the belief that this life was a vale of tears. Such a situation is widely believed to prevail in Muslim societies, owing to the fatalism—the belief that everything is God’s will (‘insh ‘allah’)—that is considered an important element of Islamic culture.

All countries discussed in this volume once constituted, grosso modo, nations that were defined, in turn, in terms of religion. A specific religion once determined the norms of individual and social behaviour of a country’s citizens (or rather, ‘subjects’); the state’s leadership worked closely with the religious establishment in exercising surveillance over public morality, providing education and establishing personal status laws. Those who were outside the framework of the dominant religion were, at best, tolerated, and, at worst, socially ostracized, legally handicapped, forcibly converted, ghettoized or expelled.

That is no longer true in the countries under review. Members of all religions are equal before the law, provided, of course, that their practices do not clash with the dominant political values of the state. Religious conflict is no longer pursued by means of crusades, theological disputations or holy wars; blasphemers or heretics no longer are burned at the stake; and adherents of minority religions are no longer publicly molested and can openly practise their beliefs. Owing to the rapid pace of secularization and the decline of the peasantry, churches are losing members and are increasingly on the defensive. Moreover, owing to the influx of new populations and the spread of democracy, religious pluralism is now widely accepted.

The countries examined in this collection share a number of features: they are democratic, at least in the formal constitutional sense; they are committed to the principle of the free exercise of religion; the adherence of their citizens to a religion is increasingly voluntary, and, at least officially, ‘exit’ is possible. Although one or another religion may be dominant, it has lost its monopoly over defining the proper path to morality or spirituality; and—largely as a result of the weakening of central ecclesiastical authority— there is increasing pluralism even within religions. Educational curricula and personal status increasingly are defined by the state (whether embodied in a central government or regional authorities) rather than religious institutions, within varying parameters ranging from those of secular France to selectively ‘theocratic’ Israel. Finally, religious public-policy agendas are promoted by democratic and peaceful means, such as interest groups, social movements, political parties and elections. In some countries, religious groups enjoy official legitimation and their participation in the political process—via confessional political parties, trade unions, or ‘recognized’ charitable associations—is institutionalized; in others, religious groups have the same opportunity as other sectors of civil society to exert pressure on the public authorities by informal means. In some societies, adherence to a religion is less a matter of theology than kinship or other ascriptive ties. In short, in all these countries laïcité is the dominant norm, although it may not be expressed in terms of the Jacobin dogma of republican France. This norm is reflected in the affirmation of fundamental rights, the religious neutrality of the state (at least in practice), freedom of religion and non-religion, and the autonomy of the individual conscience.

This is not to suggest that all countries have a uniform approach to religion. In six countries—the United States, France, Turkey, India and, more recently, Italy, Spain and Poland, religion has been ‘disestablished’ at least in some formal sense. In Greece, Israel (Northern) Ireland and the former Yugoslavia this has not yet been accomplished, in part because the very identity of these states continues to be defined in terms of a specific religion.

The British case is more complex: while there are two ‘established’ religions, the non-established religions operate on a roughly equal playing field. Anglicanism may be the norm applied to the Crown, but it has gradually ceased to be the decisive indicator of Britishness (or even Englishness), and the continued reality of two established Churches has not had a chilling effect on the free exercise of a great variety of non-established religions. Yet religious equality has not yet been fully achieved: the ‘lords spiritual’ of only two religions have special representation in the House of Lords; and it is only very recently that former Catholic priests obtained the right to sit in the House of Commons.

In two of the countries under discussion—Spain under General Franco and France under Marshal Pétain—religious institutions once functioned as hand-maidens of autocratic government—but they were politically deinstitutionalized as these countries returned to democracy. In fact, as democratization appeared inevitable, the Catholic Church in both countries adapted to the situation, if only in order to preserve what was left of its authority. In Spain, moreover (as Victor Urrutia argues), the Church anticipated democratic reforms toward the end of the Franco regime by supporting greater pluralism within civil society.

