Religious Actors in the Public Sphere

Means, Objectives, and Effects

Jeff Haynes, Anja Hennig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136661709
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This book seeks to argue that religious actors play a crucial role in the complex processes of entering or re-entering the public spheres of state, political, and civil society. Seeking to ameliorate the analytical lacuna and concentrating on both the meso and micro levels of religious public involvement, the contributors explain how representatives from religious and political institutions act and interact in a variety of ways for various purposes.

Analysing empirical examples from both Europe and beyond, and including a variety of religions, including multi-faith platforms, the volume examines selected religious actors' objectives, means and strategies and effects in order to address the following questions:

• What are selected religious actors' public and/or political activities and objectives?

• In what ways and with what results do selected religious actors operate in various public spheres?

• What are the consequences of religious actors' political involvement, and which factors condition the degree to which they are successful?

Whilst focusing mainly on Europe, the book also utilizes examples from Egypt, Turkey and the USA to provide a valuable and unique comparative focus. The contributors demonstrate that various religious actors, whether functioning as interest groups or social movements, and almost irrespective of the religious tradition to which they belong and the culture from which they emanate, do not necessarily differ markedly in terms of strategies.

This important study will be of great interest to all scholars of International Politics, Religion, and Public Policy.

1 Introduction

Jeffrey Haynes and Anja Hennig

Over the last two decades, political scientists and those interested in international relations have increasingly been concerned with what appears to be an intertwining of religion and politics, fundamentally calling into question the once hegemonic explanatory power of the secularisation paradigm. Within this debate, there is often an assumption that secularisation – that is, in terms of the decline of religiosity at individual level (most visibly in Europe) – is accompanied by a growing presence of religious issues in the public sphere (Habermas 2008). For Casanova in the mid-1990s, this was a process which he called ‘de-privatisation’, whereby ‘religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestations, discourse legitimation, and redrawing the boundaries’ (Casanova 1994: 66). More recently, however, Casanova has revised his assumption, pointing out that religion has also widely entered the public sphere of both political society and the state. For Casanova, then, ‘we need to go beyond the secularist discourse of separation and beyond the public sphere of civil society, in order to address the real issues of democratic politics across the world’ (Casanova 2008: 106).

The contributors to this book believe that various religious actors play a crucial role in these multifaceted processes of entering or re-entering the public spheres of state, political and civil society. Consequently, with its focus on various kinds of religious actors, the book analyses the relation between ‘religion and politics’. It starts from the position that this is a field of research which still lacks analytical approaches that are widely agreed among those making such analyses. Seeking to ameliorate the analytical lacuna and concentrating on both the meso- and micro-levels of religious public involvement, the contributions to this book collectively aim to shed light on how ‘religious actors’ – that is, representatives from various religious traditions – act politically, interacting in a variety of ways for various purposes.

The contributors to this book also share a second understanding. This is that the term ‘religious actor’ includes representatives of or individuals belonging to a community or organisation which is overtly informed by religious references. The contributors also understand, third, that the term ‘religious actor’ involves expressing religious and/or political concerns in the public sphere and/or seeking broader or specific political influence in various ways. On the other hand, it is clear that the various forms of religious actors can differ in the degree to which they are institutionalised. For example, some may be organised at national level – such as religious political parties, associations, issue networks or local denominational communities – transnationally – such as the Catholic Church or Islamic networks or supranationally, including religious non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The contributors use the term ‘public sphere’ in a broad sense, which implies something separate from religious agency in the religious field. ‘Public sphere’, however, is not synonymous with ‘political sphere’. Like Stepan and Casanova, we locate the public sphere in three environments: civil society, political society and the governmental arena (Casanova 1994; Stepan 1988). Religious actors address one or more of these levels in order to express and pursue their concerns.

