Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, Volume 2: Religion and Politics (Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion)

Religion and Politics

Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Editors

Enzo Pace, Luigi Berzano and Giuseppe Giordan Editorial Board

Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa) Anthony Blasi (Tennessee State University) Roberto Cipriani (Università di Roma Tre) Xavier Costa (Universidad de Valencia) Franco Garelli (Università di Torino) Gustavo Guizzardi (Università di Padova) Dick Houtman (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) Solange Lefebvre (Université de Montréal) Otto Maduro (Drew University) Patrick Michel (CNRS and EHESS, Paris) Ari Pedro Oro (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) Adam Possamai (University of Western Sydney) Ole Riis (Agder University) Susumu Shimazono (University of Tokyo) William H. Swatos, Jr. (Augustana College) Jean-Paul Willaime (EPHE, Sorbonne) Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (University of Leipzig) Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University) Fenggang Yang (Purdue University) Sinisa Zrinscak (University of Zagreb) VOLUME 2 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/arsr.

Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 2: Religion and Politics

Edited by

Patrick Michel Enzo Pace

LEIDEN • BOSTON LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN 1877-5233 ISBN 978 90 04 20928 2 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS Preface: Religion and Politics����������������������������������尓����������������������������������� vii Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace Articles PART I

THE RECOMPOSITION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND POLITICS, AND THE NEW FEATURES OF THE GLOBAL RELIGIOUS SYSTEM Religious Pluralization and Intimations of a Post-Westphalian Condition in a Global Society����������������������������������尓������������������������������� 3 Peter Beyer Resurgent Religion in Politics: The Martyr, the Convert and the Black Knight of Apocalypse����������������������������������尓�������������������������� 30 Enzo Pace Religious, Political and Global����������������������������������尓��������������������������������� 48 Patrick Michel Complicating the “Clash of Civilizations”: Gender and Politics in Contemporary Kuwait����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓� 64 Alessandra L. González and Lubna Al-Kazi The “Social Integration” of Religious Groups in Society: A Social Mechanism Approach����������������������������������尓��������������������������� 85 Jörg Stolz PART II

RELIGION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY Christian Religion in the West: Privatization or Public Revitalization?����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓����������������� 119 John Roeland, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, Willem de Koster, Peter Mascini, and Jeroen van der Waal

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The Cultural Foundations of Islamist Leadership in Morocco����������� 135 Mohammed Maarouf The Protestant House Church and Its Poverty of Rights in China����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��������������������������� 160 Zhaohui Hong Rethinking the Role of the Catholic Church in Building Civil Society in Contemporary China: The Case of Wenzhou Diocese����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������� 177 Shun-hing Chan PART III

RELIGION AND POLITICS BETWEEN COMMUNITARIANISM AND POLICY OF IDENTITY India: The Politics of (Re)conversion to Hinduism of Christian Aboriginals����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������������������� 197 Christophe Jaffrelot Religion and Politics: The Italian Case����������������������������������尓���������������� 216 Franco Garelli The Reciprocal Instrumentalization of Religion and Politics in Brazil����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��������������������������� 245 Ricardo Mariano and Ari Pedro Oro The Reinvention of Cuban Santería and the Politics of Identity�������� 267 Elena Zapponi A Secular Cancellation of the Secularist Truce: Religion and Political Legitimation in Australia����������������������������������尓������������������� 287 Marion Maddox Note The Concept of Implicit Religion: What, When, How, and Why?����� 309 Edward Bailey List of Contributors����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������ 326 Index����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓 333

PREFACE Religion and Politics Patrick Michel and Enzo Pace Over the past thirty years, religion has increasingly played a relevant role, both on a national level and in international affairs. Since 1978, with the Iranian Revolution, there has been an acceleration in the events occurring after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the rise of political Islam up to its senile disease of terrorism, the crucial part played by Pope John Paul II in seconding the final collapse of the Soviet system, the emergence of neo-Hindu movements ever more aggressively against religious diversity, and a parallel growth in the new Christian Right Wing in the USA could all be listed on the agenda of the social sciences, as well as on the agenda of international affairs. All these events have been interpreted as symptoms of God’s “return” or “revenge”, a religious revival all over the world. Is it a restoration of the sacred canopy? One the most prominent scholars of secularization, Peter Berger, who biased a generation of sociologists in the West (and elsewhere, if we consider the Marxist version of his theory in the former Communist regimes), has himself dismantled his earlier assumptions (Berger, 1999; 2008). Meanwhile, all over the world, religion is a vital force in the life of individuals and societies – only Europe still seems to be a sort of exception (Davie, 2002), reversing, in a sense, the old American exception. Around the world, but not in Europe (usque tandem?), people are furiously believing and practising religion, according to Peter Berger once again (1999). This explains why scholars who paid little attention to religion in the past, and particularly those who did not specialize in the social sciences of religion, have turned to focus more and more on analyzing the key factor of religion in society. Economists and political scientists, scholars of international relations and students of marketing have considered religion as a useful password for understanding social and economic processes, political conflicts and the circulation of commodities in societies shaped by diverse religious identities. We are therefore faced not only with a huge quantity of books, articles and surveys, edited by social scientists of religion, but also with a varied and sometimes plethoric production outside the traditional confines of the sociology or anthropology of religion.

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We are indeed witnessing an increasing interest in the topic of religion, sometimes associated with the issue of risk. The Risikogesellschaft (Beck, 1986; 1997) is the ideological or theoretical frame that enables us to understand the mutual attraction between the religious theme and the risk society. Religion immediately brings to mind fanaticism, ethnic conflicts, violence, terrorism; it represents a new threat to democracy, peace and world order. At the same time, religion has become a pressing issue on the political agenda. The continuing reference to security in the politicians’ rhetoric, sometimes linked to migration policy, but also to fears of terrorist attacks by so-called radical Islamic groups, confirms the above considerations. In the absence of other topics for mobilizing and polarizing public opinion – it’s the case of the collapse of dictatorship or authoritarian regimes, falling down dramatically in Tunisia or Egypt in the hot winter of 2011 – the religious risk has worked, and continues to do so, despite evidence all over the world that the radical politico-religious movements have failed (Roy, Volk, 1988; Roy, 2010; Pace, 2004). The attempt made by politicians to reframe the policy of social cohesion in a neo-nationalist light (one land, one language, one religion = one political community), demising any kind of multiculturalism, facilitating instead a return to assimilation shaped by fear of the other (culture, religion, language, and so on), is very often associated with a restoration of the primacy of religious discourse in the public sphere. It is not just a return of religion in the public sphere (Casanova 1994), but the exploitation of religion by politics to reconstruct a social cohesion in the absence of ideological resources. The main goal of the second issue of the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (ARSR), devoted entirely to religion and politics, is precisely to question the sense of a reconstruction of the mutual and simultaneous relations between these two spheres of social life. What does this process mean and where is it taking us? We take a pragmatic stance: observing religion as a macro-indicator of a transformation in the political domain. Our hypothesis is as follows: instead of supporting the idea of the return of religion to the public domain, we prefer to argue that its new social visibility and role as a protagonist in politics is evidence of the crisis being experienced by politics. In particular, this crisis concerns one of the most important  constitutive elements of politics: the capacity to imagine a new world, what Hannah Arendt calls the miracle of the incipit (Arendt, 1973), i.e. the narrative capable of creating a universe of believing that gives identity to people and, at the same time, infuses hope in social



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change. In the contemporary world, all the great narratives of the 20th century have disappeared. This means that all the conditions for mobilizing a collective belief in the miracle of politics no longer exist. Politics is consequently continuing to lose its credibility, its reliability. Politics gets into trouble when it attempts to manage its autonomy, its legitimating mechanisms, and its effectiveness all together. Its autonomy is limited by the global market and global migrations, which tend to reduce its sovereignty over a given national territory. The traditional legitimating mechanism, based on the recognition of a national identity, has become more and more precarious nowadays in many societies with high levels of cultural and religious diversity: I can feel like a new citizen in a nation to which I do not belong historically. Last but not least, the effectiveness of politics is faced with such a strong differentiation between people by race, gender, sexual orientation, religious diversity, that its decision-making process suffers a sort of paralysis. Religion, on the other hand, seems to be able to play a crucial part on the public stage and in the political arena, both when it comes to redefinÂ� ing the role of politics and involving religion in this process, and when politics makes religion instrumental to its own ends, mobilizing salvation goods (Stölz, 2008) to recreate a mechanism for its own Â�legitimation. To sum up, therefore, when politics becomes less dependable, religion can mobilize to make people believe in the effectiveness of politics despite the deregulation processes underway in society, and despite the widespread decline in the sense of belonging to a political community. By appealing to religion, politics reveals its internal difficulties, relating both to the lack of any utopian prospects of a new world, and to the resurgent forms of Millenarian and Messianic movements that very often extend their religious utopia into the political sphere. When politics agrees to support such movements, it is indeed seeking new grounds for its legitimation. The challenge for politics is to find a password so as to enter the movement of society, to grasp the arcane of social change, convincing people that they form a society, not just a segmented, fragmented jumble of various individualist interests and strategies. For politics, referring to religion means defining its relationship with the movement of society, managing the main devices for either controlling or rejecting that movement. In the latter case, politics tends to use Â�religion to promote a new vertical sociability, splitting society into pure/impure human beings, loyal/disloyal citizens, friends/enemies (on the inside and on the outside). It also tends to reconstruct the myth of the origins of a nation and of national identity, applying a sort of dual

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Â�standard of citizenship to those who do not share the same history and certain linguistic, religious and cultural values. The casestudies that we have collected in the present issue converge on a non-essentialist definition of religion, seen as one system of belief among others, with symbolic boundaries that interact with other provinces of meanings (politics, economics, everyday private life, the media, and so on). By doing so, we aim to undertake a theoretical and methodological analysis enabling us to focus on the process of recomposing the relationship between religion and politics in the contemporary world. This aim is necessary to help us cope with the shortcomings of the traditional theoretical approaches and methodological tools for thinking about the world, particularly its unprecedented social and political changes. The articles focus on a set of questions that reveal an internal coherence. Reading these articles, in fact, religion seems to be connected with: •â•‡how politics manages the crisis of cultural pluralism; •â•‡the increasing difficulty with which politics controls its territory in a world where “God needs no passport”; •â•‡the deregulation of the sense of belonging; •â•‡new kinds of conflict, and particularly conflicts of values, as Habermas put it (1998), which go beyond the traditional social space and reach the space of the so-called civilizations. The various cases studies show that we are looking at a transnational, globalized religious space where religion is challenged by an ever greater liberalization of the market of symbols (including salvation goods). The evidence does not support the clash of civilizations. In a globalized space, the problem for religions is not stability, or how to defend their symbolic and geographical boundaries – quite the reverse, the challenge lies in accepting the mobility, the circulation of salvation goods, and coping with different social and political contexts. This issue is organized in three parts. In the first, which is more theoretical than the others, we have collected five papers. To dispute the clash of civilizations thesis (Huntington, 1998), three articles highlight the reconstruction of the autonomy of politics (Enzo Pace), the recomposition of the mutual relations between religion and politics (Patrick Michel), and the new features of the global religious system (Peter Beyer); the other two, moving from the presentation of the findings of



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empirical research (one study conducted in Kuwait by Alessandra Gonzalez and Lubna Al-Kazi, the other concerning Switzerland by Jorge Stölz), stress the multiple dimension of the relationship between religion and politics in everyday life. In the second part, we present the cases of China, the Netherlands and Morocco: different places, different people, with histories bearing no resemblance to one another. In spite of their diversity, a comparison shows that a renewed vitality of public religion does not necessarily correlate with a revitalization of private religion (Dick Houtman et al.). Indeed, its public role is functionally oriented to balancing the regulation of the market of religion by the state (as in China according to both Chan Shun Hing and Zhaohui Hong), or to creating a political opposition that tends to promote traditional religious symbols with a new political value (as in the case of the Islamist movement in Morocco, illustrated by Mohammed Maarouf ). In the case of both China and Morocco, religion is an ambivalent tool for preserving tradition and imagining a new world at the same time: more freedom of religion means more freedom in civil society or in the political battle. In the third part, we could briefly sum up the rationale behind the series of articles in just one short sentence, i.e. communitarianism  without religion does not work. Where there is communitarianism,  this social pattern works in both politics and religion. The crisis of social cohesion is a matter for the political agenda. When the religious  identity of a community is reaffirmed, this identity becomes a dilemma for politics. It may be useful for mobilizing some of the people to defend the sacred, shared values that politics aims to represent (veritatis splendor), but this almost inevitably paves the way to social and interreligious conflict. When the religious affiliation becomes a sort of political marker (as Christophe Jaffrelot showed in his article devoted to India), then politics and religion tend to play the same game. Their mutual instrumentalization is also a feature of the present scenario in Brazil (see the article by Ari Pedro Oro and Ricardo Mariano, in which the two authors update the thesis, analyzing the recent presidential elections). The process of mutual instrumentalization applies to cases only apparently very different one from another: suffice it to look at what is happening in Italy (see Franco Garelli) and in Australia (see Marion Maddox). Despite the historical and cultural differences, we are seeing the same trend, with politicians adopting Christian rhetoric to support the politics of national identity. The Italian case is particularly emblematic of the movement of a society slowly changing from a

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monopoly of Catholicism towards an increasingly pluralistic scene. In Cuba too, the regime’s relative liberalization of the market of religion, the public resurgence of Santeria, which combines and recombines the Youruba memory (from African cultures) with the hegemonic Catholicism, seems a strong symbolic resource for reconstructing the cultural identity of the people during the unrelenting decline of Castroism (see Elena Zapponi). As a rule the Journal includes also a section devoted to a key concept in the sociology of religion. The present issue focuses on the notion of implicit religion. Edward Bailey, who first introduced this notion in religious studies, traces out its trajectory from the theoÂ�retical assumptions up to the empirical testing, and to the recent developments.



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References Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt: Jovanovich. Beck, Ulrich. 1986. Risikogesellschaft, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Policing the Risk Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Berger, Peter. 1999. The Desecularization of the World, New York, Eerdmans Berger, Peter, Davie, Grace, Fokas, Effie. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe?, Farnham: Ashgate. Casanova, Josè. 1994. Public Religion in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davie, Grace. 2002. Europe: The Exceptional Case, London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. Between Facts and Norms, Boston: The MIT Press. Huntington, Samuel. 1998. The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster. Pace, Enzo. 2004. Perchè le religioni scendono in guerra?, Roma: Laterza. Roy, Olivier. 2010. Le croissant et le chaos, Paris: Hachette. Roy, Olivier, Volk, Carol. 1988. The Failure of Political Islam, Boston: Harvard University Press. Stölz, Jorge (ed.). 2008. Salvation Goods and Religious Market, Bern-Berlin: Peter Lang.

PART I

THE RECOMPOSITION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND POLITICS, AND THE NEW FEATURES OF THE GLOBAL RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

RELIGIOUS PLURALIZATION AND INTIMATIONS OF A POST-WESTPHALIAN CONDITION IN A GLOBAL SOCIETY1 Peter Beyer Introduction: The Changing Observation of Religion The relatively recent rise in popularity of the idea of globalization has occurred at roughly the same time as a reconsideration of the place and importance of religion. In most elite, including academic, circles around the world up until about the 1980s, the word globalization was almost unknown and it was common wisdom that we were living in a world characterized by secularization, a world where religion was or should be less and less important. Roughly beginning in the very early 1980s, however, that began to change with the rise to greater prominence of a number of terms, including globalization and, on the religious side, fundamentalism. Then, with increasing vehemence during the 1990s and the first decade of the current century, globalization became something close to a buzzword. Everything was global or threatened to be overpowered by the global. As concerns religion, it became increasingly difficult to assert that secularization was the prevailing vector of the present or the future, except perhaps “exceptionally” (Davie, 2003). Instead, the rise of so-called fundamentalisms and other religious developments that elite observers began to notice indicated that either religion had never declined the way many had thought, or it was in the process of coming back: there was a resurgence of religion, the world was de-secularizing, we were perhaps even entering a post-secular era (e.g. Berger, 1999; Habermas, 2010; Westerlund, 1996; Zeidan, 2003). In this context, a related feature of religion seems to have received increasing attention and frequently been the cause of increasing concern, namely that of religious diversity. Not only has religion “come back”, it has seemingly returned as legion, for there are many forms and denominations; and for some observers this assumed characteristic of religion seems to be 1 ╇ And earlier version of this article served as the basis for a lecture entitled “Religious Pluralization in a Global Society” delivered as part of the McGill Centre for Research on Religion’s fall 2010 lecture series on “Religion, Globalisation, and Dialogue”.

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potentially problematic or at the very least a “challenge” (cf. Policy Research Initiative, 2009). Much like the so-called fundamentalist religious movements were instrumental for the talk about a resurgence of religion, it is clear that the high level of post-World War II transnational migration, especially of people from non-Western countries to those of the so-called West, is one of the main factors at the root of seeing religious diversity in this way. A connected debate concerning religion has been somewhat less visible, taking place mainly within that rather ill-defined area called the study of religion. Here a serious current has developed, also mainly over the past 20 to 30 years (but see Smith, 1991), which questions the validity and cogency of the very concept of religion, purporting to reveal it as an ideological and orientalist (Said, 1979) construct intended to enforce particular power relationships, or at least as a profoundly Christiancentred conception that cannot serve as the name for an assumedly near universal human phenomenon (Balagangadhara, 1994; Masuzawa, 2005; McCutcheon, 1997). At first glance, this development may seem to be going in the opposite direction from the broader debate just mentioned: where the first debate sees religious resurgence, this one seeks to dismiss religion as ideological construct, as not really all that real in the first place. On closer inspection, however, the criticism of religion is more ambiguous and has far more profound implications because of what it does to the very distinction between the religious and the secular. It does not say that religion is declining or disappearing; rather it states that religion is not a valid, because not globally applicable, concept. Yet in thus deconstructing “religion”, it simultaneous deconstructs the “secular” (cf. Asad, 1993). In undoing one side of the distinction, religion, one thereby removes the defining feature of the other side, the secular, which is precisely not religion. Therefore, if those involved in the first debate are talking about desecularization or the post-secular, those in the study of religion should by contrast be talking about neither desecularization nor secularization, but rather something like the postsecular/religious. What precisely that might mean is of course not clear, but neither is the idea of the post-secular. In neither case do we really know yet what we are talking about. In what follows, I unpack this situation with respect to the observation and social reality of religion in today’s global society, along the way suggesting some alternative ways of understanding it that are similar but also different from the ones that I have just mentioned. I do this in two ways simultaneously, socio-theoretically and historically, outlining



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a theory of what is happening through an adaptation of a relatively familiar narrative historical account of how we got here and what it says about where we might be headed. What I argue is that developments in the area of religion, but above all changes in the contemporary understanding of religion in the light of those developments, are symptomatic of a social restructuring of religion and thereby also of the relation between this religion and the global society in which it operates and in which we conceive it. The restructuring of religion I will subsume under the idea of pluralization; the restructuring of the relation between religion and society, especially but by no means exclusively the state, I will discuss under an idea similar but also different from the idea of the post-secular, namely the post-Westphalian, my word for the above indicated post-religious/secular.2 Along the way, I will try to show how contemporary observations of religious resurgence, de-secularization, post-secular, and religion as orientalist and ideological construct are inadequate for understanding our global situation with respect to religion, in part because the opposite of what they claim can be just as cogently argued as what they claim. The Historical Construction and Globalization of Religion, Religions, and the Secular My aim in retelling aspects of a possibly familiar historical narrative is to trace the development, to tell the story, of the several concepts that seem to inform current re-evaluations of religion and the relations of religion to its social context, in particular the modern state. The most important of these concepts is religion itself, along with religious diversity or pluralization; the secular and secularization, along with its related terms like secularity and secularism; but also much of what is subsumed under the cover of what I have called global society, which is to say the contemporary globally extended social context (Beyer, 2006, 2007). The history of the European concept of religion, along with those social realities to which it has referred, is long and complicated (Despland, 1979; Feil, 1986–2001), as is the history of any such basic concept. 2 ╇ As will become clear in due course, by post-Westphalian, I mean something connected to but also different than what this word designates in current debates in political science and connected disciplines. See, for example, Kveinen, 2002; Linklater, 1996. Above all I am not concerned with ideas like state sovereignty, but rather with shifts in the structuring and self-description of both religion and state.

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The aspect that I want to bring to the fore concerns what some have called the “reification” of religion (e.g. Smith, 1991), the semantic development by which it came to refer to a systematic and differentiated domain of human and social life, related to but also separate from the rest, which by contrast would eventually come to be understood as secular. The beginning of this reification is difficult to place precisely, but probably achieved its first significant phase in the context of the rise of Christian religion, and institutionally the Christian church in the late Roman Empire. Daniel Boyarin makes a reasonably convincing case for locating this first phase in the context of the mutual identification of what we now call Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism during the 3rd to 5th centuries C.E. (Boyarin, 2007). His argument is all the more intriguing because it allows a possible understanding of why and how the subsequent development of the Islamic word for religion, din, beginning in the 7th century, from early on exhibited analogous reified qualities, similarly regarding religion as systematic and capable of manifesting itself in the plural, as different religions existing in the same social context (see Gardet, 1960 [1980]). Moreover, in both cases, “religion” refers not just to a distinct system but also to a collectivity, a “people” that carry and that identify through this system, particularly through the theological concepts of “church” and “ummah”. Connecting the Jewish/ Christian and Islamic developments has the added attraction of Â�pointing to another important aspect of the narrative: it is in one sense a European story, but from early on – well before the 19th and 20th centuries in this case – not just a European story, but rather a global one, at least incipiently. What the Islamic development further adds to the picture is that it made clear – and probably clearer than in the case of Christianity and Judaism – that this reified system of religion was understood as both distinct and foundational, as a system in the sense of what many of us now call a “way of life”, as necessarily foundational to both individual human life and any proper social order. This foundationalism, which so many of us today still take for granted, must also be seen as having developed historically, at least in the civilizational regions where Christian and Muslim religion came to dominate.3 Assuming Boyarin is correct in his assessment, a second and, for my purposes, more consequential phase nonetheless only began several centuries later in the European case. This is the early modern phase 3 ╇ I should note that, in including this earlier “phase”, I am revising the analysis of the development of the concept of religion that I published earlier, especially in Beyer, 2006.



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which scholars like Talal Asad, Michel Despland, and Peter Harrison have also identified as beginning between the 15th and 17th centuries (Asad, 1993; Despland, 1979; Harrison, 1990). It is during this period that the European concept of religion begins to take on distinctively modern characteristics which include a significantly heightened sense of the older ideas that religion is a systematic and differentiable domain of social life; and that it manifests itself as a plurality of distinct religions; while maintaining the understanding that this domain is foundational for human and social order. To these, however, Europeans added two further and in some senses seemingly contradictory features. The first was that religion – in spite of or even because of its foundational quality – could as a direct consequence of its plurality also be divisive and destructive of social order. The second was that (certainly by the later 18th and 19th centuries) the contrasting secular was not just the complementary other side of the religious medallion, but that it had its own systemic forms and logic that could stand over against religion and even replace religion, including in its foundational character. In other words, the development of the secular could necessarily imply secularization. These European conceptual developments were of course not independent of the specific historical and social institutional context in which they took place. They were rather reflective of these, just as our contemporary understandings are reflective of our context. In the medieval to modern European case, we witness multidimensional transformations which feature the simultaneous and mutually conditioning rise of a number of institutional and systematic domains beside one for religion. A relatively common narrative tells the story in terms of a EuroÂ� pean “renaissance”, the emergence of Europe from its own “Dark Ages”. A political renaissance saw different attempts at forming a new empire to replace the Roman one, but which eventuated instead in the eÂ� mergence and gradual consolidation of a shifting plurality of separate monarchical states in the Germanic, Frankish, British, Italian, Scandinavian, and Iberian regions of Europe (Tilly, 1992). Another sub-narrative tells of an intellectual renaissance which sees the recovery of the Greco-Roman heritage along with its gradual transformation in relatively independent centres of learning, above all the universities (see Huff, 2003 for a comparison of Europe with China and Islamic empires). Then there is the story of the rise of European cities, not so much as centres of empire, but more as economic centres which provide the crucible for the emergence of differentiated capitalist enterprise and a subsequently expanding capitalist economy in ensuing centuries (Wallerstein, 1974).

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Simultaneously, however, there is the story of the rise of the Roman Christian church, not only as one powerful institution among others, but as one which formed and transformed what constituted religion in historically novel ways. The story of renaissance very much includes the church, not as something that was there before it all began, but rather as one of the, we can now say with hindsight, modernizing institutions that helped express the construction of a differentiated religious system in particular and even idiosyncratic ways (see, in lieu of many others, Délumeau, 1983; McGuire, 2008). Illustrative of this role of the church in the renaissance story is its relation to the rise of another differentiated domain, that of law, especially in the sense that the development of state-centred law and that of church-centred “canon” law occurred simultaneously and in an express modeling of the one on the other (see Berman, 1983). This last point is also of more general importance. These differentiated institutional systems in the European sphere neither developed all at once or in some sort of splendid isolation from one another. What happened instead – and the narratives as usually told remind of us this constantly – was a competitive and sometimes even antagonistic process that nonetheless involved a great deal of mutual modeling of one systemic domain on the others. Independence established itself only in the context of interdependence. Moreover, the emergence of these differentiated institutional systems was very gradual, and it is only with hindsight that it can even be described in this way. At this point in the story, one can already see some of the reasons that the understanding of religion that developed out of this context was different from what had happened before, say in late Roman antiquity or the early centuries of Islam. Religion for the Europeans appeared clearly as a distinct and reified domain because socio-structurally it developed its own differentiated institutions that increasingly determined what counted as religion; and because the “secular” in the form of the other systems for polity, economy, law, and science was gradually taking on an ever more distinct institutional character of its own. Religion became ever more clearly something distinct and selectively particular; but so did the “other side” of religion, the secular, and this in plural forms. What has not appeared yet, and what brings us to the second part of the narrative, is how religion comes to be conceived as more clearly plural and how that plurality is connected to the understanding of religion as both foundational and potentially inimical to social order and the good society. This brings us to the historically simultaneous sub-narratives of



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the Reformations and of European imperial, and eventually global, expansion. The Protestant Reformers of the early 16th century had in mind first and foremost the purification of religion in the sense of ridding it of its worldly, or one could say secular, interferences. The rationale of religion should be purely and self-referentially religious, not, for instance, either economic or political. The different branches of the Protestant ReformaÂ� tion formulated this impulse in different ways, but all of them pointed toward a greater differentiation of religion. The subsequent Catholic Reformation moved in the same direction, seeking to solidify the church as much more primarily a religious organization which was more effective at determining religion. This greater differentiation, however, took place within society and therefore necessarily implicated the rest of that society, including very especially the co-arising, co-differentiating political sphere in the form of the plurality of monarchical states. The differentiation of religion and state, while well under way, was at this point anything but clear; the received expectation that the two could not help but be intimately interrelated still prevailed in the sense that religion was seen to be foundational for the state and the state responsible for protecting and fostering religion. The Reformation created a dilemma in this context: it incipiently pluralized religion in a much more consequential way than had happened before; and it did so in a context of pluralizing states. The difficulty in reconciling these two pluralities eventuated, especially in the later 16th and earlier 17th century in protracted and violent conflict, both within states and between them, as was the case in the French wars of religion and the Thirty Years War initially centred in the Holy Roman Empire. The working out of a differentiated political state system was thoroughly entangled with the working out of a differentiated religious system. Working their way through this situation, the European power elites came up with a solution to the dilemma that was in complete continuity with received understandings of statereligion mutual dependence, but with a highly consequential twist. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 included a stipulation in its treaties that, henceforth, the plurality of states should be coordinated with the new religious plurality, but that the states would decide which religion prevailed within their boundaries. Cuius regio, eius religio ran the Westphalian formula, to whom the realm, his religion. The states were given priority, which is to say “sovereignty”, but they were also given the responsibility of, as we would today put it, regulating religion, the now increasingly institutionalized plurality and differentiation of which was

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not thereby undone. Put in terms of system differentiation, the WestÂ� phalian formula did not provide the conditions for de-differentiating the religious and the political, say by subsuming religion as an aspect of state. Rather it contributed parameters for how that differentiation could proceed, namely that there would be a certain coordination or mutual modeling of the political and religious domains, but they would also remain distinct, developing along the lines of independent systemic rationales. If that seems somewhat ambiguous, it is only because it was. Some of the symptoms of that ambiguity are highly significant for my purposes here. One is that, because the Westphalian model did not do away with religious plurality but rather only sought to regulate it, to keep in under control, the selection of a dominant religion in a particular state simultaneously always posed the question of what to do with respect to the manifestations of that plurality, prime among which were the “dissenters” (or just “heretics”), what we now call “religious minorities”. And from early on, already in the 16th century, that dilemma was expressed through the idea of “tolerance”, a word that even today still carries its connotation of the subordination of that which is (merely) tolerated. A second, and connected, symptom is that the Westphalian model, in not succeeding or even necessarily attempting to subsume religion within the institution of the state, provided for or did not prevent the further differentiated development of religion as its own institutional system, meaning that religious developments continued also in independence of the states. From the 16th century, this was already clearly the case with the segment of the European religious system that was the Roman Catholic church, two powerful indicators of which were this church’s continued “transnational” development across European states and its global expansion in the form of missions, whether or not these were in coordination with the states that had chosen it as their dominant religion. The early and continuous emergence of “dissenting” movements in the Protestant fold was a further indication of this independent religious development. A third, again connected, symptom is variation in the implementation of the model, not just from one state to another or, say, between Protestant and Catholic states; but also within the same state over time somewhat irrespective of whether that state was Protestant, Catholic, both, or, as eventually proved to be possible, neither. A prevailing variant on the implementation of the model was, of course, the state or established church or churches, but even here variations occurred in



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just how “established” these were, how much, for instance, “minorities” could be tolerated. In this context, two kinds of variant need especially to be brought to the fore. These are what one might call the denominational model and the civil religious model, both of which were to a certain degree a negation or overcoming of the model, but only to a certain degree. In the first case, exemplified best in British colonial settler states like the United States, Canada, and Australia the established religion took the form of a few, several, or many organized denominations – eventually both Catholic and Protestant, but this was problematic right up until the 20th century in all of them – which together formed a de facto or shadow establishment, if not an official one. These states were still “Protestant” or “Protestant & Catholic”, really not all that much different from bi-confessional European states like the Netherlands or Germany. The civil religious variant moved further along the continuum in promulgating a formal “separation” of state and religion – and thus the United States could exemplify both – and in effect substituted a nationalist or state foundational “quasi-religion” for institutionalized and differentiated religion, thus seeking to shift the foundationalism of religion in part over to the state. In every case, however, the civil religion thus institutionalized was visibly a “secularized” version of the dominant religion in that state, for instance Protestant Christianity in the United States and Catholic Christianity in France. Beside that of the Reformation and its aftermath, the other critical sub-narrative is that of European global expansion and its consequences. This is another familiar story that begins symbolically just a bit before the Reformation with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Significantly, these voyages were not intended as voyages of conquest, but were rather economically motivated attempts to circumvent the Muslim Ottoman empire for access to trade with India and China. What this points out is that European expansion of influence was from the beginning multi-dimensional or multi-systemic in parallel with the kind of institutional system differentiation that was gradually developing within European society itself. In particular economic expansion was not consistently coordinated with political expansion; the two were even sometimes at odds. European expansion also included from early on attempts at religious expansion, again often in coordination with political and economic powers as in the case of the Spanish conquests in the “New World” and the establishment of Portuguese outposts in Africa and India; but sometimes not as in the case of the Jesuit missions to India and China.

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Moreover, in as much as European expansionary efforts followed the socio-structural lines of European society, so did Europeans also carry with them in their efforts the semantic correlates of those structures. They saw the world into which they expanded through the conceptual lenses developed within and for their own society. These included their developing ideas about religion, including the understanding that religion was systematic and that it was plural, manifesting itself as religions. To be sure, Christian religion provided the concrete model of a religion; for the most part they considered this to be the only “true” religion, but not the only religion. They therefore assessed the various societies that they encountered in their expansionary trajectories, and where they found institutions that in their eyes – or at the very least in the eyes of some of their elites – were sufficiently similar to those found in the religions that they recognized, above all Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic), but also Judaism, Islam and paganism (meaning Greek and Roman religion), they identified these as more religions. Eventually these “discovered” religions would include those entities that we now understand as “world religions”, most notably Buddhism and Hinduism, but not just these. Where they did not find such institutions, they usually decided that such people had no religion. In all cases, however, the Europeans tried to spread their Christianities to these other people, irrespective of whether they were deemed to have another religion or not. Now, all this might have been just an interesting historical footnote. What made it much more than that was that European expansion was never just the projection of European power onto the rest of the world, as if that rest of the world were just a passive receptacle. To the extent that European power increased in other parts of the world, in those regions where the local societies were not simply overwhelmed as was the case in much of the Americas, those other parts of the world responded, not just with attempts to repel the Europeans, but with processes of positive appropriation of initially European forms of power and their incorporation into local societies. The Development and Globalization of the Westphalian Model The Westphalian model addressed the tension, as understood by Europeans, between religious pluralization and religious foundationalism, by linking the state and religion. The modeling that has taken place as a result, in continuity with older, imperial conceptions of the relation



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of the imperial power to the religious power, effectively encouraged religion, especially through the institutional structure of churches (state, trans-state, and otherwise), to model its subsequent development more in consonance with those of the developing states, and the states to model themselves more like religions. In other words, the model foresaw a “special” relation between religion and polity, expressed as church and state, one symptom of which is that even today, when we talk of the secular, namely the “other side” of religion, we usually mean, not exclusively but certainly primarily, the state. The outcome of this process was, however, rather unpredictable because the progressive differentiation of several societal institutional systems in interdependence with one another in European society, without a clear hierarchical relation among them, meant that the transformations in each one took place with reference to a societal environment in which the other major systemic reference points were all shifting at once. Religious modeling on the state, for instance, took place in an environment in which the political system itself was continuously shifting; and the relation between religion and all the other systems, on which there was also a certain modeling, had similar characteristics. In this context, the continuous, increasing, and multidimensional development of the non-religious (i.e. also in fact secular) systems – which eventually included not just science, polity, law, and economy, but also art, health, education, and then mass media and sport as well – on their own independent structural, semantic, and value rationales and logics meant that religion was, as it were, under pressure to develop, on the one hand, in the direction of an internal independent logic that was clearly different from that of the other systems, that did not excessively “interfere” with these other systems; but, on the other hand, reflecting the interdependence of these systems, also in a direction that modeled itself on them. Already in this description we have much of what 20th century social scientific theories have labeled secularization: the hiving off of religion into its own sphere in combination with the independent development of a multi-systemic, a multidimensional secular sphere that includes the state but is also much more than the state. Looking now at the specific development of the systems that the Westphalian model suggested should be coordinated, we can note both tandem and divergent developments, developments that reached perhaps their apogee in the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the side of religion, we see a heightening and greater precision of religious boundaries, especially through the further development of organized religion in

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the form of the Christian churches. These churches insisted more and more on the idea of exclusive membership, the idea that persons were Christians in specific organizational ways, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. Their mutual distinction and identification, often rivalry, became much clearer. They also sought to penetrate more and more clearly into all aspects of their adherents’ lives, not just incorporating them, but incorporating them more thoroughly. This much was in many ways very parallel to developments occurring in the political sphere of the states, as we shall see shortly. On the other hand, what religion during these centuries also continued to do was to take on a more and more “supra-mundane”, transcendent focus, structuring itself and formulating its foundationalism more and more exclusively around the idea that religion was all about salvation or damnation, and less and less directly about the “worldly” goals of, for instance, health, wealth, power, and knowledge of “this world”. At the same time, the by contrast secular systems in these areas further developed their more and more specialized and effective concerns with precisely these intra-mundane concerns. Developments on the side of the state during this time were parallel. At the time of the Westphalian treaties, the states were still very much identified with their monarchical and in most cases increasingly absolutist rulers. The “cuius” and “eius” in the Westphalian formula referred to these kings, princes, emperors, and queens; it was to them that the realm or “regio” belonged. With the transformation of states from absolutist to nation-states from the late 18th century on, however, this situation changed dramatically. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, the European states came to be seen as the expression of particular cultural collectivities called nations, even when they continued to have monarchs as their heads of state (Gellner, 1983). A prime structural expression of this shift was the shift in most European states to more democratic governing structures. Far from undoing the close relation between religion and state foreseen by the Westphalian formula and embodied in the variants of the Westphalian model, however, this shift from absolutist to nation state, from the possession of states by monarchs to their possession by peoples, only shifted it so that the religion of the people dictated the religion of the state, and this with all the variations and ambiguities about minorities, tolerance, and domination that the model implied from the beginning. In conjunction, people who had been subjects of the monarch became citizens of the state; and especially after the  latter part of the 19th century, that state claimed to incorporate all  aspects of its citizens lives more and more thoroughly, a process



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culminating in the development of the welfare state in the mid-20th century. It is in this sense that states structured themselves in parallel to the religions. And perhaps one of the more intriguing variants of this development is what eventuated in the United States, where, by the mid20th century, an assumption had institutionalized itself that, even though there existed a “wall of separation” between church and state, nonetheless it was an expression of proper American citizenship that one had to be a member of a one of a plurality of religious denominations, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jew (Herberg, 1960). This transformation in the self-image and structure of the state also had global implications and global manifestations. In as much as the Europeans, in the process of their global expansion, developed the habit of “discovering” religions in other parts of the world, this occurred primarily during the same time period. Accordingly, in continuity with older conceptions, the Europeans discovered religions, but these were also the “religions of peoples”, for instance Hinduism for Indians or Confucianism/Buddhism/Daoism for Chinese. These European projections would have remained historical curiosities in this story if they had not been picked up and selectively appropriated and transformed by the non-Westerners that were their object. As these non-Europeans in various parts of the world found it more and more impossible to ignore the projections of European power, a point reached in almost all parts of the world no later than the mid to late 19th century, they sought various modes of response which had a double characteristic. On the one hand, in various ways, the non-Westerners tried to “do as the Westerners did”, appropriating both semantics and structure from the Europeans, but always selectively and with the aim of restoring the power balance between themselves and these encroaching and overbearing colonialist others. On the other hand, this appropriation, seen from another angle, was also always in continuity with their respectively received semantics and structures; or, to put it somewhat differently, these appropriations also represented the incorporation of the West into their own societal stories and thereby gradually set the conditions for the non-West to, in turn, contribute to the further transformation of the West, thus setting the parameters for what has by now become a truly global society in which the “flows” of influence move to some degree in all directions. Nowhere are these processes of appropriation in the non-West more  evident than in their selective appropriation of the Westphalian model. This is perhaps all the more astounding since in several cases that meant developing, constructing, or inventing both the nation-state

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and religion so that these two invented entities could relate to each other in a Westphalian way. Not surprisingly, the process of Westphalian appropriation along the way also resulted in yet more significantly different variants of the model, different from those in Western countries (now including the colonial states of the Americas and Australasia) and in continuity with the inherited structures and understandings in these non-Western regions. The South Asian and East Asian cases are illustrative. In the former, the rise of an Indian nationalism from the 19th century was coterminous  with the reimagining of indigenous religious traditions as religions, most specifically Hinduism, but also Sikhism and Jainism. A corresponding and simultaneous reconstruction of Islam in this region ended up creating what can only be called a typically Westphalian dilemma of how state, nation, and religion were to be coordinated, especially when the British colonial power was convinced to allow the construction to become complete in the form of a sovereign Indian state formally equal to any of the European ones. The results have been two very clearly Westphalian Muslim/Islamic states in the form of Pakistan and Bangladesh, a “secular” state with a “Hindu majority” in the form of India, and, not to be forgotten, a Westphalian Sri Lankan Buddhist state with very typical and more or less intractable problems centred on the “toleration” of religious and national minorities. In East Asia, we also see the simultaneous construction and reconstruction of nation-state and religion, but here, almost in reverse of the path taken in South Asia, “national religion” was immediately reconstructed as “civil religion”, with its typical mirroring of the latter in reimagined religion – Shinto in the case of Japan and a combination of Confucian traditions and Christianity via the intermediary of Marxism in China. As part of this development, the reconstructed religions themselves – religious Shinto, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianities, Islam, and New Religions were all relegated to what amounts to the status of tolerated religious minorities (Beyer, 2006). Modernization and Secularization in the 19th and 20th Centuries The “sectarian” understanding that East Asian elites adopted of the concept of religion can to a degree be understood as a rejection of what in many ways they perceived to be a Western, or more narrowly Christian, idea that was not reflective of East Asian realities. From another angle,



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however, the negative connotation was by this time, the late 19th and early 20th century, itself already very Western. A strong current in the West by this time considered religion, not so much simply a source of disunity and conflict as would have been more appropriate at the time of the religious wars of three centuries earlier, but rather a domain and orientation that was contradictory of the good life and the good society because it was mistaken, illusory, or societally infantile. Since the Enlightenment period of the later 18th century, a widespread – and often resisted – elite discourse came to draw a fundamental distinction between the ever developing contemporary society in Europe, which was deemed to be “modern” or “modernizing”, and the sort of society that was deemed to have existed in Europe before and of which there were still manifestations and vestiges, “traditional” society (cf. e.g. Nesbitt, 1966). Significantly enough, the societies over which the Europeans were exerting greater and greater influence all around the world were also deemed to be traditional, and therefore in typical orientalist fashion, static, unchanging, backward, benighted, and despotic (Said, 1979). Religion, for this perspective, was not modern and belonged more properly in the older, traditional society. Simplifying somewhat, the reason that religion was not modern was that it was not “rational”, or at least not sufficiently rational, and that therefore in modern society religion was superseded by the contrastingly rational or at least more rational. Modern rationality, on this increasingly dominant view, was represented, not by religion, but by the rationales or ways of operation of what I have been calling the secular societal systems, state, law, economy, and science especially. Correspondingly, to the degree that society became more and more modern – and for this view that is what was inexorably happening – it would become more and more rational and therefore had to become less and less religious, which is to say more secular. This was, in a nutshell, the logic of what we know as the secularization thesis. Rather than for the moment judging the truth or falsity of this thesis as contemporary debate is trying to do, more important is how this ideational perspective resonates with the socio-structural development within and outside of religion that I have just discussed. The progressive development and differentiation of the non-religious systems always included a discursive element which distanced each system from religion, largely because religion in the later medieval and early modern period had been comparatively more developed than the others, in some cases served a kind of midwifery function for these systems, and through

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its foundational structure and assumptions, claimed an overarching and hierarchical position with relation to them. By the later 18th century, however, these secular systems were developing their presence and power in the society to such an extent that various indicators could indeed be found which showed that religion was in fact declining, these indicators for the most part being simultaneously indicators of the greater relative power of the secular systems. This is especially the case with the political system which by this time takes the dominant form of the nation-state. It is during this time, that we see the strong development of “civil religions” particularly in countries like France and the United States, “civil religions” that espouse a variety of secularisms which represent the attempt to take over the assumedly foundational functions of religion and transfer them onto the state or at least the national polity. That all said, it must also be pointed out that, socio-structurally and ideationally, religion was also “developing”, changing and even in many cases “growing” (using the typical rational standards that resembled what prevailed in others systems, especially quantitative and mass involvement standards). The history of the Americas and Europe during the same period, from the late 18th century on, is replete with religious change, religious revival, and the vitalization and revitalization of religious movements. In this respect, the material for contradicting or at least seriously attenuating the secularization thesis was always there, unless one used the standards of the institutional power of the church and the relatively weaker form of the other systems in the later medieval and early modern centuries. While there were always voices that pointed out this continuous development of differentiated religion, they did not have a very broad audience, at least until the last decades of the 20th century, which brings the narrative up to the contemporary period. Globalization and the Intensified Pluralization of Religion The story that I have been telling thus far is largely a Western and European one. Included in this narrative, however, have been a couple of brief forays outside of Europe and its colonial settler societies to talk about the expansion of European influence and the appropriation of certain initially European structures and ideas in other parts of the world. This was the case for the idea of religion and the Westphalian model. I want now to move the narrative solidly to the global level, and



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this is a move that reflects what has been happening more generally over the past 30–40 years. Most elite Western observers, not to mention those in other parts of the world, have during that time, as it were, looked up and shifted their gaze to include the whole world, and not just primarily the West. The result has been not just the neologism of globalization, but what amounts to a rethinking of many of the main ideas developed with a view primarily to the West, or with the West as the presumptive universal standard through which one views the entire world. In consonance with the analysis while focusing mainly on Europe, this change in semantics, in ideas, ought to have a correlation in socio-structural changes; and these are indeed not hard to find. They include an array of changes that have been happening in the world for the last two hundred years, but which in the latter half of the twentieth century reached what appears to be a threshold, after which the changes became much more difficulty to ignore. These include the exponentially greater, faster, and thicker web of communicative possibilities and realities that built themselves up over that time, the steady increase in international and transnational governance structures, organizations, and trade; the intensification of a more and more completely global financial system and the multiplication of transnational economic enterprises; and the global flow of people through tourism, travel, and migration such that, in most parts of the world, the rest of the world is much more constantly present, both virtually and physically. Not surprisingly, in this context, this changed situation has brought about the beginnings of a change in observation with respect to religion, and of course with respect to the secular. Once we lift our gaze from Europe and the West to include also the whole world as the default unit of analysis and observation, something now seemingly obvious appears concerning religion. In a by now wellknown quote from his edited 1999 book, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (note well the title), Peter Berger declares, “My point is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever” ( Berger, 1999: 2). Immediately before this, he tells us what brought him to this conclusion: in a word, it was the Ayatollah Khomeini, or worldwide “fundamentalist” movements more broadly. What had happened between the 1960s, when Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy (Berger, 1967), a book that analyzes religion in terms of secularization, and 1999 was that he had changed his gaze; and what triggered it was the

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seemingly successful incursion of religious movements into the political arena, a kind of reversal of the Westphalian formula in which the religion determines the identity of the realm, not the ruler. Berger is one of many who have made this observational move, very often for the same reasons. This change has a number of important implications. One is that, if the religiousness of the non-West now counts as evidence against the secularization of the West, if Europe is at best now the “exception” (Davie, 2003) compared to the rest of the world which provides the rule, then that means that modernity also cannot be restricted to the West. Hence we have now “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt, 2000) or a single “global modernity” (Dirlik, 2003) that includes the entire globe. A second implication is actually a non-implication: what is not implied by this semantic move. This is also contained, if perhaps inadvertently, in the words I cited from Berger: “the world, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever” (emphasis added). Religion, he is saying – and I think he is correct – has the same strength in most places in this global society, it is weaker in some others and stronger in others still. Secularization, in other words, like religious resurgence, is not a rule; it is an option; it is a category of variation. There is no dominant pattern in terms of growth or decline, by whatever measure. A third implication is then this: if the observed/ expected fate of religion under the aegis of (Western) modernity was secularization, what is its observed/expected fate – or what are the important questions about it – under the aegis of globalization or global modernity? The answer, I suggest is that there is no dominant fate, which means that the dominant question will be about variation, about pluralization in the sense of multiple forms and multiple trajectories (Beyer, 2007). This idea, in turn, brings me back to the issue of the Westphalian model, which, just to recall, was also a strategy for dealing with religious pluralization and its consequences. Religious Pluralization and the Idea of a Post-Westphalian Condition The pluralization I am talking about is not, or not simply, a new structural, heightened, or transformed religious diversity. Diversity under the heading of religion is nothing new, but as old as the set of phenomena to which the word generally refers. What can be new are two things: the way we observe or understand the plurality; and the forms that the



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plurality takes, which is the same as saying the forms that religion takes. These two are, of course, not entirely separable, but they are also not entirely the same. I deal with the first under the simple heading of pluralization and the second under the rather more difficult idea of a postWestphalian condition. The shift in gaze from the West to the globe means that everything that is happening in that global space has to be treated as belonging there. The Ayatollah Khomeini and French laïcité have to appear in the same unit of analysis. By contrast, under the older modernization view, the Ayatollah could be assigned to the past and traditional society and therefore be deemed irrelevant for understanding modern, which is to say, mostly Western society. Indeed, the current meanings of the word “fundamentalism”, to which the Ayatollah is assigned, still carries that older connotation. “Fundamentalism”, as Berger realized in the above quote, was the shocking realization that modernization along with its secularization no longer held – and here, by the way, is why Jerry Falwell is so important: he linked the USA and revolutionary Iran and thereby made it much more difficult to keep assigning the Ayatollah to the past. Now, in as much as the linking concept in the case of modernization and religion was rationalization, the modern being essentially rational whereas religion was essentially irrational and therefore modernization should entail the weakening or disappearance of religion; under the rubric of globalization, this no longer holds. What, I suggest, substitutes for the identifying quality of rationalization under this heading is the tension between the identity of globalization, that everybody and everywhere is included, and the differences that appear also to flourish in that context. This tension, along with Roland Roberston (1992), I label glocalization, the idea that everywhere in the world we do “the same thing” or are implicated in the same global society, but that everywhere we also to that same thing somewhat differently or, what amounts to the same, assert and understand ourselves to be doing that thing differently. Once this observational move is made – for example through the idea that the world contains a multitude of different “cultures”, “nations”, or, in Samuel Huntington’s suggestion (1996) that there are in the world different “civilizations” that can clash – then all of a sudden, the Ayatollah, French or Indian secularism, the American Christian Right, and the belonging without believing Swedes or Japanese can all fit into our understanding of the nature of contemporary (global) society. In this observational context, religion also appears as one of those prime ways of doing the same thing but differently. What now begins to strike us as we, like

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Berger, look out onto our global world, is how strikingly different things are with respect to religion across that world. Secularization can happen in some places, religious resurgence in others; “fundamentalisms” or politicized religion that moves forcefully into the “public sphere” can occur in some places and not in others; in some places certain religions will dominate, in some others, and in yet others none will dominate; over time religion, by whatever measure, can wax and wane and then wax again; the same religion, however identified, can be one thing in one place and a significantly variable thing in the same or another place and yet still be considered by insiders and outsiders as the “same” religion; civil religion can be strong in some places or non-existent in others; religion can cede to “spirituality” for some people or more in some places than others, and this variably over time; and other axes of diversity besides. I stress that religious pluralization in this circumstance is not or at least not just the increase in the number of religions or identifiable variants of religion, along the lines of more movements within Islam or more organized denominations in Christianity, and so forth. Instead, religious pluralization is mostly an artefact of changed understanding or observation of religion. We can, however, talk about increased religious diversity – which would, of course, also be part of the increased observation of pluralization – in terms of a greater structural pluralization when compared to the past in many places in contemporary global society. This can be seen to be happening, for instance, with the explosion of New Religions and now New New Religions in Japan since the end of the Second World War; or in Latin America with the increase in the presence of new and old varieties of Protestant Christianity or New World African religions since about the 1960s. Highly significant for my purposes, however, is also the increase during the same post-war period in structural religious diversity in a great many countries around the world, but especially in the West, that has resulted from the sustained intensification of transnational migration, especially from the non-West to the West. It is this development that, more than anything else, has brought about the perception, mentioned at the beginning, that religious diversity presents a “challenge” if not simply an out and out problem. Much of this has to do with one specific religion, namely Islam; and concomitantly with the perceived re-entry of religion into the “public sphere”. While, therefore, Islam, Islamophobia, “fundamentalism” and politicized religious movements are what is most visible, it may well be that these developments signal a much more basic transformation that



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is restructuring not just religion but the religion/secular distinction itself. To recall, the Westphalian model has been based on the assumption a) that religion or its equivalent was differentiated but foundational to social and personal order and b) that the secular in the form of the territorially delimited and sovereign state had to have the responsibility for regulating religion in the sense of controlling the possibility of multiple and conflicting foundationalisms. This required a dominant, national, established, or equivalent civil religion and the assignment of all else to at best “tolerated minority” religion. Most states around the world have, albeit with highly significant variations, tended to structure themselves along Westphalian lines, but never unproblematically since the Westphalian model does not undo the differentiation of religion from the secular and at the same time does not undo the modern tendency to structure the religious system through mutually identified religions, this latter itself representing a Westphalian modeling of religion. Therefore, inherent in the Westphalian model has always been its own undoing, its own contradiction to the extent that it posits isomorphism between state and religion in a socio-structural context where that isomorphism can at the very best be only partial and unstable. Every state has tried to find a solution to this problem, and among these are a variety of secularisms, ranging from the civil religious secularism of the United States and France – even these two being quite different – to the official atheism of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, to the purportedly inclusive secularisms of India and (postwar) Japan. In the current global context, what the new religious diversity attendant upon transnational migration in Western countries – all of them constructed historically on the Westphalian model – does is to make this “inherent contradiction” that much more obvious and unavoidable for observation. The perceived “problem of Islam” – much like the “problem of Roman Catholicism” in certain Protestant countries in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries – is centred in the perception by both Muslims and non-Muslims that this is a religion that asserts its foundationalism, sometimes to the point of inverting the Westphalian formula so that the religion determines the realm, while in many cases constituting a demographic, national, and political “minority”. The Westphalian logic asks: how can a minority religion be foundational? With the assumption that it can’t because the result will be chaos and perpetual conflict, analogous to the European situation before Westphalia. Accordingly, for instance, we see the search or call for a “European Islam” or an “American Islam”,

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meaning precisely an Islam that will either fit itself into the denominational structure that prevails in the United States, or that will behave like a minority religion and not make public claims as in the case of European countries (cf. Haddad & Esposito, 1998; Nielsen, 1999; Roy, 1999). The situation is therefore similar with the general question of religion “moving into the public sphere” in countries that have made the move to a secular foundationalism. Such religion “doesn’t know its place” as an effective “minority religion” and therefore is perceived to threaten the same chaos and conflict. In this context, what I want to suggest is that this conundrum is mostly, but not entirely, a matter of perception. It is a conundrum only on the assumptions of the Westphalian model. Therefore, one possible way to move beyond it is to move away from Westphalian assumptions and allow the possibility of the restructuring of both the secular and the religious away from this model. In particular, this would mean either ceasing to model differentiated religion on the differentiated political system in the form of the nation-state, or at least allowing such modeling to appear as what it has always been, contingent in the sense of not necessary, let alone self-evident. One can continue on the Westphalian model, but one does not have to. This is what I want to call moving toward a post-Westphalian condition. It remains to outline more precisely what this would entail. I restrict myself to three aspects of this post-Westphalian condition: 1) the greater delinking of the differentiated systems for religion and polity and only in that sense the delinking of the religious and the secular; 2) the alternative modeling of religion, not just on its own independent criteria – because that has been happening simultaneously all along – but more on other systems beside the political; and 3) the overcoming of foundationalism. In each case, for completion, one would also have to talk about the post-Westphalian state, but that I will leave aside, perhaps for others to tackle. Delinking religion and polity, at least more than has been the case under Westphalian assumptions, means undoing the assumption that a state has to have a dominant religion, including a civil one; and that religion has to structure itself to be capable of filling this need. It means, in a sense, the greater “freedom of religion” to structure itself in a greater abstraction from and lack of consideration for nation-state boundaries. What exactly that might look like is difficult to say because it describes the situation only in terms of what it will not be, not in a positive sense. Yet among the more consequential possible implications is that national



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identity might be defined in less religious or quasi-religious terms and that religion might drift away from, not only strong associations with certain states, but more consequentially from the religious delimitation structure that mirrors that of states, which means predominantly as mutually exclusive and clearly demarcated religions. A partial indication of what this might look like can be seen in the tendency that we see in much of today’s world, including in Western countries for authenticity and authority in religion to be de-centred territorially, organizationally, and in terms of the actual contents of religions; and this all the way to the individual who expresses their religion in whatever way they see fit. This includes combining religious material, including identities, that others, including elites and religious authorities would consider illegitimate and contradictory (see, e.g. Howell, 2005; Marshall, 2003; McGuire, 2008). The alternate modeling of religion has always been going on. One thinks of the degree to which religions have structured themselves analogously to science in the sense of providing and generating true statements, or of religion as law, or the historically close relation between art and religion or between religion and health. In the contemporary circumstance, what we may be witnessing to an unprecedented degree, however, is the overt and observable modeling of religion on (capitalist) economy and on the mass media information system. Ideas like the “spiritual marketplace” (Roof, 1999) or the “religious market/economy” (Stark & Finke, 2000), far from being only analytic theories in the social sciences, may gain much of their plausibility from the increasing propensity for religious people in our world to in fact do their religion in a way that copies from their involvement in the reproduction of the capitalist economic system: as producers marketing a good or as consumers choosing from what the market has to offer. One of the manifestations of this trend will be that people can “shop with less brand loyalty” (cf. Hervieu-Léger, 1999). Moreover, the seemingly easy resonance that mass media from radio and television to the internet have with religion may also be evidence that religion is being restructured more along the style of mass media information and entertainment, without thereby ceasing to be and to be considered religion (or spirituality) (see e.g. Campbell, 2010; Cowan, 2005; Dawson & Cowan, 2004). And if that seems to many people odd, the oddity may be no more than a reflection of the still automatic nature of Westphalian assumptions. Both these trends, however, point in what is probably potentially the most consequential aspect of a post-Westphalian condition for religion,

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namely the overcoming of foundationalism. The idea here is not that religion ceases to make foundational claims for its practitioners, its moveÂ�ments, its organizations, etc. Rather it is that it ceases to make foundational claims for society, or at least no more foundational than the claims made for art, health, economy, or the mass media, for instance. Absent that claim, and states can regulate religion in a way that more closely resembles their regulatory activity with respect to these other systems. Absent this claim, and religion can move in a more instrumental and “practical”, as opposed to only in an expressive and foundational, direction that Heelas, for instance, tries to capture with the idea of a “spiritual revolution”, that Inglehart labels as post-materialist, or that Carrette & King lament as a commodification of religion (Carrette & King, 2005; Heelas, Woodhead, et al., 2005; Inglehart, Basañez, & Moreno, 1998). This transformation would, of course, also apply to the civil religious surrogates. If religion ceases to be understood as the foundational “glue” that, because it concerns itself with “the conditions for the possibility of anything”, our “ultimate concerns”, guarantees social order or integrates society, then Ersatzreligionen would (pace Durkheim) lose that function as well. Conclusion The passage to what I am calling a post-Westphalian condition is perforce a speculative thesis. We are, after all, seeking to understand and analyze that which is supposedly in the process of happening, not something that we can observe with hindsight. The evidence for such a transition is therefore suggestive, but no more. Indeed, the thesis does not even claim a solid transition from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian condition: the latter is not so much a new situation as a way of pointing out the much greater perceived contingency of Westphalian arrangements. This means that it is likely – and perhaps even certain – that Westphalian religion will continue in the form of structuring religion along the lines of clearly demarcated and mutually exclusive religions  which must “incorporate” their adherents, their “religious citizens” in a preferably exclusive or at least dominant way. It means that the Westphalian state will also continue to be a possibility, sometimes including a dominant or state religion, sometimes including the declared necessity of a unified civil religious patriotism or national vision and values to which all citizens must subscribe lest they be suspected of



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disloyalty or national apostasy. If we are, however, moving into a postWestphalian condition, as I am suggesting we are, then these options will not only appear as such – as one option among others – but will be significantly harder to defend, both at the national and global levels, as self-evident and unquestionable, as a straightforward matter of religious truth and state sovereignty. And this is where the idea of pluralization of religion and that of a post-Westphalian condition converge: if the options are plural, then there will be no prevailing model for religion, for the nation-state, or for the relation between the two, although that does not necessarily at all mean the undoing of the basic social structures of global society, including the territorially delimited state system and the global system for religion.

