Faith, Secularism, and Humanitarian Engagement: Finding the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Communities

Finding the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Communities

Joey Ager

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137472137
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137472144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Strengthening local humanitarian engagement demands not only rethinking dominant understandings of religion, but also revisiting the principles and practices of humanitarianism. This book articulates key aspects of the 'transborder discourse' necessary for humanitarian dialogue in the 21st century.

1

Why Humanitarianism Doesn’t Get Religion . . . and Why It Needs To

Abstract: Religion has long been a major influence on humanitarianism. However, forces of globalization, professionalization and secularization established a clear secular framing for global humanitarian action through the 20th century. This secular approach serves to confine religion to the private sphere, marginalize it from strategic influence and limit its contribution to actions that instrumentally serve secular priorities. While there is now renewed interest in establishing partnership with faith groups as a means of strengthening local humanitarian engagement, the presumptions of this secular framing continue. Charles Taylor’s analysis of secularism as a particular form of Western thought helps to locate two fundamental presumptions of contemporary humanitarianism: modernity and neutrality. These are shown to be fragile bases for formulating humanitarian strategy for the realities of the 21st century.

Keywords: instrumentalization; marginalization; modernity; neutrality; privatization; secularization

Ager, Alastair, and Ager, Joey. Faith, Secularism, and Humanitarian Engagement: Finding the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Communities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137472144.0004.

On the schedule it was listed as any other stakeholder consultation. We had meetings with multiple groups planned as part of the situation analysis of child protection in North Darfur. This included numerous meetings with children themselves, of course, both those displaced by the ongoing conflict, to IDP camps like this one on the outskirts of El Fasher, and those living in towns swollen and tense as a result of such migration. But the analysis needed to be appropriately informed by discussions with the many adults whose actions and agendas shaped the experience of these children: parents, teachers, animators, volunteers, police and the like. This meeting with sheiks and umars packing into the meeting tent represented our commitment to engaging with religious leaders on the question of the threats to the well-being of children in the camp and the appropriate means to ensure their protection. With consistency our goal, we ran through the framing questions that we had used in previous meetings. We were received respectfully and patiently. The usual list of concerns about food, shelter, health and education emerged, articulated in terms familiar to all humanitarians and refugee populations. It had been a useful, confirmatory meeting. It was nearly done. But my brief speech offering thanks for their time and insight prompted an unanticipated diversion from the planned agenda. The speaker rose to his feet and began with echoing thanks. However, before the interpreter had put this into words for me, I could sense a shift in tone and intensity. Murmurs and gestures signaled that the assembly was swiftly aligning itself with the man’s sentiments. The translation remained a sentence or two behind the surging narrative, but it was clear that, while my concern for children was appreciated, the Western lens through which I viewed childhood was not. I had introduced a ‘khawja’¹ curriculum for children in activity centers. I had not valued the duties of children expected within Islam. I had not facilitated securing copies of the Qur’an to enable the proper upbringing of children. There was more animation in the meeting on this topic than any other but, insecure on this theme, I redoubled my attempts at thanks and closed the discussion. I tried to explain that I was not responsible for the activity centers myself; I stated that I didn’t represent any humanitarian agency but was rather working to highlight the needs of communities in Darfur to humanitarian agencies. Even as I spoke, this seemed a rather facile distinction. I was, after all, part of the humanitarian infrastructure. It was an infrastructure that provided no space for discussions of faith and religion. That was dangerous territory in Darfur—or indeed, anywhere. The irony was that, as a person of faith, I had accepted this position so readily and uncritically. The discussion with the sheiks and umars was duly recorded, but did not significantly influence the formulation of our situation analysis, which saw religious concerns coded within a broader context of traditional culture. It was some time later that I realized how article 14 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child,² acknowledging ‘the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion . . . [and] the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right’ would have been a legitimate basis for engagement with their concerns. As it was, my uncritical acceptance of a secular humanitarian ‘script’³ had silenced their religious concerns, along with any other meaningful engagement with a perspective seeing children as members of local communities of faith.

