Politics of Religious Freedom

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, Peter G. Danchin, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, Peter G. Danchin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226248509, 9780226248479
• eBook ISBN: 9780226248646
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a remarkably short period of time, the realization of religious freedom has achieved broad consensus as an indispensable condition for peace. Faced with widespread reports of religious persecution, public and private actors around the world have responded with laws and policies designed to promote freedom of religion. But what precisely is being promoted? What are the cultural and epistemological assumptions underlying this response, and what forms of politics are enabled in the process?
           
The fruits of the three-year Politics of Religious Freedom research project, the contributions to this volume unsettle the assumption—ubiquitous in policy circles—that religious freedom is a singular achievement, an easily understood state of affairs, and that the problem lies in its incomplete accomplishment. Taking a global perspective, the more than two dozen contributors delineate the different conceptions of religious freedom predominant in the world today, as well as their histories and social and political contexts. Together, the contributions make clear that the reasons for persecution are more varied and complex than is widely acknowledged, and that the indiscriminate promotion of a single legal and cultural tool meant to address conflict across a wide variety of cultures can have the perverse effect of exacerbating the problems that plague the communities cited as falling short.

Part 1

Religion

Preface

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

One of the most elusive and unstable aspects of the vociferous contemporary campaign for religious freedom is identifying precisely what counts as religion for both domestic and international legislation. On behalf of what exactly is this advocacy effort; what is included and what excluded by the word? In what ways do particular Christian histories and phenomenologies lurk within these deceptively universal formulations? How does a particular definition of religion imply a particular politics? Can we get beyond these entanglements? This section brings together seven essays that explore what might be meant by religion for religious freedom and the ways in which any such meaning is necessarily inflected by shifting connections among religion, law, politics, and freedom.

In their essays, Robert Yelle and Yvonne Sherwood trace the ways in which religion comes historically to be understood to float free of law and politics while remaining bound through those very separations to older and longer genealogies. Yelle insists that Judaism and Jewish ritual law as a negative image—as the negative image for the proposition that the state can never be the site for salvation—structures today’s understanding that true religion is that which can never be in partnership with the state. Yelle emphasizes the urgent task of reading Christian theology in order to understand how unfree we are. For her part, unexpectedly bringing together the frontispiece to Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie with recent “religion or belief” legislation in the UK, Sherwood displays the always unstable tension between the modern would-be secular settlement, on the one hand, and an always shifting set of players representing the threat to that settlement, alternatively configured as theology, religion, or belief, on the other. Religion figures in this uneasy arrangement as radically free, emblematic of a free people and yet always also threatening to a contained, domesticated democratic freedom.

Focusing on the structural role of belief and morality in politics today, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Webb Keane highlight the work that is done when religion is conceived as belief. Keane contrasts religion as belief with religion as morality—drawing a necessary link with political theologies—dependent as they are on theological anthropologies in which morality is a matter of sensibilities divinely sanctioned rather than dependent on rational thought. Hurd emphasizes the seductive link to economic and political freedom when belief and choice are made primary, leading to the marketization and confessionalization of religion—and even to something very like mind control.

For these four contributors the dialectic between reason and faith lurks—sometimes on the surface, sometimes in the depths—as an unseen puppeteer, determining and redetermining the meaning of religion. The remaining three essays demonstrate how these abstractions act on actual bodies, rearranging persons and lives. The place of Theology in the Diderot frontispiece, placed ambiguously between Reason and Philosophy, serves as a type for the French Muslim schoolgirl who, in order to have her visible sign respected, must tread the fine line between non-negotiable choice and patriarchal imposition.

Courtney Bender illustrates the chameleon-like quality of separation as the bedrock of modernity even in the short span of the last fifty or sixty years of US history, showing how American religious sociologists have moved from a mid-twentieth-century understanding of religious pluralism as having a secularizing effect that tends to produce a common civic faith to an understanding of religious pluralism founded on a market model as the creator of vitalizing religion, allowing faiths, in her words, “to become truer versions of themselves.” Both understandings affirm and underwrite an American exceptionalism that regards the United States as uniquely free in matters of religion—that religious pluralism, American style, leads inevitably to religious freedom—echoing Yelle’s and Sherwood’s depiction of a posited freedom that paradoxically underwrites an inflexible and intolerant politics.

Greg Johnson’s and Rosalind I. J. Hackett’s essays are, in a sense, protests from and for the margins to the devastating power of these realist revelations. Acknowledging the many critiques of the politics of religious freedom, they demand attention to the very specific ways in which that politics both disenfranchises and liberates those who have been excluded. The critique is shown to result in a second exclusion. Historically excluded by a religious politics that categorized the practices of African traditional religions and those of Native Hawaiians as not religion, now— just at a time when the possibility of inclusion in that politics begins to seem within reach—legal enforcement of international and national commitments to religious freedom are being delegitimated by the critique. Johnson shows how care for one’s ancestors in Hawaii, particularly in the effort to enforce laws protecting burials, has taken center stage in a campaign for respect. Hackett describes active resistance to both Christian and Islamic efforts in sub-Saharan Africa to exclude the indigenous religious traditions of Africa from legal protection. As other essays in this volume show, the power of a claim to religious freedom is often most potent when it emerges from and negotiates within the context of a local politics and when, as Johnson notes, marginalized communities can call upon the powerful to honor their commitments—and shame them into putting their money where their mouth is.