Against this background, the book takes recent European developments into consideration, especially those which have helped to created new conditions for religious political agency to act. For example, in Europe the need to deal with migration and the integration of migrants of different faiths challenges the traditional centrality of mainline Christian churches’ public involvement and interaction with the state. In addition, these developments have created a new context which has led to the establishment of new types of religious actors, such as interfaith platforms and mosque representatives, widely involved in processes of seeking to regulate cultural pluralism in cities in many European countries.

In addition, the multifaceted processes of globalisation have also had a significant impact on many religious actors in both Europe and elsewhere. In particular, globalisation implies a widespread growth of new communication structures and media, which turn out to be important tools for diverse religious some actors, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and various Christian entities in Europe.

Finally, the increased involvement of religion in the public sphere in Europe and elsewhere can be understood in the context of what Inglehart (1997) calls ‘value changes’. The implication is that we are seeing the emergence and development of both post-modern and post-material values leading in some religious contexts to anti-modern counter-reactions. This is, for instance, mirrored by the fact that many church leaders in Europe continue to take positions on controversial moral and social issues, ranging from gay marriages, the availability of divorce and abortion rights to questions of war and peace (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 196). In this book, however, we do not refer to morality policy issues (see Ceccarini 2010; Hennig 2010). We rather take into consideration that church and other religious leaders are today ‘only one voice among many’ (Norris and Inglehart 2004: 196). This suggests the importance of putting appropriate emphasis on the agency of religious interest groups from both conceptual and empirical perspectives.

With these concerns forming the background, the book addresses a research lacuna of religion and politics from a perspective that concentrates on religious actors and their engagement in the public spheres, primarily but not exclusively in Europe. Collectively, the contributors analyse selected religious actors’ public engagement and the outcomes of this process. Overall, the book looks at the following in the context of Europe and, for comparative purposes, the USA, Egypt and Turkey:

• What are selected religious actors’ public and/or political activities and objectives?

• In what ways and with what results do selected religious actors operate in various public spheres?

• What are the consequences of religious actors’ political involvement, and which factors condition the degree to which they are successful?

To examine these issues, the book examines selected religious actors’ objectives, means and strategies and effects:

• Objectives: What do religious actors intend to achieve in their public agency? The issue concerns: political changes, political participation, ‘higher’ religious aims and community related changes.

• Means and strategies: How do religious actors operate in the public sphere? This includes a concern with: networking, coalition building, political lobbying and media campaigns.

• Effects: What are the consequences (intended or unintended) of religious actors’ political/public involvement? To what extent are they successful and what factors condition their successes or failures in relation to: policy changes and wider recognition of their organisation.

The overall aim is to identify and examine key factors in the relationship between religion and politics in both general and specific ways in Europe and elsewhere. Furthermore, the search for religious actors’ objectives, strategies and effects enables the book's contributors to offer empirical knowledge in an analytically systematised way about the growing variety of religious actors, the ways they are organised, their interplay with other social or political actors and the strategies they use to try to achieve their objectives. Finally, the book sheds light on a crucial but seldom satisfactorily answered question: what are the effects of religious agency in the public sphere and on politics in particular?

This focus includes two further particularities of the book. First, analysing objectives, means and strategies, and effects of the activities of parties, churches and religious networks or movements implies that the religious or denominational culture is of secondary importance. Unlike many other recent publications (see some examples below), this book's contributions are not only concerned with Muslim and/or Christian actors. Instead, this collection of in-depth studies compares religious actors belonging to different religions, in order to show that (in the context of globalisation) there might be similarities between different religions that become visible in terms of means or strategies. In this vein, the contributions focus on a variety of religions, including multi-faith platforms (see Chapter 7, by Griera and Forteza). This is a collective religious actor that emerges as a result of the already-mentioned cultural changes in many European population centres.