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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Balagangadhara, S. N. 1994. ‘The Heathen in His Blindness …’: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Berger, Peter (Ed.). 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beyer, Peter. 2006. Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge. Beyer, Peter. 2007. Globalization and Glocalization. In J. A. Beckford & N. J. Demerath III (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (pp. 98-117). London: Sage. Boyarin, Daniel. 2007. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: Univesity of Pennsylvania Press. Campbell, Heidi. 2010. When Religion Meets New Media. London & New York: Routledge. Carrette, Jeremy, & Richard King. 2005. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. New York: Routledge. Cowan, Douglas E. 2005. Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet. New York: Routledge. Davie, Grace. 2003. Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Dawson, Lorne L., & Douglas E. Cowan (Eds.). (2004). Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet. New York: Routledge. Délumeau, Jean. 1983. Le Péché et la peur: La culpiabilisation en Occident, XIIIe - XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Fayard. Despland, Michel. 1979. La religion en Occident: Évolution des idées et du vécu. Montreal: Fides. Dirlik, Arif. 2003. Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(3), 275-292. Eisenstadt, Smuel N. 2000. Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, 129(1), 1–29. Feil, Ernst. 1986-2001. Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Begriffs. 3 Vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gardet, Louis. 1960 [1980]. Din. In H. R. Gibb & others (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Islam (Vol. 2, pp. 293-296). Leiden: Brill. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Habermas, Jürgen. 2010. An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a PostSecular Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Haddad, Yvonne Y., & John L. Esposito (Eds.). 1998. Muslims on the Americanization Path? Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Harrison, Peter. 1990. ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heelas, Paul, Linda Woodhead, et al. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Herberg, Will. 1960. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Eassy in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1999. Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion en mouvement. Paris: Flammarion. Howell, Julia D. 2005. Muslims, the New Age and Marginal Religions in Indonesia: Changing Meanings of Religious Pluralism. Social Compass, 52, 473-492.



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Huff, Toby E. 2003. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (2nd edition ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New Delhi: Viking Penguin. Inglehart, Ronald, Miguel Basañez & Alejandro Menéndez Moreno. 1998. Human Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kveinen, Else. 2002. Citizenship in a Post-Westphalian Community: Beyond External Exclusion? Citizenship Studies, 6(1), 21–35. Linklater, Andrew. 1996. Citizenship and Sovereignty in the Post-Westphalian State. European Journal in International Relations, 2(1), 77-103. Marshall, Alison. 2003. Moving the Spirit on Taiwan: New Age Lingji Performance. Journal of Chinese Religions, 31, 81–99. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press. McGuire, Meredith. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Nesbitt, Robert A. 1966. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. Nielsen, Jørgen S. 1999. Towards a European Islam. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Policy Research Initiative. 2009. Religious Diversity in Canada. Horizons, Vol. 10, No. 2. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Roof, Wade C. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roy, Olivier. 1999. Vers un islam européen. Paris: Éditions Esprit. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Smith, Wilfred C. 1991. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Stark, Rodney & Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Westerlund, David (Ed.). 1996. Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Zeidan, David. 2003. The Resurgence of Religion: A Comparative Study of Selected Themes in Christian and Islamic Fundamentalist Discourses. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

RESURGENT RELIGION IN POLITICS: THE MARTYR, THE CONVERT AND THE BLACK KNIGHT OF APOCALYPSE Enzo Pace Introduction The aim of this article is fairly simple, i.e. in depicting three religious figures, of the martyr, the convert (and re-convert), and the (apocalyptic) black knight, I would like to discuss the process of resurgent religion in politics. I assume that it is not merely a return to the past: a subordination of the former to the latter or, vice versa, an exploitation of religion by politicians. We are dealing with another theoretical puzzle: the autonomy of politics itself produces religious figures whenever politics reveals its pure soul, the symbolic code according to which the political domain works. I refer here to the semantically opposing friend-enemy code highlighted by Carl Schmitt. In 1932, Schmitt wrote in The Concept of the Political: The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend (Freund) and enemy (Feind) (2007: 27).

A few lines later, he suggested that: The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship (2007: 28).

The relationship is dominated by the figure of the hostis, the public hostis of course, which is different from the inimicus. Ironically, Schmitt notes that the well-known sentence in the Gospel, Love your enemies (Matthew: 5, 44) sounds different in Greek and Latin: diligete inimicos vestros. In other words, adversaries, competitors, disagreeable sorts of fellow become enemies in political terms (hostis) when they work as a collective unit fight against one another. The enemy is only a public



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enemy. In a note, the German sociologist quoted Plato and related the hostis to the πολεμος, and the inimicus to the εχθρος. According to Plato, war (polemos- πολεμος) only occurs between the Greeks and the barbarians (the archetypal hostis). The internal conflicts among Greek people, including any kind of civil war, were to be classified as discord, however violent they might be. This means that a people (a nation) cannot war against itself. Sometimes a civil war is indeed a pretext for settling accounts betweens families, tribes, and individuals. Therefore, the inimicos are those who hate us, while the hostes are those who fight us. In short, only the political system works according the friend-enemy binary code, precisely in the meanings clarified above. Schmitt consequently confutes the idea of religious war, or war prompted by religious motives. Indeed, war needs no sacred justification, because the friend-enemy pair is intrinsically sacred or, better still, it is based on a metaphysical (and sometimes theological) assumption: the enemy is the other, the stranger, existentially something not only different from and alien to us, but also a collective (public) actor threatening our identity, combating the integrity of the three pillars: one land, one language, one religion (Pace, 2004). That is why, in war, political rhetoric feeds on the apocalyptic symbols. The clash of civilizations pertains precisely to this kind of discourse. In this sense, even a private choice – religious conversion – can be seen as an act of war by those who claim to defend the moral, cultural and political integrity of a nation, this modern construction of a chain of memory and hub of uncontaminated, original, shared values, to be protected from the barbarians or aliens. Last but not least, Schmitt clearly stresses the difference between religious and political martyrdom. In the former, a religious community or group asks believers to provide proof of their creed by sacrificing their lives; the sacrifice serves primarily for the salvation of the souls and the moral edification of the community. In the latter, the martyrdom emphasizes the power of the religious institutions, their worldly power; so in this case martyrdom becomes a symbolic (and sometimes not only symbolic!) weapon of a religion transformed into a political entity. Its actions work precisely according to the generalized symbolic code of politics: friend or foe. Martyrdom becomes one of the methods for fighting the enemy, and the war will be not religious, but purely political. The three contemporary figures of martyr, convert and black knight seem to my mind like strategic passwords for sociologically challenging the apparent resurgence of religion in politics.

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enzo pace The Politics of Martyrdom

If we use Durkheim’s classic distinction between egoistic, altruistic and anomic suicides (Le suicide, 1897), martyrdom is, roughly speaking, an altruistic suicide. Those who deliberately sacrifice their lives for a supreme ideal (be it religious, political or moral) demonstrate not only a profound faith in that ideal, but also a strong commitment to a group. In the martyr’s hierarchy of values, individuals’ lives count for less than the supreme and universal ideal they believe in. The Ego becomes subordinated to the Alter, showing how far faith and trust enable individuals to transcend their limits, overcome their instinctive fear of violent death and prove their supreme coherence with an ideal. Group solidarity drives them to sacrifice their own lives in an altered state of consciousness, a sort of mystical experience that enables them to go beyond human fears and anxieties. The heroic dimension of martyrdom means precisely a lucid awareness that a given action leads to certain death. Martyrdom is a test for individuals and the groups they belong to. The psychic system of martyrs thus tends to reduce the social complexity they live in by adopting a terrifyingly basic binary code, life or death (resulting in: give life or take life), that they see as the fundamental moral code of every pure militant. After their death, they become an emblem for the group, which is why a martyr’s body is so important in the social representation of altruistic suicide: the group’s members are able to reinforce their conviction by exalting the martyrs’ blood and worshipping their bodies. By commemorating their sacrifice, they transform the narrative of martyrdom into a narration of the cohesive strength of the group. We can distinguish between two types of martyrdom: passive and active. The former applies to individuals compelled to sacrifice their lives to defend their ideals, because they refuse to renounce their faith or their group’s solidarity. This kind of martyrdom is frequent in both the religious and the political fields. Everyday language distinguishes the political or civil hero from the religious martyr, but the formal profile of the martyr appears to be the same. Active martyrdom applies, on the other hand, to a suicide attack, an act of self-destruction designed to strike a perceived enemy. In passive martyrdom, the violence is suffered; in active martyrdom, it is used as a weapon, killing both the martyr and the enemy. This second type of martyrdom has attracted much more attention in the social sciences because of its dramatic spread in contemporary society. The martyrdom of a suicide attack (Hassan,



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2004) has become a modern way to make war within a warring context; in many cases, it contains both the religious and the political aspects of modern conflicts. We should not forget the ancient roots of the present-day phenomenon. In the first century BC, the Jewish Zealots directed a suicide attack against the Roman army occupying Judaea and Jerusalem and trying to force the Jews to renounce their faith. In the 12th and 13th centuries, an extremist sect appeared in Islam – the Shiite Order of the Assassins (so called probably because they used to take hashish before attacking their enemies) – that developed the practice of suicide attacks, seen as a form of inner-world asceticism, a desperate method for combating a much better equipped and larger enemy. One of the best-known cases of this kind of suicide is the Japanese kamikaze. The kamikaze (from kami, God and kaze, wind – the name of the typhoon that saved Japan from invasion by the Mongol hordes in 1216) was, in fact, a soldier (an aviator, to be precise) willing to carry out an act of war fully aware that he would die in the process, and exulting in the fact that one man alone, with a single airplane, could inflict heavy losses on the enemy. It is common knowledge that such attacks were widely used by the Japanese against the United States navy in the Second World War. It is no accident that the aviators willing to carry out such attacks formed part of a special fighting force, the ko-geki tai (divine storm special force units) (Axel & Kaze 2002). The story of the kamikaze illustrates the relationship between religion and politics, which was intensified by the war; the more the political situation became dramatic, the stronger the symbolic resources provided by religion became to justify resorting to violent suicide attacks. The issue disputed in the social sciences concerns the relations between the practice of martyrdom in the form of suicide attacks and the core message of a religion. There are many references to the great value attributed to martyrdom in religious tradition. In the preachings of Jesus of Nazareth, for example, there are frequent references to the figure of a witness who should fear nothing because the Holy Spirit sustains those who cling to their faith even at the moment of the ultimate sacrifice, up to “death on the cross”. From the 2nd century onwards, the Christian martyrs were those who continued publicly to claim their identity and their membership of the Christian community, in the face of the power of the Roman Empire, even when it meant sacrificing their own lives. This idea of bloody martyrdom was gradually toned down as Christianity became a majority religion. The figure of the martyr became

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more spiritual – apart from the modern throwback when Christians, and Catholics in particular, were persecuted by intolerant, totalitarian regimes (as in many former Eastern bloc countries, for example). Islam also exalts the figure of the witness and martyr to the faith as one who perishes in battle while fighting on God’s path: the reward awaiting him is immediate entry to Heaven. Moreover, the minority Moslem Shiite sect (concentrated mainly in Iran and Iraq nowadays) remembers its first two chiefs (imam), Ali and Husayn (the latter was killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD) as martyrs of the faith. The continuity between the original religious doctrines of Â�martyrdom and the modern usage of martyrdom, separated from their historical context, has been disputed. Robert Pape (2006) has shown, for instance, that the relationship between religious fundamentalism (and radical religious traditions in general) on the one hand, and suicide attacks on the other, is very weak. In support of his view, Papp cites the case of the Tamil Tigers, the extremist faction of the Tamil ethnic minority in Sri Lanka, who claim independence for the northern part of the island. The Tamil Tigers have frequently conducted suicide attacks on SinhaleseBuddhist political and religious targets, but they are not very sensitive towards religion despite their Hindu background. In this case, religion is simply a marker of ethnic identity, one of a number of symbolic resources to use in consolidating the collective identity. In contrast, reference to a religious content is explicit in the case of the radical Palestinian movements (Jihad, Martyrs of Al-Aqsa, ‘Iz al-Din al Qasem Brigades), linked to the Hamas fundamentalist movement, because the final goal of their strategy is first to achieve independence for Palestine and second to build an Islamic republic. The same applies to the Lebanon and the Kashmir cases (Martinez, 2003). Analyzing all these cases, Papp argues that the martyrs follow a strategic logic to obtain political and territorial concessions. In other words, the martyrdom and suicide attacks of the past two decades appear to serve as a means of shifting political power relations and gaining control of whole areas of a territory. As Riaz Hassan (2004) pointed out, in the Middle East, for instance, it is far more important to consider the collective sense of historical injustice and social humiliation in which the majority of the people are living. Individuals may thus become martyrs and martyr-killers when, according to their own conscience and that of the group to which they belong, martyrdom appears to be the only way to achieve several goals at the same time: empowerment vs. powerlessness, salvation



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(in religious terms) vs. damnation and – very important in certain sociocultural contexts – honor vs. a sense of humiliation. (Hassan 1983, 1985). A United Nations relief worker in Gaza, Nasra Hassan (2001), reported the findings of a survey conducted in the Gaza strip, involving 250 interviews with aspiring martyrs. The most interesting findings of this empirical investigation were that none of the young Palestinians concerned were poorly educated, desperately poor or psychologically depressed. The only explanation Nasra Hassan found for their behavior was the desperate social disorder caused by the permanent state of war against Israel, a war that throws everyday life into turmoil, creating a pervasive sense of precariousness and impotence. I might add that the extremist politico-religious groups followers’ interiorization of the martyrdom model is the result of a sort of inner-world asceticism, a moral discipline (which only later becomes technical and military) based on the principle of making a sacrifice here today in exchange for a reward in heaven, as well as immediate benefits on earth (killing as many enemies as possible). It is therefore an act of symbolic self-inflicted violence designed to overcome the fear of death and the horror of deliberately killing innocent and defenseless people (Khosrokhavar, 2000; Jürgensmeyer, 2000). The martyr’s body becomes a sort of communication medium for persuading other young boys and girls to lay down their lives for a supreme religious and political ideal. Some of the settings where this happens are dominated by unsolved national issues, others involve a criÂ�sis in a revolutionary project (as in Iran, with Khomeini’s regime in decline, at the time of the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran, 1980–88) and, lastly, there is the form of transnational martyrdom used by the al-Qa‘ida network. From this standpoint, al-Qa‘ida is a movement composed of defeated movements, veterans from groups that lost their battles in their own countries and thus placed themselves at the service of Bin Laden’s international terrorist network, set in an international environment. By planning suicide attacks, the al-Qa‘ida leaders have thus, with extreme symbolic and physical violence, reduced the internal complexity of a system of beliefs such as Islam. The various examples we have mentioned support the hypothesis that the figure of the contemporary martyr is intrinsically related to a war-mating policy in two senses: as an asymmetric warring method, and as a means of communication reflecting the friend-enemy political code.

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enzo pace Politics of Conversion

The second figure on the stage of resurgent religion in politics is the convert and, sometimes, the re-convert. Conversion is basically a battle that takes place along the symbolic boundaries between systems of belief that happen to coexist in the same social environment. If a person becomes converted, it is as if one of the systems had lost the battle to keep their people convinced and convincingly within their own boundaries. For individuals, this decision may be experienced not so much as a breakaway from their previous beliefs, which identified them with a given salvation institution or sociallyorganized world of sense, but rather as a new spiritual voyage leading them beyond boundaries that they no longer consider impassable, enabling them to explore a territory that seems new, but not too far removed from the universe of beliefs they are formally abandoning. A conversion is therefore interpreted as a threat to a belief system that weakens the system’s ability to claim once and for all that theirs are the real salvation goods for humanity, for the whole of humanity. In this sense, a conversion always subtracts power from a system of belief. This loss is all the greater, the more the system has become historically structured into a complex organization functioning on the principle of obedience to an acknowledged authority. When the authority is political, it tends to treat religion as a means for controlling the symbolic boundaries of social solidarity, reinforcing the myth of the origin of a collective identity (shared memories, values – which include the dominant religion– and institutions); so conversions are not just a private affair but also a public threat to be dealt with using political weapons. The more the political authority is founded on the organizational axiom that Auctoritas facit veritatem (Schmitt, 1925), the more severely the socio-political actors will react to the deviation from the truth represented by those who choose another faith. The political power sees them as alien. Applying the debt and credit concept that Nietzsche identifies, in his On the Genealogy of Morality (1968), as the original social relationship in the evolutionary process that leads a human being to go beyond the level of primitive instinct, it is as if people who have converted have contracted a new moral commitment to their chosen new system of belief, while the system from which they depart is in their debt, being guilty of not having known how to keep them within its boundaries. It is hardly surprising that many religions have always treated those who



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embrace another faith as traitors, renegades, heretics, apostates, and so on. Apostasy, in particular, has been considered a punishable crime, even warranting the death penalty, since it is configured and still seen not only as offending God (a sin) but also as a gross deviation from the established social and political order (a crime). In other words, it is like a breach of contract, and the party at fault must face the consequences. There is consequently a sort of irony for the systems of belief: the more they claim to being faithful custodians of an absolute truth and entrust the responsibility for defending it to an established authority, the supreme head of a religious organization, the more conversions will be seen as a snub of this authority, because conversions point to a weakness in the image the authority strives to convey of itself as the illuminated and ultimate holder of the truth. Conversion is a process that concerns not only, or even primarily, an individual’s conscience (Blasi, 2009), but also the relationship between systems of religious and political belief. In other words, if the conversion is a battle taking place along the boundaries of a belief system, the battle concerns the politics of identity managed by a political elite or political movement, which sees religion not as being important per se, but only as a communication medium to emphasize the myth of the origin of the collective consciousness. Conversions will therefore theoretically be seen by the political system as a betrayal and by the religious system is a perversion. If people leave a religion regarded by a political élite or movement as a builder of the collective identity, then their conversion tends to be considered both as an alteration and violation of the natural order established by a god or supreme cosmic principle and as a disorder that disrupts the social cohesion. The convert is consequently a negative sign from a religious point of view, inasmuch as concerns a religion’s capacity to appear on the market of salvation goods as the authoritative interpreter of the true faith, and a cause of concern for the political establishment. The converted become contaminated, their authenticity and integrity damaged by their decision to embrace another faith (or abandon any form of belief), as if they had fallen from a state of grace into a state of impurity. In this sense, conversion is an act of war from the political standpoint. The battle to re-conquer those who have been converted thus becomes a political affair, a man-to-man combat, supported directly or indirectly by political élites. In the light of the above considerations, I aim to focus on a portion of this process, i.e. the rituals of re-conquest and purification developed

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and implemented in an effort to win back the people who have abandoned the religion of their birth or original environment. Getting people to revert is not just a matter of welcoming back people who had moved away from the faith of their fathers (and maybe celebrating the prodigal son’s return home with the sacrifice of a fatted calf). It is more an act of re-conquest expressed in rituals of purification leading to the reversion of an individual previously considered an impure degenerate (perversion), traitor and liar, in a sequence of stigma typically applied by those remaining faithful to a belief system to those abandoning it, often turning their inner experience into a public affair. This is another way to consider the friend-enemy binary code. Reconversion reveals the tension between religion and politics whenever the process of reconverting is not a private experience, but a public affair involving social actors, political and religious movements, and explicitly supported by politicians or governments. I shall particularly examine one reversion ritual to demonstrate that it can be useful to study the conversion process as an illustration of the resurgence of religion in politics. I shall concentrate on one specific case, i.e. the rituals developed by the neo-Hindu movements. Examining this case does not entitle me to generalize; it merely helps me to formulate a working hypothesis that, in a comparative study on the rituals developed in other socio-religious settings, might refute the claim that conversion is not only a matter of individual choice, but the outcome of a conversion policy, a battle taking place not only at the boundaries between systems of religious belief, but also and especially as part of a political design to impose a cultural hegemony on a society that is thereby restored to a state of purity, where belonging to a religion is part of the natural order of things (Stromberg, 1993). In modern-day Indian society, conversion is a real political and religious controversy (Bacchetta, 2000). Over the past twenty years the increasing number of conversions from Hinduism to other religions (particularly Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and the Bahá’i faith) is on the political agenda. It is hard to say how many people change religion in a year because such information is often provided by the leaders of movements undertaking intensive conversion campaigns. It is relatively easy, instead, to document the controversies that have arisen in India since 1990 between movements of different religious and political tendencies, the bone of contention being their places of worship or conversions from one religion to another. The choice of this particular year is merely a convention and refers to a march organized by Shri Advani



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(born in Pakistan in 1929), the leader of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the centre-right nationalist party that governed India from 1998 to 2004), from the Hindu temple of Somnath in the State of Gujarat to the Babri Mosque, which dated back to the time of the moguls (built in 1528), in the city of Ayodhya, in the State of Uttar Pradesh. This march between the two cities took the form of a pilgrimage based on a very popular Hindu ritual called the rath yatra (yatra meaning pilgrimage, while rath means cart), a religious festival particularly famous in the State of Orissa, where millions of people embark on a spiritual walk in summer, accompanying large allegorical carts on which the principal Hindu divinities are enthroned. The march became one of the first political and religious actions launched by the new nationalist party. As leader of the BJP, Advani was to say: If Muslims are entitled to an Islamic atmosphere in Mecca, and if Christians are entitled to a Christian atmosphere in the Vatican, why is it wrong for the Hindus to expect a Hindu atmosphere in Ayodhya? (in Brass, 2003: p. 13).

The message was clear, and the important point to note is that the leader  of the neo-Hinduist party, with the aid of the movements and groups for Hindu religious reawakening, invented a repertoire for triggering a collective action along two planes, one religious and the other political (Bhatt, 2001; Elst 2001). The traditional rituals were reinvented and became a set of collective gestures expressing a political tension, a visible statement of Hindu identity that was seen as being threatened by Muslims, Jainists, Christians or the followers of Bahá’i, as the case may be. At the time of the first march in 1990, for instance, there were numerous incidents with the police along the way, especially when the kar sevaks (militants who took part in the march or joined in en route) claimed to each be carrying a brick that was to serve in the reconstruction of the Rama temple, after the mosque in Ayodhya had been destroyed. The police succeeded in preventing an assault on the mosque, though some people lost their lives in the fight and immediately became martyrs of Ayodhya. The organizers of the march had dotted the whole route with a number of rituals well known to the Hindu population, such as blowing shankhs (conch shells) in the streets, ghanta gharial (ringing prayer bells and beating on alloyed metal plates), raising saffron flags in the daytime and organizing mashals (processions bearing flaming torches) at night (Brass, 1996: 182). This complex repertoire of rituals was designed to mobilize the people politically, making them step

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over the threshold that normally divides the day-to-day from the extraordinary, the profane from the sacred, tolerant cohabitation from violent opposition against other people, classified as enemies. Such actions can take on various features in the contingent situation in India (Jeffrelot, 1996; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). This was a case of a liturgical action conducted outside the temple and progressively taking the shape of a political event, expressing a logic that was no longer strictly religious. It tended to become a collective action to purify the land, prompting the passage from the symbolic violence of the new liturgical action to the genuine violence of an attack on the people or places of worship of another religion. One of the most important religious and political actors was the Arya Samaj movement. Arya Samaj stood at the crossroads between two powerful movements in Indian society at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, there was the need to be free of the British colonial yoke; on the other, the hope of a cultural and spiritual redemption achieved by returning to the purified and revisited religious roots of Hinduism, from where to embark on a path of reawakening (Singh, 2002). One of Dayananda’s closest collaborators within the Arya Samaj reinterpreted the ancient shuddhi ritual to adapt it to what we might define as a reversion policy. In fact, it literally means purification, but also reversion (or reverting after converting). Its origins can probably be traced back to the times when India was dominated by the Mogul empire and many Hindus converted to Islam. With the decline of Muslim rule, the shuddhi was subsequently perfected to facilitate the return of these converts to their original religion, taking a form that the Arya Samaj leaders and militants revived to lead these converts back to Hinduism. The ceremony is straightforward: it involves washing your feet and drinking a little water from the holy river Ganges (Gangajal). The context in which the revisited shuddhi ritual takes place today is characterized by recurrent socio-religious disputes, more acute in some areas than in others, but generally developing in all the states where Hindu extremists are particularly active in accusing people who have converted to Islam or Christianity of being responsible for the Hindu people’s loss of traditional values and identity, supporting the political rhetoric  of movements like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a national voluntary organization founded in 1925 by a physician originally from Nagpur, or the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, a branch of the RSS created in 1964. The shuddhi is part of a repertoire of collective activities that serve to rally political



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consent for the BJP, the political party that has succeeded in becoming  the essence and representative image of the above-mentioned movements. On this point, it is important to note how the controversies over conversions draw strength not only from tension between different systems of religious belief, but also from recurrent political and social issues concerning the position of the Dalits (literally the oppressed) and the aborigines (Adivasi in Sanskrit): the former account for around 167 million people, the latter another 70 million, and both continue to be relegated to the margins of the social scale, despite the abolition of the caste system and laws to promote positive action in favor of these outcasts and the many ethnic minorities dotted all over India, but especially in the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Ever since the 19th century, when Catholic and Protestant missionaries began to arrive, there have been massive conversions to Christianity and increasingly, these days, to Buddhism too. In the city of Nagpur, in central India, for instance, a ceremony was held in September 2006 to celebrate the conversion of approximately 100,000 people to Buddhism. This movement was begun by a brilliant lawyer, Bhrimao Ramji Ambedkar, who became a Buddhist in 1956 and encouraged other people to follow him. For all the people who did so, a by no means secondary argument in favor of their conversion to a religion different from Hinduism was the specific wish to leave the caste system behind because they felt socially discriminated against or because, as members of an ethnic minority, their fundamental minimum rights were not adequately safeguarded. In all these cases, moreover, the fact that the people being converted were outside the caste system, and therefore maximally impure by definition according to the socio-religious stratification imposed by the Brahmin at the very origins of the varna – the caste, in Portuguese (Dumont, 1980) – explains why the radical neo-Hindu movements have put the elimination of the caste system on their political agenda, and why the rites of reversion are accompanied by the promise of a better social status. It has to be said, however, that the caste system is so deeply rooted in the mentality of the people and the folds of society that it is even reproduced in other, non-Hindu religions. It is worth emphasizing that, alongside all these goings on, there is a public debate underway on the conversion phenomenon, which goes to show that the major exponents of the different religious belief systems in Indian society are striving to understand and justify what is happening. In other words, the topic of conversion has become a matter of

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collective reflection on the destiny of the democracy and the pluralism and secularism of the state, and ultimately on Indian national identity (Sen, 2005, 2006; Taylor, 1993: p. 42–45). The case study on conversions in the Indian subcontinent is an interesting test for analyzing the conversion phenomenon as a battle taking  place along the symbolic boundaries between systems of belief in a society that has historically been pluralist from the religious standpoint. This battle follows a precise narrative scheme: conversion is seen by a system of belief as a perversion; so action to obtain a reversion becomes a communication and action strategy (a socio-religious action strategy) adopted by one system against another. The action is imagined as the re-conquest of a lost soul and celebrated with rites of purification. To defend its boundaries, each system tends to describe its competitors as the expression of falsity, impurity, the reign of darkness, as opposed to its own, one and only true and pure faith, the resplendent reign of light (i.e. truth). By stint of shouting at each other that their converts are perverts, or that they have renounced the light of the true faith, the representatives of the various Indian religious denominations  seem to be admitting that their respective belief systems are no longer able to control the production of sense, since people’s freedom to choose the religion suited to their spiritual needs and demand for social justice has evidently increased in the Indian socio-religious setting. So the case of India shows that a process is underway that is eroding what I might call the principle of religious revenue: a system of belief that represents itself as the horizon of sense, that was taken for granted as part of the daily life of an entire population, is being put to the test by the conversions taking place, which give us a measure (in the case discussed here) of a liquid religiousness, to borrow a category dear to Bauman (2005), which precisely translates the idea of the permeability of a system’s symbolic boundaries. We have seen that conversion and reversion are two terms that point to a third – perversion – in a sort of semantic triangle that is effective in metaphorically showing that conversion is a sociological object that we can use to study the conflicts and tensions developing along the symbolic boundaries between different systems of belief. The loss of previous followers by a system is managed by stigmatizing people who convert and transforming the loss into a renewed symbolic investment to distinguish the system on offer as being capable of regaining what was lost. In this sense, it is not a matter of single individuals, but of the total number of conversions that can be exhibited, like trophies after a good hunting session, breaking down



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the perversity that had cast doubts over the stability of the symbolic boundaries protecting a system of religious belief. Conclusion: The Black Knight of Apocalypse Using the figure of the black knight of Apocalypse, I would like to refer more precisely to religion at war and the resurgence of religious nationalism and ethno-religious movements. It also concerns the recurrent conflicts arising all over the world in host societies because of the huge numbers of migrants; this happens not only at the macro level, but also on a micro scale, in everyday life. People perceive social change in dramatic terms when they start to experience unfamiliar sensations; the real clash of civilization begins when diversity (religious, cultural, and so on) strikes our senses in day-to-day life (our sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste), when the color of a person’s skin, a woman’s dress, the smell of a dish, physical contact, or the sound of a religious song seem strange, offensive, disturbing, untouchable. The conflicts in many societies involved in the global movement of people are the other side of the coin of modern ethnic conflicts. We have to cope with many war scenarios all over the world where the contenders not only claim land, independence or control over economic resources (oil, gold, opium, human beings, …), but in so doing they sometimes also invoke the name of God (or Dharma) to stress the impossibility of continuing to share a land with people who belong to another system of belief. Those who, up until yesterday, had learned to live together on the same land will start fighting with each other tomorrow, building barriers with their religious differences (Buddhist vs. Hindu, as in Sri Lanka; or Catholic vs. Orthodox, as in the recent Balkan wars; or Ahskenazi vs. Sephardic, as in the State of Israel, where the original religious division overlaps and sometimes conceals social, economic, political and cultural conflicts) (Vrcan, 1994; Seneviratne, 1999; Guolo, 1997; Roumani, 2009). The contemporary phenomenon of religion at war represents an extreme, violent dramatic representation of the emerging idea that it is impossible to live together, under the same roof, if we are different. In this case, war is the continuation with weapons of the will of the silent majority in affluent society to expel the inassimilable foreigners or, if this is not politically correct, to adopt numerous strategies to segregate people in new ghettoes where the religious cacophony – as studied by Smith (2000) in the case of the Newham area in East London – becomes the basso continuo of daily life, a sort of civic indifference to the differences, which

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sometimes hides latent conflicts relating to the economic and social gap between people who even belong to different religious denominations and confessions. The relationship between religion and migration helps us to understand the present tension between at least two (past and present) nation-building models, i.e. a nationalism based one on citizenship, the other on ethnicity. Under the sacred canopy of religion, the aliens’ religion in this case, we can see both these models in action, the torsion sometimes occurring in a society that tends to represent the idea of nation as a door open to newcomers wishing to become loyal citizens; other societies, shaped by the Romantic idea of the ethnic origin of the nation (as in Germany, among others), are suddenly realizing instead that migration has changed their socio-cultural and socio-religious fabric, and the collective identity is threatened by the new invaders, the new barbaroi. The contemporary apocalyptic rhetoric in the political arena, amplified by the media and supported by prominent political scientists (Huntington, 1998; 2005), evokes three hazards that have to be coped with (see figure):

1. Secularization leads to moral disorder

2. To cope with this process, we have to rediscover our religious-cultural roots

3. The collective/national identity needs a god/transcendent principle to be morally oriented



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According to this rhetoric, religious diversity becomes more and more an issue on the political agenda all over the world. The so-called multicultural policies have been criticized and abandoned, whereas they have implemented by norms and some times by best practices. Cultural, linguistic, religious and other forms of diversity have been represented as a sign of the disorder and degeneration of societies that seem too weak and compliant, oblivious to their cultural origins and roots. Without memory and identity, the recognition of religious diversity leads society to a progressive decline, and a final collapse. Consider, for instance, the rhetoric concerning the demographic gap between Christian and Muslim people. Because Muslims tend to have more children than Christians, the latter will succumb to the former. In this case, the figure of the enemy takes the shape of the younger generations, and it is taken for granted that they will be animated by an aggressive  attitude to Christians in the near future. Similarly, the religious American right wing calls for the restoration of the primacy of the Bible in the public and political domain, while the hindutva religious and political movements in India dream of a Hindu State and ardently support the construction of the Zero Line (an electronic frontier along the 4000 kilometers of its borders with Bangladesh) officially to put a stop to illegal immigration from such a predominantly Muslim country as Bangladesh. The intensity of the apocalyptic rhetoric of contemporary politicians resembles that of the representatives of certain religious institutions. It might be interesting to compare the speeches made by various political and religious leaders: a trivial war becomes a final battle between Good and Evil, not a violent confrontation between armies or soldiers, but a sacred ordeal after which truth will triumph over its enemies: it is in this sense that religion tends to infuse politics with a soul.

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Axel, Albert and Kaze, Hidiaki. 2002, Kamikaze, London, Longman. Bacchetta, Paola. 2000. “Sacred Space in Conflict in India: the Babri Masjid Affair”, in Growth and Change, 31 (2), 255–284. Bauman, Zygmund. 2005. Vita liquida, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Bhatt, Chetan. 2001. Hindu Nationalism, Oxford: Berg Publisher. Blasi, Anthony. 2009. The Meaning of Conversion: Redirection of Foundational Trust, in G. Giordan, Giuseppe (ed.), Conversion in the Age of Pluralism, Leiden-Boston: Brill. Brass, Paul (ed.). 1996. Riots and Pogroms, New York: New York University Press. Brass, Paul. 2003. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elst, Koenraad. 2001. The Saffron and the Swastika, New Delhi: The Voice of India. Guolo, Renzo. 1997. Terra e redenzione, Milano: Guerini e Associati. Hassan, Riaz. 1983. A Way of Dying: Suicide in Singapore, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hassan, Riaz. 1995. Suicide Explained, Melbourne: University Press, Melbourne. Hassan, Riaz. 2004. “Suicide Attacks, Life as a Weapon”, ISIM Newsletter, n. 14, pp. 8–9. Hassan, Nasra. 2001. “Letter from Gaza. An Arsenal of Believers”, The New Yorker, November, pp. 36–41. Huntington, Samuel. 1998. The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel. 2005. Who are we? The Challenge to American’s National Identity, New York: Simon & Schuster. Khosrokhavar, Farhad. 2000. Les nouveaux martyrs d’Allah, Paris: Fayard. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, London: Hurst. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2006a. The Sangh Parivar: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaffrelot. Christophe (ed.). 2006b. L’Inde contemporaine, Paris: Fayard. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2007. Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jürgensmeyer, Mark. 2000. Terror in the mind of God, Berkeley: California University Press. Martinez, Luis (ed.). 2003. «Violences islamistes», Critique internationale, n. 20, pp. 114–177. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. La Genealogia della morale, Milano: Adelphi. Oddie, Graham (ed.). 1977. Religion in South Asia, London: Curzon. Pace, Enzo. 2008. Raccontare Dio. La religione come comunicazione, Bologna: Il Mulino. Pace, Enzo. 2004. Perché le religioni scendono in guerra, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Pape, Robert. 2005. Dying to Win, New York, Random House. Roumani, Maurice. 2009. The Jews of Lybia, Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press. Savarkar Vinayak, Damodar. 1928. Hindutva, Who is a Hindu?, Pune: Bharat Itihas. Schmitt, Carl. 1925. Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form, München: Theatiner Verlag. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative India, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Sen, Amartya. 2006. Identity and Violence, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Seneviratne, H.L. 1999. The Work of Kings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Singh, K.P. 2002 Arya Samaj Movement: a Study of Socio-Religious Consciousness in Western Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow: Tarun Prakasham.



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Smith, David. 2003. Hinduism and Modernity, London: Blackwell. Smith, Greg. 2000. “Global Systems and Religious Diversity in the Inner City”, in International Journal of Multicultural Studies, 2, 16–39. Stromberg, Peter. 1993. Language and Self Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion, New York: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Mark. 1993. Conversion: Inward, Outward and Awkward, in Lamb Matthew & Bryant Darrol, Religious Conversion,London-New York: Cassell, 35-50. Vrcan, Srdan. 1994. “Una guerra di religione nell’Europa contemporanea”, in Religioni e società, n. 18, 16–26.

RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL AND GLOBAL Patrick Michel Few of us know Man has not changed, that he merely changes the helm of his dreams and that the night will not suffice.1 Abbas Beydoun

It is probably accountable to social sciences’ inability to agree upon one definition of Religion capable of reaching a consensus (Michel 2003: 159–170), that we can attribute the existence of completely contradictory analytic patterns regarding the redeployment of the religious on contemporary scenes. If some of these latter attest the “return” of religion, if not more directly, that of God, or even to some, of his “Revenge” (Kepel 1991), which comes down to putting the world under the sign of a “reenchantment” (Berger 2001; Cox 1995; Debray 1994), to others, the high visibility of the religious which is occurring in our world, is to be analyzed as a special indicator of the current evolutions, without, however, necessarily needing to grant any specific relevance to it. Whichever posture we chose to adopt, the religious has altogether evidently gained a high visibility in recent years2 and appears as an analytical key that cannot be ignored in order to account for the transformations of the contemporary.3 Which explains the importance it has gained in public and scientific debate, with the shifting of discussions which used to be solely characteristic of sociology of religion, regarding the validity or lack of, of the thesis of secularization, to the appropriation of the “religion” variable by different disciplinary and theoretic perspectives, which notably result on interpretations, through the spectrum of the religious, of phenomena as diverse as, among others, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, 1 ╇ Abbas Beydoun, Les poètes de la Méditerranée – Anthologie, Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 2010, p. 239. 2 ╇ The Iranian Revolution and Solidarity in Poland, because of the part played by the religious, or more precisely the use of the religious – therefore the end of the 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s – form, among other things, the starting point of the process. 3 ╇ Whether that be, to take just one example, with the role of Islam, and notably of “radical” Islam. Or also with the debate on the nature of secularism in a society such as the French.



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the political evolution in the Middle East, the handling of immigration or the banlieue issue. As a result of this appropriation, what one might want to call “false good questions” have multiplied. Hence, we may ask ourselves if religion, or to be more precise, this one confession or that other, is favorable to (in affinity with) this given type of economy, or also if religion, or to be more precise this one confession or that other, serves or harms democracy (knowing that regarding this second question, “religion” can clearly be understood as “Islam”). Such interrogations evidently draw on an essentialized vision of the religious, hence constituted within the analysis as an object exterior to evolutions, with which its relations will therefore be studied as such. Consequently, there would for instance be a “religious dimension to globalization.”4 This latter would involve effects of adaptation, of adjustment or would lead to transformations affecting religion itself. Such an approach perpetuating the notion that a religious field at least characterized by a relative autonomy could exist, results in fact from a double presupposition: that it would be possible to extend the mutations of the believing to what we may perceive of it, on a religious level alone. A conception of this religious forged in and through the reference to an organizing stability, would remain valid to identify the evolutions induced by the contemporary movement. The subject will here be, taking into account the dead end that Â�sociology of religion is facing (Michel 2003: 159–170), to invite us to ask ourselves what is really in question when the question of religion arises. The conditions in which social and/or political actors take over the religious, the changing modalities and places of such uses, should therefore be explored. Which leads to apprehend the religious, cold shoulÂ�dering the indigenous theories of specialized sociologies, not as such, but as an indicator which, when contextualized, may possibly appear to form an analyzer, a remarkable one indeed, of the recompositions of the contemporary.5 The fact that that we may no longer define what religion is proves that the analysis categories commonly used are obsolete, and that their use, for lack of anything better, is built around inertia and gives rise to a risk 4 ╇ See the special feature « Effervescences religieuses dans le monde » in Esprit 3–4, Paris, March–April 2007. 5 ╇ Contrasting with the approach of Danièle Hervieu-Léger who stated not “agreeing to sociology of religion’s deletion within a vast socio-anthropology of the believing, which would be catching in a global manner its stakes and functioning” in H Â� ervieu-Léger 1987: 28.

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of distortion in the description and the interpretation of the evolutions which their mobilization aims to carry out. They lead to a focus on the religious supply, the manner it has been designed and presented, and sometimes adapted, to account for the characteristics of the fields in which it is being cast upon. While what can be described is not any longer “religion” but the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory uses which are made of it. When the issue at hand is not so much the conformity to a suggested model (and whose interpretation would be subject to a somewhat controversial monopoly) than the actors’ capacity to capture the symbolic resources pointed out as available, and to mobilize them to serve rival strategies that aim at filling and giving a slant to the contemporary movement. Consequently, one may prefer to this reading grid another, based not on the supply but on the use which is being made of it, and which therefore fits in the framework of a political socio-economy of the utilization of symbolic goods. With this object in mind, the question at hand would be to know who, ultimately, in this complex game of reciprocal instrumentalization between religious and politics, religious and ideology, religious and economics, is serving whom. This question could find an answer deriving from common sense. In the case of Neo-Pentecostalism (a movement which is currently experiencing the strongest growth rate worldwide), the diffusion of this model from its issuing centre (the United States) would aim to serve the geopolitical agenda of that very same issuing centre. The problem is that nowadays there is no such thing as a single issuing centre, but a multiplicity of places of production and of diffusion of conservative Protestantism.6 And it is without a single doubt in the distinct areas of the primary issuing centre that the most original synthesis between available supply, users expectations and adaptation practices take place. ╇For that matter, it has to be said that the overuse of “religion” in the political and social discourse in the United States cannot be relied upon. Stephen L. Carter underlines, in The Culture of Disbelief (New-York: Basicbooks, 1993) how “religion” has become a cliché, the very meaning of the word, struck by trivialization, poses problem: “that the public sphere is saturated with religion does not mean that religion is taken seriously, and the presence of religious rhetoric in public life does not imply that the citizens to whom this rhetoric is addressed give it the amount of respect it may deserve.” Religion has become a tool used to dismiss “the other,” in a context where 85% of the American population see themselves as belonging to a Christian nation: President Carter pointed out the silence, which surrounds other confessions, and especially surrounding Jews (pp. 44–45). This assessment clearly leads to consider the question of the diffusion of conservative Protestantism in its specific register, that is the political and ideological register. 6



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The grounds on which the strategies of supply are built are certainly of instant intelligence: if the diffusion of an influence or even of an American model that can be easily spotted, the justification of the accumulation of wealth by the individual is her clearly stated. And it applies everywhere: Patrick Haenni thus describes the emergence of a “market Islam” (Haenni 2005) and Indian sociologist Meera Nanda a “new Hinduism,” where the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra have become text books enabling people to learn how to make money and succeed in business (Nanda 2009). As for Igwara, evoking the case of Nigeria, he considers that religion – all confessions included – is above all a large business, the proliferation of churches serving first and foremost their leaders’ financial interests (Igwara 1995: 327–355). It remains that the illustration of the supply’s foundations does not exhaust the subject. The recompositions induced by the acceleration of the contemporary movement are widely perceived and experienced by its actors under the prism of a crisis, a crisis in which the evolutions of the religious would be both an indicator and a control handle. This crisis is first and foremost a cultural one and presents itself in priority, in between the inflation of identity and its necrosis, in the discrepancy between identities, defined by criteria that are only stable in fiction, and a reality where it has become impossible to make believe in the stability of the criteria that allow the construction of an identity. The visibility of the religious is not to be trusted. Very often when religion seems to be questioned, it is not centrally her, which is being referred to.7 Nonetheless the fact that it is through her prism that we may allude to other things is not neutral. Following that perspective, Clifford Geertz invites us to take an interest in the reinvestment, by social sciences, of the religious as a means of deciphering contemporary transformations.8 He also called us to transcend the evolutionist perspective of the secularizing paradigm in order to focus on the changing forms of a delocalized religious, which is experiencing “deculturalization,” in a moving world. 7 ╇Can we reduce the conflict in Ulster to the opposition between Catholics and Protestants? The violence in Nigeria to the tensions between Christians and Muslims? What is at stake in the Middle East as a face to face between Jews and Muslims? Al Qaeda to radical Islam? And the debate in France on the Muslim headscarf in schools, on burqa wearers or on “positive secularism” to stances towards the religious? 8 ╇ Cliffort Geertz’s lecture at the conference “L’univers des savoirs” organized by the DADIS, EHESS, Paris, 4–6 May 2006. Extracts from this lecture have been published in the newspaper Le Monde: Geertz, Cliffort. “La religion, sujet d’avenir.” Le Monde, May 5th 2006, p. 20.

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We are in fact somewhat incapable of defining to its full extent the effects of a tendency, both serious and universal (therefore not limited only to western developed countries but affecting all contemporary societies, be it only under specific terms), leaning towards the individuation of the relationship to meaning. What is here at play in the religious field operates as a revealing vehicle of this individuation of believing as well as, simultaneously, a potential resource for braking, for protest, even for a refusal of both the individuation and the serious tendencies it triggers and that it may appear to recapitulate. While providing the lists necessary to its translation, it also contributes to making these tendencies familiar. The current pattern of decomposition – recomposition that our societies are experiencing underlines the obsolescence of an ideational system that mainly revolves, in terms of religion, around the theories of secularization and – in fact symmetrically to rather than contrarily – the “religious productions” of modernity, whether you want to add a “hyper” or a “post” to it. Therefore it is necessary to rethink with a clear perspective the link between our societies and belief, and to use this reflection to highlight renewed and efficient intellectual tools. If the uses and reuses of the religious of which the contemporary is the scene, are a product of movement and uncertainty to go back to BalÂ� andier’s categories (1985), they are at the same time the different modalities of a control which is all the more difficult to seize that it is far from being univocal, with the proliferation of the production sites and zones of deployment of symbolical material. This proliferation is confirmed by the inflation of the actors and of institutional operations, each following its specific strategies. Furthermore, the reindifferentiation appears to be here in competition with plurality. In a situation where the religious is subject to intensive use in order in particular, to make up for the political shortage that is experienced, and far from the common vision where this religious would “rise again” when the political should “go down,” thus taking its place, political and religious tend to be constantly mixed, the borders between the two becoming all the more blurry. Resorting to the religious as a favored directory to expound operating recompositions and the repositioning generated by these recompositions are in fact a strong indicator as such of the contradictory evolutions the world is experiencing today. Religion provides, as Michel de Certeau stated, a global symbolization of their uneasiness to scattered men, feeling all the more apart that their common references have been shattered and that they



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have reacted without any order to the pressures of a foreign culture, with no common recourse, without any means to make up for the anomie and the crumbling (…) The religious language offers to a distress (which had often remained nocturnal) a solution and like the day which throws light onto the nature of the problem that is encountered: it consists of the whole (de Certeau 1973: 140).

Here, the religious is a resource, which enables the deciphering and allows us to come to terms with a fragmented whole, experienced as being recomposed, the connections that are to be established with it are unsurprisingly organized under the aspect of a crisis: as a whole, the markers which were still in use yesterday as strong reference points enabling the expression of identities and, consequently, the positions induced by them (as fictitious as this stability may have truly been), appear to be in need of a renegotiation. But, as the use of terms such as “to provide,” “to use” or “to open” may tend to suggest, the fact that the religious might come as a resource does not mean that it exists outside the use that is being made of it. Yet, the visibility of the religious, we have already mentioned, sometimes leads people to uphold the idea of a “pure religious” that can be identified precisely beyond every reuse that might be made of it. This “pure” Â�religious, – which is close to what Olivier Roy writes about religion “without culture” (Roy 2008: 282) – is for instance at the core of Raphaël Lioger’s analysis when he points, in what is said of the role of the religious on the contemporary scene, to the strange lack of “religious dimension in the strict sense of the word” of the phenomena we study. If we follow him, what [could] be eluded, by-passed, consciously or not, is the very meaning of religious faith, the fact that this phenomena, whether we like it or not, would not be possible without – strictly speaking – the specificity of religious adherence (Lioger 2009: 16).

