International Development Policy: Religion and Development

G. Carbonnier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137329370
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329387
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The rise of fundamentalist movements in major religions has forced decision-makers, development organizationsand academics to turn their attention to its meaning for development. Global scholars and practitioners examine these issues and fundamentally question the secular-religious dichotomy in development discourse and practice.

PART 1

RELIGION AND DEVELOPMENT AS A FIELD OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

1

THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS NGOs: DEVELOPMENT STUDIES AND THE RETURN OF RELIGION

Philip Fountain

Abstract

In a remarkable about-turn, development studies has discovered religion and considerable attention is now dedicated to analysing religious non-governmental organisations (NGOs). How can we understand the concept of ‘religion’ that is now being so widely discussed? Through a close reading of key texts, this chapter examines how religion has been constructed and for what purposes. While development scholars have given little attention to definitional concerns, a default conceptualisation – substantivist, essentialised, ahistorical and universal – is nevertheless apparent. A pervasive secular-religious dichotomy is implicit within this conceptualisation, constructing development as located within the secular domain, set apart from religion. Drawing upon critical scholars of religion, this chapter argues that development studies has perpetuated a ‘myth of religious NGOs’. This myth arbitrarily assigns to a diverse set of development actors the status of abnormal, if still potentially useful, religious Other(s). The myth conceals the historical specificity and value-laden nature of mainstream development. The current vogue for abstracted discussions of religion should be replaced with closer attention to specific practices and particular traditions, including secular development. Studies should also show greater awareness of the political uses of ‘religion’.

Acknowledgements

This chapter has benefited from careful readings by Ben Arps, Julius Bautista, Robin Bush, Michael Feener, Patrick Guinness, Doug Hynd, Humeira Iqtidar, Jeremy Kingsley, Iris Lee, Deepa Nair, Andrew Shepherd, Toby Tan and Zhang Yijiang, as well as from the editors and the participants of the Graduate Institute workshop on Religion and Development, particularly Francis Cheneval and Jeff Haynes. The argument and remaining errors remain mine alone.

1. Introduction

For much of the past 60 years, mainstream development actors and scholars have paid scant sustained attention to relationships between ‘religion’¹ and development. This absence has now been widely critiqued. Ver Beek (2000), for instance, in an early paper, argues that religion and spirituality constitute a development ‘taboo’. Similarly, for Selinger (2004), religion is a ‘forgotten factor’ in development discourse. According to Bornstein (2003, 1), scholarly studies of development have ‘excluded the topic of religion’ from analysis. In recent years, however, the situation described a decade ago by these authors has been reversed. Religion is back on the academic development agenda in an extraordinary recent ‘surge of interest’ (Hovland, 2008, 171). The return of religion to development studies has been dramatic and swift, as is apparent in the flood of numerous recent publications.² Religion is the current ‘hot topic’ in development studies.

While a ‘return of religion’ has been heralded across the humanities and social sciences for decades, the recent surge in development studies is not confined to, nor did it originate in, academia. Jones and Petersen (2011, 1292) note that, chronologically, ‘the interest in religion came more from the development industry, particularly the big multilateral and bilateral donors, than from universities and research organisations’. Following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, various governments proactively re-engaged with religion in their development strategies.³ Prior to these initiatives, the World Bank, the ‘world’s most important development institution’ (Pallas, 2005, 677), was a trail-blazer in the area under former Bank President James Wolfensohn. Balchin (2007, 532–3) has even argued that the ‘f-word’ (‘faith-based’) is so ‘policy-sexy’ right now that it has become an almost obligatory buzzword for those seeking to get ahead in the development industry. The return of religion to development has been both programmatic and academic, without a clear distinction between them. That said, development studies is a diverse discipline and, as with other key topics, critical studies are emerging in parallel, if also intersecting, tracks. These critical appraisals scrutinise key concepts and practices in development so as to imagine alternative approaches. This chapter is situated in this dissenting tradition.

I argue that both the prior exclusion of religion and the current celebration of its newfound celebrity status by development studies are plagued by an ongoing ideological bias apparent in the framing and deployment of the concept. Religion is not an object waiting to be discovered and analysed, but rather a domain constructed according to dominant modern presuppositions by the religion and development literature. Discourse relating to religion is, correspondingly, not neutral description but deeply political, and should be analysed accordingly.

I draw on critics of ‘religion’ to question contemporary meanings and uses of the concept. This enables a rethinking of how religion is deployed in key texts in development studies. In doing so, I analyse three texts, all of which, despite differences in argument, are beleaguered with definitional problems. These texts are presented as illustrative instances of ‘the myth of religious NGOs’.⁴ Development studies has produced a mythos which implicates the discipline in a cognitive mystification of that which it calls ‘religious NGOs’ and, consequently, imagines and entrenches dominant secular ideologies as normal, neutral and morally superior. Finally, I propose some ways of navigating through these fraught concerns.