The essays presented here portray connections between religion on the one hand and ethnicity or nation on the other that reflect a considerable diversity, which can be summed up as follows:

1. religion mixed (or fused) with ethnicity—in the cases of Greeks, Poles, Bosnians, Northern Irish Catholics and Israeli Jews;
2. religion as transnational but as constituting, at the same time, a major element of national identity—in the cases of Turks, Serbs and Croats;
3. religion as pluralistic, transethnic and nonpolitical—in the cases of the United States, France, India and, increasingly, Great Britain and Spain.³

The cases of (former) Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland illustrate the fact that religion cannot always be separated from ethnonationalism—that, indeed, the two have had a reciprocal influence. Yet there is no exact congruence between the two; for example, there are Albanian Kosovars who are Roman Catholic and Croatians who are Protestant. Similarly, in Ulster there are Catholics who wish to remain citizens of the United Kingdom and Protestants who would adjust without much difficulty to union with the Irish Republic. Furthermore, both religious and national identities are shaped by collective memories, especially a memory of cruelties perpetrated by one religious group against another. In addition, both religious and national identity may be reinforced, if not created, by institutional engineering and public policies.

Yugoslavia was established as a successor state that was from the beginning multiethnic, multilingual and multireligious. Under President Tito, religious pluralism was tolerated, because it did not interfere with ‘nation-building’—i.e., the creation of a transethnic and transreligious Yugoslav political community based on Marxism, structured along federal lines and consolidated by means of a charismatic leader aided by the police. The intertwining of religion and ethnicity was exemplified by the Bosnian Muslims. The transformation of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a constituent republic under Tito led to the creation of a Bosnian Muslim nationality. This did not seem to matter too much, because the members of the various religious groups got along well in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. It was remarked that, ‘the major difference between the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, and Jews [in that city] was that the Christians don’t go to their churches, the Muslims don’t go to the mosque, and the Jews don’t go to synagogue’.

Since the disaggregation of Yugoslavia, members of the various (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) communities seem to have turned to religion in order to provide an underpinning to their collective ethnic identities. The reassertion of such identities was stimulated and exploited by Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševi , whose oppressive cultural policies against the Albanian Kosovars fed the religious consciousness of the latter.

The interface between religion and politics is clearly apparent in Spain, where three religious groups lived in harmony for many generations; after the Inquisition, however, the country became so solidly Catholic that its culture and identity could not be disjoined from Roman Catholicism. During the fascist Franco regime, Catholicism became, in effect, an institutional component of the state. In the context of post-Franco democratization, several processes were inaugurated, among them secularization and the creation of a pluralistic society, a development that resulted in a gradual and partial ‘privatization’ of religion. This process, however, stopped short of clear separation of Church and state, since special formalized relationships were set up between the state and the Catholic Church on the one hand, and the other ‘rooted’ religions, such as Judaism, Islam and Protestantism, on the other.

Greece and Poland bear comparison because in both countries national and religious identities have tended to merge. Just as Greek Orthodoxy is a marker of ‘Greekness’, ‘to be Polish is to be Catholic’. Both countries are committed to freedom of religion; but that commitment is limited in practice. Greek Orthodoxy enjoys a preferential status, while other religions have encountered official obstacles in their legitimation, if not their observances: for example, as Adamantia Pollis points out, the Eastern Orthodox leadership has been pressuring the public authorities to reinstate the mention of religion on identity cards. Muslims and Jews enjoy special legal status as well; but this means less than meets the eye. The Greek attitude to Islam is coloured by the country’s more or less antagonistic relations with Turkey; and freedom of worship for Jews is not a significant public issue, since there are few Jews left in the country after the genocide committed during World War II (in which the role of the Greek Orthodox establishment was not negligible).⁴ Nevertheless, religious pluralism (or at least tolerance) is making steady progress, in part because of increasing secularization, and in part because of the influence and ‘surveillance’ of the European Union and the Council of Europe.

The role of religion in Poland is more complex. For many generations, the Church played a dominant role in the development of Polish national consciousness and, indeed, the Polish state.⁵ Poland developed as a distinct political entity when under the leadership of Duke Mieszko I, it embraced Christianity. The aristocracy and landed gentry were almost exclusively Catholic and (for the most part) Polish, and the Black Madonna of Cz stochowa became a powerful symbol of Catholic as well as Polish collective identity. From the fourteenth century on, many Jews and German Protestants settled in...