It is this radical component of religion that might explain “the potentially infinite political instrumentalization of the religious.” This potential whose existence could be summed up under a single question, after having plainly assessed the instrumentalization of the religious by the political, “why isn’t anything else being instrumentalized?” The question could rather amount as to understand why the political finds itself in a position and almost in a necessity to instrumentalize other registers? This instrumentalization would prove, not the power of  the political (measured through its capacity to instrumentalize), but rather on the contrary, its weakness (using what one might want to

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name as a major difficulty to exist on its own as our yardstick). In addition, regarding the idea that the religious would hypothetically lend itself more readily than other registers to instrumentalization, let us not forget that, to take only one example, the political use, which is being made of Islam is not totally unrelated to the process that has verified, one after another, the limitations in the use of the belief when placed in nationalism, anti-colonialism and socialism. For Michel de Certeau, when the political is weakened, that is when the religious makes its return. But if it does return, it most certainly does not do so as such. Under the assumption that, after the dismissal of utopia as a core means of legitimizing political initiative, a dismissal inferred and attested by the collapse of Communism (Michel 1994; Michel 1999: 79–97), the main function of its visibility would therefore be to underline such a painful political deficit that it would actually be lacking the political words to express itself. Which explains the use of the religious, as a connecting register, in a time of general wavering of criteria and markers, of urgency and simultaneously, of the impossibility to establish a renewed connection with a whole. And this, in a context of exhaustion of the believable and maybe even more so than that of the religious, it is the credibility of the political which is currently questioned. Therefore, what matters in this perspective, is to ask ourselves about the part that is being assigned to the religious when it comes down to managing the recompositions which the contemporary societies are currently experiencing, but also as an indicator of the transformations and the modes in which these latter are administered. At this stage, two comments must stand out: first of all, the specific religious contents are, although that may imply hurting all the supporters of essentialism’s feelings, only moderately significant. The same content can be taken to go along with the movement as well as to contradict it, to laud it or to refuse it, and very often to harness it, that is to translate, at least temporarily, the categories of this movement in a register which is more readily accessible, in order to, if need arises, to be able to present them as compatible with the tradition, even if this latter is only to be invented little by little, as one would pretend to be rediscovering it and to defend it. Secondly, through the reuses of the religious we can see the outline of a new connection to the political (new expectations, new actors, new fields, new limits, new ways of apprehending “credibility”). Here, this process is potentially that of a reinvention of the political, with both its



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necessity and the difficulties it faces being clearly felt, yet for all that, it still seems impossible today to define precisely towards which forms this process shall lean. The religious steps in, first and foremost, as a resource that can be mobilized in order to reorganize the connection with the meta-markers, disrupted by the sense of acceleration that accompanies the contemporary movement through time and space. The question here is eminently a political one: the emergence of a “time of simultaneity” to use the phrase coined by Marc Augé (1994: 149), is the sign that the linear time of the nation-state has become obsolete, replaced by the worldwide time of globalization. Following the same perspective, which is marked by the indissolubility, highlighted by Norbert Elias (1997), of the link between time and space, the transition from the semi-open space of the modern State to a space entirely organized by the circulations which are taking place and which are constantly reshaping it, prompts us to rethink pell-mell borders and nations, State and sovereignty, political constructions of the identity and consequently, the possible, if not only accepted, enunciations of this identity. This process borrows from the fundamental logics induced by the sense that the pace of globalization is accelerating, in every aspect, not merely in the expected registers of economics and technique, but forcing us to define a new link with a multifaceted movement whose obviousness cannot be called into question (trade, population movements, standardization and consequently, relativization). Picturing contemporary space (or the different spaces making up what is aiming at presenting itself as a united space tending towards homogeneity whose dimensions would match that of the planet) would in any case, as a consequence, merely appear a product of the location of the positions occupied in this space. It is the circulations that can define the positions, which are limited trough time, the occupied position not allowing us to infer the location of these circulations. In this context, and in a world defined by population movements, the resulting cross-fertilization, and the reactions they give rise to, the Â�manner in which we are linked to the territory seems to be in the midst of drastic transformations. Hence the uneasiness expressed by someone Â� atin-Americans such as Samuel Huntington with the massive presence of L in the United States and the resulting feeling of expropriation which is experienced by some: a form of unbinding between territory and the cultural modalities relating to its occupation. An uneasiness, which, leading to the question (which does not lack a certain amount of pathos):

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“Who are we?” (Huntington 2004), reminds us, in a country such as France of the opening, following the authorities’ initiative, of a public debate focusing on the question of “national identity.” The religious is central in both instances. In Huntington’s thought, it plays a part as an essential marker of integration into American society, through the conversion of immigrants to Protestantism. As for France, numerous analysts have stressed that under the guise of (re)defining national identity, Islam and Muslims alike were likely to be called into question. When it comes to managing the transformations of the connection to territoriality, it is not neutral that John Paul II’s reign has been subject to redefining the modalities of administration of the universality of a church affected by an obvious plurality, the reiteration (which cannot be ignored because of the church’s claim to “catholicity”) of its true nature experiencing adjustments, through his trips, to local realities. The world is nothing more than a vast diocese, “pastoral visits” have become a means of governance, and circulation the very method of inhabiting and giving a direction to this world. Another example that brings into perspective the micro and macro levels in an original way, appearing in the relation established with space, can be found with neo-Pentecostalism. The break with the territoriality benchmark aims here at creating a transterritoriality, which appears to guarantee the movement’s global growth. In Latin America for example, what is occurring in practical terms is an attempt to “break” a parish logic, which has reached exhaustion, and to replace it with a network logic open on the outside world, and allegedly perfectly attuned with the contemporary movement no matter which register is used to comprehend it (Garcia-Ruiz and Michel 2011). A questioning of such classic categories as that of the local, the national and the international may follow, at least implicitly. Neo-Pentecostal churches work simultaneously from all three levels, and doing so manage to transcend them. Mass communications mediums as an emblematic tool of the contemporary’s recomposition but also as the production space of a new sociological type personified by televangelists, turns out to be both the vehicle and the space in which this rearticulation occurs. It is no surprise that the televangelist model should find its counterpart in the Muslim world. Telecoranists have appeared, preacher Amr Khaled is one of them, which tends to confirm the simultaneity in the redefinition, everywhere, of the relation to time and space, a redefinition, which is organized, here, through the emergence of a “globalized Islam.” The issue conjured up by this expression aims not so much as to



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describe Islam as being globalized, but rather as to point out to a process in which globalization, while deploying itself, claims Islam both as a vehicle of this deployment and as an attestation, through the resistances enabled by the mobilization of Islam as a means of opposing it, of the status of this deployment. In any event, this phenomenon is inflecting itself in a very broad action range, from the figure of the radical Islamist, determined enemy of the Western world, to the emergence of a “market Islam,” (Haenni 2005) to the gradual set up of a “European Islam,” which tends to be experienced as authentic Islam within the cultural environment in which it finds itself (thus beyond the fact that this environment might be an unfamiliar one). But this “globalization of Islam” is only one of the many aspects in a broad process leading, via the boom in the supply of believing, to the harsh competition that governs today the market of symbolic goods. The generalized pluralization of the religious offer, which is prone to having a significant effect on the evolution of the demand, also leads the contents given to be believed in, as to be put into perspective. As a matter of fact, this pluralization of the religious supply feeds, with the transformation of the relation to the symbolic (no longer organized as referring to a norm but required to give the individual the elements he needs in terms of personal development, and personally confirmed through its connection to meaning, to the world, to others, to the self), this crisis of the believable as expressed by Certeau: too many objects offered to believe in, thus, in the absence of credibility, inability for these objects to give rise to belief, and therefore the limitation of the capacity to believe is stressed in its incapacity to take on the objects which are offered to it. This crisis of the believable does not only affect the religious and obviously, is not simply in relation with the evolutions of this religious. We can even come to consider that the political, clearly, will be hit harder. From this standpoint, the collapse of Communism (as an undertaking whose aim, as we have highlighted, was to wager the relation to the political based on a legitimating reference to utopia) has presumably played a conclusive part (Michel 1994) (in this respect, Hobsbawn was certainly right to have the 20th century end in 1989, opposing in doing so those who later thought they could use September 11th as their turning point). It is also not devoid of effect on the relevance granted to the markers mobilized for means of building systems of identity, the consequent deregulation of which can be perceived in the questioning of these

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identities and in the replacement of the vertical sociabilities structured by belonging, with horizontal sociabilities, established through adherence. The first can be associated to an “inherited-religious” whereas the second is related to an “optional-religious” that is closely linked to “conversion” (Michel 2009). In any case, the religious appears here as required, and mobilized, at different levels, under the purpose of controlling the destabilizing effects induced by this deregulation. The uses and reuses of the religious can, in that respect, make up so many materials that can serve a re-founding often associated with a “return to the origins,” even if these latter are, as it is the case with “traditions,” often more readily invented than real. They can also serve to operate the articulation of new forms of community, the register of the views allows the consolidation of the neo-community around a designated “enemy,” and the means by which the community sphere is legitimized come as a response to that, presented as unfair, of a society labeled as corrupt. Finally, they are also susceptible to serve, in order to frame and justify, the social circulations of which they contribute to creating the conditions of, notably playing a part as a stabilizing framework for the stages that have already been cleared on the routes induced by these circulations. Contemporary uses and reuses of the religious form, following that logic, a number of elements displaying the blurring of the landmarks that used to enable telling the public and private spheres apart. Although fundamentalist movements express “the eminently private and personal dimensions of the modern faith,” these religious actors, “taking over the public arena in order to turn to the governing bodies as a form of protest,” clearly signal – as Camille Froideveaux-Metterie underlines, reviving José Casanova’s concept (Casanova 1994) – an entirely new process of “deprivatizing religion,” in contexts yet “defined precisely by the private confinement of the religious” (FroideveauxMetterie 2009: 13). The numerÂ�ous discussions that are taking place in several European countries over dress codes, and more generally over religious visibility (the “conspicuous signs”) confirm this evolution, as does the re-undifferentiation of the religious and political fields, of which she is a result and that she also amplifies. Therefore, the tested operability of the religious does not only stem from the potentialities of this religious, but from their activation due to the difficulties of the political to handle a loss of credibility in terms of enchantment. Given the fact that the religious appears so malleable that it tends to border on neutrality, it therefore lends itself to any instrumentalization, even when these may seem conflicting. Thus, Islam may



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form a special vehicle for integration in a non-Muslim society (SaintBlancat 1997; Saint-Blancat 1999; Tietze 2002), and at the same time it is also available to being used as a contestation medium in that very same society. Evangelicalism for its part, serves the interests of Liberalism but also allows the articulation of a criticism of secularity, which appears none-the-less as a major feature of a Western world largely organized through the use of the liberal reference. The religious makes up a space where are usually highlighted the redeployments induced by the acceleration of processes that go beyond it, as it is the case with any register open to comprehension in a distinctive way. It is of no surprise if this acceleration operates today in a mode where it exacerbates tendencies that have already been at work for a long time, while, in the religious field, it occurs in the mode of individualization and privatization. Embodying this acceleration, globalization, on the principle that societies have become disarticulate, represents, based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, “a myth, in the strong sense of the word, a strong rhetoric, a ‘key idea’, an idea which has social grounding, which secures the belief. It is – he adds – the main weapon in the struggles against the Welfare State” (Bourdieu 1996, 1998). Bourdieu’s notion allows the articulation of three fields, the exploration of which seems necessary in order to weigh up and to define the significance of the redistributions at play in a contemporary of which the religious is an integral part. First of all, the importance given to the myth, where one comes across the perspective supported by Claude Lévi-Straus, when he suggested we define it as a vigorous protest against the absence of meaning. A new paradigm has emerged, carrying a sense and a direction, to which everyone is required to subscribe and is supposed to comply with. Secondly, there is the emphasis, which is put on the fact that, beyond any type of content, what is first and foremost involved here draws on to a connection with the believing. That is to say that the logic we are currently discussing is referring to the capacity to take into account a stance resulting from a need to believe and to satisfy the resulting expectations. Thirdly, the underlining of the willingness to get rid of a certain type of State, historically built, not in the perspective of its complete destruction, but rather in order to transform deeply its nature. From ultimate authority, the State becomes, within the framework of globalization, a mere mechanism in an infinitely more complex set. To remain within Bourdieu’s perspective, globalization forms a rhetoric that aims at Â�dispossessing the States, which are already for the most part outstripped

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by the transformations they are facing, of their usual prerogatives, and notably of the role they aspired to in terms of producing and controlling an “identity.” The religious register is evidently summoned here. First, because it embodies the traditional repertoire where a believing, which this religious professes, if not to exhaust, at least to recapitulate, may find its place. Second of all, because the institutional religious can bank on its long experience in terms of anticipation, of reproduction and of amplification, in a field depicted as being specific, of the evolutions that are taking place outside this field. In the case of neo-Pentecostal churches, this logic is taken very far because these churches, while adopting the values of individualism, of the market, of money, of managerial functioning, credit themselves with the function of articulating the economic, the social and the political, which boils down to assigning the religious with a function which unifies all these different subsystems. The use of the religious in the political field, without necessarily requiring us to link this use to a faith or a content of belief, implies by the very nature of the specificities of the register that is used, a way to perceive the world, to picture authority and to govern. It gives a slant to the political programs, has a claim in redefining normativity and, since it is backed by an absolute that is non-negotiable, on securing the systems of truth. But if the discourse articulates itself from a religious standpoint, this reasoning stands clearly in the political register, with power as its self-assigned goal and the transformation of societies as its program. Here, in fact, it is not the religious that turns into the political, but the political, which, passing trough the religious and capturing to its own benefit the broader operationnality granted to what is perceived in essence as an ultimate legitimacy, is transformed into religion and then redeploys itself as political. Religion only appears here as a means9 and an alibi, in the strong sense of the word: this other zone only summoned to provide the justification which political fundamentalism requires. Could the problem therefore consist in the religious putting the political at risk? Could it stand in the way in which the contents and the processes peculiar to the religious, or to a certain type of religious, applied to the political, could inform it, weigh upon its redeployments and threaten it with perversion? What can be noted, especially in the 9 ╇ As Neal Gabler underlines: “political tolerance is no match for religious vehemence” in Gabler, “Le conservatisme, une nouvelle religion”, in Los Angeles Times, reissued in Courrier International 998–999, Paris, December 17th 2009.



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United States, seems precisely to draw on an opposite process, that is to say a total appropriation of the logics of the religious by the political to deploy itself, as political and not religious, onto the stage. As Neal Gabler remarks, conservatism has therefore gone, after an evolution which had less to do with the alliance between right wing and evangelical Protestants than with “an intimate conviction so unshakable that it brooks no political opposition whatsoever (…) from a political movement to a certain kind of religious fundamentalism.”10 This fundamentalism that opposes the very idea of making concessions, of compromise, of respecting the rights of minorities, of Â�submitting to the vote of the majority, is based – the author states – “on immutable truths that cannot be bargained with, do not allow for a compromise, and cannot be changed,” therefore it is “diametrically opposite to the liberal democracy that has been practiced in the United States.” And Gabler to conclude: “when politics become religion, every political decision becomes a matter of life and death,” “every political battle is a crusade, a holy war, a question of right and wrong.”11

10 11

╇ Ibid. ╇ Ibid.

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Augé, Marc. 1994. Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains. Paris: Flammarion. Balandier, Georges. 1985. Le détour – Pouvoir et modernité. Paris: Fayard. Berger, Peter L. 2001. Le réenchantement du monde. Paris: Bayart. Beydoun, Abbas. 2010. Les poètes de la Méditerranée – Anthologie. Paris: Poésie/ Gallimard. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le mythe de la ‘mondialisation’ et l’Etat social européen,” Speech at the General Confederation of Greek workers (GSEE) in Athens, in October 1996, in Contre-Feux, 1998: http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/socio/bourdieu/ contrefe/mythe.html Carter, Stephen L. 1993. The Culture of Disbelief. New-York: Basicbooks. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cox, Harvey. 1995. Retour de Dieu – Voyage en pays pentecôtiste. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Debray, Régis. 1994. Dieu fin de siècle. Religion et politique. Edition de l’Aube/Libération. de Certeau, Michel. 1973. L’Absent de l’histoire. Paris: Repères-Mame. “Effervescences religieuses dans le monde,” Esprit 3–4, March-April 2007, Paris. Elias, Norbert. 1997. Du temps. Paris: Fayard. Froideveaux-Metterie, Camille. 2009. “Comment l’esprit de la religion défie l’esprit de la laïcité.” Critique international 44. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Gabler, Neal. “Le conservatisme, une nouvelle religion,” Los Angeles Times, reissued in Courrier International 998–999, Paris, December 17th 2009. Garcia-Ruiz, Jesús and Patrick Michel. 2011. Et Dieu sous-traita le Salut au marché – Eléments pour une socio-anthropologie politique des mouvements évangéliques à partir du cas latino-américain. Paris: Economica [to be published]. Geertz, Cliffort. Lecture at the conference “L’univers des savoirs” organized by the DADIS, EHESS, Paris, 4–6 May 2006. Extracts published in Geertz, Cliffort. “La religion, sujet d’avenir,” Le Monde, May 5th 2006. Haenni, Patrick. 2005. L’Islam De Marché – L’autre révolution conservatrice. Paris: Seuil. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1987. “Faut-il définir la religion?.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 63(1):11–30. Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Qui sommes nous? Identité nationale et choc des cultures. Paris: Odile Jacob. Igwara, Obi. 1995. “Holy Nigerian Nationalism and Apocalyptic Visions of the Nation.”Nations and nationalism, 1(3): 327–355. Kepel, Gilles. 1991. La Revanche de Dieu: Chrétiens, juifs et musulmans à la reconquête du monde. Paris: Le Seuil. Lioger, Raphaël. 2009. “Introduction – Recomposition du champ religieux, recomposition de l’analyse du champ religieux. Du désenchantement national au réenchantement transnational du monde.” Revue internationale de politique comparée 16(1). Michel, Patrick. 1994. Politique et religion – La grande mutation. Paris: Albin-Michel. Michel, Patrick. 1999. “Religion, nation et pluralisme – Une réflexion fin de siècle.” Critique internationale 3: 79–97. Michel, Patrick. 2003. “La ‘religion’, objet sociologique pertinent?.” Revue du Mauss 22: 159–170. Michel, Patrick. 2009. “Semiotics of conversation.” Conversation in the Age of Pluralism [Giuseppe Giordan ed.], International Studies in Religion and Society (ISRS) series, Leyden-Bostan: E.J. Brill: 73–89. Nanda, Meera. 2009. The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu. New York: Random House.



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Roy, Olivier. 2008. La Sainte Ignorance. Le temps de la religion sans culture. Paris: Seuil. Saint-Blancat, Chantal. 1997. L’islam de la diaspora. Paris: Bayard. Saint-Blancat, Chantal, eds. 1999. L’islam in Italia, una presenza plural. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro. Tietze, Nikola. 2002. Jeunes musulmans de France et d’Allemagne: les constructions subjectives de l’identité. Paris/Budapest/Turin: L’Harmattan.

COMPLICATING THE “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”: GENDER AND POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY KUWAIT Alessandra L. González and Lubna Al-Kazi Introduction and Background Scholars have noted a recent shift towards traditionalism and conservatism in Arab Gulf politics and societal norms. Some theorists suggest that a conservative backlash towards globalization or increasing conflict with the West due to geo-political realities are to blame. These scholars give Huntington(1996)’s “clash of civilizations” thesis much of the credit. However, in the midst of changing macro-sociological realities in the region, Kuwaiti women have seen an increased opportunity to expand their public roles in society, especially after they were granted their political rights by the government in May 2005. How are Kuwaitis able to navigate the fine line between their traditional Islamic values and rich history of political participation while giving women an increasingly equal role to men in politics and society? Measures of religious traditionalism and conservatism may be the most obvious source of traditionalism in traditionally Muslim countries. However, as a complex society such as Kuwait’s demonstrates, religion is intricately woven into other sources of culture, such as gender, family socialization, peer networks, and community factors. Lastly, there are political forces that are much more vulnerable to chronologies of events, such as Kuwait’s history before the discovery of oil, demographic and economic changes after the discovery of oil, and changes in the role of women after the Iraqi invasion of 1990. This paper presents a case study of data from Kuwaiti college students that tests Samuel Huntington’s (1996) “clash of civilizations” thesis. In other words, the case study in this paper tests the idea that as societies modernize, they will increasingly leave their culture and tradition behind in favor of secular modern values, as Huntington’s theory predicts. This paper also goes a step further to challenge Inglehart and Norris’s (2003b) thesis which asserts that issues of gender are the most poignant issues of cultural conservatism, which will leave a gap between modernizing countries. This paper highlights Kuwait as a country which



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is breaking this “clash” thesis by incorporating a “co-existence” model for religious traditionalism and progressive modernism when it comes to women’s political rights. But first, a brief review of Kuwait’s history will summarize the progression of women’s public roles until modern times. Review of Women’s History in Kuwait From Private Places to Public Spaces The rapid change that transformed the Kuwait landscape from a simple fishing and trading country to a modern urban state was a result of oil revenues. The metamorphosis of Kuwait in the sixties was both physical and social. Prior to the fifties, Kuwaitis lived in narrow streets lined with mud brick houses on either side. Electricity came to the houses in the early fifties. The houses looked inward with no windows except doors opening to a central courtyard to give the women folk privacy and for climatic reasons. Men were away either pearl fishing or on trading trips to the Indian subcontinent. The women of the wealthy families lived within the walls of their homes, entertaining visitors or having their mid-day tea in the courtyard where the mother, daughter and daughterin-laws gathered. Here, women who sold goods like clothes and handicrafts would drop by to sell it to the family members. The poorer women worked as cooks and maids at the wealthy houses. These poorer women were less secluded as they had to take their clothes to be washed by the sea, go into the market to buy vegetables needed for cooking and return home at night (AlMughni 2001). Women from modest households were not idle. They worked as midwives (dayah) delivering babies, as seamstresses who tailored clothes, and the more literate (Mutawa) taught the Qur’an to young girls in their homes as schools had not yet opened. Some women also sold their goods at the women’s market or Souk Alhareem. Wives of traders often asked their husbands to bring goods on their travels abroad, which they later sold to the women they invited to the morning teas in their courtyards. Thus, we see that women were active in everyday life in Kuwait in the 1950’s but these activities were usually conducted in private spaces. Those who ventured out did so with their faces covered in a heavy veil and loose, black abaya as modesty required the body outline to be obscured. The 1960’s heralded a new era of modernization. Water and electricity reached all the homes and western style neighborhoods began to spring up beyond the old Kuwait walled city. As schools opened, girls were

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enrolled and the shift from private to public spaces began to unfold. As experienced in most societies, education was one of the most important catalysts that moved Kuwait from traditionalism to modernity. Public schools broke down old barriers. Women and Education Before Kuwait University opened in 1965, girls from wealthy families used to travel abroad to study at elite schools in Egypt, Lebanon and the United Kingdom. Once university education became more accessible, Kuwaiti women began to make great strides in education, find job opportunities, and began to enter the workforce. Figure 1 shows the rapid progress in Kuwaiti women’s educational status in the last four decades. While nearly two thirds of Kuwaiti women were illiterate in 1975, by 2008 the number fell to only 8%. In fact, at present there are more Kuwaiti women with university degrees than Kuwaiti men, and the gender gap is 5.3 in favor of women (Essential Features of the Population and Labour Force 2008). Even though the girls need higher GPAs to enter the University, they graduate in larger numbers from all colleges, even those of medicine, law and engineering. This gender Â� bias in GPA is defended by public officials who say that it is Figure 1.╇ Distribution of Kuwait Population (10 yrs and Above) by Sex and Educational Status, 1975–2008 (Percents) Male Year Education Level Illiterate Read & Write Primary Intermediate Secondary Diploma University & Above Total No.

1975

1995

30 5.2 20.9 6.1 26.7 22.5 14.0 32.8 6.6 18 Included 5.3 Above 1.8 9.9

Female 2008 1.4 10.4 28 26 18.7 7.3 8.2

149,654 220,137 383,678

1975 59.1 8.2 17.5 9.7 4.5 Included Above 0.8

1995

2008

15.2 7 20.4 26.5 17 5.1

8 11 23.7 16.5 17.7 9.5

8.7

13.5

150,120 226,035 411,427

Sources: 1975: Annual Statistical Abstract, 1987, p 44, Ministry of Planning, Kuwait; 1995: Annual Statistical Abstract, 2001, p. 46, Ministry of Planning, Kuwait; 2008: Essential Features of the Population and Labour Force, 2009, Human Capital Development, Kuwait, p. 35.



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Figure 2.╇ Kuwait Participation Rate in Economic Activity by Gender, 1985– 2008, 1975–2008 (Percents) Year

Male

Female

1985 1995 2008

56.0 59.0 58.9

10.6 23.0 43.2

Sources: 1985 and 1995 – Derived from Table 81, p. 100 Annual Statistical Abstract, 2001, Ministry of Planning, Kuwait; 2008: Essential Features of Population and Labour Force, March 2009, Administration of Human Capital, State of Kuwait.

necessary to encourage boys, who have currently lower achievement scores, to enter higher education. Interestingly, this situation is not unique to Kuwait, but fits into a prevailing trend where women are outperforming men in education throughout (Faley, 2010). Women and Work Kuwaiti women’s labor force participation has also grown in the last three decades, not merely in numbers but also in the spheres of employment they occupy. In 1985, only 10.6% of Kuwaiti women were actively employed in the labor force, now 43.2% of them are formally in the labor force (see Figure 2). They are the majority in the teaching profession as is typical in most countries, but Kuwaiti women also outnumber their male counterparts among medical doctors and health professionals and among lawyers and economists (Essential Features of the Population & Labour Force 2008). Kuwaiti women joined the police force in 2009. They have played prominent roles in the economy for a long time. Maha Al-Ghuneim has headed Global Investment House with $2 billion of assets and Shakha Al-Bahar is CEO of the National Bank of Kuwait. Women and the Hijab In the eighties, Islamist groups like the Islamic brotherhood and the Salafis began to gain prominence in Kuwait as elsewhere in the Arab world. A wave of social discontent with westernization was sweeping the region. Some people saw their intrinsic identity being obscured with the modernization taking place around them. Men saw women entering public life and wanted to impose certain dress codes on them. Kuwaitis saw the hijab (the head scarf) being embraced by women. Some women saw it as the only way they would be allowed to be in public with other men,

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while others were being enlisted as members in these Islamic m Â� ovements and thus embraced their dress code. However, it is important to emphasize that those who wore the hijab were as active in public life as the others. Though they chose to wear the hijab as a symbol of Islamic identity, they wanted to show that the hijab does not curb their participation in the development process nor their views on women’s emancipation. In the tribal (bedouin) communities, the men have greater authority over their women than the more urban population. Here, social norms of obedience to male family members still exist. Most women from tribal backgrounds tend to work in segregated occupations like teachers or social workers in gender segregated schools. However, tribal women are becoming more independent in their choices and one of them even stood as a candidate in the parliamentary elections of 2009 and came very close to winning. Some women from bedouin backgrounds are lawyers and doctors. With education and civic awareness, women from tribal backgrounds will play a greater role in their country. Women and Political Rights The 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq brought a change in the mind-set of Kuwaitis, both men and women. They had served side by side in Kuwait and outside for the liberation of their country and were determined to include women in the political process. Women themselves were no longer silent citizens, they approached the Emir (Late Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed) in Jeddah while in exile and he promised them full political rights. By the end of the Iraqi invasion, women had vocally organized in social movements to demand equality. Women were such an important aspect of civil society in Kuwait that the country earned the nickname the city-state of women (Tetreault 2001:211). According to Tetreault, “democratization of Kuwaiti political life has proceeded in fits and starts that parallel the uneven process of democratization of gender relations.” Data and Methods of the Present Study The Islamic Social Attitudes Survey (ISAS) data were collected using snowball sampling. A total of 1139 undergraduate students enrolled at Kuwait University participated. Students completed the ISAS during the 2007 spring and summer semesters. The data were collected in 58 undergraduate classes from 11 different departments (anthropology,



gender and politics in contemporary kuwait

69

sociology, psychology, statistical consultation, liberal arts information, English, electrical engineering, political science, education, business, and life skills) at all three different campuses of Kuwait University (Shwaikh, Keyfan, and Khaldiya). Kuwait University is the oldest and largest university in the country.1 The survey was distributed to students during class time (2263 surveys were distributed), and students were invited to take the surveys during the class period (participation was voluntary). The survey was in Arabic. The ISAS English version was translated by a local team of translators and edited by social science faculty involved with this project. The data was then entered into a database by the Statistical Unit at Kuwait University and analyzed using statistical software packages SAS and SPSS. Sixty-one percent of respondents are female, and half are in their early twenties. About 45% are in their last year of college. Over half (58%) come from families that earn between $40,000 and $100,000 annually; 16% are married; and are 78% Sunni. These students come from highly educated families, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of the respondents’ mothers have attended at least some college. The ISAS focuses on the measurement of religiosity, political attitudes and civic engagement and contains some religiosity items approximate to those in the Baylor Religion Survey (Bader et al. 2007). The ISAS for Kuwait has a total of 159 items including modules on religious practice, belief, behavior, belonging, religious networks, spiritual experience, and family religiosity. Social attitude modules include questions on women’s rights, minority rights, attitudes about democracy and relations with the West. The sample for this case study is limited to college students which constrains the generalizability of the findings. Nonetheless, as some scholars have noted (Al-Thakeb and Scott 1981), younger generations in the Arab Gulf have remained almost as traditional as their parents and grandparents, widening the gap between them and the liberalizing youth of the West (though this may not be the case in all Muslim societies). ╇ A comparison by field of study indicates the sample had fewer natural science, liberal arts, education, and law majors, while having more engineering and Islamic studies majors. No discipline was oversampled. We did not distribute any surveys to the faculty for Sharia and Islamic studies, so the fact that there were proportionally more of these majors in my sample than the proportion of majors in the university population as a whole must be considered as part of the sampling error. In other respects, such as sex and sect ratio, the sample matched the university population. 1

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alessandra l. gonzález and lubna al-kazi Religiosity Variables

Sunnis are the majority Islamic sect in Kuwait, so in the model, sect is recoded as a dummy variable with Shia used as the higher scored reference category, coded as “1”. In addition to two main sects, specific religious schools of thought were coded: Salafi, Muslim Brotherhood, Najaf, Qom, and No Affiliation. For the reader who is unfamiliar with these schools of thought, they can be loosely compared to Christian denominations because they provide some semblance of structure and standardization of belief “platform” for their members. Within Sunni Islam, Salafis are considered the most conservative on a wide variety of socioreligious and political issues compared to the others (Almahmeed 2006: 106), and thus were used as the contrast category for the religious tradition measure in Fig. 6. The Muslim Brotherhood is another conservative school of thought within Sunni Islam, but more moderate than the Salafis (Almahmeed 2006: 180). The Najaf and Qom Schools are both within Shii Islam; the religious school of Qom was founded in light of the political turbulence in Iraq under Saddam Hussain’s secular Bath party system, and is considered by many to be a branch of Shiism more politically driven than the Najaf. The last category included those respondents who marked that they had no affiliation beyond being a Muslim. Religious Salience captures those respondents who considered themselves “very” or “somewhat” religious; Qur’anic Literalism is recoded as as a dummy variable for those respondents who marked that “the Qur’an is perfectly true, and should be interpreted literally, word-for-word, on all subjects” as opposed to those that marked that “The Qur’an is perfectly true, but it should not be interpreted literally. We must interpret its meaning.” Spiritual Experience is recoded as a dummy variable for respondents who mark that they “changed profoundly as the result of a religious experience.” Raised religiously is recoded as a dummy variable for respondents who indicate that they were raised religiously. Whether or not the respondent was raised religiously would help support or disconfirm the role that gender and religious socialization plays in determining attitudes towards women’s rights (Miller and Stark 2002). Mosque Attendance is an ordinal variable with an eight point range of 0=“Never Attend” to 8=“Attend daily”. The Qur’anic Reading variable is an ordinal measure of whether a respondent reads their holy book outside of religious services coded as an eight-point scale ordinal variable from “never” to “daily”. The Been to Hajj variable indicates that the



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respondent has made a pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia; this pilgrimage is known as the Hajj and is one of the five required Pillars of Islam, or rites that a Muslim is expected to comply with in his or her lifetime. However, it is important to note that there is likely to be some difference in this practice by gender due to cultural expectations for men to represent their households in the society, and perhaps lack of resources to send all family members on a dangerous and expensive excursion. This variable was recoded as a dummy variable, where having gone to Hajj = “1”. Political Variables Political variables include whether or not the respondent self-identifies as politically Islamist or politically Liberal. This question was recoded to make it into a dummy variable, where the higher score indicates the respondent identifies politically as an Islamist. The Liberals and Moderates were grouped together into the contrast category because there were so few Liberals in the sample to create a meaningful separate analysis.2 Also included in the political variables is a Political Activity Score. This score is created from responses to a series of questions about whether or not the respondent “ran as a political candidate,” “volunteered,” “textmessaged, distributed a flyer, forwarded an email, wrote a letter, or made a phone call,” “attended an informational meeting or conference,” “marched or protested,” “donated money,” or “voted in” a political, religious, or women’s rights campaign or cause inside or outside of school. The various questions were recoded as dummy variables with affirmative responses receiving a 1 and then the various questions were added to create a continuous variable with possible scores ranging from 0–7. Each activity was added and the sum is the respondent’s Political Activity Score. Control Variables Demographic control variables include: gender, age, income, mother’s education, and marital status. These are standard demographic controls 2 ╇ The respondent was asked to place his or herself on a scale from “extremely Islamist” (5.7% of the total), “Islamist” (15.8%), “leaning Islamist” (9.8%), “moderate” (61.8%), “leaning Liberal” (3.0%), “Liberal” (2.7%), or “extremely Liberal” (0.5%).

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which have significant effects on individual-level outcomes. In the Kuwaiti context, mother’s education and marital status are expected to be significant predictors of women’s rights attitudes. The descriptive statistics reveal that the respondents in this sample have highly educated mothers, which could broaden their image of women’s potential outside the home. Marital status has the potential to conservatively influence attitudes as traditional gender roles are solidified in marriage. Dependent Variables Many of the questions that composed the women’s rights attitude module of the ISAS were taken from other surveys, such as the World Values Survey, the United States General Social Survey, the Meyer et al. 1994 study survey, (Meyer et al 1998) and the Almahmeed (2006) study survey. Respondents considered 1) whether a woman should have a role in both internal and foreign affairs; 2) whether women are as qualified as men to be political candidates; and 3) whether Kuwaiti women in leading posts have performed well so far; 4) whether Islam is compatible with women’s political leadership; 5) whether a woman can be a good Muslim and not wear a head-covering (hijab); and 6) whether respondent agrees that Islam is a source of personal motivation for him or her to fight for women’s rights, what we label here as “Islamic Feminism.” For all the regression models, each of the 5 point Likert scale dependent variables was recoded as a dummy. Where the respondent held a more liberal view on the question, they received a “1” and if they held a more conservative view, they received a “0.” Findings Modern Muslim Youth Remain Religious A two-tailed significance t-test was conducted on this sample of Kuwaiti college students to identify gender differences on the religiosity variables to be controlled for in the regression models. This t-test addresses whether or not women in the sample appear to be more religious than men, which will have a direct bearing on the interpretation of the results from the rest of the analyses. Women describe themselves as more religious than men, but in most other measures, men appear to be as religious as women in terms of most of the religiosity indicators including



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Figure 3.╇ Religiosity Measures by Gender (N = 1139) (Percents) Gender “Very” or “Somewhat” â•…Religious Religious Experience Sect Sunni Shia Religious School of â•…Thought* Salafi Muslim Brotherhood Najaf - Shia Qoms - Shia No affiliation Qur’anic Literalism â•…Literalist Non-Literalist Frequency of Prayer â•… outside 5 prescribed* Never At least once/day Wears a Veil Wears Niqab â•… (face veil) Wears a Beard Raised Religiously Attended Religious â•…Classes Mother wears veil Mother wears face â•…veil (niqab) Weekly/Daily Mosque â•…Attendance Daily Qur’anic â•…Reading Been to Hajj

Political Affiliation

Female

Male

Liberal

68.7

59.0

*

Moderate Islamist

2.6

60.7

36.8*

51.1 77.3 20.8 10.3

50.2 74.2 23.1 20.4*

2.6 5.4 8.1 0.0

60.7 61.5 66.7 39.8

36.7* 33.0* 25.2* 60.2*

8.6 7.3 4.2 44.4 49.8

10.6 10.0 4.1 38.0 48.0

0.9 8.4 6.4 7.9 6.8

46.7 54.7 70.2 68.4 66.0

52.3* 36.8* 23.4* 23.7* 27.3*

47.6

45.5

5.2

60.3

34.5*

13.1 12.2 88.5 14.9

18.3 11.6 -

15.1 3.7 3.1 0.0

68.0 49.6 66.4 53..5

16.9* 46.7* 30.5* 46.5*

87.4 61.7

10.9 83.9 59.5

2.0 3.9 2.3

28.0 62.9 59.4

70.0* 33.2* 38.3*

94.0 34.7

93.9 34.4

1.0 4.8

55.5 62.7

43.5* 32.5*

6.4

56.8*

2.0

54.4

43.5*

22.1

14.5*

4.1

52.1

43.8*

11.3

22.7*

5.6

46.9

47.5*

Data: ISAS Kuwait 2007. *Chi-square and T-test results in a significant difference at the .05 level.

Qur’anic Literalism, Spiritual Experience, Frequency of Prayer, Religious Education, and Mother’s religious dress (see Figure 3). These findings contradict the idea that women are universally more religious than

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men, but fit our expectations within the framework of Islamic societies. Specifically, there are clear legal and social expectations for maintaining religious norms. In Kuwaiti society, these norms lower the benefits for males to take the risk of being irreligious and increase the incentives for men to conform to religious standards. Except for the Salafi case, women appear to affiliate as much as men with each religious school of thought. It was expected that gender differences would appear here because men are socialized to continue their father’s associations, including meetings and groups and attending social events outside of the immediate family with others from similar schools of thought. However, the data show that women identify with these groups as much as men. This is an important finding because it reveals that young Kuwaiti women are as socially embedded in these Islamic groups as men. As stated earlier, religious schools of thought can be compared to denominational affiliations in U.S. Christian churches. Perhaps this generation of women are socialized to worship not only at home, but also in the company of their mother’s social and religious associations. In a majority-Muslim context, these Islamic associations could provide additional religious, cultural, and social Â�capital (Bourdieu 1977; Coleman 1988). In a majority-Muslim context, it is likely that certain religious norms in the culture equalize the religious expectations for women as well as men, excepting gender-differentiated religious practices such as mosque attendance and pilgrimage to Mecca (as seen in Figure 3). Overall, the data show that these students, despite their elite status, remain observant and relatively religious, which already begins to test Hunter’s clash of civilizations thesis. Modern Muslim Youth Remain Pro-Women The second point to test in the data is the compatibility of certain women’s rights attitudes among these relatively religious Kuwaiti college students. If Inglehart and Norris are correct, then the data should show a vast gender gap when it comes to issues of progressive women’s rights. In Figure 4, we see the frequencies by gender of the response to the statement, “I consider myself a feminist,” with response categories including “Strongly Agree,” “Agree,” “Disagree,” “Strongly Disagree,” and “Undecided.” In Figure 5, we see the frequencies by gender of the response to the statement, “Islam is a source of personal motivation for me to fight for women’s rights.” As we can see from Figures 4 and 5, the vast majority of men in the sample agree or strongly agree with gender equality, and that their



gender and politics in contemporary kuwait

75

Figure 4.╇ Responses to the Questions “I Consider Myself a Feminist*” by Gender 50 45 40 35 30 25

Men

20

Women

15 10 5 0 Strongly Agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Undecided

Data: ISAS Kuwait 2007.*In the Arabic translation, the term refers more closely to a belief in “gender equality.”

Figure 5.╇ Responses to the Question “Islam is a source of personal motivation for me to fight for women’s rights” by Gender 45 40 35 30 25 20

Men

15

Women

10 5 0 Strongly Agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Undecided

Data: ISAS Kuwait 2007.

Â�religion is a source of motivation to fight for women’s rights. These findings counter the predictions by both Huntington and Inglehart and Norris that Islamic traditionalism is incompatible in the long-term with progressive women’s rights. Another important finding that challenges

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Norris and Inglehart’s predictions of a gender gap, and an otherwise universal assumption in sociology of religion, we observe from the data that in terms of practice and socialization, women are not more religious than men for this population. Despite some scholars observing a return to religious traditionalism in the region, these modern youth do not equate that return to religious and cultural conservatism necessarily with blanketly pre-modern roles for women. We can see that instead of leaving their religious culture and traditions aside, that these Kuwaiti college students are finding ways to incorporate their modern and traditional values in co-existence. Towards a “Co-Existence” Model So if Kuwaiti youth are indeed religiously observant, perhaps even more outwardly so than their parent’s generation, as some scholars observe, then how do they reconcile remaining progressive in their attitudes about women’s rights? We can gain an even deeper understanding about the nuances within this co-existence model by looking at how these students’ opinions vary by individual-level social and demographic characteristics, in addition to political affiliation and religiosity. In order to look more closely at variation in women’s rights attitudes by individuallevel characteristics, a binary logistic regression was conducted on the women’s rights attitude questions described in the dependent variables section. In Figure 6 we can see that women have more liberal attitudes about women’s role in politics than men. Mother’s education has a positive effect on views towards women in politics. Respondents who said they were raised religiously appear to have a negative attitude towards the idea that women are qualified for political leadership. As expected, being a politically conservative Islamist has a negative effect on attitudes about women in politics. Accompanying this finding is the fact that Muslims with no religious group affiliation hold a significantly more positive view of women in politics compared to Salafis. Salafi Sunni Muslims are considered more conservative than other religious groups, particularly towards the idea of women in public positions of authority that, in their view, are reserved for men. Therefore, we expect Salafis compared to Muslims with no affiliation to be more conservative on this issue. PolitÂ�ical activity correlates with a favorable attitude towards the performance of female political leaders. Shia Muslims express more liberal attitudes about women in politics. Last, going to Hajj is negatively correlated with the issue of women in politics.

2.847*** 1.037 (0.291)

1.04 (0.274)

â•… Politics â•…Islamist â•…Political â•… Activity Scale Religiosity â•…Shia

â•…Mother’s â•…Education â•…Married

â•…Income

â•…Age

2.822*** 0.525 (0.341)

1.764** 0.512 (0.259) 0.035 (0.058) 0.282 (0.246) 1.952*** 0.371 (0.208) 0.555 (0.313) 0.451*** −0.349 (0.215) 0.101 (0.045)

2.621*** 0.568 (0.220) 0.010 (0.046) 0.080 (0.194) 1.678** 0.669 (0.170) 0.411 (0.235) 0.599** −0.797 (0.181) 0.048 (0.036)

0.963 (0.206) 0.052 (0.044) 0.307 (0.185) 0.518 (0.161) 0.048 (0.207) −0.513 (0.170) −0.013 (0.284)

Demographics â•…Female

−1.105 (1.312)

−0.265 (1.032)

1.481 (0.349)

1.668* 0.694 (0.237) 0.050 (0.048) −0.135 (0.203) 0.584 (0.182) −0.031 (0.237) −0.254 (0.197) 1.106* 0.051 (0.039)

−1.240 (1.099)

4.396*** 0.358 (0.290)

2.001** 0.430 (0.220) 0.046 (0.046) 0.064 (0.195) 1.794** 0.610 (0.169) −0.253 (0.212) −0.411 (0.179) 0.025 (0.036)

0.609 (1.039)

Odds Performance Odds Islam Odds Hijab Ratio Ratio Compatible Ratio

−1.394 (0.985)

Qualified

Constant

Odds Ratio

Political Role

Unstandardized B (Std. Err)

1.477*

1.809*

(Continued)

0.051 (0.321)

1.538* 0.593 (0.249) −0.062 (0.052) −0.188 (0.220) 1.841*** 0.390 (0.201) 0.549 (0.306) 0.663* −0.370 (0.215) −0.004 (0.041)

1.444 (1.164)

Odds Islamic Odds Ratio Feminism Ratio

Figure 6.╇ Binary Logistic Regressions of Politics, Islam, and Pro-Women’s Rights Attitudes on Demographic and Religiosity Variables.

gender and politics in contemporary kuwait 77

Political Role

Odds Ratio 0.228 (0.298) 0.600 (0.414) 0.556 (0.523) 0.209 (0.185) −0.045 (0.181) −0.167 (−0.162) −0.271 (0.170) −0.607 (0.258) −0.021 (0.053) 0.016 (0.047) −0.601 (0.235) 0.155 792

Qualified

0.702 (0.387) 0.363 (0.485) 0.596 (0.639) 0.450 (0.225) 0.093 (0.218) 0.003 (0.199) −0.384 (0.210) 0.545* 0.036 (0.312) 0.035 (0.060) 0.011 (0.057) 0.548** −0.620 (0.275) .065 684

0.871 (0.332) 0.147 (0.469) 0.005 (0.594) 1.568* 0.405 (0.196) −0.239 (0.195) 0.350 (0.176) 0.068 (0.181) −0.270 (0.278) −0.010 (0.056) 0.008 (0.051) 0.538* −0.001 (0.251) 0.103 730

2.388** −0.220 (0.291) −1.225 (0.368) −0.908 (0.447) 1.500* 0.094 (0.191) −0.546 (0.186) 1.419* 0.023 (0.161) −0.103 (0.169) −0.416 (0.267) 0.009 (0.052) −0.034 (0.047) −0.383 (0.227) 0.094 801

Odds Performance Odds Islam Odds Hijab Ratio Ratio Compatible Ratio

Data: ISAS Kuwait 2007. *p < 0.05 level; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001. aSalafi Sunnis were used as the contrast category

Religious School of Thoughta â•…Muslim −0.013 â•…Brotherhood (0.284) â•… Najaf (Shiite) 0.212 (0.363) â•… Qom (Shiite) −0.043 (0.446) â•… Muslim - No 0.822 2.275*** â•…Affiliation (0.177) â•…Religious −0.151 â•…Salience (0.172) â•…Qur’anic −0.143 â•…Literalism (0.154) â•…Spiritual −0.180 â•…Experience (0.161) â•…Raised −0.088 â•…Religiously (0.233) â•…Mosque −0.049 â•…Attendance (0.045) â•…Qur’anic −0.018 â•…Reading (0.045) â•… Been to Hajj 0.037 (0.224) R2 0.150 N 856

Unstandardized B (Std. Err)

Figure 6.╇ (Cont.)

0.636 (0.380) 0.294*** 0.979 (0.506) 0.403* 0.084 (0.540) 0.193 (0.218) 0.579** 0.332 (0.211) −0.026 (0.193) 0.072 (0.204) −0.081 (0.289) −0.051 (0.060) 0.027 (0.056) −0.507 (0.263) .062 738

0.602*

2.662*

Odds Islamic Odds Ratio Feminism Ratio

78 alessandra l. gonzález and lubna al-kazi



gender and politics in contemporary kuwait

79

The last three columns of Figure 6 contain attitudes about the compatibility of Islam and women’s rights, where again women hold statistically more liberal attitudes than men. Mother’s education is consistently correlated with liberal attitudes about Islam and women’s rights.3 Political conservative is negatively correlated with the issue of unveiling for women. Sunnis of the Muslim Brotherhood are more likely to think that Islam is compatible with women’s political leadership than their Salafi Sunni brothers and sisters. Muslims of no denominational affiliation correlate positively compared with Salafis on the issue of Islam being compatible with women’s rights. Interestingly, Religious Salience has negative effects on attitudes about whether a woman must wear a veil to be a good Muslim. This finding supports the argument that religiosity can mitigate effects of gender and create a conservative outcome on attitudes about women’s rights.4 Another interesting finding is that going on Hajj has a negative effect on the attitude that Islam could be a source of personal motivation to fight for women’s rights. But then again, this effect was not very powerful given the strength of the other significant variables in the model. Still, this religious ritual could have a conservative mediating effect on women’s rights attitudes, and should be considered as a dimension of Islamic religiosity when conducting future studies of the impact of Islamic religiosity on socio-political attitudes. Finally, going to Hajj appears negatively correlated with the issue of women in politics. This could be due in part to the fact that more males go to Hajj and males have a more negative view of women in leadership.  A socio-religious explanation could be that the Hajj as a rite of passage into a deeper level of religious life enhances the salience that an Islamic-oriented worldview has on the respondent and a dampening effect on the concerns of this world. The conservative Muslim “ideal” ╇ We ran these models with the interaction of gender and mother’s education to see if this variable would knock out the significant religiosity variables; for Islam Compatible, the interaction variable was not significant, but gender and mother’s education became non-significant while Shia, Muslim Brotherhood, No Affiliation, and Qur’anic Literalism remained significant. Thus, the interaction did not cancel out the effects of the religiosity variables. For Hijab, the interaction variable was not significant, and gender, mother’s education, and all the religiosity variables remained significant. For Islamic Feminism, after controlling for the interaction variable, only gender remained significant. 4 ╇ We ran the model including the interaction of gender and religious salience for Hijab, and while the interaction variable was not significant, all the previously significant variables remained significant. However, we also ran a test of the Variance Inflation Scores which appeared higher than normal, indicating multicollineariity. Therefore, we cannot definitively conclude the effects of the interaction of gender and religious salience on Hijab. 3

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that the respondent experienced on their pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia may seem diametrically opposed to a “Western” feminist agenda to expand women’s rights. Though the causal mechanism is unclear, the effects of going on Hajj are worth noting for future reference and study. To complicate the effects of religiosity, Qur’anic Literalism has a positive correlation with the attitude that Islam is compatible with women’s rights. This strengthens the idea that women educated in their religious scriptures may be more likely to think independently and critically about assumed gendered cultural norms. Also, they may use their religious knowledge from regular Qur’an reading to motivate others to seek legitimacy and authority for women in society from within their Islamic tradition. As expected, politically conservative Islamists are more conservative in their attitudes about women in politics. Because of the controversy leading up to women’s right to vote and run for office in Kuwait, political conditions forced a necessary dichotomy of political Liberals and Conservatives over this particular women’s rights issue. Conservative political Islamists tend to oppose women running for political office and unveiling for women. This finding makes sense considering the recent political climate that could condition an Islamists’ position on these two particularly salient issues concerning women’s rights and Islamic jurisprudence. Also, respondents with a high Political Activity Score appear to be more supportive of women’s performance in politics. Political activity in of itself may have a liberalizing effect, but on the other hand, could be a product of a minority view (the liberal one in a traditionalist culture) that is motivated by a desire to change the status quo. Discussion The fact that gender is one of the most important factors across the dependent variables appears to confirm Inglehart and Norris’s thesis, as well as that of Rizzo, et. al (2007) who found a gender gap in terms of support for women’s rights is more true of Arab nations than in other Middle Eastern countries. However, the fact that Kuwaiti youth remain religious in practice and belief, and the vast majority of male students agree with Islamic compatibility and a belief in gender equality shows a more complex “co-existence” of beliefs than Huntington or Inglehart & Norris’s predictions suggest. Data from this sample of Kuwaiti college students show that when considering the topic of women’s rights, gender always matters, religious tradition sometimes does, and religious



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practice does not. These independent variables predict the most women’s rights outcomes in the final analysis of various pro-women’s rights attitudes relating to politics and compatibility with Islam. After the gender effect, mother’s education promotes women’s rights outcomes. This finding appears consistent with the scenario that as Muslims are socialized into households where women are highachievers in education, they carry a more favorable view of the capacities of women in political leadership. Respondents who said they were raised religiously appear to have a negative attitude towards the idea that women are qualified for political leadership. While their mothers may be highly educated, those raised in religious households express attitudes consistent with a patriarchal view of women’s qualifications for political candidacy. Islamist identification works against women’s rights, and Shia sect identification make a significant difference. An argument can be made for the embattled subcultural identity (Smith and Emerson 1998) that minority groups assume in majority Muslim countries. Since Shia are a minority in Kuwait, elite Shia college students may express more liberal attitudes towards the promotion of women’s leadership than the majority Sunni students who may be more comfortable with the status quo. In challenging a “clash” thesis for a “co-existence” model with regards to women’s rights in traditional Muslim contexts, it is important to note that the data suggests some evidence that Muslims do not necessarily equate a pro-women’s rights agenda with a pro-Western style feminism. For example, in Figure 2, the Najaf and Qom Shia appear even more conservative than the Salafi Sunnis on the issue of women having to be veiled to be a good Muslim, while at the same time, they correlate positively with the idea that Islam is a source of personal motivation to fight for women’s rights. Further research needs to be done to assess the correlations between ideologically and theologically conservative Muslims and the women’s rights issues they perceive to be worth fighting for. Sunnis of the Muslim Brotherhood think that Islam is compatible with women’s political leadership significantly more than their Salafi Sunni brothers and sisters. This makes sense only by understanding that Islamist women of the Muslim Brotherhood are themselves being groomed to run for political office and take leadership positions. This Islamist group is expending time, energy, and resources to cultivate a progressive, pro-women image in Islamic societies around the world (Shanahan 2004). However, this progressive agenda has not tangibly differed from the Salafis on most of the other women’s rights attitude

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questions, so perhaps there are limits to the length that this Islamist group will go to transform their image and maintain their conservative constituent base. More observation needs to be done to assess this moderate Islamist “pro-women’s” agenda. Another interesting observation is that Muslims of no denominational affiliation correlate positively compared with Salafis on the issue of Islam being compatible with women’s rights. Perhaps these unaffiliated Muslims take a broad-minded approach to Islam, and this ideological flexibility leaves room for a progressive women’s rights agenda, while the Salafi’s more narrow Islamic ideology keeps the issue of women’s rights at a distance, disassociating indiscriminate gender equality from its Islamic ideal. Finally, Muslims with no religious affiliation appear to have a significant relationship in favor of women’s rights attitudes. This finding could capture a trend where youth who disaffiliate with particular established religious schools of thought could be considered generally more liberal towards women’s rights. Again, future research should explore what significance disaffiliation of Muslims in a relatively pluralistic Islamic environment has on political and social attitudes. Conclusion This study makes several important contributions to the literature on Islam, gender, and comparative studies of religiosity. This paper analyzes data from a pilot sample of Kuwaiti college students on a variety of socio-Â�demographic and religiosity variables and their corresponding attitudes towards women’s political participation and social rights. The findings challenge a “clash” thesis and offer a more complicated “coexistence” model for Islamic traditionalism and women’s progressive rights. StatisÂ�tical results suggests that gender and family socialization are the most influential factors on students’ social values regarding women’s political participation, even beyond self-reported political and religiosity measures. Though the data is not generalizable to Kuwaiti society as a whole, it offers insights as to the pre-eminence of social and family values even over self-reported measures of religiosity and political affiliation. The example of gender and politics in Kuwait offers a counterpoint to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis and offers a more complicated picture. When young people in a majority Muslim context encounter questions of women’s increasing participation in social and political life, this paper’s findings suggest that Islamic traditionalism co-exists



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and may even be perceived as compatible with women’s progressive rights. In contrast to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, from the data, we see that gender, sect, religious school of thought, and political identity but not religious practice have persistent effects on attitudes about women’s rights. The fact that sect came up as consistently significant for this study while measures of religious practice had no effect on women’s rights attitudes runs counter to the finding of Meyer, et al. (1998) which found attitudinal orthopraxy to have a negative impact on women’s rights attitudes despite sect. In addition, the ISAS data does not show a relationship between certain behavioral religious practices and women’s rights attitudes to be true, specifically: mosque attendance, Qur’anic reading and pilgrimage to Mecca, religious socialization (being raised religiously), and Qur’anic literalism have no consistent or persistent effect on women’s rights attitudes. This finding is also significant because many scholars and popular writers hypothesize a significant relationship between traditionalism and an outward appearance of religiosity, which was not found in this data. The second important contribution to the literature is to point out the complex “co-existence” model that young Kuwaitis, particularly male students, are having to contend with, as their traditional societies demand certain responsibilities from them, while being raised by a generation of women with relatively high levels of education and experience in political life, particularly in Kuwait’s modern history. In contrast to Inglehart and Norris’s predictions of a rising gender gap in women’s rights in societies with traditional Islamic values, the male Kuwaiti college students in the sample, admittedly with mothers with relatively high levels of education and a post-Iraqi invasion patriotism, affirmed their belief in gender equality and in the compatibility of Islam as a source of motivation to fight for women’s rights. Research on Islam and socio-political attitudes in the future should continue to include and control for various dimensions of religiosity to see whether the literature can take a clear position on this important and popular assumption about the relationship of Islam and various social attitudes. Having overcome war, political uncertainties, and a unique balance of geo-political variables, Kuwaiti society has emerged as a strong voice and example of a resilient society. Kuwait is an example of a society with a population of diverse cultural backgrounds and religious traditions within an Islamic context that strikes a “co-existing” balance of opening opportunities for women while maintaining their traditional values.

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Almahmeed, Khadeejah Abdul Hadi. 2006. The Position of Women in the Islamic Political System. Doctoral Dissertation: University of Sunderland, UK. AlMughni, Haya. 2001. Women in Kuwait: The politics of gender. London: Saqi books. Al-Thakeb, Fahed and Joseph E. Scott. 1981. “The Revitalization of Islamic Penal Law: An Examination of its Opponents.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, Spring 1981, Vol. 5, No. 1; pp. 65–80. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. Verso. Bader, Christopher, F. Carson Mencken and P. Froese. 2007. “American Piety: Content and Methods of the Baylor Religion Survey.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 46(4): 447–464. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theroy of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977. Colerman, James. 1988. “Social capital in the creation of human capital,” American Journal of Sociology. Essential Features of the Population and Labour Force. 2008. Ministry of Planning, Human Resource Department, December 2008: Kuwait. Foley, Sean. 2010. “All I want is Equality with girls: Gender and Social change in the twenty-first century Gulf ”. Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 14, No: 1, pp. 21–35 (March 2010). Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. 2003a. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World, Cambridge. Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. 2003b. “The True Clash of Civilizations.” Foreign Policy, No. 135. (Mar. – Apr., 2003), pp. 62–70. Meyer, Katherine, Helen Rizzo and Yousef Ali. 1998. “Islam and the Extension of Citizen’s Rights to Women in Kuwait.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37: 131–144. Miller, Alan and Rodney Stark. 2002. “Gender and religiousness: Can socialization explanations be saved?” American Journal of Sociology 107(6): 1399–1423. Rizzo, Helen, Katherine Meyer, Yousef Al-Ali. 2002. “Women’s Political Rights: Islam, Status and Network in Kuwait”. Sociology, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 639–662. Rizzo, Helen, Adel-Hamid Abdel-Latif and Katherine Meyer. 2007. “The Relationship Between Gender Equality and Democracy: A Comparison of Arab Versus Non-Arab Muslim Societies,” Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 6, pp. 1151–1170. Shanahan, Rodger. 2004. “The Islamic Da’wa Party: Past Development and Future Prospects.” Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal. Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2004. Smith, Christian and Michael Emerson. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tetreault, Mary Ann, Katherine Meyer, and Helen Rizzo. 2009. “Women’s Rights in the Middle East: A Longitudinal Study of Kuwait”. International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, Issue2, pp. 218–237 (June, 2009). Tetreault, Mary Ann. 2001. “A State of two Minds: State Cultures, Women and Politics in Kuwait”, International Journal of the Middle East Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 203–220. Tetreault, Mary Ann. 2000. Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait. Columbia University Press.