2. Against ‘religion’

According to Cavanaugh (2007), suggestions that the meaning of religion is obvious, and definitional debates merely semantic, should be met with the same scepticism as a used car salesperson’s pronouncement that ‘Everybody knows this is a good car!’ Nothing is merely semantic. Language matters because it is the primary means through which we imagine and seek to change the world. Academic discussion of religion must pay attention to details, all the more so given the persistence of conceptual debates about religion since universal definitions were first proposed in seventeenth-century Europe. The observation that religion ‘defies definition’ (Taylor, 2007, 15) is taken by some scholars to indicate that the problem is not a need for further definitional clarity, but rather that the attempt to assert religion as a universal category is itself a mistake. For these scholars, religion is not waiting ‘out there’ to be discovered, but instead is produced (van der Veer, 1995), manufactured (McCutcheon, 1997) and/or constructed (Dubuisson, 2003) by academic discourse. Beginning with Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s ([1962] 1978) seminal (though problematic) study, these critics have levelled two intersecting arguments against ‘religion’ – that it is (a) inadequate as an analytical category and (b) ideologically loaded.

Two approaches to religion have dominated academic debate (Cavanaugh, 2009).⁵ Substantivist definitions posit that all religions share something in common, and attempt to identify that content. A frequent substantivist definition, be it explicit or implicit, is what Fitzgerald (2003, 5–6) derisively refers to as the ‘alleged common-sense’ variety of ‘belief in gods or the supernatural’. This formulation was initially proposed by anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the late nineteenth century, though numerous refinements have since tinkered with the general theme. Although this approach accords significant attention to ‘World Religions’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘animist’ religions are also considered to be variations of the same phenomena. Functionalists, in contrast, propose that religion should be identified according to what it does, rather than through the identification of commonalities. Following Durkheim’s (1965) famous formulation – religion is society’s self-worship which binds a community together – functionalists tend to view religion as ritualistic acts of communal unification. Within this approach, it is equally feasible to analyse religion in the patriotic flag and anthem ceremonies of a secular nation-state as it is within Muslim Friday prayers at a mosque. Given these contrasting approaches, it is important to note that functionalist interpretations are entirely absent from the recent religion and development literature. This chapter therefore is focused on critiques of substantivist visions.

Substantivists essentialise religion by assuming that there is a ‘thing’, ‘religion’, that is always and everywhere a distinct, separate and identifiable entity. A key criticism of this ‘sui generis’ (McCutcheon, 1997) approach is that the selection of common attributes is inadequate and inappropriate. The meaning(s) of ‘god(s)’ and/or ‘supernatural’ are extremely vague and translate poorly across cultures. Moreover, not all practices routinely classified as religious are concerned with such things. For example, the puja of some Ambedkar Buddhists in Maharashtra is performed not to some supposed mystical entities, but rather to honour education and celebrate human potential (Fitzgerald, 2003, 129). Lash (1996, 166–71) argues that the notion that ‘God’ is somehow ‘supernatural’ derives from a deist theology which locates a clockmaker God far away in another world, appearing only occasionally in our own. This distinctly modern framing of God transformed prior Christian understandings, and contrasts starkly with other theologies. Just as the notion of ‘gods and supernatural beings’ is limited in its analytical value, so too is the concept of ‘belief’ with its connotations of interiority, individuality, and conscious affirmation. For Asad (1993, 47), the emphasis on belief is a ‘modern, privatized Christian’ one that emerged in post-Reformation Europe (see also Asad, 1983, 1996, 2001, 2003). While certain forms of Christianity are preoccupied with systematising doctrine and affirming propositions, this has not been the case in other traditions. Similarly, this focus on belief also tends to elide practices, which are also extremely important.

Substantive definitions of religion, therefore, often suffer from being too narrow, too specific. But there is another, more general, sense in which substantive definitions are overly constrained. Attention to religion tends to arbitrarily exclude those aspects of life deemed ‘non-religious’, such as ‘economics’ and ‘politics’. This exclusion of wider contexts ensures, for Fitzgerald (2003, 2007a, 2007b), that researchers looking for religion will necessarily fail to properly understand the societies they encounter. This is because, according to van der Veer (2001), a rigid conceptual separation between religion and non-religion makes little sense even in Western countries that have implemented legal mechanisms separating ‘Church’ and ‘state’. Rejecting narrow definitions for vague or generic ones is hardly an improvement on the situation, as the concept then fails to either identify distinctive characteristics of religion or provide clarity as to what exactly is under analysis.

