Faithful to Secularism

The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines

David Buckley

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542449
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión, política y estado

Religion and democracy can make tense bedfellows. Secular elites may view religious movements as conflict-prone and incapable of compromise, while religious actors may fear that anticlericalism will drive religion from public life. Yet such tensions are not inevitable: from Asia to Latin America, religious actors coexist with, and even help to preserve, democracy.

In Faithful to Secularism, David T. Buckley argues that political institutions that encourage an active role for public religion are a key part in explaining this variation. He develops the concept of "benevolent secularism" to describe institutions that combine a basic division of religion and state with extensive room for participation of religious actors in public life. He traces the impact of benevolent secularism on religious and secular elites, both at critical junctures in state formation and as politics evolves over time. Buckley shows how religious and secular actors build credibility and shared norms over time, and explains how such coalitions can endure challenges from both religious revivals and periods of anticlericalism. Faithful to Secularism tests this institutional theory in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines, using a blend of archival, interview, and public opinion data. These case studies illustrate how even countries with an active religious majority can become and remain faithful to secularism.

1. Benevolent Secularism

A Theory of the Religious Politics of Democracy

This book engages long-standing debates about the relationship between religion and democracy. As an empirical project, it builds on recent institutionalist scholarship documenting the varieties of secularism compatible with democratic governance. It places special emphasis on explicitly benevolent forms of secularism and the impact that such cooperation has on public life. It advances institutional research in focusing on the effects that political institutions have on the preferences within religious and secular blocs and on the coalitions that often form among these blocs, even across religious-secular or interfaith divides. The argument highlights normative tensions within both religious and secular communities over the place of religion in democratic politics as well as the diverse coalitions that stabilize religion’s public role. This chapter sets out the book’s theoretical framework in more depth and explains the research design used to test its empirical expectations.

Until recently, leading empirical accounts of democracy paid limited attention to debates over the place of religion in democratic life. Classic works in modernization theory assumed that the same process of social development that caused democracy would reduce the strength of religious institutions and individual faith; Daniel Lerner’s analysis of changing social authority in Balgat remains paradigmatic in this regard.¹ This strand of political research is closely tied to sociological theories of “secularization,” in which economic development drives “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”² Even as scholars of democratization moved away from the most teleological versions of modernization theory, leading work showed limited systematic attention to the nature of the institutional relationship between religion and democratic polities. As Alfred Stepan has noted, classic works from Robert Dahl and Arend Lijphart leave the institutional place of religion in democracy largely unaddressed, although they do pay some attention to the presence of religious political parties.³ Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter make significant progress in noting the role of some religious actors in “resurrecting civil society” in opposition to authoritarian rule but pay less attention to the institutional rules that will structure religion’s place in post-transition democratic politics.⁴ Religion exists on the periphery of core institutional dilemmas about economic redistribution and political participation for former authoritarian elites.

A second wave of scholarship refocused on the place of religion in democracy, largely through attention to the threat that religious divisions may pose to democracy. In his classic work, Seymour Martin Lipset worries that unresolved religious divisions could pose a major “crisis of legitimacy” as the place of religion in democratic life turns (presumably tractable) debates over economic distribution into “a deep-rooted conflict between God and Satan.”⁵ These fears of religious threat endure in more recent forms. Adam Przeworski worries that “the resurgence of the political power of the church” will undercut the “particular form of suspension of belief” necessary for enduring democracy.⁶ Stathis Kalyvas points to credible commitments problems in contexts where “contrary to typical transitions, compromise is hindered by the challengers’ religious identity.”⁷ Assumptions of religious irrationality and threat in the West are rooted in the “religious wars” of early-modern Europe, but in contemporary scholarship are also motivated by the rise of political Islam in electoral contexts. John Water bury most clearly distills this concern, arguing that “religious political groups (Islamic and non-Islamic) are non-democrats of a particular kind. . . . Where the scriptures are both holy and explicit, as is the case in Islam, pragmatic compromise will be very difficult.”⁸ Conflicts between Islamists and other members of Arab political oppositions since the Arab Spring have lent further energy to scholars who view religion as uniquely resistant to the compromise necessary for democratic institutions.