The “social integration” of religious groups in society: A social mechanisms approach Jörg Stolz Introduction1 In everyday discourse, it seems obvious that religious groups may be more or less well “integrated” into society. Some religious groups mistrust, despise or fight society, predict its imminent destruction or try to convert any individual that comes their way. Other groups appear exotic, but interesting and peaceful. Still others identify so strongly with society and the state that they lose all profile and become almost unidentifiable. At the same time, a lack of “social integration” of religious groups is often seen as extremely unsettling. In fact, we find concerns that the good functioning of society may be damaged, because the religious groups could violate central societal norms2, enter into conflict with other religious groups, or might disregard the fundamental rights of their members.3 On another level, a lack of integration is also thought to provoke a disregard of fundamental rights of religious groups and their members by society (racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, discrimination). But what exactly is “social integration” of religious groups and what are its causes? The goal of this article is to show how explanatory sociology may treat questions of “social integration” of religious groups in society. I argue that due to the non-normative stance of explanatory sociology, a number of crucial questions cannot be answered. We cannot say if a religious group is “well integrated” or not, or what integration goals should be set by society – for by doing so, we would have to use value 1 ╇ I thank Barbara Dellwo, René Pahud de Mortanges, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Olivier Favre, Matthias König, and Monika Salzbrunn for important comments and criticisms. A rather different, German, version of this text has appeared in Stolz (2010). I thank Christine Rhone for correcting my English. The usual disclaimers apply. 2 ╇ This may range from disturbing street evangelization to the infiltration of public authority and terrorism. 3 ╇ For example, it is feared that religious groups might damage the health, freedom and finances of their members through manipulation and deceit or, if their norms are patriarchal, might disregard the rights of women, children and homosexuals.

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judgments that cannot be justified scientifically. What we can do, however, is to take integration dimensions that are thought to be important in society, use them in order to measure differences between religious groups and society in general and explain the differences with social mechanisms. What follows is an account, illustrated with a host of (mainly Swiss) examples, of how this may be achieved. While explanatory sociology remains agnostic about the desirability of specific integration goals, the results of its research may become important to public discussion of integration issues. We can provide basic facts and explanations that may be used as a framework by others in order to construct their view of integration. In what follows I will first sketch the perspective of explanatory sociology (the social mechanisms approach) (part 2). I then define integration and discuss its normative and epistemological complexities (part 3) Â� imensions and propose a way of measuring various possible integration d (part 4). Part 5 presents some of the most important social mechanisms that explain differences between religious groups on given integration dimensions. Explanatory Sociology: A Social Mechanisms Approach Explanatory sociology (or: the social mechanisms approach) is only one among various approaches in contemporary sociology. Its most prominent classic is Max Weber. Some of the central contemporary authors are Raymond Boudon in France, Peter Hedström in England, or Hartmut Esser in Germany.4 How does explanatory sociology proceed? I present only four of the most important points: •  Explanatory sociology aims for causal explanations and therefore seeks a causal mechanism. We assume that changes in the situation of the actor (e.g. changes in prices, opportunities, resources, cognitions) lead her to adapt in a subjectively reasonable way, which leads through intended and unintended effects to a new social situation. Such explanations are said to have a macro-micro-macro structure. In other words, the macro-phenomenon we seek to explain is seen as an emergent effect that results from aggregated micro-actions by actors that 4 ╇ The weberian (Weber 1978[1920]) approach remains central. For presentations of the general approach see Hedström (2005). For an introduction to the mechanism approach in the sociology of religion see Stolz (2009b).



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in turn have been influenced by a former social macro-situation. Note that “actors” may be individuals or collective actors. In all of this, we try to capture and model the social mechanism, that is, the constant link of actions and events that creates the explanandum (the phenomenon to be explained).5 Below, we will present various mechanisms that may explain differences between religious groups in various integration dimensions. •  Explanatory sociology supposes that actors will act with “good Â�reasons” (Boudon 2001). This means that actors do not necessarily behave like the “homo oeconomicus” dear to economists, but that, in their subjective way and on the basis of their own theories, they try to choose a “good option” rather than a “bad option”. In other words, we assume a kind of “bounded rationality” (Simon 1983).6 Once we know the beliefs and preferences of actors, we often recognize that their actions are quite logical and “rational”, even if they may have seemed absurd or irrational from an outside perspective (Coleman 1990: 17). •  Explanatory sociology is decidedly comprehensive (verstehend).7 Our goal is to explain actions of actors or groups from a subjectively perceived and interpreted situation. Sociologists thus have to understand how individual or collective actors interpret their situation, before they can explain the actions. •  Explanatory sociology tries to do research in a value-neutral way, that is, by trying to avoid normative thinking on the side of the researcher.8 As we will see below, this will have very important consequences for what we can and cannot do concerning the explanation of “social integration”. As a matter of fact, we will abstain from deciding when a group is “well integrated”, and neither propose nor reject goals or projects of integration. What is possible, however, is to recommend certain policies if certain integration goals are (externally) given.9 ╇ See for various possible definitions: Hedström (2005: 25). ╇ We do not deny that individuals may act irrationally and may deviate more or less strongly from (even subjective and limited) rationality criteria. Some of these deviations are purely idiosyncratic; others may even be systematic. See Esser (1999: 301ff.) for a list of so-called “anomalies”. 7 ╇ As is well known, Weber (1978[1920]: 4) defined “sociology” as a “science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequence”. 8 ╇ The classic author is once again Weber (1988[1922]: 503). See also Barker (1995). 9 ╇The discussions of recent decades have shown that value neutrality can never be fully reached, but has to be seen as an ideal that may be approached. Value judgments  already enter the central question, the method as well as the interpretation. 5 6

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jörg stolz Figure 1.╇ Macro-Micro-Macro Explanation.

In general, explanatory sociology differs quite markedly from theoretical approaches that only work with interrelated definitions (like systems  theory of the parsonian or luhmannian type), from normative approaches (such as certain types of discourse theory or action research), as well as from uniquely interpretive or descriptive sociologies (such as hermeneutical or phenomenological approaches). What is Social Integration? Definition and Types of Integration Integration may be defined as the “cohesion of parts in a “systemic” whole and the distinction thereby caused from an unstructured environment, independently of how this cohesion is caused (Esser 2000: 261; translation mine). We can distinguish different types of integration. A first, important, distinction is between “absolute” and “relative” integration (Friedrichs/Jagodzinski 2008). Absolute integration refers to a social system in its entirety. For example, we may analyze France, the Salvation Army, a football club or a group of friends as to their degree of integration. Relative integration, on the other hand, refers to the integration of a subsystem into an enclosing system. We may thus speak of the integration of a family member into a family, the Reformed Church of the canton of Zurich into the Federation of Protestant Churches of Despite these caveats, value freedom is more than a pipe dream and in concrete research practice it is often quite easily visible if and how far researchers are led by what “is” or by what they think “should be”. An exemple of a study that takes this stance with success in the most value-laden field of New Religious Movements is Barker (1984). Explanatory sociology employs the reflexivity of the researcher, a methodology that should be as independent from the researcher as possible and mutual critique in order to control value judgments.



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Switzerland, the Jewish Community in Swiss society etc.10 In this article, we will treat predominantly relative integration, more specifically integration of religious communities into Swiss society. A second important distinction is due to David Lockwood  (1992 [1964]). He distinguishes system integration and social integration. System integration is the integration of a system due to the good functioning and collaboration of the different subsystems, independently of how well individuals and groups are integrated into the system. The system integration of a modern society, for example, may be said to exist if Â�especially two things are given. For one thing, subsystems (law, economy, politics, medicine etc.) function in a satisfactory way. For another thing, the subsystems are linked to each other through mechanisms of “interpenetration” in a satisfactory way11; this means that one subsystem (e.g. medicine) includes procedures and structures of another subsystem (e.g. religion) in a satisfactory way in its own procedures and structures. For example, we find pastoral workers in hospitals, lawyers in universities, scientific consultants in politics, etc.12 Social integration is the integration of social actors into a given social system. Here, we mostly analyze not so much single individuals, but rather social groups of actors. We may, for example, ask if and how far women, the Frenchspeaking Swiss, the Muslims, handicapped people or the “Sans-Papiers” [often: illegal aliens or immigrants] are integrated into Swiss society. Social integration of a given group into an embracing system may then be analyzed on an individual and a collective level. Taking the example of the Muslims, we may ask if Muslim individuals exhibit on average a similar level of education and of professional status, and if they live in neighborhoods as attractive as the average one in Switzerland in general (individual perspective). However, we may also ask how well Muslims are integrated into Swiss society as collective actors, i.e. if their associations have similar rights and comparable resources as other religious associations (collective perspective). In this article, we look at social 10 ╇ It is important to understand that relative integration is defined with reference to an englobing system. A violent youth group may thus be poorly integrated into Swiss society, but well integrated into a European federation of violent youth groups. The example shows that integration is not automatically “good”, but depends on the values of the observer. 11 ╇ Again, it is the observer‘s value criteria that determine just what may be meant by “satisfactory”. 12 ╇ For this view on interpenetration, see: Esser (1999: 108). I deliberately avoid the luhmannian version of interpenetration that creates more problems than it solves (Luhmann 1987: 290).

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integration (rather than system integration). In other words, we will treat the question as to how religious groups differ on various possible integration dimensions in Swiss society.13 Normative Issues However, it does not suffice to define the concept; we also have to look at important normative and epistemological issues. These will strongly influence just what we will want to describe and explain. One of the main problems of any social scientific integration theory is the fact that integration has several normative components (Peters 1993, Dahinden/ Bischoff 2010: 9). First, it implies an idea of what an ideal, integrated society would look like. Second, it implies that integration may be successfully achieved or fail and that integration is better than a lack of integration (or disintegration). Disintegration then acquires something of a pathological connotation. The problem with this is that different people have very different opinions of what the perfectly integrated society looks like. This is a value question and cannot be scientifically decided. To a left-winger an integrated society might show guaranteed employment for all with equal revenue – a horrendous vision for a right winger etc. Explanatory sociology sidesteps the normative issues by clearly showing what it does not even attempt to do: We will not say (1) what the perfectly integrated society looks like, (2) what the “right” indicators are to measure integration (we only suggest possible indicators) (3) how far one has to go on a given integration dimension in order to be seen as integrated. What we can do, however, is to take integration dimensions that are thought to be important in society, to use them in order to measure differences between religious groups and society in general and to explain the differences with social mechanisms. We can then say that if dimension x measures integration, then we find such and such differences between different religious groups that may be explained with mechanism z. While this is perhaps not the answer to the questions we might have liked to have answered, (What does the perfect society look like? Are Muslims integrated?), it gives important factual information on which we may base our value-laden political opinions. 13 ╇ I do not go into the question if religion is conducive or proves, on the contrary, a hindrance to the integration of modern societies in general. See for my view on this Stolz (2010: 46).



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Epistemological Issues A second problem is epistemological. If we compare “religious groups” and “society” in various dimensions, do we not risk reifying (naturalizing, essentializing) both the “groups” and “society”? Concerning social groups, the following points have been argued (Wimmer 2008, Carens/Williams 1996, Salzbrunn 2004): (1) “social groups” never exist “as such”, but are continually socially constructed and reconstructed in contextually situated interactions, (2) “social groups” are always internally differentiated, very often it does not make sense to speak of “Judaism”, but one should speak of “Judaisms”, (3) Individuals always have multiple belongings and variable levels of allegiance and identifications with different groups, giving rise to “hyÂ�bridÂ�ity” (4) social groups are often not clearly delimitated geographically, but may exist in “transnational or trans-geographical spaces”. ThereÂ�fore, these authors continue, it becomes problematic to speak of “the Jews”, “the Muslims”, “the Protestants” and to compare them, since we depict these “groups” falsely as “solid objects” (Grillo 2003: 165).14 Explanatory sociology acknowledges with these authors that religious groups as well as society are continually constructed, internally diverse, including individuals with multiple belongings and sÂ� howing often unclear delimitations. However, it would be dangerous to fall into another kind of essentialism and to think that social groups exist only in interactions, only situationally, that individuals have only situational group memberships and that everything is transnational anyway (this might be called “methodological fluidism”; compare with Wimmer 2008: 982). From the point of view of explanatory sociology, then, the way a group distinguishes itself from its surroundings, the stability of its membership, and the extent to which there is multiple belonging are empirical (and not definitional!) questions. It is precisely one of the goals of explanatory sociology to show just how much various groups differ from their surroundings and if we can really speak of a “sociological group” or if we are just facing a collectivity constructed by an observer. In order to do this, however, we have to construct initially a unity to be observed (e.g. compare self-declared Muslims with self-declared Jews,

14 ╇ Concerning society, Wimmer/Glick-Schiller (2003) have directed our attention to the possibly damaging influences of “methodological nationalism”. By a priori assuming “society” to be the “national society”, it may well be that “society” is equally reified (naturalized, essentialized) and its constructed nature is veiled.

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self-declared men with self-declared women etc.). “We’ve got”, to quote Eileen Barker (2006), “to draw the line somewhere”. Measuring the Social Integration of Religious Groups Having defined integration and looked at some normative and epistemological issues, we may now turn to the question of how the concept can be measured. In order not to keep the discussion on a purely theoretical level, I will directly apply my methodological proposals to the Swiss situation. My goal is not to analyze the (non-) integration of religious groups in Swiss society in a comprehensive way – that would be far beyond the scope of one article. Rather, I seek to illustrate the method with the help of concrete examples. In order to do this, I use two data sets: (1) the data of the 2000 census (Bovay 2004). This census gives information about all the inhabitants of Switzerland (N = 7’288’010). Since this is a census, we can compare the different religious groups (even the small ones) on possible integration dimensions. (2) Data from the National Congregation Study Switzerland (NCSS). This is the first representative study of local religious groups (congregations) in SwitzerÂ� land, all religions included. 1043 congregation leaders were interviewed by telephone with the help of a standardized questionnaire, on mainly descriptive matters concerning “their” congregation. The response rate was 60.9% (cooperation rate 87.6%).15 This data set equally allows comparing different religious traditions, even the small ones.16 A Proposal as to How to Measure the “Social Integration” of Religious Groups In order to render integration measurable, I propose to use five different  dimensions that are then measured with several indicators. Thus, I  distinguish cultural, structural, legal, interactional and identity dimensions of integration (Figure 2). The cultural integration dimension  involves cultural competences, basic values, norms, beliefs and

╇ See for the details: Monnot 2010. ╇ We conducted a census of all religious groups in Switzerland. We counted 5734 religious groups (all religions included). The census data allowed us to overrepresent small religious groups in our sample. See for the details : Monnot 2010. Since my goal is only to illustrate the general approach, I present findings only for a selected number of religious traditions and groups. 15 16



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Figure 2.╇ Dimensions and indicators of integration of religious groups Dimensions

Possible Indicators

Cultural position

Cultural capital, national language(s), basic values, â•… norms, beliefs, practices Structural position Formal education, professional status, income, quality â•… of places of residence Individual rights, collective rights Legal position Interaction Interaction with social environment (at work, friendships, â•… marriage), type of interaction (posi-tive vs. negative, â•… discrimination, avoidance of interaction); collective â•… activities focused on society (e.g. social activities, â•… political activities, evangelizing strategies). Identification Identification with society, with the state, with the â•…constitution

practices. The structural integration dimension refers to education, professional status, income or quality of places of residence. The legal integration dimension is directed to individual and collective rights. The interaction dimension may be measured by the frequency and type of interactions with the societal surrounding as the majority of other groups, and/or if they take part in public life as collective actors in a similar way (e.g. by welfare and social work, transmitting values, interreligious dialogue). Identification integration, finally, is concerned with the extent to which the members of the religious group and respectively the community as a collective actor identify with the society, the state and the constitution. As explained above, we will not use these dimensions in order to claim that some groups are “integrated” and others are not or that some groups show a “lack of integration”. Note that in order to do so, we would need a fixed standard of comparison that would have to be arbitrarily chosen (and depends strongly on one’s value-laden project of an ideal integrated society). This cannot be avoided. Whoever speaks of integration uses – explicitly or implicitly – such a standard of comparison. The advantage of our proposal is that this fact is made explicit and that readers, if they want to judge some findings as to integration or lack thereof, are forced to make a conscious, reasoned choice as to what standard they want to use. My point is that even without the result showing whether or not a given group is integrated, the comparison of religious groups along integration dimensions and their mechanism-based explanation may have

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important functions. As we will see in the examples below, it may show that common knowledge about differences between a religious group and society is empirically false, that differences exist in places that one would not have expected, that certain groups normally thought to be very different are very much like other groups that are thought to be “integrated” etc. In short, public discourse is confronted with social science facts. Cultural Positions Let us first look at cultural position or cultural capital. This is the most visible and most often mentioned dimension of (non-)integration of religious groups. When it is said that a certain religious group is not integrated (and, perhaps, that it may on principle never be integrated), then usually this statement refers to the religious culture, the knowledge, values, norms or typical practices of a religious group that seem to hinder integration. Indeed, in this dimension we sometimes find extraordinary cultural differences between the religious group and its societal environment (see as a classical text Wilson 1990). When it comes to basic knowledge, for example, concerning the Â�faculty of speaking the national language(s) or concerning fundamental knowledge about the organizational sequences of events in society, we may already find strong differences between religious groups. ConcernÂ� ing values, beliefs, practices and norms, we also find a host of ways in which members of religious groups may differ from each other and from societal mainstream beliefs, practices and norms. Thus, Raëlians believe in extraterrestrials; scientologists see themselves as thetans; neoTemplars invoke secret masters. Jehovah’s Witnesses engage in doorto-door evangelization; Mormons started out with polygamy; Muslim women may wear the hijab or niqab; married ultra-orthodox Jewish men may wear a shtreimel; Pentecostals may enter into trance, heal and exorcize17; and Hare Krishna members may dance through cities in long Indian robes. To a certain extent, such cultural differences are trivial. Yet, it is precisely in this domain that we often find complaints that certain groups are “not integrated”. Often, when beliefs, practices and norms are outside the limit of what is considered “normal”, they are negatively sanctioned, either by public opinion or by the law (Pahud de Mortanges 1997). Examples are (religiously legitimized) polygamy, 17

╇ For an interesting comparative case study see Pace (2008).



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sexual actions with children, refusal of medical treatment (in general or concerning specific points), the wearing of religious garments (hijab, turban, soutane). Just what is outside the limits of the “normal” may differ tremendously, depending on the country, region, culture, and even the individual. In order to illustrate how the cultural position of different religious communities may be measured concretely, I compare religious groups along two indicators – language use and acceptance of homosexuality. It goes without saying that many other indicators could be used (and, in the case of a comprehensive analysis, would have to be used).18 When asking the question of who uses a national language as their main language, we already note interesting differences between different religious groups (Figure 3). Among the Reformed, the Roman Catholics, the Christ Catholics, the Evangelicals or the Jews, more than 80% of the members use a national language as their main language. In comparison, Â� we find much lower rates among the Orthodox, Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus. In these communities, maximally 50% of members use a nationÂ�al language as their main language – among the Hindus it is as low as 30%. This may be explained by the fact that we are here dealing with immigrants (often belonging to the first generation) (see below 5.1 and 5.4). Homosexuality is increasingly accepted in Swiss society (Figure 4). A tolerant view in this respect can be found among the Reformed, the Christ Catholics, and the Buddhists; a large majority of their members belong to congregations that accept homosexuals as full members. On the other hand, many Orthodox (28.4%), Muslims (41.7%) and especially Evangelicals (62.7%) are members of communities that do not Â� embers. accept homosexuals (who live their relationship openly) as full m If acceptance of homosexuals is seen as necessary in a “good” religion, then these religions are “less integrated” concerning this specific domain. Structural Positions The structural position of religious groups may be – from a sociological point of view – even more important than the cultural position just mentioned. The members of religious groups may differ in typical ways concerning their level of formal education, professional status, income or quality of area of residence. If the members of a religious group lag 18 ╇ Also, for the sake of simplicity, I only use bivariate analysis for illustrative purposes. In a comprehensive analysis, multivariate methods would have to be used.

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jörg stolz Figure 3.╇National language as main language

Source: Bovay (2004: 116). Census 2000. The population consists of individuals living in Switzerland.

Figure 4.╇ Would openly gay or lesbian couples in a committed relationship be permitted to be full-fledged members of your congregation?

Source: NCSS. The data were weighted with the Variable NumTotalParish. The data refer to individuals, not congregations.



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behind in the dimensions mentioned, this factor may have important consequences. Because of lower formal education, the members of a religious group may face on average lower probabilities of professional upward mobility.19 This may have the consequence that the group may show higher rates of unemployment, violence or criminality. From outside, the group may be stereotyped as less “respectable”; and it may become the focus of discrimination and prejudice more easily. This, in turn, may give rise to tendencies of internal responses such as fundamentalism. A lower income on average may also limit the possibilities of action of the religious group as a collective actor. Thus, due to their considerable financial means, the Jewish communities in Zurich were able to put their own cemeteries into operation. The Muslims initially sought to do likewise, but for financial reasons were unable to do so. This led to the demand for publicly funded Muslim cemeteries, a highly controversial subject (Richner 2006: 112ff.). Finally, a low formal education on average may have the effect that the group is less capable of forming its own elite that can represent and defend the group in public, interact with the societal elite in general and lobby politicians. Let us take again an example. In Switzerland, the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and OrthoÂ� dox show distinctly fewer individuals with higher professional status, more individuals who are without professional training and a higher rate of unemployment than the Reformed, Catholics, Evangelicals and individuals without religion. Among Muslims, this has (among other things) the effect that there is no elite that may currently counter the strong anti-Islamic sentiments and prejudice in the media (Rebetez/ Lorentzi 2003). It is also interesting to see that the Jews are extremely well educated on average. This, in turn, is mirrored in highly effective  public relations work and political lobbying by Jewish groups in Switzerland. Legal Positions A fourth dimension of integration concerns legal issues. Religious groups can differ as to the legal status both concerning their existence as collective actors and as a number of individual members. In Switzerland, and on the collective level, we may point to the fact that religious groups may or may not be recognized as institutions of public law (Pahud de 19 ╇ The disadvantage may be intensified by a perceived “cultural distance” and social closure.

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Mortanges 2007, Famos 2007). In most cantons, the Reformed and Roman Catholic, in some cantons also the Christ Catholic and the Jewish Community and in one canton Anthroposophy are thus recognized. Depending on the canton, the rights and duties following from this recognition may vary considerably; normally, it entails the right to levy church taxes, to offer certain services of religious “public service” (e.g. religious instruction in schools, pastoral care in prisons and hospitals) as well as financial advantages (Streiff 2008). All other religious groups are organized on the basis of private law. On an individual level, it is of central importance if the members of the group are citizens or – if that is not the case – what kind of status of residence they possess. For religious groups, the citizenship of their members may be important for various reasons. Citizens may vote and thus help their communities gain political influence. Citizenship will also legitimate the opinions of individuals who publicly defend their religious group. They can now present themselves as “Swiss Muslims” or “Swiss Buddhists”, having the effect that the religious group cannot be just rejected as “foreign”. Looking at the question of citizenship empirically, we see that religious groups in Switzerland differ tremendously (Figure 5). We find a high rate of foreigners among the Orthodox (78.1%), Muslims (88.3%), Figure 5.╇ Religious groups and Swiss citizenship

Source: Bovay (2004: 119. Census 2000. The population consists of individuals living in Switzerland.



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Buddhists (47.8%) and Hindus (92.5%). The reason is, of course, that these are immigrants, often belonging to the first generation.20 ConverseÂ�ly, the large majority of the Reformed, Christ Catholics and Evangelicals are citizens. From a sociological point of view, the granting of citizenship to immigrants and their offspring may be seen as an important instrument of integration. In this respect, it is interesting to note that in Switzerland naturalization is relatively restrictive, leading to the phenomenon that members of the third generation of immigrants may legally still be “foreigners” (Tabin 1999: 84). Interaction21 Another possible integration dimension refers to interaction. Here, we look at the frequency and type (positive/negative) of contacts between the religious group and society. Important indicators are the frequency of friendships and marriages between members of the religious group and non-members. Other important indicators are the frequency and intensity of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination of society with respect to the religious group – and vice versa. Let us again look at just one example, the discrimination of religious groups (Figure 6). AccordÂ� ing to NCSS data, 37.5% of Jews, 18.7% of Evangelicals and 11.8% of Muslims belong to communities in which some members have been discriminated against in the last 5 years. On the other hand, we find hardly any complaints concerning religious discrimination among the Reformed, Roman Catholics, Christ Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus and (astonishingly) among the New Religious Movements. Independently of how these results have to be interpreted – we see that concerning these integration dimensions there are important differences between religious groups. Our comparison of different religious groups along various iÂ� ntegration dimensions has led to a much more complex picture than what is usually depicted by those speaking of the “integration of religious groups”. We found that, in Switzerland, the Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims or OrthoÂ� dox are somewhat (and sometimes strongly) disadvantaged in various integration dimensions: structurally, legally, culturally (languages!) etc. 20 ╇ Within the category “foreigner”, different types of permits lead to greatly varying  rights and duties in Switzerland. See www.bfm.admin.ch/content/bfm/de/home/ themen.html. 21 ╇ Due to lack of space, I do not discuss the identification dimension of integration.

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Figure 6.╇Have members of your religious community been discriminated against because of their membership during the last 5 years?

Source: NCSS. The data were weighted with the Variable NumTotalParish. The data refer to individuals, not congregations.

The case of Jews and Evangelicals is very different. Jews have high measures in structural and legal dimensions, but they report problems of discrimination. Evangelicals do not differ much from a societal average when it comes to structural, legal or linguistic dimensions – but they differ very strongly when it comes to various values. Also, they see themselves as discriminated against more often than other religious groups. The Reformed in Switzerland find themselves in yet a completely different situation. They seem to be in all integration dimensions just like the Swiss average – and it is precisely this that worries them. If a group does not distinguish itself from its surroundings – why should one want to be a member? This is why, among the Reformed, there is so much talk about the necessity of “clarifying the Reformed identity” (Stolz/Ballif 2010). Explanations: Mechanisms that Explain Differences in Integration Dimensions Until now, we have enumerated possible integration dimensions, have tried to measure them and, with their help, have compared different religious groups. Explanatory sociology, however, will not be satisfied



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to just describe the differences, but will also set out to explain them. According to the techniques of explanatory sociology, we seek out the causal mechanisms that create – as a result of the intended and unintended effects of actions – the differences in the integration dimensions. In what follows, I sketch six of the most important mechanisms influencing integration dimensions. It goes without saying that the discussion of every one of these mechanisms could be expanded into an article or book of its own. Here, my goal is mainly to show that there is a multiplicity of mechanisms at work. In specific historical cases, we usually find several mechanisms that operate simultaneously and the task of the empirically working sociologist will be to show just what mechanisms are working in a specific socio-historic context. Immigration Effects Many structural, cultural or legal differences between religious groups and society may easily be explained with the help of immigration effects. The first generation of immigrants has learnt a language and certain values in its youth. If a whole group from a certain country immigrates into another country, certain differences in several dimensions of integration become very probable: •  The language is often different. The first generation of immigrants often speaks the national language(s) less well than autochthones (sometimes they don’t speak it at all). The language from their emigration context, seen as a form of social capital, is often devalued (except, possibly, in the immigration group itself). •  The “typical” socio-professional positions of immigrants may be very different on average from those of autochthones and depend both on the emigration and immigration context. It may be that the general socio-professional level in both contexts is different, or it may be that the immigration context selects immigrants from specific socioprofessional backgrounds (e.g. “cheap labor” – or, on the contrary, “high tech specialists”). •  The values and religions that are seen as “normal” may differ sharply. The world value survey shows how various values (especially concerning gender roles and sexuality norms) differ strongly between different countries (Norris/Inglehart 2004). An important point is that members of the first generation often have neither the time nor the opportunity to learn the language and many

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cultural practices of the receiving context perfectly. Frequently, they cannot make up for the structural disadvantages (compared with autochthones) they have accepted by immigrating. It is therefore often the second generation that may have the chance of overcoming such barriers. In this way, we can easily explain many differences concerning “values” and “religion” between immigrated groups and the receiving society. The values and religious beliefs are often “normal” in the emigration society, but may look very unusual in the receiving context. Note that the differences between the religious group and society result in unintended consequences of individual actions (Boudon 1983). The individuals pursue their own goals (migration, better pay, more security) but thereby produce differences in the integration dimensions. Note furthermore that, until this point in our reasoning, we did not have to assume an interaction between the religious group and society in order to explain the differences. A second mechanism may lie in the increase or decrease of religiosity of social groups due to their new immigration context (Bruce 1999: 24). For immigrants, it may be advantageous to gather together in socioreligious networks and groups in the receiving country. In such groups, they may get support, information, social capital, and sometimes even political influence (Elwert 1982). As a result, it is possible that Â�immigrants in the receiving context become more religious than they have ever been before (Herberg 1960, Warner 1998). It is important to understand that such integration into the religious group may have positive as well as negative consequences for the integration of the individual into the overall society – this depends on yet other factors.22 On the other hand, migration may also lead to a decrease in religiosity. Migrating iÂ� ndividuals may find themselves in a situation in the receiving context where their hitherto “natural” beliefs and practices are neither socially expected nor supported. Without such support, religiosity may then falter easily. A third immigration-related mechanism is given by the fact that whole groups of ethnic and religious groups may experience upward mobility when a new immigration group turns up and takes the lowest positions in the immigration context. It is now almost unimaginable that the “foreigners par excellence” in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s were Italians. They were thought to cause what was then called 22 ╇ Elwert (1982). Important factors include, among others, the extent of social closure of both society and the religious group as well as the type of integration policy used by the state.



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the “Ueberfremdung” (“foreignization”) of Switzerland.23 Other nationalities followed: Portuguese, Serbs, Bosnians, Turks and others – and suddenly Italians did not seem to be so “foreign” after all. A replication study even showed that in only 25 years, Italians had made it to the most likable group of all foreign groups (2001), indeed, that they were not really seen as “foreigners” anymore. Such phenomena can be found all over the world (For a U.S. example, one might cite the Irish Catholics; see Herberg 1960: 8). A fourth mechanism related to migration is linked to the spatial segregation of religious groups. Often we find that religious and ethnic communities live in special areas. In large cities we find “Chinatown”, “Little Italy”, “Small Istanbul” etc. This is often not so much the result of central planning or discrimination. As shown by Thomas Schelling (2006 [1978]: 137ff.), such segregation can also be caused by individual, opportunity-driven actions and self-reinforcing effects. The settlement of an individual in a specific area makes this area more attractive to members of the same social group and less attractive to members of other groups. This may lead to yet other settlements or moves away from the area, changing the attractiveness of the area even more. In short, a self-reinforcing process has set in. In this way, a strong segregation may emerge, which no single individual (or planner, for that matter) has consciously intended. Effects of Religious Norms and Cultures Sometimes, differences in integration dimensions have to be explained through the norms and the culture of the religious group. Religious symbol systems often include ethical ideas and norms (e.g. rules concerning food, clothing, rituals, behavior), that may influence integration dimensions in important ways. If Jehovah’s Witnesses do not identify with the State (and will not salute a flag), we can explain this by the fact that their norms demand such behavior (Kephart/Zellner 1988: 291). If the Amish are less educated than the average of individuals in the U.S., we can explain this by the fact that the Amish reject higher education (Kephart/Zellner 1988: 39). If Evangelicals evangelize in a way seen by many non-Evangelicals as problematic, then they are doing so as a reaction to the so-called “great commission” (Mt 28: 16–20), that is, they are

23

╇ There is a close parallel to what is today called the “Islamisation” of Swiss society.

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following (from a sociological perspective) the group norms (Favre/ Stolz (2007: 130). One of the most important points concerns marriage rules. Various religious groups encourage or prescribe marriage inside the group. In Judaism, a Rabbi will normally refrain from performing the marriage rite if both marriage partners are not of Jewish faith (Robinson 2000). In Islam, a Muslim woman is in principle not allowed to marry a non-Muslim. While a Muslim man is allowed to marry a non-Muslim woman, the children should nevertheless be educated as Muslims (Murata/Chittick 1994). In Switzerland until the 1950s, “mixed marriages” (Catholic/Protestant) were often seen as problematic. We therefore cannot deny the fact that there are cases in which members of religious groups, because of their norms and culture, do not want to integrate themselves into the society. At the same time, it is obvious that it is difficult to evaluate this finding. If, for example, small religious groups abstained from “discriminatory” marriage rules, they simply would vanish in a rather short time. A certain degree of culturally prescribed non-integration is thus necessary for any religious group and will have to be accepted by society, if we do not want to call the existence of religion in general into question. It is important to note that this cultural mechanism is probably by far the most current explanation heard in everyday and media discourse. Whenever groups are said not to be integrated, it is thought to be “because of their culture” or “because of their religion”. While – as we have seen – there may be some truth in these statements, they may just as well be very fallacious (Stolz/Baumann 2007). Let us therefore note three points of caution (compare to point 3.3 above): •  Religions are normally internally diverse; they do not form a unified “block”. Thus, Muslims in Switzerland differ tremendously Â�(differences between Sunnites, Alevis, Shiites, Sufi; differences between different language and ethnic groups). In analogous fashion, there are tremendous differences between different types of Protestants, e.g. Reformed, Pentecostals, Exclusive Brethren etc. •  Individuals are (very often) free to decide just how far they would like to follow the prescriptions of their religious group. Just because I see myself as Reformed, a Muslim, Jew or Hindu, does not yet mean that I adhere to the respective beliefs, participate in the rites, obey (or even know) the rules of the religion. Many Muslims in Switzerland are not practicing their religion; most Jews do not eat Kashrut (or only in a very limited manner); most Catholics are only mildly interested in what the Pope thinks about contraception.



the “social integration” of religious groups in society 105

•  Religions are normally not unambiguously defined through their holy texts and rites. As symbol systems, they may change. Holy texts and traditions can be reinterpreted, selectively received and adapted. For example, from finding texts in the Hebrew Bible or the Koran that legitimize violence, we cannot infer that Jews or Muslims will generally be prone to violence. Neither would it be feasible to suspect that Christians were generally peaceful, just because we do not find many verses in the New Testament that legitimize violence (Pury 2004). The bottom line is that we may indeed sometimes explain through cultural mechanisms, but that we should be very careful not to assume that all (official) members of a group are necessarily practicing and their behavior completely determined by their religion (Rex 1994). Effects of Social Closure Very often, differences in integration dimensions are due to social Â�closure. Social closure is given when a group or the members of a group  defend their share of goods and resources by excluding nongroup members on the basis of criteria of any kind (Weber 1985[1922]: 23; Murphy 1984: 548). Frequently used criteria are property, formal education, gender, language, appearance, origin, dialect – or, of course, religious preference. Social closure may be formalized in laws and organizational rules; or it may find its expression culturally in Â�stereotypes, prejudice and everyday discrimination (Stolz 2006: 549). Whatever its form – social closure may render the integration of the religious group or its member impossible, even if they wanted to integrate. Thus, for centuries, the Jews in Switzerland were permitted only to practice a very limited number of professions (Kupfer/Weingarten 1999: 17); the CathoÂ� lics in the canton of Vaud before 1870 were not allowed to build church towers24; in the 1920s a popular movement tried to ban Anthroposophy from Switzerland (Nägeli 2003: 57) and even today many individuals in Switzerland feel discriminated against because of their religious beliefs (Gisler 1999, Stolz 2006). From this perspective, the ban of minarets in Switzerland is, of course, nothing but a new strategy of social closure.25 It excludes Muslims from taking a place in the public sphere – while allowing other religious groups to do so. In the history of religion, 24 ╇“Quand Lausanne bannissait les clochers catholiques”, Le Temps, 24 décembre 2008. 25 ╇ The Swiss voted on 29 Nov. 2009, with 57.5% voting yes that the constitution should forbid the building of minarets in Switzerland (Art. 72 Abs. 3).

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there are myriads of examples showing that such strategies of social closure – prejudice, discrimination, persecution – may enhance the ethnicreligious feeling of belonging of the discriminated group. Such was the case when Christians reacted to persecution in the first four centuries (Gonzalez 1984) and when Mormons had to face their detractors in the 19th century (Brodie 1971), just as it is in the Raëlian community today (McCann 2004: 83ff). Conversely, a very tolerant and open society may pose a problem to religious groups exactly because of its openness: the feeling of togetherness may vanish, once the social closure is gone. This is of much concern to Jewish groups in Switzerland (Guggenheim 1992: 89). Generational Effects Often, integration dimensions are strongly influenced by generational effects. Theoretically, these effects emerge because members of different generations have available to them different typical (material, cultural, technical) resources, find themselves in different typical situations (e.g. are shaped by different key societal events) and are differently socialized by their parent generation (e.g. religiously, concerning vÂ� alues) (Stolz 2009a).26 As a result, they develop different levels of religious beliefs and practices and attributes in integration dimensions. Even in religious groups that have been around for a long time and are well established, generational effects are of utmost importance. If the religious beliefs, rites and norms cannot be transmitted in a convincing way to the new generation, a religious group may “secularize” itself rather quickly and tend to dissolve in the society at large (comp. to Voas/ Alasdair 2005). In western societies, one of the important points seems to be that new generations grow up in a much more strongly modernized society than their respective parent generations did, leading to new values and beliefs (Giordan 2009: 337). The importance of generational effects seems to be even more important in the case of immigrant religious groups and new religious movements. Let us look first at immigration groups. The first generation brings its language, ethnic identity and religion from its emigration context. What was often (not always) unproblematic in the emigration context suddenly becomes an important identity marker in the Diaspora situation. Due to various reasons (see above 5.1), many members of the first generation retain the Â�language 26

╇ The classical text is Mannheim (1978[1928]).



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of their emigration context as their main language and their ethnic and religious identifications often remain important or are even intensified. The members of the second generation, on the other hand, grow up in the Diaspora situation; they are immediately socialized both in the language, culture and religion of their parents and in the language and culture of the immigration context. Second generation members therefore often see the religion and culture that is linked to their family identity as “different” from the identity options that are presented by school and society (Hämmig 2000; Juhasz/Mey 2001). Ethnic and religious identities are increasingly seen as a contingent set of traits that may be chosen or avoided or that are ascribed from outside (Peek 2005: 229, Buchard 2010: 47ff.).27 These possibilities of choice seem to have led to strong secularization tendencies in at least some immigration communities in Europe in the second and third generation (see Baumann/ Salentin for Hindus in Germany).28 After a new religious group originates (due to religious innovation or splitting-off), the emergence of a second and third generation leads to “institutionalizing” effects (Weber 1985[1922]: 661). From the charismatic-Â�idealistic time of the beginnings, the group is often led back to some basic facts of reality and a more sober view of the world. The world is – other than predicted – not coming to an end just yet; the charismatic founder dies and is replaced by a less charismatic successor (or even a governing council); the children have to be fed and educated. An important point is that the children of the second and third generation often have not had the chance to know the charismatic leader personally. For them, religion is not so much about opting for a deviant lifestyle (as their parents did), but about staying in family normality (Niebuhr 1957: 54). The group thus becomes more traditional and conventional – and often seeks a more peaceful relationship to its societal surroundings already at this stage. Effects of Non-Synchronicity Sometimes, differences between a religious group and society may be explained by non-synchronicity. In this case, the differences are not so 27 ╇ Very often, already the second generation (almost certainly the third generation) will switch to the majority language of the receiving context as their “main language” (Alba 1999). 28 ╇ Dihl/Koenig 2009, on the other hand, show a remarkably stable religiosity of second generation Muslims in Germany.

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much due to the interaction between the group and society, but rather because there have been developments in one context that were absent in the other. Quite often we see that society changes, but the religious group remains as it is. Often, it will then seem to be increasingly less integrated – although it really hasn’t changed at all. Good examples are the Amish or the Hasidim who refused to change their way of dressing at a certain point in time – and therefore now appear to be completely outmoded (Kephart/Zellner 1998). In a similar vein, many individuals today do not understand why the Roman Catholics adhere to practices such as celibacy or exorcism.29 On the other hand, it is also possible that the society remains unchanged while the religious group evolves dramatically. Thus, the Oneida Community already invented free love in the 19th century, an innovation unheard-of at the time, and which brought the group into terrible conflict with society (Kephart/Zellner 1998: 52). Effects of Interaction between a Religious Group and Society In the case of an interaction effect, the religious group and society influence each other, leading to (possibly) self-reinforcing effects (Mayntz/ Nedelmann 1987, Tabin 1999: 15). Such self-reinforcing effects may be positive or negative; for example, there may be an increasing détente or conversely a build-up of tension and conflict. Very often, such interaction effects are due to yet other mechanisms that have already been mentioned above. A frequent scenario is when society creates a social closure and hinders the religious group from access to various resources. This may lead the religious group to withdraw and to emphasize its own ethnic-religious culture. This in turn may be seen as threatening from the point of view of society. Societal groups and institutions may thus amplify their social closure and discrimination – and already our selfreinforcing mechanism is well underway. In the history of religions we find countless cases of often terrible conflicts, but also times of easing of tensions, which may be modeled by such an interaction mechanism. A good example of an escalating conflict is the affair of the Divine Light Center in Winterthur (Switzerland) in the 1960s/70s. In textbook-like fashion, the tension between the religious group and its neighborhood escalated step by step. Every action on one side led to an enhanced

29 ╇ The Newspaper 24heures (3 April 2007) thought it sensational the the new Catholic exorcist “believed in the devil”. But if even he doesn’t – who will?



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negative reaction on the other side. Distrust and reproaches were Â� followed by complaints, spying, court actions – and finally burglary, poisoning and even the throwing of a bomb on the house of a politician. In the trial following these events, the leader of the group, Swami Omkarananda, was sentenced to several years (Mayer 1993: 311). Another prominent example (in which hundreds of people were poisoned with salmonella) is the self-reinforcing conflict between Baghwan’s Ranch and the population of Antelope (Oregon, USA) in the 1980s (Gordon 1987). A case of an interaction that escalated for a certain time, only to decrease in tension ever after, is the history of the Salvation Army in Switzerland (Mayer 1985). Effects of Integration and Recognition Policy A seventh class of mechanisms refers to effects of state policy of integration and recognition of religious communities (Bouma 1999, Bouchard/ Taylor 2008, Cattacin et al 2003, Baumann/Stolz 2007, Rath et al. 1999). State action may influence the position of religious groups in various ways. One of the most important questions in the field of policy of integration and recognition is the question of how large a sphere of development and influence is given to religious groups on a collective level (Münch 1998). This is sometimes framed as the question of the position adopted by states on assimilation, multicultural or accommodation. An assimilation position would like to restrict the collective rights of religious communities as much as possible and limit freedom of religion to the individual. Collective rights (e.g. leading to groups with their own schools, cemeteries, medical institutions, media, and courts) would lead, according to this position, to “parallel societies” with the ultimate effect of destroying the integration of overall society. A multicultural position, on the other hand, strives for extensive collective rights of religious groups and has confidence that the development of religious groups will eventually further the integration of the overall society. A middle and accommodation position attempts to combine multicultural and assimilation elements and allows for at least some collective rights of religious groups (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2009). As has been shown above, explanatory sociology is less interested in the ideological “correctness” of the various positions. Rather, it analyzes the specific effects of different integration policies under various socio-historical cÂ� onditions. In particular, unintended consequences are of interest (Voas 2008). For example, a multicultural policy may give religious groups a larger sphere and freedom to engage in intolerant behavior with respect to their own

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members (e.g. discrimination against women, children, homosexuals, non-complying members). They also may avoid coming into contact with cultural diversity and general rules of society more easily (Bruce 2002: 204ff). Assimilation policy that suppresses community criteria may exclude individuals who are not prepared to assimilate themselves. The latter may then be forced go underground, which may increase extreme positions. But even accommodation policy may have various unintended effects. For example, if the state and a religious group negotiate and find an accommodation solution, a part of the autochthon population may feel deceived and confirmed in their xenophobic or religiophobic feelings (Richner 2006, Beckford 2003: 94).30 Conclusion In this paper, I have shown how explanatory sociology (or: the sÂ� ociology of social mechanisms) may treat questions of the “social integration” of religious groups in society. I have argued that due to its non-normative stance, explanatory sociology will abstain from deciding whether or not a religious group is “well integrated”, what standard we should use to measure “good integration” or what integration goals should be set by society. Some of the crucial questions therefore cannot be answered by explanÂ� atory sociology, since their answering would presuppose value judgments. What we can do, however, is to take integration dimensions that are thought to be important both in society and the scientific literature, to measure these dimensions with social indicators and then Â�empirically to compare different religious groups. The differences along the integration dimensions can then be explained with the help of various social mechanisms. In this paper, I have tried to show the general approach and the examples have only been illustrative. In a specific application, we would have to decide and research (1) what integration dimensions we would consider useful; (2) what indicators to use; (3) what context parameters are given. Then we would have to analyze just what combination of mechanisms could have produced the empirically observable 30 ╇ Another promising typology has been proposed by Jepperson (2000) and applied to the question of the recognition of Muslims by Koenig (2005). This typology crosstabulates the question of how “corporate” (corporate vs. associational) and how “statist” (statist vs. societal) countries are. This gives four types of polity models that seem promising for future research on public recognition of religious groups.



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differences between religious groups on integration dimensions. I have argued that such an approach has distinctive merits. In my view, it may well be used to challenge public discourse and to ground it in eÂ� mpirically observable facts. The comparison of different groups may show that religious groups that are thought to be “not integrated” may not differ as much as one had thought, that the “real differences” lie elsewhere than had been suspected or that the mechanisms at work are completely different for different groups. In our illustrations, we have seen that while in public discourse it is especially Muslims that are seen as “different” and “not integrated”, when we compare different groups in possible integration dimensions, a very different picture emerges. For example, concerning cultural positions, we have seen that Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox groups are comparable to Muslims when it comes to the percentage of individuals who do not use a national language as their main language (Hindus and Buddhists show even less). Or we have seen that while it is true that homosexuality is seen in a critical way in a number of Muslim groups, Evangelicals see the issue in a much more critical way. Or that, in Switzerland, Jews more often see themselves as discriminated against than Muslims do, and that Evangelicals also show a certain extent of perceived discrimination. When it comes to explanation, we have seen that not one but many mechanisms may be at work and that this factor may explain observed differences. Some differences may be explained with immigration, some with norms and culture, and others with social closure, generational effects, non-synchronicity, interaction or integration and recognition policy. Which mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) works in a specific case has to be seen empirically. As we see, my goal in this article has been the illustration of the general approach. The concrete explanation of specific integration configurations is to be done in future work.

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PART II

RELIGION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY

CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE WEST: PRIVATIZATION OR PUBLIC REVITALIZATION? Johan Roeland, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers, Willem de Koster, Peter Mascini, and Jeroen van der Waal Introduction “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace’â•›” (Stark 1999: 269). Stark’s words, published just before the turn of the century, may count on much approval among sociologists of religion today. Secularization theory has been discredited because of its inability to account for religious change in the modern world (e.g., Berger, 1999; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Houtman and Mascini, 2002) and because of its sheer broadness and lack of specificity, as emphasized by Hadden (1987: 587), for instance, when he noted that it is a “hotchpotch of loosely employed ideas rather than a systematic theory”. Secularization theory’s two principal subtheses, the ‘decline-ofreligion thesis’ and the ‘privatization thesis’ (Casanova, 1994), have both become increasingly contested and recent research even suggests that these two aspects of secularization may develop in a remarkably uneven way. That idea is put forward by Achterberg et al. (2009), who point out that the decline of Christian religion in the West spawns its public revitalization rather than its further privatization. This paper elaborates on this by assessing the empirical merits of two objections that suggest that these recent findings may after all not contradict the established notion that religious decline and religious privatization occur in tandem. Privatization or Public Revitalization? Public Revitalization of Christian Religion in the West? According to the decline-of-religion thesis, one of the principal subtheses of secularization theory, religion continues to lose ground in modern societies. This thesis is critiqued nowadays by those who maintain that

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it is only institutionalized religion (read: churched Christianity) that loses ground in Western countries (with the possible exception of the United States), while in the non-Western world Islam and Christianity (in particular Pentecostalism) are thriving (Berger, 1999). Moreover, even in Western countries, and particularly in those where the Christian churches have declined most, post-Christian inner-life spiritualities of the ‘New Age’ variety have come to flourish in precisely the same period during which the Christian churches declined (Heelas and WoodÂ� head, 2005; Houtman and Aupers, 2007; Houtman and Mascini, 2002; Houtman et al., 2009). According to the privatization thesis, the second major subthesis of secularization theory, religion withdraws increasingly from the public realm and recedes into the private domain (Luckmann, 1967). Much like the decline-of-religion thesis, it has meanwhile become a major target of critique, with critics drawing attention to the renewed public assertiveness and vitality of contemporary religion, whether in politics (Casanova, 1994; Habermas, 2001), the media (Meyer and Moors, 2006), civil society (Casanova, 1994), and corporate life (Aupers, 2008[2004]; Aupers and Houtman, 2006; Costea et al., 2007). Somewhat surprisingly against the background of the almost universal acknowledgment that secularization is a multidimensional phenomenon, the possibility that religious decline and religious privatization may develop in different directions has received only scant attention in the literature. The typical (albeit usually tacit) assumption is hence that declining levels of Christian religiosity tend to coincide with a decline in its social significance for the faithful (e.g., Halman et al., 1999). In his plea for considering secularization as a decline in religion’s social significance for individual believers, Chaves (1994) does not seriously consider the alternative possibility of an increase in social significance either (see also: Lechner, 1991). In his historical critique of the debate on secularization, Gorski (2000: 162) on the other hand stresses the importance of having an eye for the possibility that different dimensions of secularization may not necessarily develop in a similar fashion. Acknowledging secularization’s multidimensionality, Bruce (2002: 39) also takes care to point out that “the secularization paradigm is not the sociological equivalent of synchronized swimming. It does not require or expect that all indices of religious vitality will decline at the same speed or evenly”. As a consequence, he argues, secularization theory – or, more correct and preferred by Bruce, “the secularization paradigm” – is not threatened by minor or exceptional counter indications:



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“We should never forget that [general social changes] are abstractions created by colour-washing the jagged edges of events in the real world. (…) The jagged bits are a problem only if it can be plausibly argued that a different abstraction can be better drawn from the same material. If there are too many exceptions, then we should consider painting ‘growth’ or even just ‘random fluctuations’. But some small reversals need not trouble the paradigm” (Idem: 40). In other words: if an all-out process of secularization is taking place, then we will surely find a number of outliers and exceptions, but the general pattern will be a decline of individual religiosity coinciding with a declining role of religion in driving preferences about the role of religion in public life. Yet, recent research suggests that religion’s social significance at the level of individual believers has increased rather than decreased. Based on research conducted in the Netherlands – a country in which personal religiosity has dropped to much lower levels than in virtually all other countries in the world (Norris and Inglehart, 2004) –, Dekker (2007) has presented evidence that the number of Christians who say that their belief is “significant” or “very significant” for them has increased by almost 30 per cent in recent decades (from 33 per cent in 1979 to 42 per cent in 2006). He concludes that “[t]he development already visible 10 years ago has continued during the last decade: faith plays a role in the lives of fewer and fewer people, yet becomes increasingly significant for those who do believe. Especially the number of believers who say that their faith is very significant in their lives has increased relatively very strongly” (Idem: 56; our translation from Dutch, emphasis in original). Recent research by Achterberg et al. (2009) has elaborated on this, building on the quintessentially Weberian notion that the study of secularization should not remain confined to the institutional level, as many a secularization theorist has done, but should address micro-level changes in religion’s significance for individual believers as well (Chaves, 1994; Turina, 2007). Besides a replication of the trend found by Dekker (2007) for the Netherlands, Achterberg et al. have yielded cross-national patterns for 18 Western countries that are consistent with the notion that in countries where Christian religion has declined most, aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are not weaker, but stronger than in other countries. What these recent findings suggest, in other words, is that religious decline coincides with religion’s public revitalization rather than with its further privatization: that while their numbers have shrunk, Christians in the West have become less rather than more willingly to accept the ‘secularist truce’, the secular contract that guarantees religious

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freedom on the one hand, yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm on the other (see also: Taylor, 2007). The present paper aims to elaborate on the aforementioned studies by critically interrogating the theoretical interpretation of the earlier findings in terms of religion’s public revitalization. It does so by scrutinizing the empirical merits of two objections to this theoretical interpretation that, if confirmed, suggest that religious decline and religious privatization may nonetheless develop in tandem after all. Two Objections to the Notion of Religion’s Public Revitalization Skepticism about the claim that religious decline spawns its public revitalization may firstly be informed by the suspicion that Christian longings for religion’s public revitalization in the most secular contexts are perhaps particularly present among the older cohorts of Christians. If such is the case, these aspirations are merely typical of the gradually waning older cohorts of Christians, while the younger ones are satisfied with the privatized status the secular truce intends for their creed. It is after all virtually uncontested that religious decline is driven by the logic of cohort replacement, with older and more typically Christian cohorts gradually dying out and being replaced by younger and less Christian ones (Bruce, 2009: 152; Voas, 2003; Voas and Crocket, 2005). Needless to say, then, such a finding would clearly contradict the notion that religious decline stimulates religion’s public revitalization rather than its further privatization. This notion instead leads us to expect not only that Christian aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are most typically found in the countries where Christian religion is least widespread (Hypothesis 1, which is identical to the hypothesis confirmed previously by Dekker (2007) and Achterberg et al. (2009)), but also that these aspirations are not only found among older Christians, but just as much among younger ones (Hypothesis 2). We also need to consider a second objection. This is the possibility that aspirations for religion’s public revitalization in the most secular contexts remain nothing more than mere longings that are not acted out and have no real public consequences. To study the validity of this second objection we will compare Christian religiosity’s role in shaping voting behavior across countries. If religious decline coincides with religious privatization, Christian religion must after all be less important for voting in countries where it has declined most; if, on the other hand, a public revitalization of religion takes place in these countries, it must play a more important role there.