* * *

A brief recent history of religion and humanitarianism

Calls to humanitarian engagement—actions to relieve the suffering of those in danger or need—are widely represented in many religious traditions. Recent scholarship has acknowledged the significance of such influence in the multiple histories of humanitarian thought across many cultures.⁴ Accounts of the development of Western humanitarianism—our major focus in this book—typically acknowledge the contribution of religious thought and institutions.⁵ Until recently, however, discussions of religion in the context of humanitarianism had become muted, arguably silenced. Religion had become an area of discomfort, even distaste, for humanitarians. Before we can address some of the challenges of rapprochement, we need to understand the basis for these concerns.

Western humanitarianism is significantly rooted in the vision and work of the first Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Henri Dunant. Dunant’s vivid account of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 included calls for the establishment of organizations mandated to address the relief of suffering in such contexts, and of a treaty providing for their recognition and protection as a neutral entity when operating in these circumstances. The International Society of the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention of 1864 were the direct fruits of these proposals, and laid the foundation for the contemporary International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) movement and the Geneva Conventions which define the core of contemporary humanitarian law. For Dunant, addressing the needs of those suffering irrespective of their allegiance was key to the understanding of humanitarianism. This core commitment became codified as the principles as neutrality and impartiality, concepts which have come to be seen as barriers to engagement with religious institutions. For the cultural context into which Dunant was writing, however, religion was not so clearly distanced from these principles. Speaking of the opportunity and moral obligation to tend to the wounds of the injured during pauses in the fighting at Solferino, Dunant drew upon both civic and religious responsibilities:

Why could not advantage be taken of a time of relative calm and quiet to investigate and try to solve a question of such immense and worldwide importance, both from the humane and Christian stand-point?⁶

Further, he makes explicit use of religious principle to challenge the presumption of partiality. When an Italian doctor appears to be providing differential standards of care to allied and enemy combatants, he notes that a countess:

made haste to show her disapproval by declaring that she gave exactly the same attention to the Austrians as to the Allies, and made no difference between friends and enemies. ‘For’, she said, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ made no such distinctions between men in well doing’.⁷

Dunant’s references to religion in the predominantly Christian context of late 19th-century Europe appear not to have distracted from the principles he was seeking to establish regarding humanitarian engagement; indeed, they appear to have been used to reinforce them. However, such language becomes more problematic in contexts of greater plurality. By the time of the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)⁸ in 1948, for example, there was recognition of the challenge of forging agreement between persons:

who come from the four corners of the globe and who not only belong to different cultures and civilizations, but are of antagonistic spiritual associations and schools of thought.⁹

Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher engaged in the process of developing the text for the UDHR, noted that ultimately agreement was reached ‘on condition that no one asks us why’, with a pragmatic focus on:

principles of action implicitly recognized . . . by the consciousness of free peoples . . . that . . . constitute grosso modo a sort of common denominator, a sort of unwritten common law.¹⁰

This notion of an unwritten common law is not without its problems, as we will discover later. However, the negotiation of language free of religious references, and of apparent universal appeal, established a model for the form of secular script increasingly adopted for the expression of humanitarian principle, strategy and practice throughout the remainder of the 20th century. There are a number of factors that appear to have contributed to this trend. Globalization, for example, leads to an increasing linkage between states and peoples within a globally interdependent system, with greater awareness of and exposure to plurality of beliefs and practices. Professionalization is another factor, shifting the emphasis within the sector from voluntary efforts and service to common standards and processes, codified in universal terms. Humanitarian agencies become increasingly focused upon funding, not from personal supporters (commonly with symmetrical faith or value affiliations to that of the agency) but from governments commissioning and contracting for services to be conducted on behalf of a state.

Processes of secularization within Western societies reinforce this adoption of a secular frame for humanitarian engagement. A number of agencies ‘rebrand’ to reflect these changes. For example, building upon work assisting children displaced by the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s, Christian Children’s Fund was established as an international humanitarian agency in 1951 and developed a strong funding base, especially within church groups among the southern states of the USA. Hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Why Humanitarianism Doesnt Get Religion...and Why It Needs To
• 2  The Place of Faith in Humanitarian Engagement with Displaced Communities
• 3  Engaging with Theological Reflection to Strengthen Humanitarian Response
• 4  Towards More Effective Dialogue between Humanitarianism and Religion
• Bibliography
• Index