Second, the geographical focus of the book is predominantly but not exclusively Europe. This is the region of course where trends of individual secularisation are not only said to be most noticeable (Norris and Inglehart 2004) but also where migration is conspicuously changing the ethnic-religious landscape. In addition, moving beyond Europe for comparative purposes, three chapters look specifically at Egypt, Turkey and the USA. Examination of these countries provides a valuable comparative focus with Europe in general and the objectives, means and strategies and/or effects of religious agency. In sum, despite differences in terms of objectives and cultural contexts, the thrust of the book is to demonstrate that various religious actors, whether functioning as interest groups or social movements, and almost irrespective of the religious tradition to which they belong and the culture from which they emanate, do not necessarily differ markedly from each other in terms of the strategies they employ to try to achieve their objectives.

Concerning the analytical perspective of the book, relatively few studies have sought to apply a similar approach to the study of religious agency in the public sphere. However, it is important to note in this respect a well-known work by Carolyn Warner (2000). Warner argues that traditional churches do act as ordinary interest groups. She provides evidence for this claim by comparing the development and agency of the Italian and French Catholic churches. In addition, Dominik Hierlemann (2005), using a similar approach albeit limited to a single case study, finds that the Polish Catholic Church acts as a political lobby, relying on what in German is called Verbändeforschung (studies of associations). In addition, Enyedi (2003) has presented a summary of the concrete strategies that Church representatives utilise in order to influence public policy making more generally. On the whole, however, there are few general or overarching approaches to the study of religious advocacy. The current book seeks to fill that lacuna. Chapter 8, by Braun-Poppelaars and Hannegraaf (‘Conceptualizing religious advocacy: religious interest groups and the process of public policy making’), seeks to make conceptual and analytical advances in this regard. On the other hand, some other chapters – for example, that by Itçaina and Burchianti (Chapter 4, ‘Between hospitality and competition: the Catholic Church and immigration in Spain’) – build on the analysis originally developed by Warner (2000), while also bringing in important insights derived from their own research and understanding. Still others, for example, the chapter by Madeley (Chapter 2, ‘Acta non verba: typifying Europe's religious political parties’) who deconstructs the term ‘religious party’, and develops in the process their own analytical framework.

The chapters

Madeley begins Chapter 2 by noting that, among religious actors in the political sphere, religious political parties might be expected to have a generally important position. Yet, it is remarkable that in this context relatively little attention has been paid to the religious political party as a distinct phenomenon; those recent contributions which have focused on the phenomenon almost routinely open with some reference to it being a neglected subject of enquiry. Madeley's chapter seeks to redress this position. He examines one possible reason for this neglect, namely that the very term ‘religious political party’, despite its wide-spread use in various contexts, is in fact deeply ambiguous and deserves careful interrogation. What, if anything, actually makes a party religious? By what characteristics can a religious political party be identified as such? Is it not true to say that all parties are in some sense or aspect religious, especially in conservative societies – also, paradoxically, even when they are on the face of it violently anti-religious, anticlerical or laiciste? Is not any party that disproportionately derives its support from one or a number of religious institutions, groups or individuals, ipso facto religious in some sense? Or is a party perhaps to be regarded as religious only to the extent that it promotes some religious end, function or purpose, whether intentionally or otherwise? Finally, Madeley asks, is ‘the religious political party’ strictu sensu only perhaps a transitional stage in the development of some parties which is likely to be transcended as involvement in political contestation ineluctably leads to party secularisation? In an attempt to broach some of these questions, Madeley examines key criteria which either severally, in specific combinations, or maybe cumulatively, might be taken to typify particular parties as in some sense or other religious. His examination touches on questions of the circumstances of parties’ origins, their objectives, the means they employ and the effects of their involvement in party competition, parliamentary representation and policy implementation. Madeley focuses his attentions to cases arising within the over 50 European state territories of Europe, in order to reduce the burden of complexity to manageable proportions.