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If the previous findings really signify a public revitalization of ChrisÂ� tian religion, we should not merely find widespread aspirations for the latter in countries where it has declined most (as Hypothesis 1 predicts), then, but also that Christians in these countries are more inclined than elsewhere to vote for rightist-Christian political parties (Hypothesis 3). Moreover, we should find for basically all countries under study that Christians with strong aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are more likely to actually vote for rightist parties than Christians for whom this aspiration is only weak (Hypothesis 4). Finally, the notion of religion’s public revitalization due to religious decline informs the hypothesis that these aspirations affect the voting behavior of Christians most strongly in countries where Christian religion has declined most (Hypothesis 5). These hypotheses contradict the notion that religion has lost its former political salience in the wake of its numerical decline. This notion is widespread in the literature, as Broughton and Ten Napel (2000: 4) note when they state that “[i]t has become common for religion not even to be mentioned in analyses of voting behaviour (…). If the topic of rÂ� eligion is mentioned at all, it is usually only in passing and largely to conclude that it doesn’t matter anymore, that religion has ‘declined’ in its impact on electoral choice”. Bruce (2003: 94ff) and Norris and Inglehart (2004) are only two examples of studies that maintain that religion’s political significance has declined along with processes of religious decline. These claims run counter to other studies, however, which maintain that religion remains a significant trigger for political behavior, including voting, in Western countries. Even though much of this literature is devoted to the United States (e.g., Lichterman, 2005; Weithman, 2002), where the Christian Right features a strong political presence and salience, studies from other countries maintain as well that the political salience of Christian religion has not declined (cf. Ruiter, 2008). If anything, these competing claims in the literature about changes in the political salience of religion point out that it would be premature to consider the debate about the implications of religious decline for religion’s public and political salience as closed. Data and Measurement Data To compare (aspirations for) religion’s public revitalization between counÂ�tries in which Christian religion has declined strongly and cÂ� ountries

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in which it still holds a firm position, we rely on the International Social Survey Program, Religious II 1998 data set. From this data source, we have selected the 18 western countries in which Christianity was the dominant religious tradition during the second half of the twentieth century, and in which it has declined during the last half century, albeit of course much more so in some than in others: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United States, Switzerland and West Germany. For the technical report of the International Social Survey Program data set, the reader is referred to www.issp.org. Because all our hypotheses pertain to differences in the public salience of Christian religion among Christians between countries in which this type of religion has declined less or more, we use country-level variables in our analysis that are hence based on statistical analyses for each of the 18 countries separately. We report our findings in the simplest possible manner, i.e., by means of plots that show the bivariate relationships between the country-level variables addressed by each of the hypotheses. Measurement Christian (non-)religiosity is measured simply as being a member of a Christian religious denomination or not. Respondents have been asked to indicate whether they were a member of a religious denomination and if so, which one. Those who indicated that they were not a member of a religious denomination, i.e. the non-religious, have been coded as 1, while those who indicated that they were a member of a Christian denomination have been coded as 0. Because the aim of this paper is to study the relationship between the proportion of non-Christians and (aspirations for) religion’s public revitalization, religions like Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have been coded as missing. Needless to say, those with a Christian denomination consisted almost exclusively of Catholics and Protestants from various strains.1 1 ╇ To be more precise: respondents indicating Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Druse, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Unitarian, Protestant (free church), Protestant (else), Orthodox, United Church CDN, Free Presbyterian, Brethren, Pentecostal, Mormon, Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventists, Hussites, and Other Christian religions as their denominations were coded as Christian.



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Birth cohort was coded into three equally sized categories. The young (year of birth: 1963–1980) were coded as 1, the old (born before 1943) were coded 3, and those born between 1943 and 1962 were coded as 2. Aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are defined as support for a role of religion in public life, thus indicating a preference for deprivatization of religion. It is measured by means of four Likert items that together yield a reliable scale (see Figure 1). Voting behavior has not been coded as voting for either a religious or a non-religious party, because specifically religious parties do not exist in all countries, although even then a particular rightist party tends to attract the bulk of the religious votes. Even though there are no specifically religious parties in the United States, for instance (Lane, McKay and Newton, 1997: 146–147), the rightist Republican Party assembles the bulk of the religious votes in this country. Therefore, instead of distinguishing religious from non-religious parties, we have made use of the coding of the various parties on a left-right scale by those who are responsible for the International Social Survey Program.2 Norris and Figure 1.╇ Factor and reliability analyses of the scale for aspirations for religion’s public revitalization. Item Do you think that churches and religious organizations â•… in this country have too much power or too little power? Would your country be a better country if religion had less â•…influence? How much do you agree or disagree that religious â•… leaders should not try to influence government â•…decisions? Religious leaders should not try to influence how â•… people vote in elections Eigen value R2 Cronbach’s α N

Factor loading 0.77 0.83 0.62 0.66 2.10 0.53 0.69 16,785

Source: International Social Survey Program (1998)

2 ╇ Because no codes are available for the parties in Northern Ireland, this country has been excluded from the analyses that test the hypotheses that require scores on this variable (i.e., Hypotheses 3, 4 and 5).

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Inglehart (2004), Elff (2009), Lago et al. (2009), and many others have used similar coding procedures in their studies of the electoral consequences of religion. More specifically, respondents’ answers to the question which party they would vote for if elections were held tomorrow, have been coded into the five following categories: 1) Far left (communists etcetera); 2) Left, centre left; 3) Centre, liberal; 4) Right, conservative; 5) Far right (fascists etcetera). Those who indicated not to vote, not to know what to vote, and those without a party preference were excluded from the analysis (N=5,292 which makes up for 24.9% of the total sample). Needless to say, to the extent that non-Christians vote for far-rightist parties and Christians do not exclusively vote for rightist ones, this coding procedure yields an underestimation of religious voting and is hence biased against finding religiously inspired voting. Results Aspirations for Religion’s Public Revitalization by Birth Cohort Figure 2 plots the percentage of non-Christians in each of the countries (x-axis) against the mean aspirations for religion’s public revitalization among Christians in these countries (y-axis), which yields the same findings as those reported previously by Achterberg et al. (2009). This means that Hypothesis 1 is confirmed: in striking contrast to the notion that religious decline and religious privatization occur in Â�tandem, Christian aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are not weakest, but strongest in countries where Christian religion has declined most and hence weakest in countries where it is most widespread. At no less than 0.72, the relationship between the two variables is moreover very strong and highly significant. In order to study whether this pattern truly signifies a public revitalization of Christian religion, or is consistent with the notion that religious decline and religious privatization occur in tandem after all, we now move to the testing of our remaining hypotheses, which are informed by the two objections to the former interpretation that have been discussed above. Hypothesis 2 pertains to differences between birth cohorts when it comes to aspirations for religion’s public revitalization. As explained, the notion that religious decline coincides with religious privatization, would lead us to expect that in countries where Christian religiosity has declined most, aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are



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Figure 2.╇ Association between proportion of non-Christians and mean aspirations for religion’s public revitalization among Christians (1998, N=18 countries, Pearson’s r=0.72; p<0.001).

Aspirations for religion’s public revitalization

3.00 2.90 2.80 2.70 2.60 2.50 2.40 2.30 2.20 2.10 2.00 0.3

0.35

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0.45

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Proportion of non-Christians

Figure 3.╇ Association between proportion of non-Christians and mean aspirations for religion’s public revitalization for three birth cohorts of Christians separately (1998, N=18 countries).

Aspirations for religion’s public revitalization

3.00 2.90 2.80 2.70 2.60 2.50 2.40 2.30

0

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Proportion of non-Christians

Young birth cohort (Pearson’s r=0.73, p<0.001) Middle birth cohort (Pearson’s r= 0.67, p<0.01) Old birth cohort (Pearson’s r=0.60, p<0.01)

0.7

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Â� particularly found among the older, yet waning cohort of Christians. The notion that religious decline spawns its public revitalization, on the other hand, predicts that these aspirations are found among younger Christians as much as among older ones. Figure 3 features three regression lines, representing the mean aspirations for religion’s public revitalization for the three Christian birth cohorts that we have distinguished. It is clear that there are hardly any differences between the three cohorts. For the Netherlands, one of the countries where Christian religion is numerically most marginal, for instance, the mean scores for young and old Christians are exactly identical (M=2.91), which means that the young attach as much value to a public role for religion as the elderly do. In Great Britain, which rivals the Netherlands for the status of having the lowest proportion of Christians, the young value a public role of religion even more than the elderly do. These findings confirm Hypothesis 2, then: in countries where Christian religion has declined most, Christian aspirations for its public revitalization are not only found among older Christians, but just as much among younger ones. Christian Voting for Rightist Parties Moving to the analysis of Christian religion and voting behavior in the various countries, we first consider the possibility that the strong aspirations for a public presence of religion in the most secular contexts are not actually acted out and hence remain without real public consequences. To assess this possibility, we test Hypothesis 3, according to which Christians in countries where Christian religion has declined most are not less, but more inclined to vote for rightist Christian parties than those in countries where Christian religion is still widespread. To test this hypothesis, Figure 4 plots the percentage of non-Christians in each of the countries (x-axis) against the mean tendency among Christians in these countries to vote for a rightist party (y-axis). Although it is clear that in countries where religion has declined most, Christians tend to vote more often for rightist parties than in massively Christian countries, the relationship between the two variables is not strong enough to reach statistical significance. This means that Hypothesis 3 needs to be rejected. Nonetheless, it is clear that the relationship is positive instead of negative, indicating that there is even less support for the notion that religious decline coincides with religious privatization.



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Figure 4.╇ Association between proportion of non-Christians and mean right-wing voting behavior by Christians (1998, N=17 countries, Pearson’s r=0.37; p=0.14). 3.20 3.10

Right-wing voting

3.00 2.90 2.80 2.70 2.60 2.50 0.3

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Hypothesis 4, also informed by the theory that religious decline spawns its public revitalization rather than furthering its privatization, predicts that in all countries under study Christians with strong aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are more likely to vote for rightist parties than Christians for whom this aspiration is only weak. To test his hypothesis, Figure 5 plots the percentage of non-Christians in each of the countries (x-axis) against the mean tendency of Christians in these countries to vote for a rightist party (y-axis), for Christians with high and low aspirations for religion’s public revitalization separately. It is clear that Christians with strong aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are more likely to vote for rightist parties than Christians for whom this aspiration is only weak. This confirms Hypothesis 4, which underscores once more that these aspirations are actually acted out and hence have real public consequences. Figure 5 also enables a test of Hypothesis 5, according to which public aspirations for religion among Christians affect their voting behavior most strongly in countries where Christian religion has declined most. As predicted, the regression lines for the two categories of Christians are farther apart in countries where Christian religiosity is least widespread, indicating that there is indeed a tendency for these aspirations to drive voting behavior more strongly in the countries where Christian religion

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Figure 5.╇ Association between proportion of non-Christians and mean right-wing voting behavior, for Christians with strong and weak aspirations for religion’s public revitalization separately (1998, N=17 countries). 3.00

Right-wing voting

2.95

2.90

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2.70 0.3

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Christians with weak aspirations for religion’s public revitalization (Pearson’s r=-0.07; p=0.81) Christians with strong aspirations for religion’s public revitalization (Pearson’s r=0.14; p=0.63)

has declined most. Again, however, the difference between the Â�massively Christian countries on the one hand and these where Christian religion has become marginalized fails to reach statistical significance (tested by means of multilevel analysis; not shown in Figure 5), so that Hypothesis 5 is refuted. However, even though we yet again fail to find firm evidence for Christianity’s public revitalization in the countries where it is numerically most marginal, it is clear that we once again find even less evidence for stronger religious privatization in these countries. Conclusions In this paper, we have elaborated on previous findings by Dekker (2007) and Achterberg et al. (2009), that in contexts where Christians are numerically most marginal, they nonetheless have stronger aspirations for a public role of their creed than in contexts where the proportion of Christians is high. This is clearly a remarkable finding against the background of the debate about secularization, which has dominated sociology of religion for decades, because it throws the notion that



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religious decline and religious privatization typically occur simultaneously into doubt. Therefore, we have studied in the present paper whether these previous findings truly signify a public revitalization of Christian religion in contexts where Christians find themselves in minority positions. First of all, we have demonstrated that Christian aspirations for a public revitalization of religion are not only most typical in countries where Christian religion is least widespread, but also that these aspirations are found just as much among younger Christians than among older ones. This contrasts with what we would expect to find if religious decline and religious privatization occurred together, because in that case aspirations for religion’s public revitalization would more typically be found among older Christians than among younger ones. This patterning across birth cohorts hence points in the direction of Christian religion’s public revitalization rather than its privatization in countries where it is numerically most marginal. By focusing on variations in religion’s relevance for voting behavior across countries, we have furthermore studied whether aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are actually translated into publicly relevant political behavior. First of all, we have found that Christians with strong aspirations for religion’s public revitalization are more likely to vote for rightist parties than Christians for whom this aspiration is only weak, underscoring that desires are actually translated into behavior. We could however find no firm evidence for either the hypothesis that Christians in countries where Christian religion has declined most are more inclined than elsewhere to vote for rightist political parties, or the hypothesis that Christian aspirations for the public revitalization of their creed affect their voting behavior most strongly in these countries. Nonetheless, we find clear albeit non-significant tendencies in the predicted directions in both instances, which means that these findings contradict the notion that religious decline coincides with religious privatization even more than the notion that it stimulates its public revitalization. For that reason, although obviously not fully convincing, we feel that our findings incline to religion’s public revitalization rather than its privatization. This conclusion contrasts with that of Bruce (2003) and Norris and Inglehart (2004), who maintain that the social and public impact of religion is weaker in contexts where religion has declined. Yet, as we already noted above, it would be premature to consider the debate about the implications of religious decline for religion’s public and political

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salience as closed. This is all the more so, because studies by Kelley and De Graaf (1997), Ruiter and De Graaf (2006), Dekker (2007) and Ruiter (2008) have demonstrated that the social (rather than political) impact and significance of religion is strongest in precisely the contexts where it is numerically least present. For future research, then, we consider it vital to carefully and critically examine the differences between these and related studies, so as to gain an understanding of how these strikingly different results could have been obtained and to subsequently contribute to the (re)construction of empirically-informed theories of secularization and post-secularism.



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Houtman, Dick and Peter Mascini. 2002. “Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in the Netherlands.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41(3): 455–473. Kelley, Jonathan and Nan Dirk de Graaf. 1997. “National Context, Parental Socialization, and Religious Belief: Results from 15 Nations.” American Sociological Review 62(4): 639–660. Lago, Ignacio, Jose Ramon Montero and Hector Cebolla. “Religious Voting in Europe: A Preliminary Analysis.” Paper presented at Research Committee on Political SociolÂ� ogy, RC18, The Enduring Impact of Class and Religion in Contemporary Party Politics, First ISA Forum of Sociology, Barcelona, Spain, September 5–8, 2008. Lane, Jan-Erik, David H. McKay and Kenneth Newton. 1997. Political Data Handbook, 2nd ed. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford University Press. Lechner, Frank J. 1991. “The Case Against Secularization: A Rebuttal.” Social Forces 69 (4): 1103–1119. Lichterman, Paul. 2005. Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Luckmann, Thomas. 1967. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York [etc.]: MacMillan. Meyer, Birgit and Annelies Moors. 2006. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruiter, Stijn and Nan Dirk de Graaf. 2006. “National Context, Religiosity, and Volunteering: Results from 53 Countries.” American Sociological Review 71(2): 191–210. Ruiter, Stijn. 2008. Association in Context and Association as Context: Causes and Consequences of Voluntary Association Involvement. ICS dissertation. Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Stark, Rodney. 1999. “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion 60(3): 249–273. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Turina, Isacco. 2007. “Secularization as a Property of Action.” Social Compass 54(2): 161–173. Voas, David. 2003. “Intermarriage and the Demography of Secularization.” The British Journal of Sociology 54(1): 83–108. Voas, David and Alasdair Crockett. 2005. “Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging.” Sociology 39(1): 11–28. Weithman, Paul J. 2002. Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS OF ISLAMIST LEADERSHIP IN MOROCCO Mohammed Maarouf* Over the past four decades, Morocco has experienced an Islamist challenge to the dominance of the ruling elites. From the period of the emergence of Shabiba al-Islamiya (Islamic Youth) in the 1970’s to the recent times when Jihadi Salafism rose on the scene in the Islamic Maghreb, the country homed a variety of Islamist groups with homegrown characteristics well explored by researchers in political sciences and sociology of religion. What has been given little consideration, however, is the cul­ tural embedding of these Islamist movements, their cultural specificity and enrollment in local activities at the bottom of social space. The context of existing Literature on the subject of Islamism delineates three main perspectives. First, there is an approach focusing upon the activist role of Islamist minorities, the causes of their radicalization and their organization and scope of influence. Mamdani (2002), Nathan J. Brown, Amr Hamzawy, and Marina Ottaway (2006) and Cavatorta (2005), for instance, have been concerned with the politics of Islamism. Lamchichi (1990, 1994), Tozy (1991, 1997, 1999, 2003), Benoamar (1988) and Vermeren (2004) have mainly been dealing with the political rapport the monarchy has established with Islamist groups and how it has managed to control the socio-religious field. Chekroun (2005) and Pargeter (2009) have explored the causes of cultural radicalization, Chekroun focusing on the political economy of Islamist radicalization, Pargeter on localism talking about the economic, regional, historical, and moral causes of radicalization starting from the cramping condition of social living in shantytowns to the social conservativeness of the Rif, the Northern Region in Morocco. Second, there is an approach that focuses on the Islamist discourse and ideology including radical trends (Abu Zayd 2006; Darif 1995; EL-Khal 2003; Ouaradi 2010; Oukasha *╇ I would like to thank Paul Willis and Philip Hermans for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Some inspiring observations by participants in the conference on ‘Religions in the Public Spheres’ – Poznan (2010) – would not go here virtually unrecorded. My sincere thanks go particularly to John Farina, Tadeusz Buksinski and the rest of Polish and international scholars participating in the conference.

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2008; Maddy-Weitzman 2003). Arkoun in this respect has been keen on approaching Islamic culture and tradition from a critical interdisciplinary perspective. His main objective has been to dismantle the ‘unthought’ and the ‘unthinkable’ in classical and modern Islamic thought, heading towards an unprecedented shift from ‘rethinking tradition’ or even ‘rethinking the Quran’ to ‘rethinking Islam’ in general. Several of his books in English and French reflect such modern concern: The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought and also Rethink­ ing Islam, Common Questions, Uncommon Answers. By analyzing the historical, cultural, social, psychological and linguistic contexts, Arkoun seeks to emancipate the ‘unthought’ and/or the ‘unthinkable’—such as the rule of law and civil society—from the blinkers of dogmatic thinking on Islam, shari‘a1 (the Islamic code of law), democracy and human rights, and initiate “a radical re-construction of mind and society in the contemporary Muslim world” (Arkoun 1994: 1). Issues such as the nature of revelation and holy book, secularism, and individualism are all ‘unthought’ and ‘unthinkable’ due to the dominant position of orthodoxy in the history of Islamic culture. The building block in Arkoun’s project is the critique of Islamic reason, the withdrawal from classical ijtihadâ•›2 that is restricted by the epistemological constraints established by jurists in the 8th to 9th centuries, and the effectuation of a modern critical analysis of the structure of Islamic reason (Arkoun 1992: 17). Tariq Ramadan is another scholar who has been concerned with modes of discourse in Islam but this time with particular importance to the discourse produced in the West. Living with some 15 million Muslims in Europe, Ramadan feels it is time to forsake the binarism in Muslim thought that defines Islam in opposition to the West. For him this is possible if one uproots Islamic values from their culture of origin and implants them in the cultural context of Western Europe. Ramadan says: “I am a European who has grown up here. I don’t deny my Muslim roots, but I don’t vilify Europe either. I can incorporate everything that’s not opposed to my religion into my identity” (Ramadan in: Quesne n.d.). Islam is not the only nominee to be redefined in the European

1 ╇ The diacritic marks normally used in the transliteration of the Arabic script have been omitted throughout this article. Arabic words are spelled in the singular with plurals indicated by ‘-s’; the dialect sound ‘g’ pronounced as ‘g’ in ‘grand’ is added to the Arabic consonants. 2 ╇ It is the endeavor of a Moslem scholar to derive a rule of divine law from the Koran and Hadith without relying on the views of other scholars.

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 137 cultural context; Europe also requires redefinition. The presence of Muslims in Europe may certainly lead Europeans to reconsider their social identities and ask questions about their cultural beliefs. Third, there is a cultural approach that deals with the culture of Islamism and the question of their identities (Burgat 1988, 1995, 2001; Dialmy 2005a, 2005b; Lee 2010) though most of this research is concerned with written texts and discourses rather than with the lived experience of Islamist minorities. It may be argued that in this literature there is too much emphasis on the Islamist trends’ written dogma rather than on their lived experience. Nevertheless, Islamists may write or preach what they may not practice during their routine life. This ethnographic research on Islamism comes to fill in this gap and deal with the minutiae of Islamist lived experience at the grassroots level. From a bottom-up ethnographic standpoint, it approaches how the spontaneous daily Islamist discourse interacts with the strictures of popular culture. In current scholarly debate on Islamism, there are slight references to the rapport between maraboutism and Islamism, especially from a cultural perspective. There is Tozy (1999), who argues that Justice and Spirituality (a Moroccan Islamist group) is the only group that has combined mysticism and Islamism in Morocco and Bourqia (1999), who expands the scope of the term by explaining that Islamism which is grouped in modern associations though is different from Sufism is still influenced by it. She affirms that “Sufism constitutes [the] organizational and spiritual background [of Islamism]” (1999: 255). Yet, these are slight references to the link of both trends and say nothing at all about the lived experience of Islamist actors. How do Islamists live their daily experience at the grassroots level? How do their cultural beliefs and practices relate to the ideological work they have been indoctrinated with? And are these beliefs and practices embedded in the host culture that receives the dogma? Such questions form up the core of what may be termed cultural embedding. The term ‘cultural embedding’, confronts us with the following questions: how is an Islamist culture embedded in the local host culture? Can the rise or decline of an Islamist trend be measured by the degree of receptiveness of its cultural bed? How does the rising Islamist movement pick up cultural representations, beliefs and values from the cultural bed that incorporates it? In this paper, I will limit myself particularly to one aspect of cultural embedding: how do Islamists conceive of leadership? Are they solely inspired by their dogmas or also by the social representations of the cultural soil? The cultural soil in Morocco is popular Islam with its

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establishment Islam, the aberrant views and practices of the illiterate, Sufi trends and what may be broadly termed maraboutic culture—the culture of saints and mediation, rituals and trance dances, to borrow from Lewis (1966, 1970/1989), we may call it the ‘ecstatic form of religion’. How does this constitute the cultural bed/background where Islamism is born? Is Islamism a post-maraboutic movement? Is it similar in its antagonistic course to post-modernism in the West? Does it settle scores with the past of popular culture of Islam? It may be argued here that there is no master narrative on Islamism, not one common version of Islamism as western media and some western scholarship try to stereotype Islamist movements as anti-American and threatening US and Europe’s interests. Such master narrative putting Islamic minorities in one basket seems reductionist. As there are many Islams there are many Islamist movements tied to the receptiveness of the cultural bed where they grow. Of course no one can deny the recurrent patterns they may share because they are exposed to more or less similar textual ideologies but the lived culture—the ethnographic aspect—of Islamism is particular to the cultural bed where they are born. We are not saying that Islamism is priori a local cultural invention with transcendental expectations. It is a common platitude that its foundation doctrines were first imported from the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the teachings of Mohammed Ben ‘Abd alWahhab (Salafi Wahhabism) and Sayyid Qutb (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin). Yet like any other doctrines, they need a receptive cultural bed to be localized inside it because it is this cultural bed that either rejects the new comer ideology or depending on the host culture’s degree of receptiveness to Islamist reform may incorporate it, reconstruct it into a recognizable identity that fits the local social conditions, or yet the new ideology may transform the local into a transnational hybrid form. Apart from the transnational radical groups and CIA-supported Islamism3 such as al-Qaidah, which seeks to globalize religious radicalism and seems to work for foreign agendas (see Mamdani 2002), Islamists with more or less homegrown attitudes though fed with 3 ╇ Mamdani argues that CIA did not create Islamism but did create mujahidin by sponsoring Taliban and Ben laden as alternatives to secular nationalism just as “the Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas to operate unhindered during the first intifadah— allowing it to open a university and bank accounts and even possibly helping it with funding, hoping to fund it off against the secular PLO” (2002: 772).

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 139 imported ideologies seem to be home manufactured identities—the participation of Intelligence services in the Arab world’s radical Islamization project must not be disowned at this level (Lamchichi 1994). According to Pargeter (2009), Islamists are culturally radicalized due to local hegemonic rapports, not so much influenced by diasporic Islam as by local social conservatism, a sense of marginalization and economic deprivation. Without denying the influence of Islamists outside the national borders like the evident consequences in countries like Pakistan, Indonesia and Algeria, homegrown radical groups have generally participated in the stability of their own regions and evinced political learning like the case of PJD (Justice and Development Party) in Morocco and MB (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt (see Albrecht and Wegner 2006). In Algeria, the FIS (the National Salvation Front) is also a homegrown Islamist group that participated in Algerian politics and accepted the rules of the political game but was prevented from taking power by the military institution when it was evident that it would win the 1991 elections. The adherents to political learning would be disillusioned and the once diasporic mujahid-s called Arab Afghans—who went to the holy war in Afghanistan to revive the mythic triumph of the guerrillas in their war of independence against the French—formed their armed wings to fight the military establishment. Martin Stone maintains that “one of the most important leaders of the Algerian Afghans was Kamerredin kherbane, who later went on to serve on the FIS’s executive council in exile” (1997: 183). The case of Algeria is unique for the high number of recruits that participated in the anti-Soviet jihad. Stone again reports that “the Pakistani embassy in Algiers alone issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers during the mid-1980s” (1997: 182–183). What I am trying to argue here is that Islamism is not born a monster we have to exorcise through a civil war. It is a culture that gives birth to radical thought under particular social, economic and political constraints. Not all groups are violent; many are participating in the democratization process of their countries. PJD, for instance, abides by the rules of the political game and legitimates the monarchic rule. Even the now seemingly violent FIS, as it has been pointed out first participated in Algerian politics till its expulsion from the democratic game in 1992 after it won the first tour of elections in 1991 when it resorted to arms. Justice and Spirituality (JS), a Moroccan radical group semi-banned by the state does not accept the rules of the political game and in the eighties delegitimized the hijacking corrupt elites, now its discourse is

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lignified towards constitutional reforms (see Arroub 2009; Darif 1995; Tozy 1999). For Western politics, the Islamist field is really a ‘gray zone’ (see Brown, Hamzawy and Ottaway 2006); westerners feel threatened by Islamist bullies; they think if the monster wins, he may implement policies detrimental to the US and European interests though in the long run local Islamists seem to participate in their country’s stability. Well, it needs to be ferreted out that the Moroccan case is unique because it is a sacred monarchy legitimated by a divine law (see Arroub 2004; Hammoudi 1997, 1999; Tozy 1999). The king is the commander of the faithful, unlike the presidential state—the case of Algeria and Egypt—in which the political contest may go to the presidential office. Hassan II was clear on this when he said: “I will never accept to be put inside the equation” (Zartman 1986: 64). In Morocco, the political players’ contest is contained within parliamentary boundaries. Methodologically speaking, this study is part of a research project in progress concerned with the lived culture of Islamism. It manures the ground for a ‘bottom up’ ethnographic perspective into cultural forms, issues and changes, engaged in work that will have significant impact on diverse aspects of Moroccan society such as popular Islam, Islamism, multiculturalism, culture of citizenship, immigration, labor, sports, media, politics, entrepreneurship, etc. Reconsidering the dialectic relationship between insider and outsider’s point of view, the project of bottom up ethnography aims at establishing a home-grown Moroccan Post-colonial cultural Studies decolonizing European research on Morocco and deconstructing the structures of national hegemonies. It defines culture not as fine plates, carvings and decorative trays and their human equivalents but as solutions to problems lived through by those at the bottom of social space, a form of cultural resistance. Cultural resistance may be theoretically approached from two divergent perspectives. There is an optimistic view that considers cultural resistance as a stepping stone in political activity. It manures the ground for political self-consciousness. On this pole, culture is thought to serve resistance even if it is not produced for this intent but culture may also be created for this particular anti-hegemonic intent. Cultural resistance from this optimistic perspective creates a “free space”, ideologically a new set of meanings and worldviews of the future, materially a community, networks and organizational models lubricating the way towards political resistance. From a more pessimistic view, cultural resistance may be thought as an escape from politics, a discharge of discontent that may otherwise be expressed through political activity, a safe sanctuary

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 141 in an unsympathetic world. On this pole, a private utopia, an ideal society is conjured up and magical solutions emerge, nevertheless in the outside world nothing changes at all. To be more pessimistic in this respect, we may argue that cultural resistance cannot exist at all. The dominant system with its complete ideological and material hegemony can incorporate any cultural expression of resistance by repackaging and transforming it into a constituent of the status-quo. From this perspective, cultural resistance as a political practice is at best a waste of time and at worst a delusional detour from real political resistance. So, if a society is engaged in cultural resistance, it means one of two things: either the dominant culture or the power it buttresses are bound to fall at any moment, or that cultural resistance has been so thoroughly incorporated back into the system that its practice is one of licensed relief. The spectrum here ranges from survival to revolution. Survival is the point at which cultural resistance serves as merely a way to cope up with the daily grind and injustice of life while holding on to semblance of dignity. Rebellion is where cultural resistance contributes to political activity against the powers-that-be. Results of this resistance may range from suffering repression to forcing meaningful reform. Revolution is the overthrow of the dominant ruling system and a time when the culture of resistance becomes just culture (for further details see Duncombe 2002). So, today’s cultural resistance may be tomorrow’s commodity culture. The commoditization of culture remains the most critical chapter in the contemporary story of cultural resistance. Adorno (2002) and Hoggart (1958/1970) maintain that commoditization may reduce our cultural passions and rebellions to “pseudo activities” easily incorporated back into the system. The analysis of cultural resistance requires an utmost importance to be given to ethnographic theories that fuse close-up observation and social critical perspectives understanding culture, domination and social structure in terms of the minutiae of experience, the cultural texture of social relations, and the remote structural forces and power vectors that bear on them. Western theorizing from the centre seems to have exhausted its top-down resources. It is high time to discover what research results can we come up with if we theorize bottom up not topdown, from the periphery not from the centre? In a post-structural spirit, the subalterns’ discourses and representations should be amplified and given a voice. History must be sought in the unrecorded versions of the victims of History.

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The data reported in this research concerning Islamist’s maraboutically embedded beliefs and practices result from interviews, intimate cultural knowledge and participant observation, natural conversations, and personal observations of the social context of Islamists at Chouaib Doukkali University where I work—bearing in mind that the university is the social setting where Islamists are generally active at the grassroots level—and in some subaltern neighborhoods in the city of El Jadida over the span of nearly two years—2006–2007. Interviews and observations have been conducted at University, in streets and private homes. Respondents have been selected in both convenient and small snowball samples including some key grassroots informants from the following Islamist groups: Justice and Spirituality—the movement under the leadership of its guide Abdessalam Yassine is semi-banned by Moroccan government for its radical political stance against the monarchy; it is to some degree similar to Solidarity Trade Union in Poland, a social movement in the 1980s associated with people from the Catholic Church combining in its struggle against economic and later political domination both social mobilization and protest, religious indoctrination and political work—, Jama‘at Tabligh wa Da‘wa (JTD) [Society for Spreading Faith] and Salafiya. Plenty of material and documentation (books, leaflets, booklets, CDS, etc.) on the subject of JS are approached by means of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The Cultural Soil Why is there a coexistence of authoritarian regimes and Islamist organizations? Does it mean that authoritarian elites do not at all care about whether opposition forces are of an Islamist, leftist, nationalist, or whatever ideological background and are just concerned about the degree to which any of these groups manages to grow into a strong opposition movement capable to challenge their rule? Or do they encourage Islamists to keep in opposition because Islam after all is a seminal foundation and a cultural soil of the regime itself, the contest thus being contained and the West refuses to shake hands with an opposition not conterminous with its secular ideals and values? The Moroccan cultural soil in few words comprises two main politico-religious institutions: the institution of the sultan and that of the saint, they share a common ideological/social formation which, following Hammoudi [1997: 8], we term an authoritarian cultural schema

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 143 which reproduces authority and a particular response to authority where social actors acquiesce to, and see as legitimate, a particular formation of power legitimated by the power of Allah and the ability to create miracles, not to mention the noble lineage of the Prophet the sultan and the saint descend from. Both dominant and subordinate groups follow the cultural schema of authority. The cultural foundations of the authoritarian schema are legitimized by ritual collective performances in society that have to do with the sultan like the ceremony of allegiance (al-bay‘a) and with the saint, also a form of allegiance, sometimes the same term is used in which blind obedience to the sultan or saint is required. The sultan-saint-shrif figure (from the Prophet’s lineage) incarnates the schema of legitimized domination in people’s politico-religious imagination. To accept the Sultan or his surrogate is to accept the system of authority he validates; the social hierarchies that shape the social interaction go virtually unnoticed, in other words naturalized. Of course the sultanic relationship is central in Morocco. Here, I refer to Hammoudi. He argues: “God ordains that the community never remains without leader (imam) and indicates to everyone through the consent of the community which candidate is his elect” (1997: 13). The relationship between the ruler and the ruled is thus sacralized by the Will of God. Utter submission to God requires utter submission to the Imam. This has ranked as a moral obligation for the Muslim. Historically, it was said that a despotic sultan was far better than anarchy.4 The texts of allegiance publicized in 1979 reinforced the allegiance to the ruler. They affirmed that “We are witness to the fact that our Lord and messenger Sidna Mohammed, Allah’s servant and Prophet, came to us with the obligation and normative conduct (Sunnah). He said: ‘if you travel by a community and you don’t find a sultan in it, do not go inside! The sultan is the shadow of God and his arrow on earth.” He also said: “he who died and was not bound with a yoke of allegiance, he died a death of al-Â� Jahiliyyah [Ignorance of Divine Guidance]” (As cited in Tozy 1999: 19). In Morocco, the monarchic system indeed derives its origins from the caliphate model the Islamists are trying to regress to in order to discover the Golden Age of a ruling justice. In the 1979 text again, the bay‘a was declared thus: Here gather our shrif-s, ulema, notables, men and women young and old and we agree to renew to our commander of the faithful and protector of 4

╇ The Arabic version goes thus: sultanun ghashum khayrun min fitnatin tadum

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mohammed maarouf our religion and faith, Sidna Hassan II May God protect him with the seven verses, our allegiance that our fathers and grandfathers paid to his fathers and grandfathers, may Allah bless their souls in the House of Peace. We pay allegiance to him in the same way the Companions paid allegiance to their Prophet under the Blessed Tree. We are bound to acknowledge his rule, adhere to his obedience and advice; we are his supporters and servants; his enemy is our enemy, thus we shoulder vows and charters, eagerly compliant, aware and informed. Bear you Allah witness to us; you are the best of all witnesses! (as cited in Tozy 1999: 19; Trans. Mine)5

It is obvious that the caliphate model traverses the text of allegiance introduced in 1979. It puts emphasis on the eternalization of the tradition of allegiance and evokes the Prophet’s election by his companions who committed themselves to Martyrly fight in support of his cause. It also dissimulates the historical dimension of the practice by putting emphasis on the fact that the tradition stretches indefinitely into the past, so that any trace of its historical origin is opaqued and any question of its end is unimaginable. Why is there such yearning among political players to revert to the Islamic ‘Golden Age’? According to Tozy, the early period of the Islamic state was crucial in building the concepts related to the Islamic rule. The authoritarian dimension it acquired would become later a major characteristic of the caliphate model. The return to the Prophet and his companions’ time is not as anachronistic as it first appears to us. Rather it is a concern with the foundations of Islamic rule, and what can present governments derive from these beginnings. When the Prophet died there was no consensus upon appointing a caliphate and the Sunnah was not clear on the issue. Ulema were forced to make research in the Qur’an and the hadith and in the Prophet’s life course to discover indicators displaying how to appoint a deputy to the Prophet. The Arab conquests and the advent of alien folks in Islam, the familiarity with Pharisee, Indian, and Greek philosophy, all contributed in building up proofs for the compulsory establishment of a caliphate system. Ulema succeeded in proving that the caliphate office was mandatory by moral obligation and by reason. But the balance was entitled according to the Asha‘ira school towards the moral obligation. There was strong fear among religious leaders that fitna might occur if the imam of Muslims did not exist. Al-Ghazali said in

5 ╇ It must be pointed out that all translations from Arabic in this paper are done by the author.

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 145 this respect: “If there is no imam with the requisite qualities to lead the community of Muslims, it is a must to bestow the rule upon a military leader to bring all to obedience” (as cited in Tozy 1999: 22). He did not make an exception the use of violence so as to subdue anarchy (fitna). The fear of fitna glosses over the question of legitimacy. Fitna is thought much more pernicious to the community than oppression. According to Tozy again, the Moroccan text of allegiance publicized in 1979 aimed at cutting the way in front of any attempt to make the sovereignty of the people a constituent part of the conditions of the royal charter. “In essence, the duty of a ruler, particularly one who laid claim to caliphal status, was to guarantee civic and political order for the practice of Islam and, in return, he could expect political obedience from the community over which he ruled” (Joffe 1988: 218). In Morocco, this was articulated through the ritual of al-bay‘a that put an end to the interference of secular laws and their apparatuses in the relationship between the commander of the faithful and his subjects. The monarchy insisted on the fact that it existed in Morocco before the existence of the state; hence it was thanks to it that the modern state rose to the scene. This explains the stability of the regime to some extent since the political contestants do not have real political expectations. They were and still are contained within the boundaries of the parliamentary institution. The parliament itself was, and still is to some extent, contented with playing the role of intercession like a maraboutic saint doing shshafa‘a, to quote Tozy’s terms. Parliamentary contestants normally legislate and supervise the executive work of the GV but the parliamentary work in Morocco have not exceeded asking oral questions and knocking GV’s doors to solve voters’ individual problems. Parliament members play a mediating role between individual citizens and authorities. In practice they do not have any power. As for the use of consultation in the ruling process, it still makes political decision a gray zone; being a consultant, Tozy maintains, does not mean having the power to issue decisions for actual power is in the hand of its user; the consultant is a technical adviser rather than a decision maker. Built on the ideal to avoid anarchy, the caliphate office required utter obedience of the community of Muslims. The history of Morocco witnessed examples of Almoravid rulers displaying allegiance to the Abbasid caliph. The Abbasid caliphate spurned mythic rituals to render the caliph a sacred body, especially by insisting on his holy lineage. Gardet and Ibn Khaldoun (as cited in Tozy 1999: 24) highlighted the divine aspect of the caliphate charter. The caliph was considered the

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deputy of God on earth. Even if the charter said that the caliph had to work for the welfare of the community, it was not made clear who the spokesmen for the welfare of the community were except for the fuqa­ ha’s opinion which was merely consultant. Ulema attempted to find a sort of mediation to shackle the absolute power of the caliph but in vain. All institutions were advisory in nature and lacked the force to open spaces for less authoritarian rulers. It seemed that one-man-rule was enrooted in Islamic political culture from the very beginning. The third companion caliph Ottoman defied his contesters who asked him to resign from his office. He said: “this is a garment I will never take off. I was attired with it by the Prophet peace be upon him” (as cited in Tozy 1999: 24). His refusal to relinquish his office would become later a normative conduct that no confrontation should occur between the caliph and his subjects without Allah’s verdict. Opposition to the caliph would be regarded as an act of treason no matter how legitimate the demands of the dissidents were. This logic, as Badie says, makes sovereignty of the people, delegation of powers, opposition, and political succession forms without import for they lie outside the cultural foundation of the caliphate; for instance, if God’s sovereignty rules, the sovereignty of the people loses its meaning (as cited in Tozy 1999: 25). Apart from the caliphate origins, The Moroccan monarchy derives its legitimacy from its holy lineage and saintly attributes. The political idioms used in bestowing legitimacy on the monarch are borrowed from the maraboutic discourse. As heir to the throne, the prince is named “Inheritor of his Secret” (waritu sirrih), secret in the sense of saintliness (see also Bourqia 1999: 248). The constitutional text of 1908 includes article 7 which states that “it is an obligation that each of the sons of the sultanate must obey the sharifian imam and respect him for his person because he is the inheritor of his blessed baraka” (as cited in Tozy 1999: 87; 2003: 64). The sacred attribute of the monarch will be insisted on in ensuing constitutions but once again with modern formulations. Baraka (holy blessing) of sultans has also been recorded in the royal history of Morocco. As Bourqia reports: In listing the accomplishments of Muwlay Isma‘il, Ibn Zaydan [royal historian] emphasizes the generosity of the sultan and the prosperity people enjoyed during his reign because of his baraka. The historian al-Nasiri also states that when ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Hicham became sultan and the people offered their allegiance to him (which the author refers to as bay‘a mubaraka), the country enjoyed peace and prosperity; the rains came and prices fell, proving his blessedness to the people. The baraka of the sultan brings rain, a highly significant belief in a semiarid culture. Writing about

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 147 Mawlay Hassan I, the same author says: ‘when he came to the throne, people were happy because of his auspicious person.’ (Bourqia 1999: 247)

Thus, the figure of the sultan has been surrounded with benediction and represented in the popular mind as a distributing centre of prosperity and providence. Moreover, the religious foundations of authoritarianism and the massive supports supplied through the religious practices around maraboutism make the religious carriers and symbolic/social systems here of immense importance and, mutatis mutandis, show a basis of similar cultural schemas across the Muslim world, especially those Sunni varieties across North Africa carrying Saints traditions in one version or another. Sharifism to which we have referred earlier contains important elements for understanding the legitimization of subordination in Morocco. The shurfa claim a lineage to the Prophet and rely on their traditional but now also state mandated symbolic capital to stress social distinction from the commoners. Royal decrees of consideration and respect (ttaw­ qir wa l-ihtiram) were issued to support the class of shurfa and, historically, freed them from paying taxes and made of their vicinities asylums for the oppressed. They were granted the right of sanctuary (hurum), by decrees of immunity, extending over vast lands surrounding saints’ lodges, declared impregnable to assault, “which meant that it lay outside the Makhzen’s jurisdiction, and any fugitive who took refuge in it was immune from pursuit” (EL–Mansour 1999: 53). Land grants (in‘am)— sometimes with occupant workers— were offered to the shurfa in return for supporting the sultan’s policy. Up to now, membership cards edged in green and red resembling official police passes are issued by the Ministry of Interior, at the local level by the Mayor’s administration, to shurfa who own decrees of consideration and respect, granting them special privileges to open doors for them and expedite their transaction with local authorities. Like color and religion, sharifism is thought to be based on inherent characteristics that mark the shrif’s fixed and lasting social status unresponsive to change. As Hammoudi states: “social status was based on criteria which individuals theoretically could not modify; birth, skin color, religion, and to a certain extent occupation” (Hammoudi 1997: 60). By virtue of their lineage, the shurfa were located at the top of the social scale. Their sharifian lineage bestowed on them the right to rule, to have prerogatives and to own khuddam (servants). This was an inherited social standing that was very difficult to change. A person’s status was clearly defined. One might attain a high social rank by virtue of social capital, wealth or knowledge, but “in practice status

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emphasized difference while individual effort tended to bring about equality. Such was the rule in a society keen on ‘ontological inequality’â•›” (Hammoudi 1997: 61). Furthermore, the cultural authority of Shurfa and their deification by the masses have engendered an ideological strategy of naturalization intended to mask social inequalities operating both at the level of religious instruction and cure. By constructing an ideological discourse naturalizing the supplicant’s submissive attitude to the sharifian saint or his shrif descendent, the maraboutic institution domesticates its followers and disciplines them into docile identities (Maarouf 2007). It seeks to pacify saint goers and persuade them to hold faith (nniyya) in the saint and his miracles to change their social conditions. Maraboutic centers operate as ‘distributing centers’ providing aid and charity on an organized and sometimes large scale basis. Saint-goers already drilled by virtue of myth and ritual to submit to the power of the Saint also hope for an intertwined material salvation from the ‘distributing center’. It seems the latter can endow them with baraka at any time. These ritualized discourses, practices and expectations function as an opiate legitimizing the power of the ‘distributing center’ (saint/Sultan/ leader) and drill the saint goers into a blind reliance on its miracles. This reproduces relationships of dominance and submission already existing in society and perpetuates people’s hope for a miraculous improvement of their social conditions. Maraboutic discourses draw upon a cultural system of magical beliefs that help the subaltern groups to continue to hope for a better future and endure their present deprivation in silence. Under the benevolent veneer of providing a source of security, maraboutic performances serve to domesticate the subaltern groups socializing them to perceive the hierarchies and dominant systems that shape their social interactions as ‘natural.’ In Sufism, the authoritarian cultural schema, in other words, the normative master-disciple relationship is activated. It shows the blind obedience to the master that has nothing to do with rational thinking. It is important to understand at this point that our Islamic culture is not organized in a secularized manner. The western dichotomy of the supernatural vs. natural does not weigh upon Moroccans’ worldview. They rather grapple with their social realities in terms of the sacred vs. profane, or the lawful (halal) vs. unlawful (haram). So far as the Sufi shaykh is ordering his disciple to execute halal commands, the disciple puts his lot completely in the hand that is stretched to him in virtue. Serving the master depends on God’s will and no one could decide how long a

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 149 disciple should work, or how strict the constraints should be. Like the disciple, the servant is someone who has renounced the pleasures of daily life and sacrificed himself for his allegiance to the saint. But it seems for a lifetime since the servants I met during my fieldwork in some maraboutic sites have set up families there and have now more than forty years of service. Attadili, a well-known hagiographer, cites a pertinent example about the blind obedience of a disciple; he narrates: Sidi Abdellah Ben Hsain used to deliver religious courses to his lucky disciples in his religious lodge (zawiya) in Tamsluht near Marrakech. One day he was talking to the notables of his region in the Haouz who came to ask his permission to graze their flocks in the prairies of the zawiya. When the shaykh was explaining to his guests legal and traditional issues related to charity and tradition, also the relationship between the inhabitants and those who graduated from his zawiya to work as religious teachers in the local communities (duwar-s), a disciple named Faris came in and reminded his master that he prepared the oven according to his command. The master signaled to him to leave and followed with his speech to the guests. The tenacious disciple after awhile returned to remind his master what to do with the heated oven. The master annoyed by his disciple’s disturbance, shouted to him in an angry voice: “go and get inside it!” It was in the evening that the master remembered the incident and sent for him to reprimand him for his misconduct in front of the guests—interrupting the master in the middle of an important discussion. However, his mates could not find him anywhere but someone then recalled the morning story and all hurried including the master to the oven only to find the disciple inside turning over the embers with one hand and a rosary in the other, his fingers moving along the beads as he recited prayers. When they summoned him he went out and told them in a serene voice: “sorry, I was taken by meditation and prayers and forgot about time.” His master looked at him sharply and then said gravely: “Look my son, the land of Allah is very vast; you no longer have a room here with us. You go somewhere else and set up your own lodge (zawiya)!” (as cited in Tozy 1999: 26–27; Trans. Mine)

This incident heralded the birth of a new saint who would later be called Sidi Faris, his shrine erected at the foot of Toubkal and known for curing with fire, his baraka was inherited by his descendents who still practice cure up to now. The story of Sidi Faris evinces how the blind submission of the disciple to his master may rescue him from fire burns. Fire could not harm Sidi Faris because he blindly fulfilled his master’s command even if the latter was issued fortuitously. Sufi poetry puts it clearly that the disciple’s service to his master does not go virtually unrequited and promises the disciple the reward of baraka. According to Hammoudi, “the master-disciple relationship in Sufi

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initiation is the decisive schema for the construction of power relations [in Morocco]” (1997: 85). The shrif ’s baraka is invaluable. It is believed to cure sicknesses, impregnate women, bring about fortune, or transform the ‘amma into bearers of baraka. It is itself a source of material and spiritual wealth. ‘Aw ‘awi, a collective folk poem recited in installments during the curing process6 by the shurfa of Ben Yeffu—a maraboutic site where I did my fieldwork in 2001–2003, see Jinn Eviction—gives a picture of the asymmetrical relationship of the shrif and his servant. The imagery conveyed in the verse is that of insemination (a recurrent image in Sufi chants). The shaykh impregnates his servant with his baraka and transforms him into a saint. Let us see how these lines quoted from the verse portray this relationship: 1.╇You, who stand before the shaykh, be patient, Work faithfully to be safe from misfortunes. 2.╇I have served my lord with a heart free from mistrust. I have served my grandfather; his fragrance has come to be in my nails. 3.╇His baraka has become in me and people come to visit me, From his secret they have seen with me secrets. 4.╇With the bliss of Allah, I have grown feathers from you, And my garden has been inseminated and its flowers blossomed. 5.╇In your sacred vicinity, my limbs, my lord, have grown serene, Pour my garden with your rain so that it becomes nightly watered (Maarouf 2007: 186)

The imagery of the servant’s fingernails perfumed by the shaykh’s scent gives evidence to the physical contact of the servant with the master’s body to get baraka from it. Does this have any sexual connotations? Of course within the Sufi social context, such images of bodily contact between the master and disciple are frequent and socially acceptable. Hammoudi maintains that “the master may spit into the disciple’s mouth or place his tongue in it and order the disciple to suck, or the Â�disciple may ingest the master by swallowing defilements from the master’s body” (1997: 139) in order to acquire his baraka. Westermarck gives evidence that the bodily contact between the two may go as far as sexual intercourse. He says, “Supernatural benefits are expected even from homosexual intercourse with a person possessed of Baraka” (1926: 198). 6 ╇ The verse ‘Aw‘awi collected in the social setting of Ben Yeffu during previous fieldwork research was formulated in two versions. One version was composed by the qadi Bu‘asriya long time ago and another version was composed by the shaykh Sidi ‘Azuz Bel Hashadiya in the 1960’s. I selected the first version because it appeared more ancient and popular than the second one.

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 151 The image of bodily contact conveyed in the verse resembles the process of procreation. The servant becomes impregnated with the shaykh’s baraka by virtue of his bond of servitude to the master. To quote Hammoudi’s terms, it is a metaphor of insemination, gestation, and birth. It may hint to the process of insemination if linked with the imagery conveyed in line 4. Also, the word “nails” has a feminine touch of servitude. Moreover, when the servant sings, “in your sacred vicinity, my limbs, my lord, have grown serene/pour my garden with rain so that it becomes nightly watered,” he conjures up the virility of the saint who can inseminate, bestow pleasure and contain his servant. This interpretation is related to the submissive position the servant (khdim) occupies in his relationship with his master. Submission is culturally defined as an aspect of feminine identity. To submit is to be feminized and bereaved of all signs of virility. Like the Sufi disciple, the servant is sentenced to work in the fields, wash the shaykh’s clothes, and prepare his food. According to Hammoudi, “khidma is God’s will and no one could decide how long a disciple should work, or how strict the constraints should be” (1997: 92). Like the disciple, the servant is someone who has renounced the pleasures of daily life and sacrificed himself for his allegiance to the saint. But it seems for a lifetime since some khuddam (servants) of the saint as it is mentioned before have set up families near the sanctuaries to which they are myrmidons and have now more than forty years of khidma (for further details see Maarouf 2007). Back to the cultural authority of saints, it is not only established and sustained by a strategy of naturalization but also by the strategy of eternalization in which saints’ authority is bereaved of its historical character and fixed within a permanent unchanging and ever recurring institution. As Max Weber (1978: 212–254) observed, claims to legitimacy may be based on rational, traditional or charismatic grounds. In the maraboutic case, if naturalization pertains to the charismatic in that it appeals to the exceptional character of the saint, eternalization appeals to the traditional in that it appeals to the sanctity of immemorial traditions. Saints’ authority in this sense is legitimized by the ceremony of allegiance modeled on the allegiance the Prophet’s companions paid him under the Tree of the Pledge, thus eternalizing the contingent. In the Budshishi order, for example, new comers have to experience a ceremonial pledge (bay‘a) to the Budshishi master akin to the bay‘a ridwan by physical contact with him. The concept of allegiance used in the Sufi discourse conveys the same obligations the subject is supposed to show

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to the monarch from self-sacrifice to blind obedience to the master (Tozy 1999: 28–29). In other Sufi orders, disciples may undergo self-denial rituals to kill in them the sense of dignity in front of their master’s commands. The disciple may be asked to take off his burnoose and collect in it the muck of his master’s mule. Najmi (2000) reports that the shaykh of al-‘Akakiza would ask his disciple to bring his wife; then the new disciple would prostrate himself on the ground with his wife on him. The shaykh would lie on the wife and copulate with her. When he reached his spasm, he would ask his followers, the fuqra, to follow one by one depending on their social rank in the Sufi group. For four centuries, al-‘Akakiza were a well-known and powerful subversive Sufi movement in Morocco. They existed in different areas from Oujda to the Sahara and last cried havoc during the sultan Moulay Ismail’s reign (1672–1727). At Ben Yeffu, a maraboutic site in the region of Doukkala, it is believed that jinns renew their annual pledge of allegiance (al-bay‘a) to the saint. During the moussem (annual pilgrimage) of the saint, mediums journey from far and near to the shrine under the influence of jinns to participate in the hadra (trance dance) that takes place there. The ritual is described by some social actors in political terms as the oath of allegiance (al-bay‘a) presented by the community of jinns to the Sultan Moulay ‘Abdelaziz Ben Yeffu each moussem during the hadra day. By projecting the monarchic structure of royal allegiance onto the world of jinns, some Buffi-s and their followers wreathe the saint in an aura of awe and veneration. As a ritual, the ceremony itself signifies that Allah has elected the saint to rule over the community of jinns and each year jinns have to renew their covenant of servitude to him. The practice constitutes a social bond between the saint and his supplicants, and places them in his servitude like a real king. In this way, al-bay‘a as a social-historical phenomenon is deprived of its historicity and its representation as legitimate is eternalized on the traditional ground that the ritual is represented as a mythic bond devoid of any historical or cultural dimension. Rather it appears as an a-historical relationship in society sanctioned by a divine law above any cleavage. Now, let us see how this authoritarian cultural schema is activated in Islamist social contexts. Islamism and the Authoritarian Cultural Schema The authoritarian cultural schema is derived from the Sufi master-Â� disciple relationship we have just explained in which the master requires

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 153 blind submission of the disciple; the teacher Yassine, leader of JS, wrote in his book al-Minhaj Nnabawi [the Prophetic Path], which represents a charter of the group, that it is compulsory to keep company with the Shaykh and obey his commands in order to rise in rank within the group. He insists on the disciple’s faithful service to the master by being at his disposal and showing perseverance so as to come closer to the source of power. If the disciple becomes closer to the source of power/knowledge, in Sufism it signifies closeness to achieve coalescence with the Divine. In the Sufi logic it goes that “He who tells his master ‘no’ will never succeed.” It also goes: “the disciple must be between his master’s hands like a dead person between his washer’s hands.” The story of Sidi Faris who executed his master’s orders to the letter and blindly got inside a heated oven is a good case in point. The authoritarian schema is also based on blood descent from the lineage of the Prophet, a social standing that cannot be changed. Take the example of Abdessalam Yassine again, the leader of JS, in his first letter of advice to the King Hassan II, he declares himself Shrif (descendent of the Prophet) though he is of Berber origins. He says in his missive: “I am the guilty servant of God Ibn al-Fallah of Berber origins; I have grown in poverty and deprivation. I read the Qur’an for it was thanks God and still remains my solely genuine reading… and here I get nearly to the topic and to be clearer, I find it necessary to point out that Ibn al-Fallah, the poor Berber, is an Idrissid of Sharifian lineage” (1974: 29–31). It is observable among JS members at the grassroots level that the Sufi master-disciple schema is re-enacted in the Islamist leader-follower social bond in the midst of obeisance to the master as the preemptory modality. Islamist leaders seem to be culturally constructed as maraboutic models, sultan-saints in the social imaginary, charismatic personalities with holy origins above common people; they are thought to wield baraka (holy blessing), and have the power to create miracles. Sharifism (holy descent from the Prophet’s lineage) is also a criterion of Islamist leadership. The Islamist leader like the sultan-saint is regarded as a mujahid (defender of Islam); such was the case of the Moroccan sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef whose face Moroccans believed to have seen on the moon when they run out in streets on the night of his exile. The Islamist leader in JS and in other Islamist groups is identified by virtue of Sufi honorific titles. Abdessalam Yassine again is identified by the Sufi title of ghaout zzaman (redeemer of all times) by some of his followers. As an example, a physician speaking during a picnic gathering in the presence of the shaykh videotaped 10 April 2005 considered Yassine a

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Sufi Messianic figure ghaout zzaman (redeemer of all times)—a rank higher than the qutb (patron leader) in the Sufi hierarchy. The Doctor narrates his story to the gathering as follows: Our grandfather used to summon us in social gatherings and tell us stories about saints. Once he took us for a promenade to the town cemetery. In the town of Qasbat Tadla, the landscape was fascinating. There was the forest and the cemetery opposite to it. Our grandfather used to wear a gown; he closed its ends on his shoulders and started reciting litanies while we children played nearby. He implanted in us from childhood the idea of saints and patron saints and redeemer saints. His speech to me carried on till I reached my second year in the faculty of medicine. He started focusing with me on the patron saint and the knower of God saint, till at a certain time I told him: “Grandfather, can you show me someone I will be his companion. Can I be your companion?” He told me: “my son for the pious there is the one who is permitted to educate and the one who is not.” My grandfather was not permitted. He added: “Allah will send you the master you will be his companion.” I told him: “tell me who he is! If you know this saint, tell me who he is.” He told me: “the time you will be called will arrive, then you will know him.” One day, an opportunity presented itself and I was present in a religious gathering and we stood up for prayer for a blessed night and one brother saw in his vision Mohammed the Prophet peace be upon him saying “My Caliph/deputy on earth is Abdessalam Yassine.”