There is little direct reference in any of these essays to academic definitions of religion, whether Durkheimian, Marxist, or Weberian, phenomenological, structural, or theological. Religious studies as a critical intellectual endeavor has had a mostly tangential relationship, at best, to interrogating the politics of religious freedom. Indeed, to the extent that the emergence of religious studies has contributed to an irenic celebration of religious universality and diversity, it has also contributed to the legitimating of religion as a space distinctively free of politics, as a space in which politics can be escaped. And most of its practitioners are advocates for religious freedom.

Enormous pressure is being placed on the word religion in the myriad of political and academic efforts to “understand” and “explain” a range of contemporary phenomena. The essays in this section direct our attention away from the utopian space of religious freedom to theology, philosophy, language, politics, economics, the media, and international aid work—not in a “religion and . . .” gesture but in order to illustrate the ways in which these other provisionally labeled and only fictionally independent domains are internal to and constitutive of religious life and it to them. Religion is returned in these essays to its embeddedness in and inseparability from the lives it shares, shapes, and inhabits.

Chapter One

Imagining the Hebrew Republic

Christian Genealogies of Religious Freedom

Robert Yelle

As a historian of religion, some of my recent work has focused on tracing the genealogy of what we call religious freedom in developments internal to European Christianity. My goal has not been to frame a normative theory of what limit ought to be placed on the freedom of religion in any contemporary jurisdiction, nor (apart from the effects of British colonialism on India) to trace the very different histories of the modernization of cultural traditions in other parts of the world, as these traditions have been shaped by the complex forces of nationalism and economic and technological development. My concern has been instead with tracing the entanglement of the origins of modern ideologies of freedom of religion, and of secularism more generally, with theological antecedents in keeping with Friedrich Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy as the uncovering of relations between categories that are ostensibly opposed—in this case, religion and secular law. This genealogical work does not depend upon a reification and reinscription of these categories, but instead takes its motivation from their effective separation in much contemporary discourse and the accompanying communication gap between lawyers and scholars of religion—two groups to which I happen to belong that rarely engage in productive conversation.

Several contributors to this discussion of religious freedom, including Elizabeth Hurd and Peter Danchin, have noted that intrinsic to the modern understanding of this concept is the idea that religion is a matter of private conviction rather than of public performance, a matter of belief rather than of ceremonial. This understanding of religion has commonly—and, I believe, correctly—been traced to tendencies that became dominant during the Reformation, as signaled by the Protestant critique of the Catholic ritual economy of salvation. It has less often been observed, however, that the separation of religion from such external matters was frequently expressed through more ancient Christian ideas, such as the distinction—of fundamental importance to the typological interpretation of the relation between the Old and New Testaments—among the natural, civil, and ceremonial portions of Mosaic Law. Natural or moral laws, such as “Thou shalt not kill,” were supposedly universal and timeless; civil or judicial laws were the laws of a particular nation or people, and binding only on such people. The ceremonial laws of the Jews included ritual commandments such as those mandating the circumcision of male children and the offering of sacrifices. This last category of laws had supposedly been abrogated by the Gospel and by Christ’s redemptive sacrifice that ended these rituals, which were regarded as no longer necessary for salvation. During the Reformation, many Protestants reinterpreted these ideas, posing again the question of the relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical powers, both within the Israelite kingdom when it existed and, subsequent to the promulgation of the Gospel, within a radically different economy in which, in Paul’s terms, “grace” was opposed to “law.”

Recently, Eric Nelson has argued that the notion of a Hebrew republic served as a model for thinking about the ideal relationship between church and state in early modern Europe, where this model influenced the development of religious toleration. Nelson also traces other important dimensions of our secular polity, including republicanism and ideas of land ownership and distribution, to theological discourses that took the ancient Israelite kingdom seriously as a model for present-day government. His approach combats the tendency of those—such as Mark Lilla—who represent the Enlightenment as having arisen sui generis, without connection to Reformation theology, and in so doing, adopt the secularist normative argument for the separation of religion from civil society as an objective description of historical reality. Nelson states, “[I]t may well be that we live, as Charles Taylor tells us, in a ‘secular age,’ but if so, we nonetheless owe several of our most central political commitments to an age that was anything but. And it seems reasonable that we will not be able to understand the peculiar fault lines and dissonances of our contemporary political discourse until we come to terms with that basic, paradoxical fact.”