In Chapter 3, Minkenberg notes that it is necessary to take into account two key considerations when thinking about the issue of religious political parties in Europe. On the one hand, there are attempts to render the European integration process a new cultural and value-based quality while, on the other, the prevalence of sceptical positions on the role(s) of religion as a factor shaping the process of European integration – and its accompanying features, such as Euroscepticism – deserves our attention. Minkenberg argues that it is appropriate to claim that the entire European Union (EU) is a project inaugurated and pushed along primarily by Christian Democratic forces and inspirations. However, the now-27 member state EU is currently characterised by an advanced state of secularisation in most of its member states and high levels of religious and cultural pluralisation. Minkenberg raises the question to what extent religious, in particular Christian, actors such as religious parties and the churches have strayed from this integrationist past and contributed to current Euroscepticism. The second question that he examines is whether a confessional pattern of Euroscepticism can be identified. Minkenberg's chapter addresses these questions by empirically and comparatively analysing the positions and influence of religious actors on Euroscepticism in a selected group of EU member states.

The issue of religious freedom is not confined to the USA's International Religious Freedom Act. It also concerns, as Itçaina and Burchianti show in Chapter 4, the treatment of immigrants with different religious beliefs in various EU member states. The political treatment of immigration puts under scrutiny the issue of national and transnational identities, as well as patterns of integration, including the religious dimension. From a religious perspective, migratory flows have two main consequences. First they change the religious landscape of the host societies. The level of religiosity of some immigrant groups alters the local paradigms of secularisation and the institutional arrangements that stem from them. Second, and most importantly, immigration is also an opportunity for religious actors to strengthen their position in the public arena. In its efforts to welcome and support immigrants in Southern Europe, the Catholic Church demonstrates this. This issue demonstrates that in some contexts religion definitely ‘interferes’ with politics, but in a rather original way – on account of the social urgency to find solutions to the immigration problem. In such a context, the Spanish Catholic Church has sought to develop a somewhat ambivalent relationship to immigration. On the one hand, the new religious situation provoked by immigration generates changes in the political regulation of religions that are consequential to relations between the Catholic Church, the state and the other denominations. On the other hand, the Church develops very welcome faith-based assistance to contemporary immigrants.

In order to go further into the exploration of this – apparent – ambivalence, Itçaina and Burchianti argue that far from limiting its perception of immigration to their religious consequences, the Catholic Church also develops a repertoire of hospitality that puts the emphasis on the integration, the socio-economical and political rights of the migrants. This commitment of the Church takes two forms. At the national level, the Church maintains an intense lobbying of public authorities concerning the law-making process. The Church's daily hospitality-based social aid to immigrants is the public counterpart of its lobbying activities. Typically, the Catholic Church offers a wide range of both religious and social services to the immigrants in their first steps toward their integration into the host society. In this respect, the national perspective remains insufficient to examine such questions, granted the variety of Spanish regional configurations. The chapter focuses in some detail on the case of Andalusia, an Autonomous Community characterised by the presence of many immigrants and by a strong third sector. The core perspective of the chapter is centred on the religious regulations of politics observed in Andalusia, with a special attention to the strategies developed by actors belonging to the Catholic third sector.

In Andalusia, the politicisation of migratory questions, although conflictual, was not first linked to properly religious issues, even if the increasing interreligious competition in the region generated few local controversies. Nevertheless, it is the social function played by the third sector that g...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Acta non verba: typifying Europe's religious political parties
• 3 Churches in the European integration process: the diminishing confessional divide in Euroskepticism
• 4 Between hospitality and competition: the Catholic Church and immigration in Spain
• 5 Religious organisations as political actors in the context of migration: Islam and Orthodoxy in Austria
• 6 Political opportunity and Muslim leadership in Brussels
• 7 New actors in the governance of religious diversity in European cities: the role of interfaith platforms
• 8 Conceptualizing religious advocacy: religious interest groups and the process of public policy making
• 9 Religious economies and religious freedom: a transnational approach
• 10 The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Movement and its media strategies: the mobilising effect of religion in contentious politics
• 11 Politics and Islam in Turkey: from Atatürk to the AKP
• 12 Conclusion: religious actors in the public sphere - patterns and perspectives
• Index