The vision conveyed by the doctor evokes the Islamic belief in al-mahdawiya that acquired a mythic touch with the rise of the Sufi movement in Morocco. Al-mahdawiya is in fact a perennial belief in the Islamic world. It is well known among Moslems that at the end of the world a descendent of the Prophet will appear and redeem the earth. He is called al-Mahdi, and Moslems will follow him. To spread hope among their followers, some Sufis exploited the belief and claimed that they were the expected redeemers. Thus they attracted more devotees and endeavored to alleviate people’s misery by their practice of intercession (shshafa‘a)7, implanting in their followers a hopeful certainty in the 7 ╇ The third shaykh of Tamgrout, Mohammed Ben Naser says that his shaykh Sidi Ahmed Ben Brahim says that when the shaykh Sidi Abdellah Ben Hsain al-Qabbab was appointed by Allah to govern the hearts of people, he said: “he whom we stamp with our baraka will be safe from any harm and “we will intercede” (n-shaf ‘u) in favor of he who loves us for the sake of Allah.” The shaykh-s of Zawiyat Tinmisla said similar statements: “If you visit the shrine of Abu al-Qasim, your sins will be cleansed. If death comes to you on the day of your visit, you will die a martyr.” Also, Abu al-Qasem was believed to have said: “I swear that he who says,—I’m Abi al-Qasim’s friend—will never get into hell!” (as cited in al-Bouzidi 2000: 47–48).

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 155 future. A relevant example in this respect was the shaykh al-Jazuli who said about himself: “You are al-Mahdi! He who wants to attain happiness should come to you” (cit. in Jarid 2000: 160)! Does not the doctor’s speech elect the Islamist leader Yassine to the status of the Expected Mahdi? Similar stories like this one plead our case that Islamist leadership differs from maraboutic leadership only in form rather than in structure. Deep down its configuration, it insists on the closeness to the Prophet but not necessarily as a hereditary blood descent like in maraboutism or monarchic culture; instead it marks the proximity to the Prophet in terms of behavior. Islamists lay stress upon the return to the Prophet’s time and imitation of the Prophet and his companions’ conduct. To expand the meaning of sharifism (descent from the Prophet), we may argue that it is not only then a blood inheritance but symbolically also an inheritance of values and prophetic moral attributes. The Islamist leader should be a model of moral and religious propriety. At the ideological level, when you read the teacher Yassine, for instance, you discover they want to go back to the ruling system of the caliphate in Islam. The model for JS is the caliphate system with pious caliphs like Omar Bin Abdul-Aziz. Yassine thus asks the monarch Hassan II to repent in the way Omar Bin Abdul-Aziz the eight caliph of the Umayyad 680–720 repented. Omar left his palace to live in a small house with the masses, renounced his treasures and returned the riches of the people to the people. Another example may be taken from Salafism. Salafi respondents interviewed declare themselves being against maraboutic practices— forms of polytheistic worship, they say—but at the same time acquiesce to be faithful to the Sultan and regard his disobedience a form of apostasy, a schema of subjectivation that is priori maraboutic. Munir, a Salafi grassroots member, says: Rulers should take everything in charge. We don’t believe in democracy. Allah says: (Wert thou to follow the common run of those on earth, they will lead thee away from the path of Allah. They follow nothing but conjecture and surmise) [al-An‘am (The Cattle), aya 116]. The majority are secularists or follow false creed, so we cannot follow them. Democracy is disbelief. It breaks people’s faith. Since the majority are secularists, by democracy they will win the game. For us, you have to follow the Sunnah [Prophetic tradition] and ulema [established religious scholars]. That’s why we have in Morocco institutions to dispense religious knowledge. The greatest authority is the commander-of believers, the king, the ulema League then the regional councils. Allah should rule and we suppose that

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What helps such views to get implanted in young Islamists’ worldview in an effective manner is the cultural ground that is basically Islamic. A Marxist ideology—take the example of the Leftists’ experience in the seventies—may find it very difficult to access the Moroccan cultural scene because the common cultural ground is not receptive for such abstract intellectual ideologies. Their doctrinal abstractions, analytic thought and conceptual inquiry are strange to a population deeply immersed in tangible religious worship through magic and rituals. Islamism in contrast, which perpetuates the givens, builds on the existing religious framework and addresses people from all walks of life by symbol, image and myth that work primarily by emotion and experience, is admirably well–fitted to carry through the ideological task of amending religion left off by maraboutism, especially if it attempts to vulgarize its dogmas for the Average Moroccan and communicate its convictions in the course of ritual performances. In a nutshell, it is important to remind ourselves that there is no radicalization process without cultural embedding. Radicalization depends on the receptiveness of the cultural bed that hosts it. It operates within a host of discourse contexts imbued with the ideology of social systems and institutions where it has evolved. To conclude, I would argue that the moment the blindfold is lifted from our eyes by an explicitly politicized picture of the popular culture of Islam—which is the cultural bed—from the perspective of a dominated/resistant historical subject, such a viewpoint hardly amplified in current scholarship, we start over by opening new horizons for a new paradigmatic order of questions to be asked upon loads of isms in our societies. In other words, history must be sought in the unrecorded versions of the victims of history.

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Hammoudi, Abdellah. 1997. Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism. Chicago: U of Chicago P. ——. 1999. “The Reinvention of dar al-mulk: The Moroccan Political System and its Legitimation.” Pp. 129–175 in The Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, edited by Rahma Bourqia and Susan Miller. Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Hoggart, Richard. 1958/1970. The Uses of Literacy. New York: Oxford U. Press. Reprinted in 1970. Jarid, Abdelilah. 2000. “Muqarabah fi jadali al qudsiy wal insiy [An Approach to the Dialectic of the Sacred and the Human].” Amal 19–20: 157–66. Joffe, George. 1988. “Morocco: Monarchy, Legitimacy and Succession.” Third World Quarterly 10 (1): 176–190. Lamchichi, Abderrahim. 1990. «â•›Les Etats Maghrébins Face à l’Islamisme.â•›» Les Cahiers de l’Orient: Revue d’Etude et de Réflexion sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman 18: 133–166. ——. 1994. «â•›Etat, Légitimité Religieuse et Contestation Islamiste au Maroc.â•›» Confluences Méditerranée 12: 77–90. Lee, Victoria. J. 2010. “The Mosque and Black Islam.” Ethnography 11(1): 145–163. Lewis, Loan Myrddin. 1966. “Spirit Possession and Deprivation Cults.” Man 1(3): 307–329. ——. 1970/1989. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism, 2nd ed. London: Routhledge. Maarouf, Mohammed. 2007. Jinn Eviction as a Discourse of Power: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Moroccan Magical Beliefs and Practices. Leiden: Brill. Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce. M. 2003. “Islamism, Moroccan Style: The Ideas of Sheikh Yassine.” Middle East Quarterly 10 (1): 43–51. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” American Anthropologist 104(3): 766–775. Najmi, Abdellah. 2000. A-Ttasawwuf wa l-bid‘a bi al-Maghreb: Ta’ifat al-‘Akakiza [Sufism and Heresy in Morocco: The ‘Akakiza Team]. Rabat: Mohammed V University, Faculty of Letters. Ouaradi, Mohammed. 2010. Khirrij al Madrasa al Budshishiya al-mashbuha Abdessalam Yassine [The Graduate from the Suspicious Budshishi Sufi School: Abdessalam Yassine]. Rabat: Matba‘at Ibn Iznasen. Oukasha, Ben al-Mustapha. 2008. Al Islamiyun fi al-Maghreb [Islamists in Morocco]. Casablanca: Toubkal. Pargeter, Alison. 2009. “Localism and Radicalization in North Africa: Local Factors and the Development of Political Islam in Morocco, Tunisia and Libya.” International Affairs 85(5): 1031–1044. Ramadan, Tariq. n.d. “Trying to Build a Great Divide.” Interview by Nicholas Le Quesne. http://www.time.com/time/innovators/…/profile_ramadan.htm, retrieved 18 March 2010. Stone, Martin. 1997. The Agony of Algeria. New York: Columbia University Press. Tozy, Mohammed. 1991. «â•›Deux Projets de Société au Maroc: Islamisme et Salafiya.â•›» Pp. 133–138 in Islam, France et Laïcité, une nouvelle donne?, compiled by Guy Gauthier. Condé-sur-Noireau: Corlet. ——. 1997. “Religion and the Stakes of Power in Morocco.” Pp. 13–33 in Islamisms ‘there’ and ‘here’: Morocco, Turkey, the Netherlands, edited by Michiel Beker, Inge Hoogerheiden, Azza Karam and Robert Soeterik. Amsterdam: Middle East Research Associates. ——. 1999. Al-malakiya wa l-islam ssiyasi fi al-Maghreb [Monarchy and Political Islam in Morocco], translated by Mohammed Hatimi and Khalid Chakraoui. Casablanca: Le Fennec. ——. 2003. «â•›La Fin de l’Exception Marocaine: L’Islamisme Marocain Face au Défi du Salafisme.â•›» Afkar [idées] 1: 63–67.

╇ cultural foundations of islamist leadership in morocco 159 Vermeren, Pierre. 2004. “Dans le Nouveau Maroc, le Palais Seul Face aux Islamistes” Esprit 308: p.105–6. Webes, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, Chap. 3. Westermarck, Edward. 1926. Ritual and Belief in Morocco. London: Macmillan. Yassine, Abdessalam. 1974. Al-Islam aw ttufan [Islam or the Deluge] (typed manuscript). Marrakech: N. Pub. ——. 1989. Al-minhaj a-nnabawi [The Prophetic Path]. Casablanca: n.Pub. Zartman, William. 1986. “Opposition as Support of the State.” Pp. 61–87 in Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State, edited by Adeed Dawisha and William Zartman. London: Croom Helm.

THE PROTESTANT HOUSE CHURCH AND ITS POVERTY OF RIGHTS IN CHINA Zhaohui Hong1 Based on observations of the causes and characteristics of poverty in both the United States and China, the author has previously analyzed the four kinds of human poverty – that of materials, capability, rights, and motivations (Hong, 2005). In a similar vein, it can be argued that there are four characteristics for various disadvantaged groups of people in their struggle to gain and protect their rights, namely, the poverty of consciousness, capability, rights, and motivations. Tens of millions of members2 (Qiu 2009:185–186) of the Protestant House Churches in China3 have either already experienced or will be undergoing these four stages of poverty. During the period from 1949 to 1976, there was a prevailing lack of consciousness concerning religious freedom in the Chinese public. ConÂ� sequently, many house churches were dissolved under heavy political pressure. Generally speaking, the government policy from 1949 to 1958 was mainly one of attacking and reforming Christian believers; it changed to one of elimination in the next twenty years (1958–1978) (Liu 2009). Most of the house church members were farmers, women and elderly, many of whom were seeking economic benefits from religious belief, and who therefore found it easy to abandon their belief when faced with threats to their lives. As a result, the church members, who had to struggle for survival, often had to be very practical and expedient. On the other hand, forceful government suppression also fostered a strong sense 1 ╇ The earlier version of the paper had been presented at the international symposium on present and future of religion in China at Renmin University of China, July 26, 2010. The author is indebted to the following scholars for their valuable review and suggestion: Yi Sun, Fenggang Yang, Zhidong Hao, and Fan Jiang. 2 ╇ It is very difficult, if not possible, to estimate the accurate members of China’s house churches. However, according various scholars’ estimations, their relative consensus is that the members of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) should have approximate 20 million while estimating that house church members should be between 20–60 million. 3 ╇ Protestant house churches could be defined as the Protestant churches which have not registered and approved by the government.



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of moral resentment (Weber 1963:110–116) among a significant number of determined believers, thus paving the way for the revival of the house churches down the road (Yu 2008b). The two decades from 1978 to 1998 constituted the phase of the poverty of capability concerning religious freedom. The public consciousness about seeking and protecting their rights began to emerge and strengthen, but their ability to do so was still restricted. Since 1978, China’s policy toward religion has begun to improve. The Ningbo CentenÂ� nial Church was reopened on April 8th, 1979, thus becoming the first one open accessible to local believers since the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Liang 1999:93). Historical grievances generated much antiThree-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and anti-Three-Self Churches (TSC) sentiment. In the meanwhile, the restoration and strengthening of relations between the house churches and their overseas connections have also raised the consciousness about the need to protect their rights (Liang 1999:157–160). In 1998, house church members delivered their announceÂ�ment, “The Chinese House Churches’ Attitude toward the Government, Religious Policies and the TSC,” stating the five major reasons for their refusal to register with the government while pronouncing their five principles against joining TSC and boldly outlining three major points in calling for the government to protect their rights (Representatives of China’s House Churches 1998). However, because house churches had not popularized themselves in cities and among the young and the intellectuals, nor had they been able to identify legal experts capable of representing their interests in dialoguing with the government, their ability to protect their rights during this period remained rather limited (Aikman 2003:161–178). During the period of continued poverty of religious rights (1999– 2009), the ability of Protestants to preserve their rights has been on the rise, owing to the increasing social diversity and openness, economic development and prosperity, and the improvement of education. The number of the young, educated, and urban residents has seen dramatic increase (Gao 2005:84–85), joined by groups such as the Christians who are returned overseas scholars, college students, and entrepreneurs (Duan and Tang 2009:137). Furthermore, a team of attorneys dedicated to the defense of civil rights has emerged and is becoming increasingly effective by building means of dialoguing with free-thinking intellectuals within the system. Despite these positive developments, however, house church members still find their rights seriously deprived, seen in the “five no” policies implemented by the government, namely, they are

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not allowed to exist legally, build churches, found foreign religious schools, conduct inter-regional church activities or establish connections with overseas churches. It is obvious that the poverty of rights is the main reason for the bottle-neck in the development of house churches in China (Aikman 2003: 295–309; Wenger 2004; Lee 2007). In the quest for religious freedom, it is possible for house church members to experience the poverty of motivation in the near future because, with the improvement of the other aspects of their lives and the prospect of separation between church and state, the believers may in fact lose some motivation for insisting on further reform. It is even possible for internal corruption and erosion to appear (Paldam 2001:383– 413). Even though presently the poverty of motivation is a remote possibility, it is nonetheless useful to conduct some preemptive studies in light of the increasing corruption with some TSPMs, Buddhist and Daoist churches. For instance, currently what Chinese Buddhists need to protest against mainly is not the external government or coercive officials, but the internal heavy-handed control mechanisms, corruption and those Buddhist abbots who have placed themselves outside of the system of fair supervision (Li 2008). The so-called “Shaolin Temple” phenomenon denoting massive commercialization of Buddhism has reached an unprecedented level (Wei 2009:47–50). In the meanwhile, TSCs have also witnessed heavy concentration of power in the hands of few and irregular accounting practices, such as using public money for leisurely travels and getting involved in risky real estate businesses (Yu 2009). As is the case for all religions, once the external government interference decreases, believers will need additional motivation to protect and preserve their rights, including their rights to privacy, property, and self-determination. Therefore, the task of enabling Christians in China to be incentivized enough to reform their church in order to preserve its integrity will be a critical one for the development of Christianity when China eventually becomes democratized (Thompson 1970). By definition, “the poverty of rights can be seen as the limitation or deprivation of rights to individuals and/or groups” (Hong 2005:726). As far as the poverty of rights on religious freedom is concerned, it Â�basically means that certain groups or individuals are unable to enjoy their opportunities and rights to express, believe, promote, dissimilate, conduct, and/or create the religions they prefer. Currently, the poverty of rights to religious freedom in China is characterized by the five “illegalities” that the house church members have been conferred – illegal status, illegal church, illegal foreign church schools, illegal inter-regional



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religious activities, and illegal organizational collaborations with foreign churches. These designations, as the primary signs of their poverty of rights, form the fundamental reasons for the unhealthy development of China’s house churches (Aikman 2003:295–309). However, one cannot discount the intricate linkage between the poverty of rights and the other three types, namely, the poverties of consciousness, capability and motivation. Due to the length limit, this paper chooses to focus on the characteristics of the Chinese house churches’ poverty of rights from 1999 to 2009 while putting forward several suggestions for their selfpreservation and future development of these churches. During the transition of the Chinese religious society, the governmental policy seems to have evolved from the administrative control to legal management. Until 2009, there was never a comprehensive legal code dealing with religion. In 2004, the State Council announced the Regulations on Religious Affairs (hereafter as RRA). However, given that the RRA was impractical, it leaves the practitioners with essentially two choices. One is to adopt the “ostrich” policy by overlooking the Â�existence of house church activities (Yu 2008a); the other one is, in the name of implementing the “rule by law,” to use the new law to delegitimize house church activities, including gathering, organizing, church building, and public transportation (Liu 2009). The “legal” approach has resulted in decreasing the previous administrative flexibility when dealing with the house churches while at the same time essentially forcing government agencies to use legal stipulations for religious control. The outcome is that most, if not all, house church activities have been rendered illegal (Dai 2009). Whether this strict use of legality is beneficial or harmful to the house churches, it constitutes a central and difficult question for the government and all house churches. This seeming “rule by law” has actually led to the violation of house church members’ rights in the following five aspects. First of all, the government has managed to place house churches on an unlawful status by using legalistic interpretations. Since 1949, the existence of house churches in China has remained illegal, thus depriving tens of thousands of church members of their rights to religious freedom for decades. According to Article Six, Chapter Two in the RRA, “the establishment, change and cancellation of the religious organizations should be registered in accordance with the relevant stipulations outlines in the Regulations on the Registration of Social Organizations (RRSO)” (China’s State Council 2004). Promulgated in 1998, the RRSO states in

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Article Three, Chapter One that “the establishment of any social organization should be inspected and approved by the agencies in charge and register by following the specific terms outlined in this RRSO.” Local agencies overseeing religious affairs in general do not like the idea of allowing the establishment of other religious organizations outside of the TSCs because Article 13 (item 2) in Chapter 3 of the RRSO states that “the founding of a social organization is not necessary if similar organizations are already in existence in the same administrative district” (China’s State Council 1998). In reality, such a stipulation forces house churches to register with the existing TSCs and subject themselves to the latter’s leadership. Doing so allows the government to exercise effective control over the Christian house churches. In addition, the authority often refuses to officially register the house churches on the grounds that “some of these organizations are cultish and must be abolished and others are manipulated by overseas hostile forces (Liang 1999:327). On the other hand, the house churches themselves are reluctant to receive the administrative inspection and control because they are required by the government to designate places and individuals to conduct their religious activities while not being allowed to preach Christianity to anyone under 18 years of age. In the meanwhile, official policies forbid house churches from contacting any overseas churches (Representative of China’s House Churches 1998). House churches are also required to have a fixed place of worshipping, but according to the interpretations of some local officials, a “fixed place” refers to a special prayer hall built specifically for such a purpose (Liang 1999:328). This creates an impossible Catch-22 situation because an unregistered church cannot construct its own building and is unable to own a place that is specially designated as a prayer hall. To make matters worse, some established churches are even forced to acquire or lease commodities that the local government has failed to sell, and to reimburse the local bureau of religion for all kinds of banquets and gifts (Liang 1999:331). The prospect of being forced into corruption is another reason for the house churches’ reluctance to join the TSCs. Consequently, house churches with their tens of thousands of members are placed into a status that is unregistered and illegal, thus leaving them in a precarious situation and making it impossible for them to map out a long-term development plan. Furthermore, the vagueness of legal clauses has also led to randomness in the local government’s management of religious affairs. For instance, Article 5 in the RRA maintains that “agencies in charge of managing religious affairs in the



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government above the county level should follow the law in dealing with religious affairs when they involve the interests of the country, the society and the general public” (China’s State Council 2004). However, there is no clear definition as to what constitutes such “interests” or what proper “administrative means” are. As a result, local governments at the county level are left with ample opportunities to use their authority arbitrarily in suppressing the house churches in their areas. In some areas, especially in the remote mid-western regions, the control of the house churches is much more strict (Yu 2008a). A unique phenomenon has thus emerged in China, that is, the Constitution serves as only legal rhetoric, when in reality it often fails to be faithfully followed despite the stipulation that “any action in violation of the Constitution must be investigated” (The National People’s Congress 2002:5). It is not uncommon for the rule of law in China to be individualized and randomly applied following subjective judgments. In other words, “legalism is subject to administrative arbitrariness of the local government” (Gao 2008). The house church is like a concubine whose marriage status depends on the interpretations of the “mother-in-law” (the government). The approximately 3,000 county governments essentially function like 3,000 mothers-in-law, whose authorities are unchecked, whose decisions are unpredictable, and whose treatment of the local house churches can be severely or superficially punitive. In reality, most of the aforementioned regulations violate or at least disregard the Chinese Constitution and the fundamental principles of the Criminal Law. Failure to faithfully and honestly abide by the legal code is one of the major characteristics of the house churches’ poverty of rights. For example, Article 36 of the Constitution proclaims that “citizens of the People’s Republic of China have the right to the freedom of religion. Any government agencies, social organizations and individuals may not force any citizen to believe or not to believe in a religion, may not discriminate citizens based on whether they believe in a religion” (China’s State Council 2002:10). The Constitution essentially protects the legal existence of house churches, for it deems religious beliefs of citizens as a private affair in the ideological infrastructure, and any public authority or legal principles must not engage in arbitrary interferÂ� ence. However, the various legal codes and administrative regulations that are currently in practice violate the principle of religious freedom, as stated in the Constitution. In some ways, the difference between TSCs and house churches is similar to that between two denominations within Christianity in the West, but they both should have their respective

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existential rights and freedom (Hong 2010b). In other words, the public authority has no right to force one of them to register with the government; doing so violates the fundamental rights of citizens whose freedom of thoughts and choices of religion are constitutionally protected (Liu 2009b). In addition, Article Five in the Constitution determines that “any laws, administrative regulations and regional codes may not contradict the Constitution” (China’s State Council 2002:5). However, in actual practice, numerous cases in which citizens’ rights are deprived or shortchanged come from those administrative regulations and regional codes which conflict with the Constitution. The house churches’ insistence on not registering with the local government is an example of protecting their constitutionally guaranteed rights to religious freedom and to personal privacy, yet they have encountered forceful suppression in the hands of local governments (Liu 2009b). Moreover, Article 251 of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China clearly states that “in serious cases, personnel of government agencies who have unlawfully acted to deprive citizens’ freedom of religious beliefs and who invade the cultures and customs of minorities may be punished with imprisonment of less than two years or detainment” (National People’s Congress of China 1979). According to this clause, public officials who have forced house churches to register should in fact pay a legal price for their violation of citizens’ rights to religious freedom, but in reality, the offenders often make a vigorous legal claim while the law-abiding citizens have to make all kinds of compromises and accommodations. Needless to say, the Chinese Constitution, which guarantees the citizens’ freedom of religion and that of assembly have been compromised by various kinds of “supplementary laws” which impede the implementation of the Constitution, as in the case of the regulations concerning religious affairs (Zou 2008:173). It is indeed incomprehensible that administrative agencies, such as the State Council and various ministries, are in the position of making, interpreting and implementing laws, thus converging the triple powers as a referee, coach and athlete. It thus makes it extremely difficult for house churches to even voice their grievances, let alone obtain their full rights (Yang 1970:180–217). The second aspect of the house churches’ lack of rights is the restrictions placed on their ability to construct a physical church where they can gather and perform religious ceremonies. As commonly known, one of the main Christian doctrines is the admonishment for each



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individual believer to “not neglecting to meet together” (Hebrews 10:25). Naturally, congregation requires a place, but the traditional space, such as a family or other private residence, can no longer accommodate a dramatic increased membership. Thus, having a church building is a dire necessity for the house churches. Of course, well aware of their importance, the agencies in charge of religious affairs have withheld permission for the church building; doing so has effectively hindered the growth of the house churches. From their stand point, the more gathering places are available, the more detrimental it is for their position and administrative control (Duan and Tang 2009:142). Lack of official registration also means that the house churches do not have the necessary qualification to build their own congregation places because, according to the RRA, “group religious activities should take place at registered religious institutions (Article 12, Chapter 3)” (China’s State Council 2004). Even some semi-TSPMs or semi-house churches have formed an alliance with the TSCs and have therefore become legal (Duan and Tang 2009:143), the criteria for them to become qualified to build their own churches are still artificially set high because the RRA makes it clear that an application for building a church needs to be approved at all three levels – county, city and province, a process that takes at least 90 days (Article 13 in Chapter 3). Even in the case in which a church is built, it is still necessary to obtain the approval from a countylevel agency before it can officially function (Article 15 in Chapter 3). The internal management of the church, including key personnel and financial matters, had to be “subject to the direction, supervision and investigation of the local government” (Article 18 in Chapter 3) (China’s State Council 2004). This is a typical example of the non-separation between the church and the state. Furthermore, there are more and often confusing regulations at the various local levels. For instance, according to the Specific Distinctions of the Two Kinds of Religious Activities in Fujian Province, issued in 2006, a church should take up more than 200 square meters of land with well-documented ownership and rights to usage; leased areas cannot be used for the construction of a church. Meanwhile, a church does not meet the qualification unless it has 100 or more permanent congregations. As a result, churches are in short supply and the existing ones are very crowded. The Muochou Road Church located on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, for instance, has to hold as many as four worshipping ceremonies on Sundays in order to accommodate several thousands of people (Duan and Tang 2009:133). The house churches in different places have

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no choice but to violate the rules by renting places, and they are often crowded and over flown to the point that worshippers have to stand in the courtyard and on the streets. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to safeguard the environment of the religious ceremonies, thus compromising the rights of the worshippers. In September 2007, the Public Security Bureau in Beijing issued the so-called “five kinds of nolease,” one of which forbids space rental to “anyone engaged in illegal religious activities” (Wang 2007). This kind of deliberate incapacitation deprives house churches of an existential foothold. Presently the wellknown Shouwang house church in Beijing is more than ready to construct its own building, but such a desire remains wishful thinking because doing so will violate existing regulations concerning church construction (Wei and Li 2010:254). While the existence of the house churches conforms to the constitutional principle which guarantees religious freedom, yet it paradoxically violates the specific rules and regulations, which essentially undermine such freedom (Dai 2009). In other words, without necessary and concrete policies in support of religious freedom, the Constitution is rendered meaningless at least in this area (Dai 2009). The third aspect of the house churches’ lack of rights is seen in their inability to accommodate their followers. The government’s restriction on the construction of church buildings, coupled with the urgent need of many believers for an adequate gathering place, has resulted in a large number of cases of “illegal gathering.” Case one involves the Qiuyu Zhifu Church in Chengdu, which was dissolved by the local government on the ground of “illegal gathering.” On June 21, 2009, Qingyang District of Chengdu City government announced the “administrative penalty notice,” claiming that the Qiuyu Zhifu Church had to be dissolved and its “illegal property” confiscated due to its lack of registration as a legitimate social organization. The city in rending its decision cited Article 35 in the State Council’s RRSO, which stipulates that “no one can prepare for a social organization’s activities without permission and no social organization can conduct any activities without official registration. Any social organization whose registration has been revoked will be dissolved and its illegal property confiscated by the registration management agency if it continues its activities. If its activities are deemed criminal in nature, such a social organization will be penalized in accordance with the law; otherwise it will be punished for its violation of security management in accordance with the law” (China’s State Council 1998). On July 9, 2009,



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Qiuyu Zhifu Church filed a petition with the Chengdu City Civil Affairs Bureau and expressed its dissatisfaction with the Qingyang District Civil Affairs Bureau’s unfair administrative measure and asked the city government to reconsider. On July 17, the Chengdu City Civil Affairs Bureau issued its verdict, recommending that the Qingyang district bureau “rectify” its decision to “dissolve” the Qiuyu Zhifu Church. At the same time, it also notified Wang Yi, head of the Church, that its petition to not abide by the district decision would not be dealt with. The verdict gave the appearance of fairness because it did not completely favor one side; however, the interests and rights of the house church remained unprotected (Hong 2010a; Zhong 2009). Case two involves the Shouwang House Church in Beijing. The local government demanded that the church be dissolved on the same ground of its lack of registration. Pressured by the Beijing Municipal authority since August 2009, Beijing Huajie Building, the company that leased space to the Shouwang Church, finally ended its contract with the latter. As a result, in the morning on November 1, 2009, several hundred church members were forced to brace the snow while gathering in the open at Haidian Park. Several days later, around 9 o’clock in the morning on November 8th, Jin Tianming, the minister of the Shouwang Church, was taken away by the authority and not released until three hours later. Around 10 o’clock that morning, about 300 church members were still at the Haidian Park gathering. In order to make it difficult for them to continue their activities, the park authority harassed them with highvolume loud speakers and monitored the members’ movements. It was not until the 15th when Shouwang Church was able to gather again inside the Beijing Zhonghua Meide Dongman Theater after the city government made some compromise. Another week later, the church managed to gather at the Sunshine Hall inside of the Qinghua Science and Technology Plaza and restored its three sessions of worshipping ceremony (Wei and Li 2010:251–254; China Aid Association 2009a). Case three involves the Wanbang Church in Shanghai. In February 2009, the municipal authority began its interference in the normal activities of the church, which had a membership of 1,200. On November 2nd, over thirty officials from four government agencies entered the church and ordered the members to disband on the pretext that their gathering was illegal. On the evening of November 11th and 12th, the city authority closed down the location of the church gathering–Building 2708 on Wuzhong Road in Minhang District. On Sunday, November 15th, Wanbang church members were forced to hold their 10–12 o’clock

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worshipping ceremony in an open place near its original location, while several hundred of municipal officials and policemen filmed the entire ceremony from a higher locale. A week later, four ministers were taken away at 6 o’clock in the morning on the ground that they had held illegal organizational activities. Over 500 church members, in the absence of their ministers, insisted on holding two sessions of their worshipping ceremony (Hong 2010a; China Aid Association 2009c). Subsequently, an investigative group sanctioned by the local authority began to conduct a large number of visits at the church members’ work places, families and their children’s schools in an effort to identify those who participated in regular church ceremonies, regardless of whether they were Shanghai residents, temporary visitors or lease holders, seniors, students or workers. During the entire process, the authority used means of threat, coercion; including forcefully taking the members’ finger prints and forbidding them from taking part in future ceremonies (Hong 2010a; Shanghai Wan Bang Church 2009). The fourth aspect of the house churches’ lack of rights is seen in the forceful violation of their members’ rights. Local authorities often use violence to deal with unarmed church leaders and believers even to the extent of imposing unlawful detention and imprisonment (RobertÂ�son 2009). The Fushan House Church case is a telling example. On September 13, 2009, the Fushan county authority in Linfen city, Shaanxi Province dispatched over 400 policemen and unidentified mobsters to force their way into the gathering place of the Fushan House Church which had about 30,000 members. The intruders attacked the church members who were fathered in the dormitory, over 100 of whom were injured, and some lost consciousness. Worse yet, the Fushan County authority also used bulldozers and excavators to destroy several dozens of buildings, damaged television sets, refrigerators, cars and cooking utensils, all of which were properties of the church. On November 25th, the Yaodu District court in Linfen City issued its verdict sentencing the head minister of the church and other “responsible individuals” to term of imprisonment and monetary penalty on the pretext that they had “illegally occupied farm land” and exhibited “disorderly conduct in gathering people to disrupt the traffic.” Five days later, five other Linfen religious leaders were sentenced to reeducation through labor on the grounds of gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic order (Hong 2010a; Bodeen 2009). The Xinjiang Ahlimujiang case serves as another illustration of the blatant violation of house church members’ rights. Alimujiang, a



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Protestant Uighur who converted from Islam to Christianity in 1995, became the leader of a house church for Uighurs. On September 13, 2007, the Kashi City authority issued a document branding Ahlimujiang’s religious activities as “illegal” because he was seen to have “spread Christianity among the Uighur people by distributing religious propaganda materials and recruiting believers of Christianity.” On January 12, 2008, Ahlimujiang was detained by the intermediary level public security bureau in Kashi District on the grounds of “suspicion of activities intended to separate the country” and “providing national secrets to overseas sources.” He was subsequently detained at the provisional jail in Kashi City. On May 27, the intermediary level court dealt with AhlimuÂ�jiang’s case and decided to return the case to the local public security bureau for further investigation due to “insufficient evidence.”  Two months later, the court opened the case for the second time, but concluded without announcing its verdict. On August 6, however, a verdict was secretly reached, sentencing Ahlimujiang to a 15-year prison term because he was deemed “culpable for leaking national secrets to overseas personnel” (Hong 2010a; China Aid Association 2009d). The Zhang Mingxuan case serves to further illustrate the grave violations of individual house church members’ civil rights. Zhang was the head of the Chinese House Church Association and, consequently, a target of intense pressure and persecution. During the time span of twenty two years, he was jailed for twenty six times. During the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, he and his wife were once again placed under house arrest; they were not released and allowed to return to Beijing until the end of September. On September 30, he and his family moved into a newly rented apartment, yet the very next day, the local authority expelled them. Around noon time on October 16, his apartment, located in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, was broken into by the local authority, which forced the Zhang family to leave Beijing within an hour. Over the years, Zhang and his family were compelled to move for over 100 times, and every single time they were accompanied by public security personnel or plain-clothes policemen. The local government forced Zhang out by means such as terminating water and electricity supplies and/or blocking the road, and even went so far as to place his photos, identification number and cell phone number as well as those of his family members at various local police stations, train stations and hotels in order to prevent them from renting apartments or staying at a hotel. Unable to enter Beijing, Zhang and his family often found themselves floating from one place to another without a permanent residence. Their basic

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civil rights, such as those to housing and privacy, were seriously violated (Hong 2010a; Pan 2008). The fifth aspect of the house churches’ lack of rights is the violation of their property rights. The absence of their legal status makes it impossible for their property to receive proper protection. Article 77 of the People’s Republic of China Civil Codes stipulates that social organizaÂ� tions,  including religious entities, are entitled to legal protection of their properties (National People’s Congress of China 2004). The Bible encourages each believer in God to make voluntary contributions, which enable the church to accumulate sizable assets. However, the fact that the churches cannot obtain their legal status means that their collective assets necessary for their basic operations can be arbitrarily taken away, while their leasing contracts can be suspended without justification (Liu 2009b). It needs to be pointed out that some local governments have refused to grant legal status to the house churches largely because of their desire to occupy the latter’s land and other assets on a permanent basis. In other words, once legalized, the house churches would be able to reclaim their properties. Therefore, some local authorities have decided to take preemptive actions by making it impossible for the house churches to gain legitimacy while at the same time confiscating their assets and financially penalizing their members (Liang 1999:329). Admittedly the aforementioned violations of individuals’ rights to the freedom of religion are not exclusively to China. Comprehensive studies indicate that religious discriminations occur in close to one-third of the countries in the world, while violent crackdowns of religious entities and believers in fact take place in close to half of world (Grim 2009:5– 6). It is worth noting that the local authority in the Wenzhou region (Zhejiang Province) in China has learned its own lesson from dealing with religious matters; that is, “religion is like a rubber ball–the harder one tries to push it down, the higher it bounces back” (Liang 1999:130). Given that the Chinese government is excluding the Protestant house churches’ rights to engage in religious activities, it may be worthwhile for the Chinese authorities to take note of the historical experience of the American slave owners who ultimately allowed the slaves to become Christians in the 17th and 18th century. The slave holders once regarded the issue of whether to allow the slaves to gather and worship God on Sundays as a dire predicament. On the one hand, they feared that such regular gathering would provide slaves with an opportunity to vent their discontent, to escape or plot rebellions. On the other hand, they were



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also fully aware of the potential benefits for allowing the slaves such practice; namely, the essence of love, forbearance and peace that was inherent in Christianity would be instilled in the slaves, thus making them more willing to tolerate their lot. Of course, the slave owners were not exactly eager to practice such Christian principles themselves (Cornelius 1999). The decision to allow slaves to express their faith in an open manner seemed to benefit the slave owners. “Uncle Tom” in Uncle Tom Cabin indeed had the ability and opportunity to organize rebellions of his fellow slaves, or at least to orchestrate a group escape, yet he insisted on peaceful non-resistance. Even when almost beaten to death by his third owner, he was still able to cling to the spirit of forgiveness and eventually died with a sense of peaceful resignation and an expectation to go to heaven (Stowe 1981:590–591). The story of Uncle Tom was typical of the outcome of religious “brainwashing” sought by slave owners. During the long history of slavery from 1619 to 1865, there were only four group rebellions participated by over 50 slaves4 (Aptheker 1943; Foner and Garraty 1991; History Guy Web 2010). Among other reasons, one has to wonder if the fact that slaves were indoctrinated with the religious ideas of compassion, toleration and non-resistance was at least partially responsible for their lack of organized revolts. A thoughtprovoking question remains: if the American slave owners were able to recognize the “value” of religion over 300 years ago, then should the Chinese authorities in the 21st century not have the cleverness? In conclusion, currently the development of Protestant house churchÂ�es in China seems to have reached a bottleneck. Due to the government’s determination to restrict further growth of these churches as well as the latter’s own limitations, it is rather difficult for them to break out of the present predicament (Hong 2010b). It is urgent for the government to realize that violence is incapable of changing individuals’ faith. The numerous political movements in China since 1949 have shown that the government should not and cannot really change one’s spiritual essence. Any idea that violent suppression can alter the house church members’ faith is more than likely to backfire.

4 ╇ According to Herbert Apthker’s calculation, more than two hundred separate slave revolts and conspiracies took place from 1619 to 1865. However, there were only four slave rebellions in which more than 50 slaves participated, including 1) Cato’s Conspiracy/Stono in 1773 (80 participants); 2) St. John the Baptist Parish of 1811 (500 participants); 3) Fort Blount Revolt of 1816 (300 participants); and 4) Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831(80 participants).

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RETHINKING THE ROLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN BUILDING CIVIL SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA: THE CASE OF WENZHOU DIOCESE* Shun-hing Chan Introduction In sociological literature, researchers consider that the Catholic church is instrumental in civil society building and makes a contribution to democratization (Gagnere 1998, Casanova 2001a, 2001b, Sullivan and Leppert 2003). For example, José Casanova holds that the Catholic church plays a prominent role in civil society formation in three aspects. First, the church serves as an autonomous public space and as a countervailing force to state power. Second, the church becomes an institution of civil society when it gives up its monopolistic claims and recognizes religious freedom and freedom of conscience as universal and inviolable human rights. Third, the church enters the public sphere of civil society to raise normative issues, participating in ongoing processes of normative contestation (Casanova 2001b: 1041–1050). Although the condition of the Catholic church in Chinese society is different from the west, Casanova’s observation is useful in understanding the possible contribution of the Catholic church in civil society building in a Chinese context.1 Richard Madsen’s many writings on the Chinese Catholic church are valuable for researchers to understand the relationship between  the CathÂ�olic church and civil society building in contemporary China (MadÂ� sen 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004). In his China’s Catholics, he uses Robert PutÂ� nam’s republican model of civil society to examine the “civility” of the Chinese Catholic church, assessing whether the church could contribute to the making of a civil society. In his conclusion, he asserts that the *╇ This research project is supported by the General Research Fund (HKBU 2430/ 06H), Research Grants Council, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. This paper was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. The author wishes to thank Anthony Lam and Robert L. Montgomercy for their helpful critiques of earlier draft, but claim full responsibility for the analyses and interpretations presented herein. 1 ╇ For example, the Catholic population in mainland China is only 12 million, which occupies only a small portion of the Chinese population, and the theology and ethical teaching are from the tradition before the second Vatican Council.

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Chinese Catholic church is “uncivil,” because most of the Catholics he studied are focused on vertical relationships of authority and Â�dependence more than on wide horizontal relationships of reciprocity and cooperation. Furthermore, Catholics exhibit a great deal of solidarity at the village level, but are hostile to outsiders. They are concerned more about their personal salvation than being alive to the interests of other (Madsen 1998:22). Madsen admits that his studies were limited in terms of data collection, northern bias (pp. 11–21) and, in my view, the chosen conceptual framework and his political philosophy of European tradition (pp. 126–128). If one rigorously uses the same conceptual framework to examine the Catholic church in Hong Kong, the findings will also be “uncivil,” a conclusion contrary to what he had described in the book (pp. 142–144).2 Notwithstanding the problematic conclusion he draws from his studies, I consider Madsen’s many observations and analyses of the Chinese Catholic church to be insightful and significant, from which we can stand on the giant’s shoulder to look farther and clearer. What we need to do is to rethink the same issues with a different conceptual framework, methodology and object of study, to avoid the same problems Madsen encountered in his research project in the 1990s. This paper is a study of the Catholic church in Wenzhou, examining its contributions to and limitations of building a civil society in contemporary China. The research questions are: what is the role of the Catholic church in building a civil society in Wenzhou? What are the limitations of the Catholic church in playing such a role? In the following, I shall discuss the conceptual framework of civil society used in this paper, and explain the three hypotheses I formulated with reference to the theory. Then I shall provide a historical account of Wenzhou diocese, and examine the case of the Wenzhou Catholic church with reference to the three hypotheses. In conclusion, I shall discuss the limitations of the Wenzhou Catholic church, and suggest how these limitations can be overcome in the future. Civil Society and the Catholic Church in China There are many discussions regarding what is a civil society and how to conduct such research in Chinese society. Generally speaking, three 2 ╇ This judgment is based on my discussion with members of the Justice and Peace Commission of Hong Kong Catholic Diocese.



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different models of civil society can be identified, i.e., the liberal, the republican and the Marxist (Habermas 1989, Calhoun 1992, Putnam 1993, Ku 2002, Madsen 2008). Social researchers use each of these models to study the issues relating to civil society in which they are interested. Regarding the application of the concept of civil society in China, the journal Modern China organized a symposium in 1993 to discuss “â•›‘Public Sphere’/ ‘Civil Society’ in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies,” in which researchers debated whether there was a civil society in Chinese history.3 Craig Calhoun and other researchers also provided further discussion of the use and misuse of the concept of civil society in Chinese society (Calhoun 1993, Brook and Frolick 1997). I find the working definition of civil society provided by the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics, useful in conducting my research on the role of the Catholic church in civil society building in Chinese society today. The following is the definition: Civil Society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups (Centre for Civil Society 2004).

From the above working definition, we can first of all argue that the Catholic church as a faith-based organization is an actor in a civil society. Referring to three different aspects of a civil society suggested in the definition, I formulate three hypotheses to examine whether the Catholic church in China demonstrates the characteristics of a civil society. Civil society refers to an arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In China, there are government approved open churches and underground churches. Being registered with the government, the open church has a legal status and is supervised by the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). The underground church refuses to register as a social institution under a government body, and therefore does not enjoy a legal status. Generally speaking, the government controls the open church through the CPA, and 3

╇See Modern China, Volume 19, Number 2, April 1993.

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suppresses the underground church through the Public Security Bureau. Between the government and the open church there exists a type of vertical relationship of authority and dependence. However, many priests from the open and the underground churches resist the control of the government and seek religious freedom. Seeking religious freedom is an act of affirming civil rights. This can be seen as the shared interest, purpose and value of the Catholics and citizens in the wider society. Hence: Hypothesis 1: The more the Catholic church seeks religious freedom, the more she demonstrates the characteristics of a civil society. The boundaries between the Chinese government and the Catholic church are complex, blurred and negotiated. The relationship between the government and the open church is far from the ideal of a civil Â�society due to their coerced form of organization, whereas the relationship between the government and the underground church is closer to the ideal of a civil society because the church exercises self-governance and seeks independence from the state. In reality, there are priests from the open church who resist the control of the government, and priests from the underground church who are able to communicate well with government officials. Therefore, the relationship between the government and the church should be understood not only from the form of organization, but also from the power relation between the two parties, particularly whether the priests are able to take collective action seeking religious freedom. Hypothesis 2: No matter whether the relationship between government and the church is that of conflict or cooperation, the more the church seeks religious freedom through collective action, the more she demonstrates the characteristics of a civil society. There are a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms in the Catholic church, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Some bishops of the open church have the “apostolic mandate” from the Pope, while others do not. The legitimacy of open church bishops highly affects their interaction with the underground church. Some open church bishops are in conflict with the underground bishops, while some can peacefully co-exist with them, and some can collaborate through negotiation.



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Hypothesis 3: There are multiple relationships between the open and the underground church, including those of conflict, co-existence and collaboration. No matter which kind of relationship, the more the church seeks religious freedom through collective action, the more she demonstrates the characteristics of a civil society. Data and Methods This is a qualitative research utilizing fieldwork to collect data, and the research subject is the Catholic church in Wenzhou. The reason for using the qualitative approach is simple. The study of the Catholic church in China continues to be a very sensitive issue. Fieldwork allows the researcher to conduct research in a flexible way, by meeting and interviewing priests and the laity from both the open and underground churches. I chose Wenzhou diocese as the subject of study because Wenzhou is one of the most liberal areas across the nation. Wenzhou diocese could project the most liberal picture of the Catholic church in a variety of dioceses in China. I conducted fieldwork in Wenzhou diocese on two separate �occasions. The first trip was in June 2007, during which I visited three parishes, met and interviewed a total of ten people, including Catholic priests and laity in both the open and underground churches. The different perspectives of the priests and laity in both churches on certain events and issues were useful in confirming the information gathered and in �understanding the complexity of the issues. The second trip was conducted in January 2009. The purpose of that fieldwork was to conduct further in-depth interviews, and at the same time validate the information gathered in the first trip. In the second interview, I shared with the interviewees my preliminary research findings, and listened to their feedback. To ensure their safety, I concealed their identities and titles in this paper. The Catholic Church in Wenzhou Diocese The Wenzhou diocese is located in the northern part of Zhejiang Prov� ince. The history of the Catholic church can be traced back to the Ming dynasty, during which a Spanish Dominican named Juan Bautista de Morales from Fuan started preaching in Wenzhou. In 1696, a Zhejiang Apostolic Vicariate was once established, but was soon abolished because of the Rites Controversy. In 1924, a Ningbo Apostolic Vicariate

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was established, which included the areas of Wenzhou, Taizhou and Lishui. In 1949, the Vatican elevated Wenzhou as the Yongjia diocese, and commissioned Bishop André-Jean-François Defebvre of Ningbo diocese as the administrator in charge of Wenzhou, and Father Su Xida as the Vicar General. The Yongjia diocese was renamed as the Wenzhou diocese later.4 In Wenzhou diocese today, the open and the underground churches co-exist and confront each other. In 2009, there were 110,000 Catholics in Wenzhou diocese, including 70,000 in the open church and 40,000 in the underground church. The bishop’s office and the St. Paul’s Cathedral are located at Zhouzhaici Lane. Bishop Zhu Weifang is the official diocesan bishop conferred by the Vatican. The parishes of the underground church are located in the area of Cangnan, Yueqing, Ruian and YongÂ� qiang. Bishop Shao Zhoumin is the titular bishop of the diocese conferred by the Vatican. Between the open and the underground church, there are churches of the “middle-path.” Located in the area of Longgang parish in Cangnan County, these churches are part of the open church in organizational structure, but the priests and lay Catholics of the parish have built friendly relationships with the underground church. The Catholic population in Longgang parish has approximately 50,000 Catholics, which is the majority among parishes in the open church.5 The Catholic Church in Wenzhou and its Role in Civil Society Building In this section, I shall examine whether the Wenzhou Catholic church shows the characteristics of a civil society by testing the three hypotheses stated in the previous paragraph, i.e., the collective action of the Catholic church seeking religious freedom, the boundaries between the CathÂ�olic church and the government, and the interaction of actors in the Catholic community. Collective Action Seeking Religious Freedom Many Catholic priests and laity in Wenzhou diocese were put in jail after 1949. The Vicar General Father Su Xida and his successor Father ╇See A Brief History of Wenzhou Catholic Church (in Chinese) (Wenzhou: Catholic Wenzhou Diocese, 2006), pp. 1, 25–30. 5 ╇The data was collected in my field trip in Wenzhou diocese in 2007. See also Charbonnier (2008:512–515). 4



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Wang Yijun were arrested in 1955. Father Su died in prison in 1958 and Wang was released in 1970. During the intense political environment of persecution, some priests chose to follow the government, and others turned to work underground. For example, Father Wang made efforts to organize the underground church until he was arrested again by the government in 1982. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, the government decided to revive the work of religion in Wenzhou, and urged the underground priests to come out from hiding and to work in the open church again. They promised to return the church property to them. In face of the new situation, the underground priests discussed together should they take the opportunity. The majority resolved that they should divide themselves into two groups: one group turned to work in the open church and took back the church property from the government, while the other group continued to work underground so that the government could not arrest them all in case there was a plot targeting the church. In December 1981, the government called the Congress of Catholics in Wenzhou in Huaqiao Hotel, requesting the priests to establish the Administrative Committee of the Catholic Church in Wenzhou City. During the meeting, the underground priests criticized those priests who had followed the government, and stated the principles for supporting the establishment of the Administrative Committee, as follows: 1.╇ The Administrative Committee of the Catholic Church in Wenzhou City acknowledges the Pope as the leader of the Catholic church. 2.╇ The priests and laity who had betrayed the Pope are not allowed to take part in the Administrative Committee in Wenzhou. 3.╇ The Administrative Committee in Wenzhou has no relationship with the “Two Hui, One Tuan” of the Chinese Catholic church in Beijing, and will not follow their way of dissociating from the Pope.6 4.╇ The Administrative Committee will comply with the policy of the government on matters that are right. This is the oft-quoted “Four Principles of Huaqiao Hotel” in the Wenzhou Catholic community. The government officials of the Religious Affairs Bureau agreed with the priests in negotiation. Then some of the 6 ╇ The “Two Hui” refers to the Catholic Patriotic Association and the Chinese Catholic Church Administrative Committee, and the “One Tuan” refers to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

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Â� underground priests turned to work in the open church. When the renovation of the Bishop’s Office and St. Paul’s Cathedral was completed, the priests organized a grand ceremony celebrating the reopening of the Catholic church in the Christmas of 1983. After the Congress of Catholics in Wenzhou, the Catholic Â�community split into four different groups. There were two conflicting groups in the open church representing different political positions. One can be called the “pro-government” group, and the other the Â�“pro-dialogue” group. With only a small number of people, the “pro-government” group followed the policy of the government. The “pro-dialogue” group sought to negotiate with the government in safeguarding the rights and interests of the church. They would work with the government on matters they considered contributing to the common good, and oppose the government on matters they considered to violate the Catholic faith. This position was stated in the fourth clause in the “Four Principles of Huaqiao Hotel.” The third group was the underground church, in which the priests dissociated with their counterparts in the open church. The split was due to some underground priests refusing to take part in the ConÂ�gress of CathÂ� olics in Wenzhou, insisting on organizing the church underground. The fourth group was the priests and laity in the Longgang parish of Cangnan County. Although the ideology of this group was close to the underground church, they also advocated dialogue with the government. I call this group the “middle-path.” In the four Catholic groups listed above, three endeavored to seek religious freedom and maintain the autonomy of the church. Embedded in their structural location in the diocese, they used a variety of strategies to resist the control of the government. Below are some illustrative examples from each of the groups. Regarding the “pro-dialogue” group in the open church, the priests had to deal with government officials circuitously since they could not oppose them face-to-face. A good example explaining this strategy is the negotiation on writing the constitution of the CPA in Cangnan County in 1999. In that year, the Party Secretary of Zhejiang Province demanded that the priests had to establish the CPA, in Cangnan. In the face of enormous pressure from the government, the priest and laity decided to establish a CPA, which is faithful to the Pope. They intended to Â�structure it in the service of the church after taking the key positions in the CPA. The first step of the plan was to provide justification for this alternative CPA. Leading a team of priests and lay Catholic leaders, Father Wang Yijun negotiated with government officials to add the following Â�sentence in the “Constitution of the Catholic Patriotic Association in Wenzhou”:



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As Catholics, we hold the basic principles of the Catholic faith, follow the teaching of the Bible, observe the doctrines, the teaching and the rules of the church, administer the church from the Spirit of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic succession of Peter.

This sentence affirms that the priests of Wenzhou diocese accept the papal supremacy in the Catholic hierarchy, which opposes the slogan “independence and autonomy, administer the church by oneself ” advocated by the government. The government officials agreed with the priests in negotiation. This sentence is now included in the second clause of the constitution. The political implication of this statement is that the priests and lay Catholic leaders have strong justification to refuse to work with the government in matters in conflict with the Catholic faith. Regarding the group of the underground church, the priests and laity defied the control of local government officials. They neither registered their churches under the government bodies, nor participated in the CPA. Since the underground church did not have a legal status in the political system, the Public Security constantly suppressed them, even demolished their churches. According to a report in the Justice and Peace Commission of Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, the local government demolished the underground churches in the Linjiayuan Village, Lupu Township of Cangnan County, on three occasions from April 2000 to October 2001. Fierce confrontation between the Public Security and the Catholics took place. The first incident occurred on Easter Sunday on 23 April 2000. The Public Security kept disrupting religious activities of the church one week before the demolishment. The second incident took place when the Catholics were celebrating a feast in honor of Our Lady on 8 December 2000. The police disbanded the Catholics and wrecked the church. The Catholics then rebuilt the church in three days and nights. The third incident occurred in 2001. A total of 60 to 70 Public Security went to forbid the Catholics from rebuilding the church on 4 October. Encountering strong opposition from the Catholics, the Head of Public Security Bureau led approximately 600 people to demolish the church by force on 25 October.7 The case of Linjiayuan Village shows the spirit of protest of the underground priests and laity by the act of confrontation and rebuilding of their churches after demolishment. 7 ╇ See Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, ed., 2004. Bird in the Cage: Freedom of Religious Belief in China (Hong Kong: Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese), p. 38.