Nelson is not the first to make such claims. Henning Graf Reventlow, in his magisterial The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, carefully excavated the theological dimensions, and in particular the engagement with biblical typology, of such important contributors to secularism and religious freedom as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Joshua Mitchell also argued, “The central theoretical issue of the Reformation was this question of the meaning of Christ’s fulfillment of the Old Truth. . . . This is no less true of Luther than of Hobbes and Locke. . . . Toleration, required because of the New Dispensation, entails that political power be wanting in matters of faith, that one be free of political power to be free to attain salvation. . . . [S]peculations on the meaning of biblical history are the threads that hold together the fabric of early modern political thought.” As far back as 1895, Georg Jellinek noted that Reformation theology shaped the origins of religious freedom. Jellinek’s work in turn informed that of Max Weber, although neither scholar was aware of the extent to which Christian anti-Judaism influenced secularism, and Weber’s own biases against Rabbinic Judaism have been pointed out by such scholars as David Ellenson.

Recently, as a result of my own investigations into the role that Christian theological discourses played in the formation in early modern Europe of what we now call secular law, I have become increasingly convinced that part of what marks the Reformation discourse of secularism and religious freedom as Christian is precisely the use of Judaism as a foil or counterexample, in addition to the transformation of associated theological distinctions such as Paul’s oppositions between “flesh” and “spirit,” or “law” and “grace.” This complements the work of scholars, such as David Nirenberg, who have shown how the idea of Jewishness has often served as a contrasting category or negative image for European civilization. Although it is clear that these transformations do not establish a simple continuity with what came before, they retain many traces of their origins, without a study of which our understanding of secularism and religious freedom remains incomplete.

There is a line that runs from Martin Luther’s argument, in The Freedom of a Christian (1520), that “Man has a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily one,” to John Locke’s Letter on Toleration (1689), which concludes that “there is absolutely no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian Commonwealth.” The idea that there exists a radical divide between internal faith and external performance, and that—predestination aside—only the former has to do with salvation, leads ineluctably, not to freedom, but to “freedom of religion.” Luther, Hobbes, and Locke insist that Christians remain subject to the governing authorities, and as Perez Zagorin has pointed out, Luther himself was scarcely tolerant of religious dissent. Arguably in no other tradition has there occurred such a total bifurcation of spirit and matter. One thing that makes this doctrine distinctive is its claim that the state cannot in any sense be a site for salvation.

Thomas Morgan, in A Brief Examination of the Rev. Mr. Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1742), expressed the logical conclusion of this tendency when he insisted, paraphrasing Locke, that religion is a purely internal matter. Whatever is outside of us, and in the public domain, is not religious, but necessarily political and subject to the state:

An established Church is certainly a Creature of State, and purely a political Thing; but an established Religion, or Religion established by Law, is an Absurdity and Contradiction. . . . Coercive Power can neither promote nor restrain Religion . . . can never enlighten the Mind, purify the Affections, or recommend Men to God . . . why then should you talk of established Religion? . . . Religion being purely a spiritual and internal Thing, consisting in the inward real Perswasion, Temper, and Disposition of the Mind, a Religion established by Law, can be nothing but an ecclesiastical Phantom, since the Law might as well make a God as a Religion.

Morgan held up the Jews as an example of the problems that come from confounding politics with religion: “The grand fundamental Error of that unhappy People from first to last, has not been Obedience to the Law in all its Parts, as a national civil Law supposed to have come from God; but mistaking and substituting it for Religion. . . .” According to this view, while there can be no such thing as a separation between church and state, there can also be no possibility of the state encroaching on true religion. This was the conclusion of a Protestant redefinition of religion as private or interior, and therefore as unconnected with ritual and the body, including the body politic.

The thesis of the impossibility of a “Christian Commonwealth” depended on the rejection of the Hebrew republic. Judaism was preserved in this secularizing dialectic as the negative image of Christian salvation or of a kingdom to come that was endlessly deferred as the parousia. I agree with Nelson on the importance of the Hebrew republic or Mosaic constitution to early modern political discourse. However, I take issue with his argument that toleration emerged not, as is commonly thought, out of the idea that church and state ought to remain separate but instead out of the Erastian notion that church and state ought to be collapsed and consolidated—as they supposedly were in the ancient Hebrew republic. It is true that the idea of the Hebrew republic permitted many laws that had been classified as “religious” and therefore as a source of contention among different sects to be reclassified as merely “civil” laws, which, even if legislated by God or Moses for the Israelites as a nation, had long ago ceased to be binding. It is also true that the Erastian consolidation of civil and ecclesiastical authority tended to reduce religious controversy. More important than either of these two developments, however, was the idea that, under the Gospel, religion is purely an internal, spiritual matter. Even in Hobbes, who was arguably the most thoroughgoing Erastian, such typological ideas are foregrounded. In Leviathan, Hobbes insists that Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world” and that the inward condition (as opposed to external conduct) of a Christian, whether saved or damned, is not in any case accessible to the political authorities.

Condemnations of the Hebrew republic accelerated during the deist period, which exacerbated traditional Christian anti-Judaism. The deists, for whom true or “natural religion” (meaning the moral law) was universal and rational, abhorred the idea that salvation could depend on a particular historical dispensation given to a chosen people. The idea that religion requires revelation to be known is inconsistent with the deist idea that human reason is sufficient for salvation. Deists therefore rejected what Matthew Tindal referred t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Religion
• Part 2. History
• Part 3. Law and Politics
• Part 4. Freedom
• Contributors
• Index