Other, less-pessimistic scholarship has recently contended that political institutions can mitigate the tensions between religion and democratic politics. This view is in keeping with the broad turn to institutions in political science and has in general produced more optimistic readings of the relationship between religion and democracy. Although Daniel Philpott acknowledges the “political ambivalence of religion,” he makes a case for institutional independence between religion and state as summoning the better angels from religious actors in democratic life.⁹ Stepan’s research has demonstrated the diverse institutional conditions compatible with the “twin tolerations,” from liberal forms of religious establishment to more pluralistic systems in India and elsewhere.¹⁰ Jeffrey Haynes has documented the nuanced relationship between religion, democracy, and development in much of the developing world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.¹¹ Much institutional scholarship stresses the importance of historical critical junctures—for instance, Ahmet Kuru’s persuasive case that early institutional variation among France, Turkey, and the United States shapes current political outcomes.¹² Institutions can have an effect because, to borrow from Stepan, religious movements are “multivocal.” Diverse political norms coexist within seemingly singular religious communities, and institutions can affect these internal debates. This sort of institutionalist argument has extended to the analysis of Islamist movements, with the “inclusion–moderation hypothesis” arguing that the institutional conditions of political participation may change behavior or norms within religious movements.¹³ This scholarship has made important progress in “taking religion seriously” while noting the diverse empirical impact that religious actors have actually had on democratic politics in recent decades.

This recent scholarship is in many ways a significant advance on earlier assumptions of religion’s irrelevance or inherent threat to democracy. However, it raises several subsequent questions about the impact of political institutions on religious politics. First, how do institutions shape the “multivocality” of religious groups? What are the relevant “multivocal” blocs within a given religious community, and what mechanisms explain how institutions have an impact on these internal dynamics? Second, how do institutions shape politics not only within religious communities but also between religious majorities, religious minorities, and secular movements? Why do divisions along religious-secular lines or between faith groups feared by many scholars not emerge, and how are institutions linked to religious-secular or interfaith cooperation? And third, if historical legacies matter so much for the place of religion in democracy, what explains patterns of institutional change in religion–state relations? Why do institutions sometimes endure revisionist challengers, and why does the place of religion in democracy seem simultaneously path dependent and highly dynamic?

In answering each of these questions, this book traces institutional effects both at traditional critical junctures, or “secular emergence,” and through periods of institutional change, or “secular evolution.” This division draws on recent theories of institutional change, in particular what James Mahoney and Kathleen Ann Thelen call “gradual institutional change.”¹⁴ Dividing periods of emergence from periods of evolution provides significant benefits in making sense of the relationship between religion and democracy. Emergence is undeniably important because the basic rules of the political game are open for debate, whether due to revolution or to postcolonial independence. However, the institutional relationship between religion and democracy remains dynamic beyond these junctures. Ignoring periods of secular evolution overstates the continuity of the religion–democracy relationship. Understanding when this dynamism leads to subtle patterns of institutional change rather than to a full collapse of existing institutions is essential to making sense of the impact of periods of new religious mobilization on democracies from Latin America to the Muslim-majority world.

Although this argument is primarily empirical, the findings come with implications for ongoing debates among theorists of religion and democracy. Richard Rorty’s classic claim that religion is a “conversation stopper” has come under scrutiny from a range of philosophers and theologians in the past decade.¹⁵ Thinkers as diverse as Jürgen Habermas, Jeffrey Stout, Émile Perreau-Saussine, and Abdullahi an-Na‘im have imagined more extensive public roles for religion in democratic politics.¹⁶ Some, reviving Tocqueville’s evaluation of religion in American democratic culture, have argued for the normative contributions of religion to democracy, whereas others have at the very least tried to chasten liberal voices most skeptical of religion’s involvement in democratic debates. Several questions drive this recent research in political theory, philosophy, theology, and law. Do religious claims impede democratic deliberation? What would be lost by the liberal tradition if religion were driven entirely from democratic politics? And how does the trajectory of what Charles Taylor has dubbed the West’s “secular age” compare with dynamics of religion and society elsewhere? These theoretical questions are pressing, but they all also come with empirical implications. Throughout this volume, empirical findings demonstrate both the flexibility of democratic polities in incorporating religion into public life and the conditions that encourage broader religious-secular cooperation than is often found among Western theorists.