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The “middle-path” group in Longgang parish challenged the control of government officials by means of law and legal procedure. Below is an example. In May 1995, the Catholic church in Longgang established the Young People’s Catholic Mission in Wenzhou (“YPCM”). The YPCM organized a number of social activities for young people in the church, including publishing a newspaper named Herald. In August 1995, the officials of Public Security Bureau from both the Zhejing Province and Wenzhou City went to the Catholic church, banning the YPCM and the Herald for the reason that the YPCM was an illegal organization and the newspaper was not legally registered. The young leaders of YPCM argued with the government officials on the facts that the Civil Affairs Bureau had told them that the YPCM did not need registration because the church had already done so, whereas the Herald was an internal publication of the church, and therefore had a legal status. The officials of Public Security rejected their explanation and imposed a heavy fine of RMB 80,000 on the church. The young leaders disagreed with the unreasonable penalty, which had become a collective memory of young Catholics in Longgang parish. In May 2006, a total of 600 participants who were former members of the YPCM took part in the eleventh anniversary of the organization. Many of whom are now leaders of the church in the Longgang parish in Cangnan. The Boundaries between the Church and the Government Three different boundaries between the Catholic groups and the government can be identified in Wenzhou diocese. The first is the relationÂ�ship between the “pro-government” group and the government. The second is the relationship between the “pro-dialogue” group, the “middle-path” group of Longgang parish and the government. The third is the relationship between the underground church and the government. Between the “pro-government” group and the government, it is a vertical relationship of authority and dependence. To use the concept suggested by Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, this is a form of “state corporatism.” State corporatism refers to “a system which the state recognizes one and only one organization as the sole representative of the sectoral interests of the individuals, enterprises or institutions that comprise that organization’s assigned constituency. The state determines which organizations will be recognized as legitimate and forms an unequal partnership of sorts with such organizations.” (Unger and Chan



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2008:48–49) In the political context of Chinese society, the CPA is such an organization determined by the government and representing the Catholic church in China. The government controls the Catholic church through the CPA, and the pro-government priests have to follow the commands of government officials. Such a power relation is inconsistent with the ideal of a civil society. Between the “pro-dialogue,” the “middle-path” group and the government, their relationships are determined by negotiation. The two Catholic groups advocate dialogue with government officials, seeking religious freedom for Catholics and safeguarding the rights and interests of the church. The Congress of Catholics in Wenzhou in 1982 and the establishment of the CPA in Cangnan County in 1999 are two examples explaining this strategy, in which the priests and laity affirmed their Catholic position in the “Four Principles of Huaqiao Hotel” and in the “Constitution of the Catholic Patriotic Association in Wenzhou” respectively. The government officials finally agreed with the Catholic priests in concession. It is worth noting that the “pro-dialogue” and the  “middle-Â� path” groups are able to change the policy implemented by the local government in negotiation under the constraint of the political system. Between the underground church and the government there is a kind of antagonistic relationship. As explained in the previous paragraph, the underground church defied the control of the government by refusing registration under the government bodies, and the Public Security suppressed them by disrupting their religious activities and demolishing their church buildings. However, according to the data collected in my field trip in 2007, some underground priests had registered their churches in recent years. Notwithstanding, they continued to refuse government intervention in church administration and activities. The underground church can be described as an autonomous social organization in a local region, which is closer to the ideal of a civil society. Interaction of Actors in the Catholic Community The Catholic church is similar to that of a civil society embracing a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms. The “pro-Â�government” group and the “pro-dialogue” group in the open church are in conflict, whereas the open and underground churches are also at odds with each other. The “middle-path” group of Longgang parish is able to communicate with both the “pro-dialogue” group in the open church and the group of the underground church.

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The conflict between the two groups in the open church lies in the fact that a small number of the “pro-government” group was co-opted by the local government. However, they became isolated from the majority of the Catholics in the open church. The “pro-dialogue” group refuses to celebrate mass with them, not even hold funeral services for them when these people pass away. Below is an example. The Â�government officials attempted to control the election of a bishop in 1999, selecting their candidate for the position. After the election, the candidate had the majority of votes. The “pro-dialogue” group exerted pressure on the candidate, conveying a message to him that the Wenzhou diocese needed to build a faithful image to the Pope. Under such pressure, the candidate told the government officials that the ordination had to seek the Vatican’s approval, requesting the “apostolic mandate” from the Pope. After two months, the Vatican did not respond to the candidate. The government decided to hold the ceremony of ordination without the Vatican’s consent. The candidate refused the ordination. This example shows that the “pro-dialogue” group can exercise their power on the “pro-government” group, weakening the controlling mechanism of the government. The conflict between the open and the underground church is due to different strategies adopted by the priests of the two groups facing the control of government officials. The “pro-dialogue” group in the open church chose to negotiate with government officials, safeguarding the rights and interests of the church. The underground priests avoided interaction with government officials. In the eyes of the underground priests, the so-called “negotiation” initiated by the “pro-dialogue” group is actually an act of compromising their faith in disguise. Although some of the priests and laity of the “pro-dialogue” group had tried to explain to their underground counterparts, the efforts they made were to no avail. Looking from another angle, these two groups are actually consistent in resisting the control of the government, despite the fact that they are at odds with each other. Finally, the “middle-path” group of the Longgang parish is most unique in Wenzhou diocese. They are part of the open church, but their ideology is close to that of the underground church. After numerous discussions and debates with the “pro-dialogue” group, the priests and laity in Longgang parish changed their mind to align with the “proÂ�dialogue” group. The “middle-path” group is able to communicate with both the “pro-dialogue” group and the underground priests. The strength of this group is their openness to communication, which may pave the



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way for reconciliation among conflicting Catholic groups in Wenzhou in the future. Conclusion and Discussion This paper examines the role of the Wenzhou Catholic church in civil society building in contemporary China. I propose three hypotheses to test the case of the Wenzhou Catholic church, investigating whether or not the church demonstrates the characteristics of a civil society. The research findings are summarized as follows: First, there are four different CathÂ�olic groups in Wenzhou diocese, including the “pro-government” and the “pro-dialogue” groups in the open church, the underground church, and the “middle-path” group of Longgang parish in CangÂ�nan County. Except for the “pro-government” group, the other three Catholic groups have been resisting the control of the government and seeking religious freedom over the last thirty years. As a faith-based organization in Wenzhou, the Catholic groups have collectively demonstrated the characteristics of a civil society. Second, there are multiple boundaries between each of the Catholic groups and the government. Three different patterns can be identified: the first is a vertical relationship of authority and dependence between the “pro-government” group and the government. This “pro-government” group follows the policy of the CPA, which is controlled by the government. The second is the relationship between the “pro-dialogue” group, the “middle-path” group and the government. These two groups safeguard the rights and interests of the church in Â�negotiation with government officials. The third is the antagonistic relationship between the underground church and the government. The Â�underground church refuses to comply with the policy of the government, and the government suppresses them outright. The underground priests continue to reject the intervention of the government, despite the fact that some of the underground churches had registered with government bodies in recent years. The self-governing form of organization of the underground church is closer to the ideal of a civil society. In sum, the relationships between the Catholic groups and the government in WenÂ�zhou diocese are complex and negotiated. Except for the “pro-government” group, the three other Catholic groups have been seeking religious freedom, which demonstrated the characteristics of a civil society. Third, the diversity of actors and institutional forms in Wenzhou Catholic church is similar to that of a civil society. Three different

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Â� patterns of interaction among Catholic groups can also be identified. The first is a relationship of conflict between the “pro-government” group and the “pro-dialogue” group, as well as the open and underground church. The former can be understood as the resistance of the priests to the government-controlled agents, and the latter contending strategies adopted by contesting groups facing the control of the government. The second is a relationship of collaboration between the “pro-dialogue” group and the “middle-path” group. These two groups find a common ground on strategy of negotiation after discussion and debate. The third is a relationship of communication between the “middle-path” group and the underground church. Although the “middle-path” group is part of the open church, the priests and laity of the group are able to exchange ideas with their underground counterparts. In sum, the majority of the Catholic groups seek religious Â�freedom despite conflicting relationships that continue to exist among them, which also demonstrates the characteristic of a civil society. From the case of Wenzhou Catholic church, we can further discuss the role of the Chinese Catholic church in building a civil society in contemporary China. As suggested by the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics, civil society includes different kinds of organizations, such as community groups, women’s organizations, faithbased organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups. We can find each of these organizations in China today. However, the authoritarian regime still tightly controls social organizations in all aspects. This explains why there are popular protests in Chinese society, but the development of a civil society is still in its premature stage (Weller 2005, Unger 2008, Lu 2009). In this regard, I argue that the collective action of the Catholic church seeking religious freedom in the religious realm represents a nascent spirit of civil society. However, there are limitations of the Catholic church to play a more active role in civil society building in the present context. The resistance of the Wenzhou Catholic church to the control of the government is largely aimed at preserving the autonomy of the church and the religious freedom of the Catholics, of which the identity of resistance comes from Catholic faith and church life. The building of a civil society requires Catholics to go further from the church to the public sphere, linking the Catholic identity with citizenship. The Catholics have to extend their concern over other social groups in society and to defend the rights of other groups far beyond the rights and



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interests of the church. In doing so, the Catholic priests and laity have to take seriously universal human rights, knowing that the right of religious freedom is an integral part of civil rights and citizenship. This has to do with Catholic education in theology and ethics in the church. The theology and ethical teachings of the Chinese Catholic church today are basically those traditions of pre-Vatican II. Many of the priests and laity know little about the Catholic social teaching issued after the second Vatican Council, which has hampered the Chinese Catholics in social engagement in their region. The Chinese Catholic church would have been an influential actor in civil society if the priests and laity had learnt the theology and ethical teaching of contemporary Catholicism. In addition to theology and social teaching, the collective action of different Wenzhou Catholic groups seeking religious freedom was organized primarily within the boundary of the church. The building of a civil society requires that priests and laity go beyond this boundary, constructing social networks with other groups and organizations in the public sphere. As researchers have pointed out in sociological literature, the Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and Latin America provided a platform for social activists to discuss political issues and to organize an opposition movement against the authoritarian regimes of the 1980s. In the rural area, the church played a mobilizing role, organizing the peasants to defend their rights and interests. In the urban area, the church played a facilitating role, bridging different social strata of conflicting interests to join hands together to seek social justice (Johnston and Figa 1988, Johnston 1989). In Chinese society, the priests and laity can extend the influence of the church to the public sphere by providing social services to individuals and social groups, making the church a platform for understanding and practicing civil rights. As such, the Catholic church would be able to play a more active role in civil society building in contemporary China in the future.

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Brook, Timothy and B. Michael Frolick, eds. 1997. Civil Society in China? Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Calhoun, Craig. 1993. “Civil Society and the Public Sphere.” Public Culture 5:267–280. ——, ed. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Cao, Nanlai. 2010. Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christmas, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Casanova, José. 2001a. “Religion, the New Millennium and Globalization.” Sociology of Religion 62 (4):415–441. ——. 2001b. “Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam.” Social Research 68(4):1041–1080. Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics. 2004. “What is Civil Society.” http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/What_is_civil_society.htm. Retrieved 2006-10–30. Charbonnier, Jean. 2008. Guide to the Catholic Church in China 2008. (Chinese language) Singapore: China Catholic Communication. Chan, Shun-hing and Anthony S.K. Lam. 2002. “The Transformation and Development of Church-State Relations in Contemporary China: A Case Study of the Catholic Church.” Ching Feng 3(1–2):93–128. Gagnere, Nathalie. 1998. The Catholic Church and the Rebirth of Civil Society: Elite Con­ verÂ�gence, Mobilization and Democratic Transitions in East-Central Europe. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Oklahoma. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ho, Baogang. 1997. The Democratic Implications of Civil Society in China. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Johnston, Hank. 1989. “Toward an Explanation of Church Opposition to Authoritarian Regimes: Religio-Oppositional Subcultures in Poland and Catalonia.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28(4):493–508. Johnston, Hank and Jozef Figa. 1988. “The Church and Political Opposition: ComparÂ� ative Perspectives on Mobilization against Authoritarian Regimes.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27(1):32–47. Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, ed., 2004. Bird in the Cage: Freedom of Religious Belief in China. Hong Kong: Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese. Kean, John. 1988. Democracy and Civil Society. London: Verso. Kindopp, Jason. 2004. The Politics of Protestantism in Contemporary China: State Control, Civil Society, and Social Movement in a Single-Party State. Ph.D. dissertation. Washington DC: George Washington University. Ku, Agnes Shuk-mei. 2002. “Beyond the Paradoxical Conception of ‘Civil Society without Citizenship’.” International Sociology 17(4):551–570. Lam, Anthony S.K. 1997. The Catholic Church in Present-Day China: Through Darkness and Light. Hong Kong: The Holy Spirit Study Centre. Lu, Yiyi. 2009. Non-governmental Organizations in China: the Rise of Dependent Autonomy. London: Routledge. Ma, Qiusha. 2006. Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China: Paving the Way to Civil Society? London: Routledge. Madsen, Richard. 1998. China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2000. “Chinese Christianity: Indigenization and Conflict.” Pp. 271–288 in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (second edition), edited by Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden. New York: Routledge.



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——. 2003. “Catholic Revival during the Reform Era.” Pp. 162–181 in Religion in China Today, edited by Daniel L. Overmyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2004. “Catholic Conflict and Cooperation in the People’s Republic of China.” Pp. 93–106 in God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, edited by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. ——. 2008. “Religion and the Emergence of Civil Society.” Pp. 79–94 in Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, edited by Bruce Gilley and Larry Diamond. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sullivan, Francis and Sue Leppert, eds. 2003. Church and Civil Society: A Theology of Engagement. Adelaide: ATF Press. Unger, Jonathan. ed. 2008. Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Unger, Jonathan and Anita Chan. 2008. “Association in a Bind: the Emergence of Political Corporatism.” Pp. 48–68 in Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces, edited by Jonathan Unger. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Weller, Robert, ed. 2005. Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing between Family and State. London: Routledge. White, Gordon, Jude Howell and Shang Xiaoyuan. 1996. In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

PART III

RELIGION AND POLITICS BETWEEN COMMUNITARIANISM AND POLICY OF IDENTITY

INDIA: THE politics of (RE)CONVERSION TO HINDUISM OF CHRISTIAN ABORIGINALS Christophe Jaffrelot Conversion is rarely an individual decision in India. Since time immemorial – aside from personal spiritual choices such as that made by Emperor Ashoka (273–237) in favor of Buddhism –, collective migrations from one religion to another one are rooted in a community’s soÂ�cial strategy. Thus, in medieval times, entire castes – especially artisans, who were ranked at the bottom of the social hierarchy – went over to Islam to escape the caste system. Since the 1950s, the Untouchables (who prefer to be called Dalits) have been following a similar path, but with a preference for Buddhism. Until the late 19th century, no conversion procedures existed for Hinduism, the majority religion in India: one was born a Hindu and it was hardly possible to become one. The situation changed during the British Raj with the development of Christian proselytism by missionaries who provoked a defensive reaction among Hindu elites, notably in the form of social-religious reform movements which invented a ritual for the (re)conversion to Hinduism, the Shuddhi, inspired from upper caste purification rites (Jaffrelot, 1999). This phenomenon gathered momentum in the early 20th century with the institution of a systematic census, prompting each community to count its numbers, all the more since in 1909 the Muslims obtained a separate electorate, suggesting that a community’s demographic weight could be reflected in politics. The motives for the growing involvement of the Hindu nationalists in campaigns against the Christian missionaries and in operations to (re)convert people who have gone over to Christianity or Islam are, however, more existential than electoral: for them what is at stake in conversion is a wholesale “denationalization,” as they perceive the new Christians or Muslims as leaving the bosom of India when they join a faith founded outside of the country. The debate over conversion in India thus offers a good analyzer for interpreting the role of religion in this country, this notion applying less to the spirituality it holds than to its cultural and collective dimension. Hindu nationalism, however, has led the country to take a further step in

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the same direction by redefining the collective identity associated with religion in political terms, those of ethnic nationalism. The following pages will set out to show this, drawing on the example of the aboriginals, who very early on were the preferred target of the Christian missionaries, and later the Hindu nationalists. The Tribals, the Preferred Target for Conversion Aboriginal populations make up 7.5% of the Indian population according to the 2001 census. They are concentrated in forest and mountain regions where they long subsisted by hunting and fishing before being hired in “modern” economic sectors such as mining – without for all that losing their primarily rural nature. They are found in especially large numbers in the northeast of India near the Chinese border and in the so-called tribal belt that runs through India from Bihar and Jharkhand down through Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat (see Map). The aboriginals readily refer to themselves as India’s adivasis, meaning “those who were there before,” claiming precedence – as do all autochthonous peoples. But this one term does little to conceal the great diversity of tribes, reflected mainly to their languages and customs. Adivasi beliefs also vary enormously from one tribal group to another (Carrin, 2002). They do, however, share an animistic substratum that has proven to be more permeable to outside influence than religions that are codified by an ecclesiastic body that has the community “in its grip.” Aboriginal vulnerability to missionary propaganda can also be explained by the population’s extreme state of destitution. This tends to enhance the appeal of the Christian religious organizations, which excel in the art of offering potential converts not only respect and dignity, but also greater access to education and health care (Clémentin-Ojha, 2008) The conversion of aboriginals to Christianity gathered a certain momentum during the colonial period, the majority of entire tribes – and hence regions – having gone over to Christianity in the space of a few decades, as is the case for Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland where the official language has therefore become English. The scale of the phenomenon is much smaller in the tribal belt, where only Orissa, ChhattisÂ� garh and Jharkhand (where aboriginals make up between 20 and 40%) are affected, but its impact is no less considerable, compounded by the fact that the tribal belt runs through the heart of India in areas with a Hindu majority where the fear of the Other is heightened by geographic



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� proximity. Indeed the strong Christian presence in Kerala and Tamil Nadu is not linked to the presence of aboriginals.

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christophe jaffrelot Conversion as “Denationalization”

Already in 1947, the question of converting from one religion to another was at the heart of debates at the Constituent Assembly. The more conservative Congress MPs wanted a law to regulate something that, they believed, did not flow from decisions made by informed individuals in search of salvation but which corresponded to less disinterested motivations. They held up as proof the alleged missionaries’ methods, which involved attracting potential converts by advertising the network of Christian schools and hospital. Heated debates surrounded discussion of article 19 of the Fundamental Rights on religious freedom. This was codified in the first version of the Constitution drawn up by the Drafting Committee in a very liberal form allowing people to profess their religion. During the plenary session to examine the text, opposition was voiced against what some equated to capitulation. Loknath Misra, a Congress MP from Orissa thus raged: … article 19 is a Charter for Hindu enslavement. I do really feel that it is the most disgraceful Article, the blackest part of the Draft Constitution. I beg to submit that I have considered and studied all the constitutional precedents and have not found anywhere any mention of the word ‘propaganda’ as a Fundamental Right, relating to religion…. You know that propagation of religion brought India into this unfortunate state and India had to be divided into Pakistan and India. If Islam had not come to impose its will on this land, India would have been a perfectly secular State and a homogeneous State. There would have been no Partition. Therefore, we have rightly tabooed religion …. If you accept religion, you must accept Hinduism as it is practised by an overwhelming majority of the people in India…. This unjust generosity of tabooing religion and yet making propagation of religion a fundamental right is somewhat uncanny and dangerous. Justice demands that the ancient faith and culture of the land should be given a fair deal, if not restored to its legitimate place after a thousand years of suppression…. In the present context what can this word ‘propagation’ in article 19 mean? It can only mean paving the way of the complete annihilation of Hindu culture, the Hindu way of life and manners. Islam has declared its hostility to Hindu thought. Christianity has worked out the policy of peaceful penetration by the back-door on the outskirts of our social life. This is because Hinduism did not accept barricades for its protection. (Misra, 1989: 822–824)

Other Congress MPs objected that Islam and Christianity could not have a monopoly on proselytism. T.T. Krishnamachari thus argued: Sir, objection has been taken to the inclusion of the word ‘propagate’ along with the words ‘profess and practise’ in the matter of religion. Sir, it does



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not mean that this right to propagate one’s religion is given to any particular community or to people who follow any particular religion. It is perfectly open to the Hindus and the Arya Samajists (members of a rather militant reformist hindu movement) to carry on their shuddhi propaganda as it is open to the Christians, the Muslims, the Jains and the Buddhists and to every other religionist, so long as he does it subject to public order, morality and the other conditions that have to be observed in any civilised government. (Krishnamachari, 1989: 836)

As a result, the Constitution of India guarantees missionaries of all faiths the right to proselytize by virtue of article 19, which became article 25 of the Constitution in 1950. Cast in liberal terms despite a few formal restrictions, the article is very similar to article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Indian Constitution reads, Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.

Hardly had the Constitution of 1950 been proclaimed, than the state of Madhya Pradesh – at the time led by an ultra conservative Congress chief minister, R.S. Shukla – ordered an enquiry into Christian missionary activities in India. He appointed a commission headed by B.S. Niyogi, a retired civil servant. Niyogi handed in his report in 1955, giving it a nationwide dimension. He thus stated that the number of Christian missionaries in India had gone from 4,377 in 1951 to 4,877 three years later and that during this fairly short time period – 1951/1954 – the tidy sum of 2.9 billion rupees (two-thirds of which came from the United States) had been spent to build schools, orphanages and hospitals where conversions to Christianity were occasionally obtained by deceitful means (Niyogi, 1957: 135) The rapporteur moreover attributes missionary action to political objectives in the conclusion to his report: Evangelization in India appears to be a part of uniform world policy to revive Christendom for re-establishing western supremacy and is not proÂ� mpted by spiritual motives. The objective is apparently to create Christian majority pockets with a view to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, and the mass conversion of a considerable section of Adivasis with this ulterior motive is fraught with danger to the security of the State. (Niyogi, 1957: 13)

This interpretation of conversion reflects a view of religious affiliation as a political act. It calls up an ethno-nationalist conception of religious membership: for an Indian to be Christian means that the person attaches himself to the Western world and is therefore a potential traitor

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to the Indian nation. This reasoning also applies to Muslims, who till Partition were readily accused of paying allegiance to Middle East-based religious  authorities by virtue of a pan-Islamism that was a threat to national security – since 1947, Muslims are also suspected to be Pakistan’s fifth columnists by the most militant Hindus. Underlying this reasoning is an ethno-nationalist definition of the nation. The Indian state, while claiming to be secular, distinguishes between followers of a religion born in India (whether Hindus, Sikhs, Jains or Buddhists) and the others. Article 25 of the Constitution in fact stipulates that Hindu religious institutions are to be open to all Hindus (a scarcely veiled reference to caste discrimination) and adds that the word “Hindu” in this case also refers to the Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. Hindu nationalists, for whom Indian identity boils down to the culture of the majority community, the Christian and Muslim minorities being required to adhere to it in public, carried the logic of the Niyogi Report even farther by decreeing that any conversion was tantamount to a process of “denationalization.” (Sarkar 1999, Shourie, 1994).1 For them as well, the adivasis were the preferred target of operations that jeopardized national security. This viewpoint gained increased legitimacy following the creation of Nagaland in 1963, a new state of the Indian Union established for the benefit of a tribe, the Nagas, four-fifths of whom were Christian and whose leaders often demanded independence for their territory. This demand was based as much in linguistic and socioeconomic considerations as geopolitical factors, as the area in question is situated on India’s periphery, along the Burmese border. But Hindu nationalists cÂ� onsidered the main reason of their separatism to be the Nagas’ adhesion to ChrisÂ� tianity. The following year, the Pope’s visit to India finally convinced Hindu nationalists of a need to react, given that the “Holy Father” was supposed to perform hundreds of conversions when he would visit Bombay. In response to this announcement, the main Hindu nationalist  movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association – RSS) started a new organization, Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council – VHP) in charge of federating Hinduism in the face of the threat posed by Christianity and of conducting reconversion operations. Its leader, S. S. Apte, an RSS, stated shortly afterward: 1 ╇ For an overview of the Hindu nationalist approach of the conversion issue see the chapter entitled « Conversion and the arithmetic of religious communities » in Jaffrelot 2007.



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The declared object of Christianity is to turn the whole word into Christendom – as that of Islam is to make it Pakistan. Besides these two dogmatic and proselytising religions there has arisen a third religion, communism…. The world has been divided into Christian, Islamic and Communist, and all these three consider the Hindu society as a very fine rich food on which to feast and fatten themselves. It is therefore necessary in this age of competition and conflict to think of, and organize, the Hindu world to save itself from the evil eyes of all the three. (The Organiser, Diwali Special, 1964: 15)

Catholicism in particular preoccupied the Hindu nationalists due to the political strike force they attributed to its organizational capacity. In response to the Pope’s visit, the RSS weekly magazine, The Organiser, warned of this Catholic “invasion” on its front page: Catholicism is not only a religion, but a formidable organisation allied with certain foreign powers […] The conversion of tribals on a large scale in the industrial heart of India [in Bihar] constitutes a threat for national security because, in the case of conflict between their country and the church, the allegiance of Catholics will always be foremostly to the Pope! (The Organiser, 31 August 1964: 1)

This line of argumentation was perfectly consistent with that which the Hindu nationalists used with regard to Indian Muslims, a fifth column accused of swearing allegiance to Pakistan and hence devoid of any Indian patriotism. As the most active missionaries turned out to be conservative ProtesÂ� tant  Americans, the geopolitical interpretation of conversion became directed against the United States. The RSS weekly thus wrote in 2005, after the triumphant re-elections of George Bush, perceived as the Â�herald of Christian civilization in arms: America is funding Christian militants in India, like they had done to the Talibans. This is with the aim to create Christian nations in India by dismembering it. American President, George Bush got elected with the help of Christian fanatics who distributed funds from White House. Millions of dollars flow to Christian missionaries and Christian NGOs in India. The seriousness of this situation can be guaged from the fact that Christians run most of the 4,000 NGOs in India and most of them are involved in misinformation and conversion activities. (Krishna, 2005: 17)

As a reaction to this Christian offensive, Hindu nationalists began by campaigning for legislation that would challenge the religious freedom introduced by the Constitution.

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christophe jaffrelot Preventing Conversions through Legislation

The Hindu nationalists attempted to change the legislation regarding conversions by putting pressure both on the states and on the Centre. At the national level, the Hindu nationalist party, the Jana Sangh, had gained momentum in the 1970s owing to its taking part in the creation of a coalition party to oppose the Congress Party, the Janata Party, which came to power in 1977. As principal components of the JP, the Jana Sanghis backed a bill that aimed to regulate conversions on a nationwide scale. This Freedom of Religion Bill, introduced on December 22, 1978 by a Jana Sanghi MP, O.P. Tyagi, aimed to prevent anyone from «converting or attempting to convert, directly or otherwise, a person from one religious faith to another by the use of force or by fraud or blackmail or deception, or by whatever other fraudulent means». A similar provision, moreover bearing the same name, was passed in Arunachal Pradesh, a Territory of the Union of India – unlike states, the territories depend directly on New Delhi for their legislation. In this bill, it was furthermore stipulated that the construction of any place of worship would henceforth be subject to administrative approval. The Janata Party ended up withdrawing its Freedom of Religion Bill in the wake of protest from the Christian minority. This defeat prompted Hindu nationalists to focus once again on the state level where they were likely to encounter the sympathy of authorities gained in the fight against the Christian missions, even when these officials were not members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP – Indian People’s Party), the organization that replaced the Jana Sangh after the demise of the Janata Party in 1980. At the state level, the first laws had been passed in the late 1960s in the wake of the electoral defeats that affected the Congress in several states in 1967. Nowhere was the Jana Sangh in a position to govern alone, but it joined forces with other parties to form coalitions which never governed more than two years, but that was enough to pass laws ironically called “Freedom of Religion acts” in 1967 in Orissa and in 1968 in Madhya Pradesh. The latter law was attacked in court by virtue of article 25 of the Constitution of India. The Supreme Court nevertheless ratified it in the framework of the Rev Stanislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh decision, arguing that the right to convert did not ensue from the right to propagate one’s religion as provided by this article. The first decade of 2000 then saw a new series of similar laws voted in several states. Chhattisgarh, which grew out of a division of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, inherited the



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law of this state; Gujarat in 2003 and then Rajasthan in 2006 passed a similar law following the BJP victory, and Himachal Pradesh followed suit in the same year while the Congress Party was at the helm of the state government.2 This is because of the influence of Hindu traditionalists among party ranks and because of the Congress strategy to counter the pressure the BJP and its allies exercise on public opinion. These laws all contained the following paragraph: “No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any person from one religion to another by use of force or by inducement or by any fraudulent means, nor shall any person abet any such conversion.” (South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, 2008: 64). These laws all share the same definition of the word “force” as well (“‘Force’ shall include show of force or threat of injury or threat of divine displeasure or social-excommunication”) (South Asia Human Rights DocuÂ�menÂ�tation Centre, 2008: 64) They differ only as regards the punishment incurred, ranging from one to three years’ imprisonment and a 5,000 to 50,000-rupee fine depending on the case – which is a more severe punishment that what the Indian courts can hand down on people found guilty of rioting or negligent homicide. It should be noted that some laws provide for heavier sentences when the converts are children, women, Dalits or tribals (South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, 2008: 71). Far from protecting freedom of conscience, these laws are primarily meant to prevent a decrease in the number of Hindus. The president of the BJP moreover called on all the states controlled by his party to vote a similar law in 2006. If the law is supposed to prevent a reduction in the number of Hindus, it is not in a position to do so everywhere in India. Secondly, some activists want to increase the number of Hindus. This requires (re)conversion operations. We have to speak of (re)conversion here, as under the pretext of bringing stray sheep – supposedly deceived by subterfuge – back into the fold of Hinduism, Hindu missionaries in fact perform outright conversions. This is particularly clear in the case of aboriginals who, before being Christian, practiced an animist form of worship. (Carrin, 2006) A Mimetic Strategy of (Re)conversion The invention of a Hindu reconversion procedure, Shuddhi, in the 19th century was based on an imitation of Christian rituals, although 2

╇ A similar law was passed in 2004 in Tamil Nadu but revoked the same year.

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considerably vernacularized. Similarly, the strategy employed by Hindu nationalists to bring Christianized tribals back into the Hindu fold at first drew its inspiration from what they believed to be Christian techniques. The first organization to implement them was the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (Ashram for Tribal Welfare – VKA). Hindu nationalists do not call aboriginals Adivasis, “those who were there before,” but instead Vanavasis, “forest dwellers,” because they consider the Hindus to be India’s first inhabitants, the true autochthonous people. The RSS created this organization in 1952 to offset the progress made by Christian missions in the Raigarh and Surguja districts – of then Madhya Pradesh and today’s Chattisgarh – and in particular the area around Jashpur where the VKA at first had its base. To counter the Christian missions that had been working since the 19th century with the Oraon tribes, particularly to protect them from money-lenders, the VKA attempted to develop a similar strategy of social work. Its Â�president, R.K. Deshpande – a former RSS official appointed by the organization –, directed his attention primarily at the appeal Christian schools had for the aboriginals. To better counteract them, he undertook to develop similar ones. A girls’ boarding school with a capacity of 125 pupils was established in Jashpur-city and dozens of schools and centers for apprenticeship were created in the surrounding villages. It should be pointed out that the VKA enjoyed state support. Till 1957 it worked within the framework of the administration (more specifically the Tribal Welfare Department, which feared that mission activity might  raise political consciousness among the tribes) (Sen, 1990). It later enjoyed the generosity of the SVD government in 1967–1968 (The Organiser, 1977: 15). The VKA also received backing from the former Maharajah of Jashpur who in 1963 inaugurated the permanent VKA headquarters in the presence of M.S. Golwalkar, chief of the RSS. His son Dilip Singh Judeo later took an active part in operations to (re)convert aboriginals to Hinduism. First confined to Chhattisgarh, the VKA became nationwide in scale in 1977 when it took over the VHP tribal sector as it was transformed into the Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram. From 1978 to 1983, the number of districts where the organization had established its presence went from 15 to 91 through the work of a growing number of activists (264 – including 56 aboriginals – in 1983 compared to 44 in 1978). Along with this expansion, the movement diversified its means of



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action, multiplying the number of free medical dispensaries (from 37 in 1978 to 118 in 1983), better to counter the Christian missions that specialized in medical treatment as well as access to schools (The Organiser, 1981: 8 and 5). In addition to health care and education that the Hindu nationalists thus made available to aboriginals free of charge to divert them from Christianity and draw them to Hinduism, the VKA soon strived to HinÂ� duÂ�ize aboriginal populations that according to R.K. Deshpande, if left to their animist beliefs, were less well equipped to resist the missionaries’ appeals. Ilina Sen explains that women were their principal target. The VKA organised them in the framework of Bhajan Mandali (Circles for religious recitation). In addition, it built a large number of Hanuman temples, claiming that this religious figure of the Hindu pantheon was the tribals “god”. (Sen, 1990: 9). The creation of a cult of Hanuman in the tribal milieu is revealing of the image the Hindu nationalists convey with regard to aboriginals. This image in fact draws much of its “good savage” aspect – depicting the aboriginals as pure, or, at least, as naive and innocent – from British Orientalism (Guha, 1999). Hanuman is the devoted monkey god serving Ram as his army general in the Ramayana epic. Promoting him in tribal land is a clever means of connecting the aboriginals to the great Hindu tradition, but at a subordinate rank. The VKA made this its speciality in Madhya Pradesh where it orchestrated huge rallies of newly (re)converted aboriginals to expose them to the discourse of the movement’s head ideologues and inculcate in them the proper rituals. In 2002, 250,000 aboriginals thus gathered in Jhabua, a tribal district on the Gujarat border, to listen to the sermons of VHP leaders (Praveen Togadia and Sadhvi Rithambara) and master the art of singing bhajans (religious chants) and performing puja (Hindu ritual) (Citizen’s Inquiry Committee, no date). The same type of gathering was reported to have taken place on a smaller scale (only 40,000 people in attendance) in a neighboring district, Alirajpur, in 2004. Propaganda, Intimidation and Violence in Gujarat In the 1990s reconversion campaigns more or less imitating the Christian missionaries were no longer enough for the Hindu nationalists. They began to use strongarm tactics. This strategic reorientation can be explained first by their political rise in strength, enabling them to hold

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power in several states and as of 1998, in New Delhi where the BJP headed the government coalition until 2004. Gujarat, where the BJP seized power in 1995, was the first theater for this strategy. Again this time, the aboriginals were the primary targets of the Hindu nationalists who moved under cover, via an ad hoc organization, the Hindu Jagaran Manch (Hindu AwakenÂ�ing  Forum – HJM) which establisged first a residential school in Waghai (district Dangs) in 1991 (Shah, 2002: 132). On 25 December 1997 – and it will be seen that Christmas became the ideal occasion for their rampages – the HJM organized anti-Christian demonstrations in six districts south of the area where aboriginals were in larger numbers. Six months later, one of these districts, Dangs, became the focus of their action, probably due to the extremely high proportion of Adivasis: out of 144,091 inhabitants, 135,376 were aboriginals according to the 1991 census. Among the aboriginals in this small, very remote district – it is the least populated of all Gujarat but an area where forest cover represents the highest proportion of total land area (90%) –, the Bhil, Kokani and Warli tribes were the most numerous. That did not mean there were a great number of Christians – they were about 5% of the total population –, but missionaries were relatively active. This context led the VHP to send one of its most enterprising clerics on a special assignment in 1997: Swami Aseemanand, originally from Western  BenÂ�gal, settled there to organized a ghar-vapasi (“homecoming”) campaign among tribals converted to Christianity (Jaffrelot, 2011). The Swami established a network of political commissioners throughout the district. He enlisted unemployed youths – and paid them – to monitor the Christians’ comings and goings. One of them, Ram Das, posted in Dhagunia, a hamlet located about 60 km from the district headquarters where there were only 14 Christian families, declared: “We want everybody to follow one religion. If Christians want to leave in peace they should adopt Hindism,” a statement that shows that the idea was not merely to perform reconversions, but indeed outright conversions. As for his method, Ram Das did not stop at leading a demonstration to insult Christianity, he also orchestrated a social boycott of the Christians, who were no longer allowed to draw water from the village well, and broke into several houses to smash crucifixes and burn Bibles (Rawat, 1998). The VHP backed the Swami’s propaganda regarding a new rewrite of the Ram myth. It claimed that while the deity was looking for his wife Sita, who had been kidnapped by the demon Ravana, he went through Dangs (according to a local legend that the District Gazetteer did its



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utmost to spread), met one of his devotees, an elderly woman from the Bhil tribe who had devoted her life to worshipping Ram. This woman, named Shabri, showered every attention on him, even going so far as to taste the berries in the forest for him and give him only the sweetest ones. She recommended he go seek Hanuman’s help to find Sita – which proved to be an excellent idea. The VHP not only propagated this version of the myth among the aboriginals, but also built a huge temple where Shabri supposedly met Ram. All this of course aimed to accredit the theory that the aboriginals had a Hindu ancestry – notwithstanding any animist tradition – not only by connecting them with the most prestigious symbols of high tradition, but in having them practice a religion that conformed to Hindu canons in an appropriate place of worship. The VHP also built small temples next to the stones where the aboriginals would worship Dungar Dev, the deity that watched over their crops. When secular activists, concerned about these activities, visited the place, they noted that the government backed the whole strategy, with local civil servants having orders to provide logistic support and other state means for this cause.3 The Hindu nationalists took advantage of the political protection they enjoyed in Gujarat precisely to shift from propaganda to violence, supposedly as a necessary reaction to missionary proselytism. The HJM first distributed a telling tract that read: Conversion activity by Christian Priest is the most dangerous burning problem at present in Dangs district. Innocent and illiterate tribals are converted through cheating, alluring by offering temptations, and other deceiving activities; under the pretext of services, these devils are taking advantage of tribal society and exploit them… Hindus, awake and struggle continuous (sic) with these robbers who snatch away your right by telling lies and teach these people a lesson (Chenoy, 1999: 43)

Shortly after this tract was distributed to lay the mental groundwork, some ten churches were burned down or damaged in the district. Then the HJM organized another anti-Christian demonstration on Christmas day during which slogans were shouted such as “Hindu jago, Christi bhago!” (“Hindus, awaken, Christians, go away!”) and “Gali gali mein chor hai, padri sab chor hain” (“There is a thief in the alley, all priests are thieves”) (cited in Chenoy, 1999: 7). This time, 16 churches were burned and 8 others ransacked. 3 ╇ Citizen’s Inquiry Committee, The untold story of Hindukaran (Proselytisation) of Adivasis (Tribals) in Dang, Gujarat, Anhad, New Delhi (no date).

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Christmas 1998 was marred by the same outbreak of violence as the year before, the religious calendar marking new rituals of provocation. In 1999, the same scenario was repeated, accompanied by tracts of an increasingly political nature. One of them stated, «The perverse objective of the missionaries is to transform the entire tribal belt of Bharat into another Nagaland or Mizoram. They collect huge sums of money in foreign countries by propagating lies and use these resources to intensify conversions-oriented activities» (see South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch, 3/12/1999). The Minorities Commission dispatched a mission to the area and drew up three inquiry reports, all sent to the government in Gujarat, which it accused of “passive complicity.” The Commission’s annual report covering the 1998–1999 period devoted to Gujarat a record number of pages mainly taking the angle of the “atrocities” committed against Christians aboriginals. In particular, it stated: The issue of allegedly induced conversion of tribals ‘from Hinduism’ to Christianity has been blown out of proportions and the facts highly exaggerated and distorted. While the claim of any forcible or unwilling conversion from Hinduism to Christianity remains unsubstantiated, if there have been any cases of such nature no Constitutionally provided and legally tenable measures have been thought of by the State Government authorities, indirectly allowing certain people to take the law in their own hands in this regard. (National Commission for Minorities, 1999: 93)

The state of Gujarat was a de facto accomplice of the Hindu nationalists, as attests the circular that the Superintendent of police for the Dangs district passed around to his subordinates at the suggestion of a government minister, Mangubhai Patel. He asked them to gather all possible information regarding priests because “presently the Christian priests are carrying out proselytisation activities in full force. This has come to the notice of the Honourable Minister, and the leaders of this religion are making police complaints on the basis of false representations and exaggerated charges” (cited in Chenoy, 1999: 6). Starting in the 2000s, the Muslims once again became the preferred target of the Hindu nationalists in Gujarat – as the pogrom of 2002 attested –, without for all that a lull in activity in the tribal areas, on the contrary. In fact, the violence in 2002 fit in with the same strategy to Hinduize aboriginals, the latter having been armed by the VHP and then encouraged to attack Muslims in villages where the fact that they sometimes happened to be the local usurers aroused greed (Devy, 2002). But as for recourse to violence in connection with proselytism or



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anti-Christian persecutions, the theater of operations shifted to Madhya Pradesh in 2000 and then to Orissa, where outbreaks of violence occurred on an unprecedented scale. In this east Indian state, the first noteworthy incident took place in 1999, when a member of Bajrang Dal, Dara Singh, murdered an AustralÂ� ian missionary, Staines, and his two sons by burning them alive in their car. This was a harbinger of a strategy of mass violence that culminated nearly ten years later (Kanungo, 2008). Once again, Christmas celebrations served as a focal point. In a predominantly Christian tribal village, Brahmanigaon, the inhabitants were preparing to build a crèche across from a Hindu place of worship. The Hindu minority alerted the local VHP leader, a cleric by the name of Swami Laxmananda Saraswati, who immediately came to the scene. Christian aboriginals attacked his car, and the skirmish left 10 dead. Six months later, the Swami’s ashram was celebrating Janmasthami when some thirty masked assailants armed not only with pistols but four AK-47 burst in and killed the Swami as well as four of his disciples. VHP and Bajrang Dal retaliation (a famous Hindu festival in the honour of Lord Vrèshna’s Anniversary) resulted in the death of 9 Christian aboriginals, the demolition of 30 churches and orphanÂ�ages (The Times of India, 28/8/2008) and the arson of 4,104 houses. Nuns were also, perhaps primarily, the victims of rape. ApproxiÂ�mately 50,000 people fled to makeshift camps in the city (The Statesman, 7/9/2008) The Hindu nationalists who now controlled their village demanded, in exchange for being allowed to return, that they convert to Hinduism by performing an unheard-of ritual: potential converts had to shave their heads, crack open a coconut as an offering to the temple and/ or swallow a mixture made of cow dung supposedly to purify themselves (Indian Express, 12/10/2008). As is often the case, Hindu nationalists had managed to exploit rivalry between social groups to step up the violence. In this case, the VHP created a new division between Panas (classified by the British among the “criminal castes”), converted by Catholic priests as much as by Baptist missionaries, and the Kandhas, aboriginals (re)converted to Hinduism by the organization. (Wankhede, 2009; Chatterji, 2009). Conclusion The question of aboriginal (re)conversions to Hinduism in India is indissociable from a politics of numbers. It, in fact, has only taken on such an importance because proponents of Hindutva had adopted an

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ethno-nationalist definition of religious communities in competition in the public arena. Today, however, the matter is no longer overdetermined by electoral considerations as it was in the early 20th century, but by the dread of a decline in population that remains constant in Hindu nationalism and even more by the fear of seeing a treacherous body, foreign to the nation, develop in the heart of India. This political – and even geopolitical dimension – became even more acute in the 2000s (which moreover explains the last wave of anti-conversion laws) due to an auspicious internal and external context. At the international level, the “clash of civilizations” rationale followed by George W. Bush led the Hindus to view him as a new crusader who was useful against the Muslims but harmful in his potential support for the Christian missionaries. Domestically, the unprecedented and relentless Hindu nationalist harassment against Christians in the last decade is also explained by the fact that at the same time Sonia Gandhi accepted the leadership the Congress Party and became a serious candidate for Prime Minister. She is perceived by Hindu nationalists – who readily refer to her by her Italian maiden name – as a Christian. Katiyar, then head of the Bajrang Dal, justified his new aggressiveness toward Christians in these terms: “Christians have become aggressive ever since Sonia Gandhi took over as Congress president. Christians feel they have the perfect protector… to convert Hindus.” (Gupta and Jaffrelot, 2007). Although exacerbation of the conflict between Christians and Hindus naturally owed much to the deeds of Hindutva activists, the missionaries themselves are not blameless. The rector of the Catholic seminary in Mumbai thus explained in 2004: “We have to fight on two fronts: the awakening of Hinduism, which obliges us to remain discreet, and pressure from pseudo-missionaries who evangelize aggressively in villages, organize tutoring, pay for youth trips to America, etc.”(Le Monde, 20/2/2004). This charity work can appear to be a strategy to convert the most destitute by fraudulent means. The Christians of India will probably have to demonstrate both their ability to resist as well as to adapt so as not to lose their foothold in India. Their share of the population has already declined, having gone from 2.4% in 1961 to 2.3% in 2001. In addition to the adverse part played by, on one hand Hindu nationalists and on the other from radical missionaries, Christians in India may have to adjust to the new attitude of the Supreme court regarding conversion. The very fact that the Court had upheld the laws that state assemblies had passed to regulate conversion had already shown its



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orientation. This inclination was reconfirmed dramatically in 2011 when Supreme Court judges, not only agreed with the High court judgement which had given Dara Singh a life term, contradicting the district court’s death penalty judgement, but more importantly, justified this verdict in the following terms: It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in one’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other.

This sentence created an uproar among the Christians since it suggested that conversions were illegal. In an unprecedented move, the Supreme Court cut it away from the final version of the judgement. But the judges have made clear that proselyte activities are not as legitimate as they used to be. This is one of the impacts the rise of Hindu nationalism has made on the Indian public sphere over the last few years.

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Carrin, Marine. 2002. “Retour au bosquet sacré: réinvention d’une culture adivasi”. pp. 245–264 in Marine Carrin and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), “Tribus et basses castes. Résistance et autonomie dans la société indienne”, Purushartha n° 23, 2002. Carrin, Marine. 2006. “L’univers de tribus. Repli identitaire et mouvements révoÂ� lutionnaires”. pp. 543–567 in C. Jaffrelot (ed.) L’Inde contemporaine. Paris: Fayard. Chatterji, A. 2009. Violent Gods. Hindu Nationalism in India’s present. Narratives from Orissa. Gurgaon: Three Essays. Chenoy, K.M. (ed.). Violence in Gujarat: Test Case for a Larger Fundamentalism Agenda. New Delhi/Bangalore: Aliance for Women. Clémentin-Ojha, Catherine. 2008. Les Chrétiens de l’Inde. Entre castes et Eglises. Paris: Albin Michel. Devy, Ganesh. 2002. “Tribal voice and violence” Seminar, n° 513, http://www.india -seminar.com/2002/513. Guha, Ramchandra. 1999. Savaging the Civilized. Verrier Elwin, his Tribals and India. London: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Smita, Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2007. “The Bajrang Dal: The New Hindu Nationalist Brigade” pp. 197–222 in Living with secularism. The destiny of India’s Muslims edited by Mushirul Hasan. Delhi: Manohar. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1999. “Militant Hindus and the Conversion Issue (1885–1990): From Shuddhi to Dharm Parivartan. The Politization and the Diffusion of an ‘InvenÂ� tion of Tradition’,â•›” pp. 127–152 in The Ressources of History. Tradition and Narration in South Asia edited by J. Assayag. Paris: EFEO. Jaffrelot, Christophe (ed.). 2007. Hindu nationalism. A reader. Princeton (Nj): Princeton University Press. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Maheshwari, Malvika. 2011. “Paradigmatic Shifts by the RSS? Lessons from Aseemanand’s Confession” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVI, n° 6, 5–11 Feb.: 42–46. Kanungo, Pralay. 2008. “Hindutva’s fury against Christians in Orissa” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, n° 37:16–19. Kanungo, Pralay and Joshi, Satyaka. 2009. “Carving out a White Marble Deity from a Rugged Black Stone?: Hindutva Rehabilitates Ramayan’s Shabari in a Temple”, International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, 3:279–299. Krishna, N. 2005. “Conversion with Foreign Funds” The Organiser, 10 April:17. Krishnamachari, T.T. 1989. Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. VII, 4/11/1948-8/1/1949, New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat. Misra, Loknath. 1989. Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. VII, 4/11/1948-8/1/1949, New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat. Niyogi, B.S. 1957. Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee, vol.1 and 2. Indore: Government Press. Rawat, Basant. 1998. “Christian Tribals Ostracised in Gujarat” The Indian Express, 4/12. Sarkar, Sumit. 1999. “Hindutva and the question of conversion” In K.N. Panikkar (ed.) The concerned Indian’s guide to communalism. New Delhi: Viking. Sen, Ilina. 1990. Women and Proselytisation: A Case Study of Christian Missionary and Hindu Revivalist Attitudes Towards Women in Raigarh District of Madhya Pradesh, paper presented at the World Sociology Congress in Madrid, July, 7. Shah, Ghanshyam. 2002. “Conversion, reconversion and the State: recent events in the Dangs” pp. 120–140 in P. Brass and A. Vanaik (eds) Competing Nationalisms in South Asia. Essays for Asghar Ali Engineer. New Delhi: Orient Longman.



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Shourie, Arun. 1994. Missionaries in India. Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. New Delhi: Asa Publications. South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre. 2008. “Anti-conversion Laws: ChalÂ� lenges to Secularism and Fundamental Rights” Economic and Political Weekly 12/1. Wankhede, H. 2009. “The Political Context of Religious Conversions in Orissa” Economic and Political Weekly 11/4:33–38.

RELIGION AND POLITICS: THE ITALIAN CASE Franco Garelli The Role of the Church and Religion in the Public Sphere Any discussion on the relationship between religion and politics in Italy must still today include an analysis of the dynamics existing between the world of politics and the catholic religion (and its church) due to the preeminent role it has long held in the country. In fact, if it is true that on one hand Italy today is in all respects a pluralistic country where all religious faiths have the right to exist, on the other hand it must be remembered that not only is the Vatican, the centre of world Catholicism, in Rome and that the vast majority of Italians still today profess catholic affiliations but also that the tradition of catholic hegemony in Italy is not without its consequences. Whilst maintaining its role of extreme importance in national dynamics, the presence of religion in general (and Catholicism in particular) in the public and political sphere in Italy has profoundly changed over the last 60 years. In order to understand its present importance, it is necessary to go back to the situation the country found itself in at the end of the Second World War, characterized by the fall of the Fascist regime, the difficult and delicate passage towards parliamentary democracy, an economy on its knees and the principal infrastructures devastated by the conflicts between the Anglo-American Allies and the Nazi-Fascist armies. Catholicism and Politics in Post Second World War Italy: From Hegemony to Pluralism In the years bridging the 1940s and the 1950s, the role of the church and the catholic religion in the life of the nation is enormous, from a religious, social and political point of view. It was an age of churches packed with worshippers, religious vocations filling seminaries, Azione Cattolica attracting a large number of young militants intent on deepening their religious faith and testifying it in society. As regards the political situation, the catholic electorate mostly identified itself in the Christian Democratic party, thanks to the pulling force at this level of the capillary



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and dynamic network of the parishes, where many future party organizers originated. In this context, after the memorable electoral victory of 1948, the Christian Democrats (CD) lead the national modernization process, carrying out decisive social reforms (such as the agricultural reform) and promoting industrial recovery: Italian and foreign investments enable the reconstruction of a modern infrastructure network; important industries, automotive, petrol and chemical, begin to pick up again, and consumption is on the increase, as is a marked internal migration from the South to the North of the country. In short, this is the famous Italian economic miracle. The overall social climate reflects the solidity of the system, with any conflicts being reabsorbed without significant upheavals, certainly also due to the fact that the principal subcultures in the country (Catholic, Communist, Liberal) – apart from their ideological differences – Â�nurture shared values and civil coexistence. In this process, the catholic world takes on a leading role not only because the majority of the population adheres to Catholicism in a convinced and active way, but also because the managerial class (political, economical and ecclesiastical) of catholic extraction demonstrates to be up to handling the challenges of the moment. In those years a particular model of society seems to establish itself, defined by the historian Arturo Carlo Jemolo as “an unexpected realization of a Guelph state one hundred years after the decline of neoGuelph aspirations”1, whilst other commentators defined it as a “new modern Christianity”2, that is to say, a Christian inspired social project capable of overcoming the limits manifested until then by Capitalism and Communism. However, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s as the economic boom draws to a close and the economic and political crises strike the country, a phenomenon clearly emerges that had been predicted by the most perceptive observers at the very moment catholic hegemony reached its peak: the diffusion, also in Italy, of the processes of secularization, and with them those changes in mentality and customs that had already been seen in more advanced nations. The search for immediate happiness becomes the new goal, religiosity  returns to the private sphere, the great surge of catholic associations  seems to peter out and the flows towards the churches and the 1 ╇ Arturo C. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni (Torino: Einaudi, 1963). 2 ╇ Pietro Scoppola, La nuova cristianità perduta (Roma: Laterza, 1985), p. 15.

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seminaries diminish. The certainties of the past are severely fractured by the student and worker protest struggles that spread throughout the nation. Their major effects can be seen in the principles of authority and legitimacy of institutions being disputed, in the forceful demand for political change, and the experimentation of alternative life styles. Many factors, therefore, can be held responsible for this disorientated nation, entangled in a social and political climate of uncertain outcomes, and posing serious problems of governability that severely test the soundness of the system led by the Christian Democrats. Those are also the years following the Vatican Council II, in which  the universal church considered it time to adapt itself to a world undergoing profound transformation and by now considered de-Christianized. The occurrence of the Council aroused great expectations not only in catholic settings, although it was conditioned by the political and social tensions of the moment, reflecting within the church the climate of contestation and disagreement that ran throughout the broader society. The two referenda held between the mid 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s are emblematic of the change in the scenario – at a political level as well as in the customs of the population. Both the referendum on divorce and that on abortion mark the defeat of the Italian catholic world and sanction two rights contrary to the catholic doctrine, and guaranteed by a Christian Democratic led State. Some observers, both within and outside the catholic world, begin to doubt that Italy can still define itself a catholic country and little by little the sense of hegemony gives way to the perception that Catholics are starting to become a minority group in the country. It is precisely in the moment when the presence of the catholic church and world in Italy appears at its most bleak and uncertain that the charisma of Pope John Paul II bursts onto the public scene. The new Pope who comes from the East and is distinguished for his capacity to communicate with the masses and to interpret the new churchworld relationship, will also have a decisive role in the collapse of the communist regimes dependent on the Soviet Union. This is a pontificate characterized by an unquestionable international air, overall for the reproposal of Catholicism as a political, economic and social model alternative both to Capitalism and Communism, which however provided deep and long-lasting effects on the Italian church. And so, from the beginning of the 1980s, having overcome the economical crisis that had gripped the country throughout the previous decade, the church’s initiative gains consensus and its public role is



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confirmed once again, even though in a more pluralistic context. The new Concordat between Church and State – signed by the laic, socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and by the Vatican Secretary of State, cardinal Casaroli, particularly attentive to the evolution of the modern world – no longer defines Catholicism as the State religion, but lays down the bases to guarantee it a pre-eminent part in the life of the country. As regards the associations, Azione Cattolica no longer holds its dominant position of the past, even considering that more than 10% of the adult population continues to be part of catholic groups or movements and that new and dynamic associative forms develop (Comunione e Liberazione, the Scouts, spiritual movements, voluntary activity and social engagement groups etc), showing how religious and cultural pluralism is rapidly spreading even within the catholic world itself. Many of these groups operate in the so-called “Third sector” or “Private social sector,” in other words, that area of civil society half way between the state and the market that offers an important contribution to sustaining the country system, especially in a historical phase in which the traditional public welfare systems are prevented from carrying out their function to the full because of financial and structural limitations. Added to this, the sociological analyses of the period describe an Italy still characterized by high levels of religiosity, if compared to the other more secularized central and northern European countries, either catholic or protestant. This scenario offers the by now pluralistic Italian catholic world a renewed awareness of not being designated to the social and cultural sidelines, but of being able once again to hold its own in public dynamics: Catholics rediscover their numerically significant strength, in terms of worshippers and religious institutions, as well as being a resource for the country, which is re-emerging with a new optimism from the dark ages of the economic crisis and the terrorism of the 1970s. The New Public Pole of the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium The return to the public scene of Italian Catholicism in the 1980s is however still based on the old model of the transmission belt between the catholic world and the party of its political unity (the Christian DemÂ� ocrats), and it is the result more of a process of the ecclesial forces adapting to the secularization of society rather than their capacity to cope with the spreading of pluralism both at a religious and cultural level.