The idea of sui generis religion emerged at a particular juncture of history. Saler (2000, ix) glosses it as a ‘Western folk category’, and argues that studies of religion make Eurocentric assumptions that Christianity (and sometimes Judaism or Islam) is the norm against which other religions are measured. It is also a distinctly modern idea traceable only to the seventeenth century, evolving within the broader Enlightenment project (Asad, 1983, 1993; Fitzgerald, 2003, 2011; Lash, 1996; van der Veer, 1995; van der Veer and Lehmann, 1999).⁶ The fact that religion tends to be modelled after certain forms of Christianity, and exhibits the residue of modern liberal theology, indicates that, despite common assumptions, it is not a neutral, purely descriptive concept.

The argument against ‘religion’, however, is not just that it is inadequate, but also that it is deeply political. The modern strategy of demarcating religion is, according to Milbank (2006, 103), a means of ‘managing’ the many particular religions by privatising them and ensuring that as mere ‘belief’, they no longer operate as mediums for public truth. The redefinition of religion corresponded with the invention of the secular, which was conceptualised as ‘non-religion’ (Asad, 2003; Fitzgerald, 2011). This creation of a ‘secular sphere’ of facts and rationality became the authoritative, legitimate location of politics, economics, military violence and objective science, all newly liberated from religious interference. Academic discourse about religion is directly implicated in the rise of secular regimes of knowledge. It is a ‘policing of the sublime’ (Milbank, 2006, 101–44) with far-reaching effects, not least of which was the institutional restructuring of political relationships and the creation of the modern European nation-state as a secular entity.⁷

The rise of modern discourse on religion and the European secular state was cotemporaneous with the spread of Western imperialism. Indeed, religious and secular redefinitions emerged within interactions between metropole and colony (van der Veer, 2001). While the ‘discovery’ of different religions through colonial expansion should be understood as an ‘imaginative creation’ (Almond 1988, 4), this process operated equally, for example, on Buddhism and Christianity. Colonialism also instigated new mechanisms of bureaucratic domestication and control of religion within the colonies, many of which continued after independence. These mechanisms paralleled the European experience, though there was considerable innovation, and these processes often generated a vigorous backlash (Hooker, 1975, 2002; Fitzgerald, 2007a). Significantly, however, not all states have adopted an explicit secularity, and the ways religion is defined differs considerably between countries. Consequently, to imagine a universal secular-religious dichotomy is to misconstrue ‘a contingent power arrangement in the modern West for a universal and timeless feature of human existence’ (Cavanaugh, 2009, 17).

Fitzgerald (2003, 8) explicitly links his critique of religion to development:

[The construct of the secular] is actually far more important [than that of religion] since it is the location of the dominating values of our societies, but it has to be legitimated as part of the real world of nature and rational self-realization that all societies are conceived as evolving toward. But how can so-called underdeveloped societies come to realize and conform to this natural reality in order to be considered fully rational? They can be helped by adopting the non-indigenous western division between the religious and the secular and by placing their traditional values in the department of ‘religion’, where they become objects of nostalgia thus clearing a cognitive space in their culture for putatively value-free scientific facts, for the natural world of autonomous individuals maximizing their rational self-interest in capitalist markets, for liberal democratic institutions such as parliaments, for modern nation states, and so on.

The construction of sui generis religion is directly implicated in the project of modernisation. The marginalisation of religion, and corresponding imagination of a secular domain free of its influence, was crucial to ensuring the smooth expansion of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy. Through sui generis religion, it becomes possible to imagine a (de-religionised) development that is universally desirable, politically neutral and morally unassailable.

In his study of the literature on ‘religious violence’, Cavanaugh (2009) argues that despite analytical confusion and a lack of empirical evidence, the idea that religion is peculiarly prone to bloodshed is perpetuated because it serves a political purpose through which certain practices are normalised and others denigrated. Specifically, ‘revulsion toward killing and dying in the name of one’s religion is one of the principle means by which we [in the West] become convinced that killing and dying in the name of the nation-state is laudable and proper’ (2009, 4–5). Secular state violence is therefore concealed from full moral scrutiny. Cavanaugh’s analysis finds its counterpart in McCutcheon’s (1997, 158) critique of phenomenologist Mircea Eliade’s ‘romantic, redemptive project’ of returning modern, secular society to its authentic, spiritual roots and the universal sacred. Rather than liberative, for McCutcheon, Eliade’s ecumenical theological project is ‘but one s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Religion and Development: Reconsidering Secularism as the Norm
• PART 1: RELIGION AND DEVELOPMENT AS A FIELD OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
• PART 2: FAITH-BASED ORGANISATIONS AND SECULAR DEVELOPMENT
• PART 3: RELIGION: ALTERNATIVES TO TECHNOCRATIC AND NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT?
• CONCLUSION
• INDEX