Assessing the Outcomes of Interest

What does it mean to assess the place of religion in democratic politics? The question is of practical importance. For instance, should the existence of religious political parties such as Ennahda in Tunisia at a critical juncture in regime transformation be taken as evidence of the secularism trap? And once we decide how to evaluate the status of the relationship between religion and democracy at critical junctures, how should we evaluate the endurance of secular institutions over time? Does the lack of any recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution related to religion indicate that no institutional change has taken place in the United States in the past half-century or more? Clear understandings of the outcomes at critical junctures and the nature of institutional change over time are needed before evaluating theories of how secular democracy emerges and evolves.

At critical junctures, three outcomes are possible for the relationship between religion and democracy. First, religious actors could coexist with democratic politics and minority rights protections. This outcome is what Stepan defines as the “twin tolerations” between religion and democratic politics. Stepan defines his tolerations as a kind of mutual accommodation between religion and state institutions that cuts two ways. First, “democratic institutions must be free, within the bounds of the constitution and human rights, to generate policies. Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives that allow them to mandate public policy.” State institutions must be autonomous and effective, able to form and implement policy without quasi-judicial veto from religious institutions. Second, toleration falls on the state in the protection of religion: “At the same time, individuals and religious communities . . . must have complete freedom to worship privately. In addition, as individuals and groups, they must be able to advance their values publicly in civil society and to sponsor organizations and movements in political society.”¹⁷ As Stepan acknowledges, a wide range of empirical arrangements between religion and state meets his standards; there is no particular assumption that a strict exclusion of religion from democratic politics is a necessary characteristic of democracy.

If this mutual accommodation constitutes one outcome at critical junctures in regime formation, then political breakdown through the secularism trap provides the other two. The secularism trap can spring from the religious side, when a religious majority uses a moment of political opening to seize control of state institutions, in the process excluding religious minorities from equal protection and enshrining power for religious institutions in constitutional law that violates the twin tolerations. This outcome has path-dependent implications by linking religious institutions to the coercive apparatus of an antiliberal political regime. This dynamic took place over the course of the Iranian Revolution, with long-lasting results.

A third outcome is important to remember as well. The secularism trap can spring from the secular side, with political elites using fears of religious takeover to legitimate the repression of religious institutions. This occurred most dramatically in the lead-up to the Algerian civil war but has also occurred at various points in time in authoritarian regimes’ manipulations in Turkey and Egypt, among other states. In these cases, state officials’ tolerance of religious institutions breaks down, resulting in violation of religious liberty, forced privatization of religious practice, or the coercive incorporation of religious institutions within the state bureaucracy. Although liberal democrats tend to worry about the religious side of the secularism trap, the empirical record suggests that the twin tolerations regularly, perhaps more regularly, break down from the secular authoritarian side.

Assessing the existence of the twin tolerations obviously requires careful evaluation of comparative political institutions. Looking at a constitution for the existence of a state church, for instance, is only a first step. Some established state churches—for example, the Church of England—are generally compatible with the twin tolerations, whereas some states that seem to provide for freedom of religious belief, such as China, may violate the twin tolerations in practice. This means that assessing the twin tolerations takes attention to more than the most basic features of constitutions. It also requires tracing the implementation of constitutional provisions through legislation, jurisprudence, and policy formation.

In contrast to the critical junctures that characterize secular emergence, periods of secular evolution vary between those that result in gradual institutional renegotiation and those that lead to the breakdown and replacement of political institutions. Will institutions concretized during critical junctures evolve gradually over time or go through a more dramatic process of breakdown and replacement? Secular evolution is a process of institutional change other than formal replacement; it is characterized by variation within existing institutional boundaries as institutions vary in application. Evolution is a more gradual process in which religious and state actors push the boundaries of existing institutions without breaking down those institutions and replacing them with an institutional alternative. The institutional change captured by secular evolution has become a major focus of comparative institutionalist scholarship in the past decade. Institutionalist work from James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, Jacob Hacker, and others has observed that much institutional change does not result from the wholesale replacement of an existing institution by another contender but rather from the different operation of the same formal institution within a changed social or political context.¹⁸ Although replacement—that is, the formal shift from one typological space to another—is one path of change, it is not the ...