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Everything changes again when that model of the relationship between the church and society is no longer adequate. This occurs during the first half of the 1990s and approximately coincides with the collapse of the catholic party par excellence. The ultimate cause of the end of this political experience is certainly to be found in the scandals involving the Christian Democrats at that time, along with the other historical political parties of the First Republic (as is called the period from the foundation of the Italian Republic until the early 1990s), due to politics entangled with business, widespread corruption and bribes for political ends. However, for several years the party had already been losing consensus in the catholic world, not only because it was seen as being increasingly involved in power games and less able to keep to its fundamental principles, but also because the catholic electorate itself was widening its horizons and political choices. The disappearance of the Christian Democrats not only sets the catholic vote free from the “belly of the Balena bianca” (White whale), as the party was called by some political commentators of the time, but left the church orphan of its political reference point that it had counted on to defend and promote catholic values and interests in Italian society. This marked the beginning of a long pathway of transition for the country, from the old political-institutional structures to a sort of imperfect two party system based not so much on two parties as on two alternative coalitions, centre-right and centre-left, that, with great difficulty and at the cost of severe divisions in the country, alternate in government. This has occurred despite the prevalence of the centre-right coalition which is profoundly inspired and conditioned by the personality and strategies of the television media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who burst onto the political scene and monopolized it, for better or worse, for the following 15 years. However, well before the collapse of the CD, the church had perceived the closing of one world and the opening of another, also as a consequence of international events (the fall of the Berlin wall, great ideology crises, crises in the nation-State, the return of migratory flows etc.) which could severely condition the life and culture of the country. In an increasingly open and pluralistic society traditional reference points are weakened, a mix of cultures emerges, and the importance of memory and roots dwindles: all factors which lead to lack of public spirit, the rise of particular and local needs and interests, and the decline of the most important national subcultures (including the catholic one). In this picture, the church perceived the growing threat of an ethical crisis, the



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affirmation of the radical-libertarian culture and the spread of weak thinking, all of which could undermine the roots of the catholic culture that had been the most widespread reference for so long. A renewed presence of the Church and Catholicism on the public scene emerges from this change in the scenario: according to the Bishops, even in a pluralistic context as by now that of Italy, respect for other faiths and cultures should not obliterate a cultural and religious tradition that is an integral part of the national history and memory. And so the “Cultural Project” was set up, triggering some of the recent battles of the church in the public arena, such as those to defend the presence of the crucifix in schools, or to reassert the religious value of some festivities that are assuming secular significance, or again to condemn the omission of the reference of Christian roots in the European Constitution. Well aware that the social bond is at constant risk of erosion in a global and pluralistic world, the church deemed it necessary to make its voice heard loud and clear on crucial questions for civil coexistence and social regulation; sustained by the “widespread conviction that advanced modernity lacks substantial values and that Christian thought and anthropology has numerous resources of meaning at its disposal able to promote a noble idea of human social harmony.”3 Religion and Politics in a Pluralistic Society In this picture the relationship between religion and politics changes. All political parties, in every election, want to win over the largest share possible of the catholic vote. The reasoning – correct or not, although often backed up by surveys on political-electoral themes – can be explained as follows: elections are won at the centre because extreme positions tend to frighten off electors who are already worried about the rapid and profound changes imposed on their daily lives by the processes of globalization. The catholic electoral pool, despite being smaller than in the past, is still a considerable size, and by its very nature places itself at the centre of the political spectrum. In a two-party contest, however, the electors must take a stand for one side or the other – otherwise there is risk of political irrelevance or a no vote protest – therefore the catholic vote, positioned in the centre, is also the most mobile; the winning coalition is the one that can, apart from keeping its faithful 3 ╇ Franco Garelli, Catholicism in Italy in the Age of Pluralism (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 88.

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grass-root electors, secure the largest share of the catholic vote. This explains why the catholic vote has been desired by all successive coalitions, in power or in opposition, over the last 15 years. What better way to attract the catholic vote than by convincing the electors of this or that coalition, rather than this or that political party, to be the best promoter of catholic values in society? An example, therefore, of politics seeming to need religion for tactical electoral purposes. In fact, also for strategic reasons this attention to religion in general, and in Italy in particular to Catholicism, emerges. Various factors, both internal and external, make governing the country in a period of tensions and contradictions extremely difficult. On one hand, as in all Western democracies, also Italy must take account of the economic crisis and cut backs in public finances which lead to the reduction in the welfare system, industrial reorganization and consequent precarious and unstable employment, difficulty in coping with the migratory flows as regards social and cultural integration and so on. On the other hand, various anomalies (widespread illegality, waste in the public administration, economic and productive differences between the North and the South, flaws in the education system and so on) persist in the country, conditioning growth and development and dampening hope for the future. A climate of distrust and uncertainty is the consequence, and it is particularly notable in the public’s disaffection towards political parties and institutions, but it also erodes the very sense of national belonging. The priority in such a situation is to reconstruct the bases of civil coexistence, to recuperate guiding values that can hold the country together and restore its dynamism. This can also involve drawing on the patrimony of symbols and resources that are part of the catholic religion, which still today continues to be a reference point for the majority of the population. This explains why many political groups pay particular attention and respect to the presence of the catholic church in Italian society, acknowledging not only its capacity to form public opinion and the contribution ecclesiastical groups make to the common good, but also the role Â�carried out by the church and catholic culture to avoid weakening the national social fabric. This is the scenario in which the majority of the political parties claim to be in favour of keeping religious symbols in schools and public buildings, reminding everybody of the prevalent human and religious references in the country; that willingly help the associations and social-assistance groups (many of catholic origin) that intervene where the state and welfare system no longer can afford to; that do not block



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the existence of the – mostly catholic – private schools, in the hope of propping up a public education system in difficulty, and so on. On the other hand, this interest shown by politics towards religion fits in with, and in a certain sense facilitates, the church’s new approach to the public sphere. Over the last 15 years, the Italian church has clearly been seeking support and consensus in promoting catholic values, interests and religious institutions, spurred on by the intention to affirm Christian anthropology, to oppose the secularization of consciences, and not to lose the patrimony of values and experience that it considers constitutes the nation. Along these lines, it acts in an increasingly direct and open way, no longer entrusting its public representation and mediation of catholic needs to any political party (as it did with the Christian Democrats in the past). Thus another distinctive characteristic of the church’s current public presence: the tendency to negotiate directly with political powers, the formation of pressure groups, the constant lobbying on themes “dear to Catholics” such as the importance of the family based on marriage, the value of life in all situations, bioethical Â�issues, the education emergency, the defence of catholic schools, the public visibility of religious symbols, the keeping of Christian festivities in the national calendar and so on. In this picture some unusual configurations appear in the relationship between religion and politics that produce paradoxical results. It has happened for example that the church – in this new public role  – finds more support and stronger recognition from centre-right parties, whose most important exponents make no mystery – both in public and in private – of laic, if not actually secular, life styles which are anyway far from the precepts of individual and family catholic morals. It is sufficient to recall the silence of many exponents of the ecclesial hierarchy and associations in response to the recent personal scandals that have involved the Prime Minister and his inner circle. On the other hand the church itself appears less in tune – or anyway believes to find less attention to the defence of Christian values – with political parties on the centre-left, that altogether are more engaged in the area of legality, manifest more sober and less apparent (or anyway less secularized) life styles, trying to credit themselves as being champions of more ethical orientations; even if in fact they are in favour of a more laic State and are more respectful of pluralism of choices in the ethical field. Another example of these singular configurations in the relationship between religion and politics in Italy can be seen in the conflicting

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relationship between the Lega Nord and the church regarding territorial representation. In the last 15 years the catholic church has systematically spoken out against locally-orientated needs and against hostility towards foreign immigrants (issues instead at the base of the electoral success of the Lega Nord) by repeatedly underlining the value of national political and territorial unity and a solidarity that reaches far beyond ethno-centric limits. And yet, the most recent political surveys have shown that large numbers of Northern Catholics – including those closest to the traditional church religious model – vote for the Lega Nord, in clear contradiction to the official positions expressed on this by the catholic hierarchy. Here an often latent tension emerges between the local churches and the church in Rome, between the fringes and the centre of the Italian catholic world, mirroring the tension in the economic, social and political fields at the base of the electoral successes of the Lega Nord. Probably a growing number of Northern Catholics consider the church in Rome closer to central power than to the reality of local churches and the daily lives of its worshippers.4 The Trajectory of Italian Political Catholicism The fate of the organized presence of Catholics in politics is obviously intertwined with the different phases experienced by the church and religion in Italy in the public sphere. The Three Currents of Political Catholicism and the Phenomenon of Diaspora The Christian Democratic party, according to one of its founders and perhaps its most important and able leader, Alcide de Gasperi, was defined at its debut as “a centre party looking to the left”. Apart from the different interpretations, rarely impartial, that can be given to this definition, it clearly expresses the core of the Christian Democratic experience in post Second World War Italy: the attempt to establish (in the shattered economic and political reality of the period) the model of society that is an alternative both to Anglo Saxon Capitalism on one hand and Communism on the other, and that had been shaped in the social Catholicism experience between the end of the 19th and the 4 ╇ Franco Garelli, ‘Chiesa-Lega: la posta è il territorio’, La Stampa, 28 August 2009, pag. 1.



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beginning of the 20th centuries. In other words, the CD was born with the ambition to hold together the enterprise and the workers, the individual and the community, wealth and its redistribution, and so on. In this bold and difficult operation the party was born with the benediction of the Vatican Hallowed Halls, but at the same time it kept its autonomy, albeit at a price and not only in political terms. Furthermore it presented itself right from the start as the natural electoral opening for the vote of those Catholics who in the immediate post war Italy filled not only the churches, but also the parishes, the oratories, the artisan workshops, the countryside, the co-operatives, the rural credit banks and so on. The social group of reference is extremely broad, spanning from the small-scale landowners to the middleclass entrepreneurs or from Statesmen to artisans, and thus aims to hold together diversified groups, proposing noble mediation based both on common Christian values and on a project – Christian inspired – to transform the country and carry it towards modernity. The political Catholicism that was shaped in that experience was variegated at the start but consolidated into roughly three broad tendencies, forming the base of the Christian Democrats successes as long as they move in a centripetal direction, but triggering the end of the CD when they begin to move in a centrifugal direction. One group is on the left, so giving more importance to social Catholicism (more attentive to the issues of solidarity and the conditions of the poorest in society) and therefore more akin to establishing pacts first with the Socialist Party and later with the heirs to the Communist Party. Another group is at the centre, seeking a solid balance between economic growth and social solidarity and therefore more inclined to govern autonomously or come to agreements with other laic and liberal central parties. And lastly the group on the right, more sensitive to the needs to protect Catholic values in the face of advancing communism and therefore disposed to accept more conservative political positions. These three interpretations of political Catholicism go through phases of changing fortune, on one hand each forming an internal current within the CD, taking from time to time the upper hand in the various party congresses and consequently imposing its political ideas on the country; on the other hand “legitimizing”, time by time, right or left political areas according to how the country is evolving. The 1950s is a period of central government, dominated by the strong figure of De Gasperi and the alliance with the laic and liberal central groups, there then follows a phase of centre-left government in the 1960s and 1970s

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under the leadership of Fanfani and Moro; and then the period of the so-called ‘five party’ government led by Andreotti, a pact with both laic and liberal socialists. All this takes place within a political system that on one hand hinges on the CD (a party that never received less than 30% of the vote even in its worst moments), and on the other hand is blocked by the impossible alternative of the left, represented by the Italian Communist Party which, should it have won, would have decisively shifted the balance of power of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. For a long time, these three currents constituted a strength in the Italian political system, in that they guaranteed Italy, at least in the first thirty years of the CD, a minimum degree of change both of ideas and managerial class, in a context profoundly conditioned by the foreign policy of the two great blocks that were in conflict from 1945 until 1989. The attention to the prevailing interpretations of political Catholicism in Italy (grouped into the CD) must not let us forget the active catholic minorities that – over the years – have never wanted to be part of the Christian Democrats, or have kept their distance from the “ecclesial” imperative presence for catholic political unity. Apart from small and qualified catholic groups that have always held positions close to the proposals of the socialist or communist parties, the phenomenon of Catholics who do not identify with the Christian Democrats grew markedly at the end of the 1960s and throughout the following decade. This was a consequence of the demand for political change that grew up in the period of student protest and worker struggles, as well as the greater openness in the church-world relationship foreseen in the Vatican Council II. There are also groups of grass-root Catholicism who identify in the struggles of the liberation of man from the historical alienations (such as those who follow the line of the worker movement or the ‘Christians for socialism’), as well as catholic organizations (Acli and Csil) that are dissatisfied with the relationship with the CD and Â�condemn the collateralism they were entangled in. In this period new political formations are set up (such as the MPL), although destined to electoral failure; there is an increase in the presence of militant Catholics in the left-wing parties, also outside parliament; movements are created (such as ‘Catholics say no’, contrary to the abrogation of the divorce law) who keep their distance from the church and the catholic party on various public issues, and so on. In short, these are all experiences that affirm the political diaspora the catholic world is undergoing, calling into question the then pre-dominant faith-politics relationship, fostering the



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public debate on these themes (testified by the more engaged catholic journals such as Testimonianze, Com-Nuovi Tempi, Idoc etc.), contributing to confirm the idea that pluralism in the catholic political choices is by this time an unavoidable issues. At that time, these convictions and choices involve a minority of believers but they represent the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that will soon modify the catholic presence in the political field.5 The Breakdown of the Transmission Belt Linking the Catholic World to the CD In fact, going back to the prevalent catholic pathways, something seems to block the mechanism – in the 1980s – underlying the CD electoral success. There are various reasons for this, but two stand out that have already been referred to: on one hand the progressive regression of the catholic party and its growing detachment from its base and principle inspirations; on the other the increasing affirmation of pluralism in the political choices in the catholic world. These two tendencies are partly bound together and partly independent. The bond comes from the result of lacklustre CD activity in the country that persuaded increasingly high numbers of Catholics to move away from its environment and look for new references and fixed points. However, the tendency towards plural choices in the political field (as in other areas of life) is a typical aspect of advanced modernity, involving the catholic world independently of the destiny of the party of reference. In short, the party of catholic political unity gradually weakens because the unity of the social block that represented it in the past no longer exists. One rupture regarding this comes from the marked expansion – Â�during the 1980s – of the phenomenon of ecclesial motivated socioassistance voluntary activity. With time and the progressive regression of the catholic party, many catholic groups have chosen to direct their engagement much more to the area of solidarity and altruistic voluntary work rather than to the party political field. This drain on the forces has undoubtedly contributed to giving greater impetus to voluntary activÂ� ity although it has had the effect of reducing – as regards the catholic environment – the turnover of political personnel, as well as widening 5 ╇ Franco Garelli, La chiesa in Italia. Struttura ecclesiale e mondi cattolici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), pp. 34–37.

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the detachment of the political area from his base and from civil society. More generally, however, the focal point of catholic actions in Italian society seems to have shifted. Whilst in the past the specific area for lay catholic practice (the area where religious identity is translated in life choices, where faith is witnessed in historical time) was represented by political engagement or taking responsibility in work or profession, today it seems to be found – not only in the collective imagination, but also in choices with more public appeal and in life practices – in supportive actions towards the least fortunate in society. In that way a form of presence less exposed to compromises is preferred, that better answers the need to be constructively and ethically active in society. In other words, the best catholic youths in the country are attracted much more to engagement in frontline social fields (the struggle against old and new forms of poverty; help for the aged, youths at risk, and families in difficulty; immigrant integration; spread of the culture of legality etc.), rather than to take on responsibilities in the political-institutional sphere on which the future of society depends and where the destiny of collective life is decided. It is interesting to note how public opinion appreciates and favours this switch in commitment, in a context where politics is increasingly less favourably valued in the opinion surveys of the time, and is perceived only as a power struggle for individual gains or vested interests, while social voluntary work seems to be the true answer to the problems of the welfare systems undergoing structural crises. Another signal of change can be found in the internal dynamics of catholic associations, where by now not only different religious sensibilities are compared (and contrasted), but also conceptions of the church-world relationship that foresee increasingly more diverse political options. Whereas some ecclesial groups and movements appear insensitive to the political discourse (in that they are exclusively fired by spiritual interests and religious instruction), there are others that combine religious identity with a particular public presence. This is the case, for example, of ‘Comunione e Liberazione’, that through strong conviction wants to affirm faith in advanced modernity, translating it both into culture and social work; and as regards politics, it identifies itself in the moderate area that supports the church’s role in society. There are other catholic based associations that express more open political positions (e.g. Azione cattolica, Acli, Scouts, Comunità di Sant’Egidio etc.) identifying more with a religious faith open to global dialogue, to be interpreted more as a principle of personal reference rather than a factor



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fostering distinctive religious (and political) affiliations. Traditional and progressive political orientations mix together in the vast area of catholic-based voluntary work, even if the emerging groups (particularly engaged in issues of peace, legality, the fight against addictions, international cooperation and so on) identify more with the left-wing parties than other political groups. In short, even though a substantial share of the members of the catholic archipelago continues to vote – in the period under consideration – for the catholic party, it is clear that very different motivations lead to this choice, whilst other committed believers now feel free from the old bonds. Faced with these situations, it was the head of the Italian church himself who put an end to the catholic political unity – in the mid 1990s, after the end of the Christian Democratic experience – by officially having to recognise it no longer existed. “Very recent distressing events – a document from the Episcopal Conference in 1995 states – have led to a further deeper divide in the catholic political representation that refers to Christian inspiration. The process that, over some years, has witnessed the decline of the unitary engagement organized by Italian Catholics in the political field has continued and has almost reached its conclusion.”6 Thus the ‘conditional’ recognition the church manifests towards the new situation, illustrated – reporting Pope John Paul’s words at the ecclesial Convention in Palermo that same year – above all in the idea “that the church must not and will not be involved in any choice of political or party faction, in the same way as it does not express preference for one or another institutional or constitutional solution, and it respects authentic democracy”; it was followed by an invitation to Catholics to avoid “a cultural diaspora corresponding to the political diaspora, as if all reference points had been lost”.7 Although it recognises pluralism in political options, the church reminds Catholics that “ they cannot consider every idea or vision of the world compatible with faith, or with their easy adherence to political or social groups that oppose, or do not pay enough attention to, the principles of the church’s social doctrine regarding the respect for individuals, the family, freedom of scholastic choice, solidarity and the promotion of justice and peace”.8 6 ╇ Alceste. Santini, ‘Dalla crisi del cattolicesimo politico del XX secolo alla ricerca di nuove vie’, in: AA.VV., Quale futuro politico per i cattolici (Torino: SEI, 1997), p. 121. 7 ╇ Santini, supra note 6, p. 125. 8 ╇ Santini, supra note 7.

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Political Catholicism at the Sidelines of the Two-Party System Passing from the level of principles to real processes, it can be seen that the three factions of political Catholicism do not disappear in the Italian two-party world that emerged after the collapse of the CD and the crisis of the First Republic, but rather remain latent. The progressive area (first united in the Partito Popolare) obviously joins forces with the political groups that originate from the crisis in the old Communist Party, setting up initially the Ulivo, and then the centre-left Union, before finally joining the Partito Democratico. The conservative current recognises in Berlusconi and his policies, that formally defend catholic values, a barrier against the definitive de-Christianization of Italian society and so joins the formations where that political experience evolves (in Forza Italia first and then in the Popolo della Libertà). The centre has more difficulty than the others in establishing its collocation, continually swinging between the centre-left and the centre-right, always looking for the re-birth of a Centre Party, incarnated first by the UDC then by the API and now by the newly forming Terzo Polo or Partito della Nazione. These three traditions of political Catholicism are – in the past as today – another of the elements of the specificity of the Italian case, that is not found in other European countries, where the catholic components fit in with the parties or coalitions of the centre-right without particular difficulty. In this situation the importance of political Catholicism in the country is markedly reduced. In the current scenario catholic inspired parties exist but they are small groups they have only slight influence on the overall political balance of power. Furthermore, groups of committed Catholics are present in the most important parties that make up Italian politics (Popolo della Libertà, Lega Nord, Partito Democratico, Italia dei valori) but their contribution does not seem particularly decisive in the orientation of the programs set out by these political formations. What is more, the party coalitions that dispute the political guidance of the nation mostly have an intrinsically laic leadership, so also at this level the current weakness of the catholic presence in the political arena is evident. The scene, therefore, is dominated on one hand by coalitions and parties that woo the catholic vote but are culturally and politically far from the principles of the church’s social doctrines; on the other hand by a church that primarily acts to defend and promote the catholic values and interests in society, sometimes influencing, even indirectly,



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the government formation or parliamentary majorities, endemically minimal in Italy. In the Italian parliament many members and senators of catholic extraction are called upon regarding numerous issues and appreciated for their prominent roles. Their integrity, competence and capacity for political mediation derives from a long-lasting tradition and is widely acknowledged. However, often these figures are missing from the lineup of leading exponents in parties, coalitions or governments and their influence appears to be marginal as regards important decisions. The scattered presence and lack of a common project therefore marks the current condition of Italian political Catholicism, that though still widespread imposes little influence. The majority of catholic politicians, both in national and local institutions (Regions, Provinces and Town Councils) is united regarding the irrevocable values (family, life, education, religious freedom etc.) proclaimed by the church, however, they are divided precisely on the ways of promoting them and this is demonstrated by the fact they belong in small numbers to all the parties that make up the variegated panorama of the imperfect Italian two-party system. On the other hand, right in the catholic base, in the thousands of parishes and the numerous ecclesial associations, political strategies that defend catholic values in society are no longer discussed, not only because they are primarily dealt with by the church, but also because such discussions would give rise to further division in an already very differentiated context. Religiosity and Political Attitude The surveys carried out in the last ten years on Italian catholic political and electoral attitudes have shown, with some degree of continuity, the tendency of electors of catholic extraction to position themselves at the centre of the political spectrum. Furthermore, the greater the adherence to the traditional model of church religion, the more the moderate orientations tend to increase. Up until the existence of the CD, that is to say until the mid 1990s, this implied that the majority of catholic electors voted for the party that, for better or worse, represented catholic political unity and defended their  interests within the broader society. This party permanently occupied the centre of a political system that – for various national and

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international reasons – appeared blocked, without offering real practical alternatives. The results of a recent research, carried out on a representative national sample of the population aged between 16 and 74, permit on one hand the confirmation of this tendency and on the other the possibility to carry out deeper analyses on the issue.9 First of all, important indications are illustrated by the analysis of how Italians position themselves politically, noting their possible position on a scale of right-centre-left (Figure 1). On one hand it can be seen that more than 40% of the sample refuses this type of placement, either because they do not want to answer the question or because they are not able to orient or place themselves. On the other hand, it is quite clear that left-wing electors are much more inclined to declare their preferred political orientation than those on the right. If these indications are translated to an electoral level a situation would occur – not confirmed by any recent electoral contest – in which the progressive area would far outvote the moderate-conservative position. In particular, the data show that 15% of the sample place themselves on the left of the political spectrum, 12.9% in the centre-left area, 10.5% at the centre. 11.9% in a centre-right position and 6.8% on the right. Whilst the largest “parties” Figure 1.╇ Political Belonging of the Italian Population 25

21.3

21.6

20 15

13

12.9 10.5

11.9

10 6

5 0

2

Extreme left

0.8 Left

Centre-left

Centre

Centreright

Right

Extremeright

I don't know my position

I don't want to answer

N° cases: 3,160. ╇ It refers to a survey, which findings will be published soon. The survey was promoted by APSOR (The Piemontese Association of the Sociology of Religions) and carried out in 2007 by the Eurisko Demographic Institute on a representative sample of the Italian population aged between 16 and 74 (cases: 3,160). 9



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are represented either by those who refuse to take a position and reveal their political orientation (21.6%), or those who seem politically disoriented (21.3%). The basic tendencies illustrated here are not new to experts in the field, who are well aware of the Italian culture in which many people shy away from displaying their own electoral orientations or where the right-wing voters are less inclined to declare their political leaning, taking – as the results on this issue show – easy refuge in the categories of political indecision or refusal to answer. However, political commentators interpret this reserve from another point of view, that is, as an expression of Italian disaffection from politics, and as an indicator of the opaque political climate that prevails in the country. In fact, other data from the research confirm the idea that the relationship between Italians and politics is not an easy one (Figure 2). Only 4% considers to be politically engaged (compared, for example, with the 12% of Italian adults declaring to be actively engaged in a religious association), while 37% is interested in politics and keeps up-todate but without being directly involved. The rest of the population considers itself incompetent on the subject (18%), or openly declares a lack of interest in politics (31%) or even disgust (10%). This estrangement, however, is not only evident from the survey but also from electoral behaviour, which translates into an increasing rate of abstentionism or void ballot papers. Looking more deeply at the catholic issue, it can be seen that the political unity of this cultural area – for decades the principle cornerstone of Italian political and religious society – did not take long to fade away. From the survey mentioned, in fact, it can be seen (Figure 3) that 45% of Italians believes that Catholics are free to vote for any political party without problems of conscience, that 31% shares the same point Figure 2.╇ Attitude to politics (data %) % I consider myself politically engaged I am well-informed on politics but do not take part I leave politics to those more competent than me I’m not interested in politics I feel disgusted by politics Total N° cases: 3,160

4.1 37.3 17.6 31.1 9.8 100.0

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franco garelli Figure 3.╇ Opinion on Catholic political unity (data %) %

Catholics should vote for only one Christian party Catholics should vote for parties with Christian values Catholics can vote for different parties and add their values Catholics can vote for any party without problems Total

7.2 16.8 31.0 45.0 100.0

N° cases: 3,160.

of view but together with the idea that Catholics must affirm their values in the different political factions. On the contrary, more restrictive positions are expressed by 17% of the population who believes Catholics should explicitly choose parties that promote Christian values and 7% who considers that Catholics are obliged to vote for one Christian inspired party. More than three quarters of the population believe Catholics no longer have limits to the way they vote. This has been achieved in only a few decades, although it seems a century away. It is useful at this point to evaluate how political attitude changes according to the position the population takes on the religious issue, considering for example the different collocation within the political spectrum of lay Italians compared to Catholics, and the apparent differences among the diverse types of religiosity that make up the variegated catholic world. A variable will be used for this – again with reference to the survey mentioned – that is the self-collocation of subjects within the religious sphere. This has already been tested in numerous researches and has always shown its capacity to significantly discriminate the orientations and attitudes of the population on many issues and in different environments. Regarding religiosity, the prevalent types in Italy can be identified in 9% defined as ‘no religious belonging’ (who do not belong to any religious confession and generally manifest atheist-Â� agnostic orientations); 5% belonging to other non-catholic religions; whilst the vast catholic affiliation is made up of the group of ‘committed and active’ believers (including 19.2% of Italians), ‘committed but not always active’ Catholics (27.6%), those who adhere to Catholicism generally more for tradition and culture (30.3%) and lastly 9.1% who interpret Catholicism in their own ‘do-it-yourself ’ way on the margins of institutional religion. The relationship between religious belonging and political cÂ� ollocation (Figure 4) illustrates two important data. On one hand, the tendency to take a central position in the political spectrum rises with the increase

N° cases: 3,160.

Left and centre-left Centre Right and centre-right I don’t know my position I don’t want to answer Total

18.3 18.3 22.2 20.8 20.4 100.0

24.7 10.2 19.6 21.6 23.8 100.0

29.7 8.6 19.3 21.8 20.6 100.0

30.3 10.8 19.5 19.5 19.9 100.0

18.5 8.6 6.6 37.1 29,.1 100.0

54.4 2.4 12.5 12.5 18.1 100.0

Committed and Committed but Catholics Do-it-yourself Other No religious active Catholics not always active for tradition Catholics religions belonging Catholics and culture

Religious belonging

Figure 4.╇ Cross-reference between political position and religious belonging (data%)

27.9 10.5 18.7 21.2 21.6 100.0

Average

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in the degree of identification in church religion: 18% of ‘committed and active’ Catholics in fact declare to prefer the centre, with respect to a national average of 10%; on the other hand, another 18% of more engaged Catholics place themselves on the left, but compared to a national average of 28%. In other words for integrated Catholics there is twice the possibility to lean towards the centre and half to lean towards the left with respect to the national average. At the other extreme, those with ‘no religious belonging’ are far more oriented on the left with respect to the average, with 54% of cases. Catholics for ‘tradition’ and ‘do-it-yourself ’ Catholics instead show positions generally in line with the average. On the other hand, however, within all the types of religious affiliation there is a certain degree of differentiation. The ‘committed and active’ Catholics, for example, are equally divided in left, centre and right, with an incapacity to collocate themselves and little will to answer, with shares oscillating between 22% and 18%. Catholics for ‘tradition’ and the ‘do-it-yourself ’ group, are instead a little more orientated to the left, (with about 30% of preferences), and less at the centre (9%). Those belonging to a different religious faith from Catholicism either do not answer (29%) or do not know where to position themselves (37%) on the issue analyzed here, showing a greater detachment from politics with respect to the other types of religious affiliation. Therefore, Catholics still tend to prefer the centre of the political spectrum, but 15 years of the two-party system have anyway left their mark, both in terms of differentiation in electoral orientation and above all in terms of disaffection from the political system. Other interesting considerations can be made to evaluate whether some kind of relationship exists between the positions people take on the religious issue and political attitudes, above all in a context where – as has been seen – more than 40% of the sample does not declare a political collocation, either because the interviewees are not willing to or because they are not able to (Figure 5). The two groups furthest away from politics are the ‘committed and active’ Catholics and those who profess a non-Catholic faith, with 37% and 49% respectively declaring they have no interest in politics, in comparison to a national average of 31%. This is a paradox because in both cases the individuals concerned are strongly tied to their official Â�religious model – non-Catholic religious minority believers tend to be committed and active – in a context, such as the Italian one, where religion holds an important place on the public and political scene. From the CathÂ�olic point of view that could be interpreted as an act of delegation

N° cases:. 3,160.

I consider myself politically â•…engaged I am well-informed on politics â•… but do not take part I leave politics to those more â•… competent than me I’m not interested in politics I’m disgusted by politics Total

3.1 37.8 18.2 30.5 10.4 100.0

4.0 32.5 18.6 37.1 7.9 100.0

32.3 10.5 100.0

18.2

35.6

3.5

24.0 12.2 100.0

17.7

42.7

3.5

49.3 10.5 100.0

15.8

22.4

2.0

14.6 6.6 100.0

12.8

54.2

11.8

Committed Committed Catholics Do-it-yourself Other Nonand active but not always for tradition Catholics religions religious Catholics active Catholics and culture belonging

Religious belonging

Figure 5.╇ Cross-reference between attitude on political engagement and religious belonging (data%)

31.1 9.8 100.0

17.6

37.3

4.1

Average

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by religiously engaged Catholics to the church in this field, that would implicate a notable alignment to the strategy of public presence – Â�without political mediation – carried out for some time by this institution. It is precisely because it is distant from politics that the public role of the catholic church is legitimized. As regards the other religious Â�confessions, this percentage could indicate the distrust towards the Italian political system, perceived as discriminatory or absent with respect to non-catholic religions. In other types of ‘catholic’ religiosity (the ‘committed but not always active’ and catholic as a result of ‘tradition and culture’) a level of disinterest towards politics that reflects the national average can be observed, the ‘do-it-yourself ’ catholic group instead is better informed on political issues and reveals a lower level of disinterest. In this picture levels of political interest by those who declare not to belong to any religion stand out: 12% of these subjects declares to be politically engaged, the treble not only of the national average but also of the figure registered among Catholics and those professing other religious faiths; 54% of these cases are well-informed on political issues, against an Italian average of 37%; whilst the disaffection from politics (manifested by lack of interest or disgust) includes slightly more than 20% of this group in comparison to 41% of the national population and 35% of the committed and practicing Catholics. In other words, in pluralist Italy with a renewed public role of religion, the more a person is integrated with a church religion – not only catholic – the less he or she is interested in or engages in politics; on the contrary the more a person is distant from religion the more he or she is engaged in politics. It is well worth remembering that this is in a context where politics habitually woos religion. Another ‘sensitive’ issue regards who the catholic vote should go to (Figure 6). The ‘do-it-yourself ’ Catholics (who live slightly at the margins of the church) and the ‘no religious belonging’ group are together the less convinced of all the others regarding the fact that Catholics should vote for an unique Christian party. On the other hand, however, ‘committed and active’ Catholics are the most eager supporters of the idea that Catholics can vote for any party that defends and promotes Christian values (declared by 30% with respect to the national average of 17). In other words freedom of choice has become a trend that will not change, however, the nearer an

N° cases: 3,160.

Catholics should vote â•… for a unique Christianâ•… inspired party Catholics should vote â•… for parties expressing â•… Christian values more Catholics can vote for â•… parties of any ideology, â•… but then try to affirm â•… Christian values â•… within them Catholics can vote for â•… any party without â•… experiencing any â•… problems of conscience Total

6.4 15.5 39.5

38.6

100.0

10.9

29.7

35.4

24.1

100.0

Committed and Committed active Catholics but not always active Catholics

100.0

52.9

25.9

14.0

7.1

Catholics for tradition and culture

100.0

51.6

32.1

13.2

3.1

100.0

52.0

22.7

14.7

10.7

100.0

71.5

16.3

7.6

4.5

Do-it-your-self Other No religious Catholics religion belonging

Religious belonging

Figure 6.╇ Cross-reference between attitude to catholic political unity and religious belonging (data %)

100.0

45.0

31.0

16.8

7.2

Average

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individual is to the model of church religion the more he or she tends to vote for parties that incorporate Christian values. Mirroring this, only 24% of ‘committed and active’ Catholics feel able to vote any party, whether or not it defends Christian values, an opinion shared by 45% of Italians. The further one moves from the core of active Catholicism the more one is aware of the irrelevance of the connection between religion and party politics. The complete freedom of vote for Catholics (the fact they can give their preference unconditionally to any party) is affirmed by 39% of ‘committed but not always active’ Catholics and by more than 50% of other types of catholic religiosity (Catholics for tradition and culture and those ‘do-it-yourself ’) together with the followers of other religious confessions. The biggest group though that shares this position is the ‘no religious belonging’ (71%), whose libertarian orientation comes out also in the support for a completely laic vote for Catholics. Among those who do not belong to any religion only very few sustain the right for Catholics to vote either for a catholic party or those parties that promote Christian values in society. An intermediate option among those above mentioned is the possibility that Catholics support any party on the condition they can affirm their specific religious and life convictions within them. This is a situation regarded more favourably by the more committed Catholics than those more traditionally oriented, and confirms the fact that a part of more engaged Catholicism seeks a compromise between freedom of vote and the search for a area where its voice can be heard. In short, the new Italian socio-religious context, marked by pluralism on one hand and the renewed public role of the church on the other, has resulted in catholic attitudes towards politics becoming less uniform and predictable than once. It is characterized by a form of nostalgia for the centre as the elected political area, but without only one party of reference, seeking a political support that promotes Christian values in society, without however renouncing the political and electoral autonomy attained following the collapse of the CD. The Specificity of the Italian Case: A Reciprocally Utilitaristic Approach between Religion and Politics As regards the issue of the relationship between politics and religion in general, therefore, the Italian case reveals some particularities with respect to the European context it is part of.



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On one hand, similarly to what has occurred in other advanced countries, Italian politics has been profoundly weakened in the last 15 years, as a result of processes of globalization, difficulty in governing efficiently and the end of ideologies. Religion, on the contrary, above all in Italy, seems a more resistant and dynamic symbolic reservoir that the political forces dip into to favour the processes of social cohesion that globalization itself undermines at the root: one people, one language, one religion produce a more cohesive, even political, community. These neo-communitarian tendencies, that are not present throughout the whole country (consider the Lega Nord), are often associated with the rediscovery of the public role of religion. Politics through religion tries to reinforce its identity at both a local and national level. From this derives the diffidence towards multiculturalism and the religions different from the national catholic tradition; the acceptance of religious symbols in schools and public places; the support for religious institutions; respect towards the catholic church and acknowledgement of its public role and so on. Of course, this attitude is more diffuse among the parties making up the centre-right coalition, but it is not absent in the centreleft coalition. The Lega Nord, the only party to present itself openly in competition with the church on a series of issues (foreign immigration, public order, territorial representation), does not attempt to substitute the Catholicism of its electors with a sort of secular-pagan cult to nourish the people of the North. It simply aims – with some success – to detach the faithful from the church in terms of political-electoral attitude, acknowledging  and favouring the role of the catholic religion – more than its institutions – in the public sphere. In other words, it proposes itself as an entity of potential political and social integration in competition with the church. Also this is a specific element of the Italian case. It must be said, incidentally, that the analysis of the electoral results at the most recent political and administrative elections prove the Lega Nord right. The party demonstrates its efficiency by attracting catholic votes in the northern parishes, prospering, and putting down roots precisely in the electoral pool once exclusive hunting ground of the catholic party (CD). This utilitaristic approach to religion adopted by politics, that believes to be able to gain advantage from religion’s symbolic reserve, comes from the enormous difficulty that politics itself faces in the regulation and management of cultural pluralism, that often risks translating into fragmentation that involves the political system itself and undermines the capacity of governing the country.

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The recourse of weakened politics to the religious symbolic patrimony, however, is not particular to the Italian case, since it occurs in various other European countries. What is specifically Italian is the strength that religion and the church demonstrate in their lobbying on the political system, for the defence and promotion of religious values in society, convinced to help the common good and civil harmony. No longer is it necessary to turn to mediation by political Catholicism, that today, as already seen, is at its historical low. The phenomenon takes on even more interesting social aspects if we consider that it takes place in a now completely pluralistic context. The electors of catholic extraction, despite being inclined to prefer the centre of the political spectrum, manifest much higher degrees of liberty than ecclesial declarations, both in terms of voting for parties or political exponents of Christian inspiration – a clearly minority tendency even among the more committed and active Catholics – and in terms of electoral preference given to parties far from ecclesiastic institutions, such as the Lega Nord. In this new public role, at least during the last 15 years, the catholic church has repeatedly shown itself more efficient than politics, conditioning its positions and directions at various times. A relevant exception is the Lega Nord, that today seems to be the only political party able to compete with the Hallowed Halls. The very evident presence of the church on the public scene has naturally produced negative reactions often coming from a part of the laic-liberal world or other religious confessions. They accuse the catholic hierarchy of wanting to interfere in Italian society, of pursuing vested interests, of not respecting religious freedom and diverse cultural formations present in the country, of considering Italy as a nation still imbued in the catholic culture, as if it had been excluded from the process of secularization of consciences. Furthermore governments and political parties that guarantee positions of public privilege to the catholic church are strongly criticised, in a period in which the State should take a neutral role towards the different religious confessions and be more inspired by laic principles. However, not all the secular world shares these criticisms, and some of its exponents (‘devout atheists’ is the term used) appreciate the potential contribution offered by the church and catholic religion to resolve the problem of national social cohesion.



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References AA.VV. 1976. Religione e politica. Il caso italiano. Roma: Coines. AA.VV.1997. Cattolici in Italia tra fede e cultura. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Abbruzzese, Salvatore. 2001. Comunione e Liberazione. Bologna: Il Mulino. Acquaviva, Sabino Samele. 1979. Il seme religioso della rivolta. Milano: Rusconi. Acerbi, Antonio (ed.). 2003. La chiesa e l’Italia. Per una storia dei loro rapporti negli ultimi due secoli. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Bachelet, Vittorio. 1973. Il nuovo cammino dell’Azione cattolica. Roma: Ave. Baget-Bozzo, Gianni. 1979. Questi cattolici. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Bedeschi, Lorenzo. 1974. Cattolici e comunisti. Milano: Feltrinelli. Bedeschi, Lorenzo et al. 1976. I cristiani nella sinistra. Roma: Coines. Cardia, Carlo. 1980. La riforma del Concordato. Torino: Einaudi. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religion in the Modern World. Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press. Casavola, Francesco Paolo et al. 1997. Quale futuro politico per i cattolici. Torino: SEI. Cesareo, Vincenzo, Cipriani, Roberto, Garelli, Franco, Lanzetti, Clemente, Rovati, Giancarlo. 1995. La religiosità in Italia. Milano: Mondadori. Diamanti, Ilvo, Pace, Enzo (eds.). 1987. Tra religione e organizzazione. Il caso delle Acli. Padova: Liviana Editrice. Diamanti, Ilvo, Ceccarini, Luigi. 2011. La parabola del voto cattolico. Dall’unità alla diaspora. Roma- Bari, Laterza. Diotallevi, Luca. 1999. Religione, chiesa e modernizzazione: il caso italiano. Roma: Borla. Fabro, Nando. 1970. I cattolici e la contestazione in Italia, Fossano: Editrice Esperienze. Faggioli, Massimo. 2008. Breve storia dei movimenti cattolici. Roma: Carocci. Ferrari, Silvio, Varnier, Giovanni Battista. 1997. Le minoranze religiose in Italia, Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo. Filoramo, Giovanni. 2007. La chiesa e le sfide della modernità. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Formigoni, Guido. 2010. L’Italia dei cattolici. Dal Risorgimento a oggi. Bologna: Il Mulino. Garelli, Franco. 2007. “The public relevance of the church and Catholicism in Italy.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12 (I): 8–36. Garelli, Franco. 2007. La chiesa in Italia. Struttura ecclesiale e mondi cattolici. Bologna: Il Mulino. Garelli, Franco. 2010. Catholicism in Italy in the Age of Pluralism. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. Garelli, Franco. 2011. “Religion und Gesellschaft.” In Länderbericht Italien by Rörig, Karoline, Glassmann, Ulrich, Köppl, Stefan (Hg.). Im Erscheinen: Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Garelli, Franco, Guizzardi, Gustavo, Pace, Enzo. 2003. Un singolare pluralismo. Indagine sul pluralismo morale e religioso in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Giorello, Giulio. 2005. Di nessuna chiesa. La libertà del laico. Milano: Cortina. Galli, Giorgio. 2007. Storia della DC. 1943–1993: mezzo secolo di Democrazia cristiana. Milano: Kaos. Giura Longo, Raffaele (ed.). 1975. La sinistra cattolica in Italia. Bari: De Donato. Gualerni, Gualberto et al. 1977. I cattolici degli anni ‘70. Milano: Mazzotta. Guasco, Maurilio. 2001. Chiesa e cattolicesimo in Italia (1945–2000). Bologna: Dehoniane. Gubert, Renzo, Pollini, Gabriele (a cura di). 2005. Italia e Europa: valori a confronto. Milano: Franco Angeli. Guerrero, Elio (ed.). 1996. La Chiesa in Italia. Dall’unità ai giorni nostri. Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo. Guolo, Renzo. 2011. Chi impugna la croce. I cattolici e la Lega. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Jemolo, Arturo Carlo. 1963. Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni. Torino: Einaudi.

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Malgeri, Francesco. 2005. L’Italia democristiana. Uomini e idee del cattolicesimo democratico nell’Italia repubblicana (1943–1993). Roma: Gangemi editore. Maritain, Jacques. 1946 (5° ed.). Umanesimo integrale. Roma: Borla. Martelli, Stefano. 1988. L’arcipelago cattolico. Bologna: Tecnoprint. Martina, Giacomo. 1977. La chiesa in Italia negli ultimi trent’anni. Roma: Studium. Marzano, Marco. 1997. Il cattolico e il suo doppio. Organizzazioni religiose e Democrazia cristiana nell’Italia del dopoguerra. Milano: Angeli. Mauro, Ezio. 2005. “Le ragioni di un naufragio laico.” La Repubblica 14 giugno: 1. Melloni, Alberto. 2004. Chiesa madre, chiesa matrigna. Torino: Einaudi. Menozzi, Daniele. 1993. La chiesa cattolica e la secolarizzazione. Torino: Einaudi. Miccoli, Giovanni. 2007. In difesa della fede. Milano: Rizzoli. Odifreddi, Piergiorgio. 2007. Perché non possiamo essere cristiani (e meno che mai cattolici), Milano: Longanesi. Prandi, Alfonso. 1968. Chiesa e politica. Bologna: Il Mulino. Riccardi, Andrea. 1996. Intransigenza e modernità. La chiesa cattolica verso il terzo millennio. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Riccardi, Andrea. 2003. Governo carismatico: 25 anni di pontificato. Milano: Mondadori. Romano, Sergio. 2005. Libera chiesa. Libero stato? Milano: Longanesi. Ruini, Camillo. 1996. Per un progetto culturale di orientamento cristiano. Casale Monferrato: Piemme. Rusconi, Gian Enrico. 2000. Come se Dio non ci fosse. Torino: Einaudi. Rusconi, Gian Enrico. 2007. Non abusare di Dio. Per un’etica laica. Milano: Rizzoli. Sciubba, Roberto, Sciubba Pace, Rossana. 1976. Le comunità di base in Italia. 2 voll. Roma: Coines. Scoppola, Pietro. 2005. La Democrazia dei cristiani. Il cattolicesimo politico nell’Italia unita, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Sorge, Bartolomeo. 2979. La “ricomposizione” dell’area cattolica in Italia. Roma: Città Nuova. Viano, Carlo Augusto. 2006. Laici in ginocchio. Roma-Bari: Laterza.

THE RECIPROCAL INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS IN BRAZIL Ricardo Mariano and Ari Pedro Oro Introduction This paper addresses the changes in the relations between religion and politics in contemporary Brazil prompted particularly by the entry of Pentecostals into party politics from the mid-80’s on. It seeks to show that the effects of the skyrocketing growth of Pentecostalism and the fiercer inter-religious competition triggered by it extrapolate the religious field to encompass the mediatic and political fields, ultimately affecting the Brazilian public sphere itself. The effect is double: on the one  hand,  the presence and visibility of religious groups, especially EvanÂ�gelicals and Catholics, in the country’s public life has been considerably enhanced; on the other, given the significant religious and political capital amassed by Pentecostals in the last few years, candidates and political parties can no longer disregard them as possible allies lest their electoral success be jeopardized. Hence their effort to obtain support from pastoral leaders during elections, in hope of turning these leaders’ religious flocks into an electorate. Simultaneously, representatives can no longer afford not to promise and propose to them joint ‘social’ projects and partnerships. Not without self-interest, thus, Brazilian religious and political institutions and actors have strengthened relations in a reciprocal instrumentalization of religion and politics. As will be seen below, all this was evident in the 2010 presidential election, showing the significant political power exerted by Catholic and Evangelical pressure groups on Brazil’s political class. The religious occupation of the public sphere and the composition of a symbiosis of sorts between religion and politics do not seem to be met with major obstacles in the country’s contemporary public life. Pluralization of the Brazilian Religious Field: Catholic Contraction and Pentecostal Expansion Between 1500 and 1822 Brazil was a colony of Portugal, which Â�established and defended Catholicism in the conquered territories. Brazil became

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an independent Empire in 1822 and made the Catholic Church the official State religion, standing by its institutional interests and securing its virtual religious monopoly. In 1889, the inception of the Republic led to the juridical separation between State and Church. Even though considered one of the less conflictive in Latin America, the disestablishment in Brazil was decried and resisted by the clergy. The separation nonetheless sprang the Catholic Church from state tutelage, allowing it to submit  and report directly to the Vatican, to Romanize, discipline and moralize its cadres, repress its liberal clergy, shape popular Catholicism, beef up its infra-structure, recruit and train new pastoral personnel, and expand its network of seminaries, parishes, dioceses and schools throughout the national territory (Pierucci, 1990:211–219). During the last forty years of the Old Republic, the Church became stronger as a religious institution and locus of political power. In spite of the disestablishment, the Brazilian state kept on privileging the Catholic Church over other, demographically insignificant religious groups: protestant minorities, spiritualists, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian rituals. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Brazilian religious field remained dominated by Catholicism, showing little religious diversity. In 1970, the country was 91.1% Catholic. Thirty years later, in 2000, Catholics had decreased to 73.8% of the total population, especially in the metropolitan and more economically developed regions. In the last quarter of the century, Catholic hegemony was disrupted pari passu with re-democratization, the intensification of economic modernization, the mediatization of culture, cultural changes, pluralization of the religious field, and the formation of a religious market. The accelerated expansion of the Pentecostal movement and, more surprisingly, of those without religion has contributed significantly to the receding of Catholicism since the 80’s. Even with such demographic depletion, Catholics added up to 125.5 million in a universe of 170 million Brazilians in 2000. It should however be noted that, traditionally, most Brazilian Catholics do not attend Catholic cults, nor do they take part in official religious activities, are routinely exposed to ecclesial authorities, or follow their moral, doctrinal and religious guidelines. One could say that Grace Davie’s famous phrase, “to believe without belonging”, has long been true of Brazilian Catholicism. The low participation of the faithful in official cults and their feeble institutionalization is a defining trait of Brazilian Catholicism; not by chance, it has been evocatively defined by Rubem César Fernandes (2005) as a religion of “few priests, few masses, and a lot of festivities”.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 247 The expected result is shown in a survey by the Datafolha Institute published in 2007: Catholics are the religious people who least declared to have changed habits because of religion – only 9 percent against 54% of Pentecostals and 45% of protestants.1 During the last two decades, however, there have been indications of revitalization and greater Catholic mobilization of its bases. Supported and encouraged by the Vatican, the mainstream reaction against the decline of Catholic hegemony and Pentecostal expansion has been spearheaded by the Catholic Charismatic Renovation and other theologically conservative groups. They seek to restrain anti-traditionalist trends, reanimate the Catholics’ sense of belonging, practice and religious fervor, to secure ecclesiastic control of Catholic festivities and pilgrimages, tronic to intensify proselytism and evangelization through the  elecÂ� media, and to act more aggressively in the political sphere (Oro, 1996; Mariz, 2006; Carranza, 2006). Towards this end, they draw on the significant cultural roots of popular Catholicism and Catholic festivities. Since the middle of the last century, the fastest growing religious group in Brazil and Latin America are the Evangelicals. These include both protestant churches originating from Europe and the United States and Pentecostals, whose denominations are mostly autochthonous. There were 4,833,106 Evangelicals in Brazil in 1970 (5.2%), 7,885,650 (6.6%) in 1980, 13,157,094 (9%) in 1991 and 26,452,174 (15.6%) in 2000. Pentecostals account for most of such remarkable Evangelical expansion, since the protestant denominations, with the exceptions of Baptists and Adventists, grew very little in this period; some like the Lutherans even showed quantitative decline. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Pentecostals doubled each decade, from 3.9 million in 1980 to 8.8 million in 1991, to 17.7 million in 2000. They comprise around 80% of all Evangelicals today. Since the 80’s, Pentecostals have achieved high public visibility, growing social legitimacy, expressive space in radio and TV, and significance in party politics, radically changing the national landscape with its myriad congregations and temples. Pentecostal expansion has met however an important class threshold, since its advance takes place primarily in the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. Its followers generally earn lower income and have less schooling than the national average, also being well above this average in terms of precarious and domestic 1

╇ Folha de S. Paulo, May 6, 2007.

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occupations lacking labor rights. In general, middle classes tend to resist Pentecostal conversion, both on account of rejecting its traditionalist sexual morality and its attachment to ascetic and sectarian behaviors and beliefs, and for being less susceptible to its salvationist appeal, mostly geared toward unprivileged social strata. By the end of the century, Brazil was still overwhelmingly Christian, with 89.2% of Catholics and Evangelicals. Christians and those without religion (7,3%) together made up 96.5% of the entire population. Despite the popular belief in the country’s great religious diversity, the fact is that only 3.5% of Brazilians declared to be affiliated with non-Christian religions (Pierucci, 2004). The largest non-Christian groups were KardeÂ� cist Spiritualists (2,337,432), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1,104,879), AfroBrazilian cults (571,329), Buddhists (245,870), Mormons (199,641), other eastern religions (151,082) and Jews (86,819). There were only 27,233 Muslims, 2,908 Hinduists, 17,092 affiliated with indigenous traditions, and 58,443 esoterics (Jacob, 2003). The most recent and trustworthy survey on religion in Brazil, the national survey with Brazilians over sixteen years old carried out by the Datafolha Institute in 2007, revealed that the number of Catholics has plummeted to 64% (56% in state capitals), that of Evangelicals has risen to 22% (17% Pentecostals and 5% protestants), and those without religion have remained around 7%. With the exception of the latter, whose number remained constant, the trends of previous decades were confirmed: sharp Catholic decline and significant Pentecostal expansion. The other religious groups together amounted to 7%. Of its current 191 million inhabitants, Brazil has around 121 million CathoÂ� lics and over 40 million Evangelicals, of which roughly 30 million are Pentecostals – making it the country with the largest absolute number of both Catholics and Pentecostals in the world. During the last two decades, such robust growth of Pentecostalism was accompanied by its entry into party politics. Pentecostal Penetration in the Political Sphere The elections for the National Constitutional Assembly in 1986 not only symbolized Brazil’s re-democratization after twenty-one years of a military dictatorship, but inaugurated Pentecostal activism in party politics. In effect, until the early 80’s Pentecostals excluded themselves from party politics by invoking the sectarian slogan “crentes [Evangelicals] do not mess with politics”.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 249 Surprisingly, from the mid-80’s on, large Pentecostal churches started to join national party politics in an organized fashion, in order to defend their corporate interests and religious values. The new slogan became “brother votes for brother” – the title of a book by Evangelical Josué Sylvestre (1986) written based on an electoral interest to defend the ideological and political shift of his brothers-in-faith in the Constitutional Assembly. The landmark in this shift took place precisely there, when the ecclesial high echelons of the country’s largest Pentecostal church, the Assembly of God, mobilized its pastoral base for supporting the denomination’s official candidates in most Brazilian states. This strategy resulted in the election of 13 of its federal deputies, and originally stemmed from a fear that the new Constitution would restrict religious liberty by re-establishing the Catholic Church as official State religion – alarmist and persecutory rumors the dissemination of which that church’s top ranks themselves contributed to (Mariano and Pierucci, 1992). Due to the electoral efforts of the Assembly of God and other denominations, from the 1982 to the 1986 legislatures, the number of Pentecostal federal deputies increased from two to 18, which, added to the other 14 EvangelÂ� ical deputies who had also been elected, resulted in a group of 32 representatives. This phenomenon drew the attention of both the press and sociologists of religion at the time (Pierucci, 1989; Freston, 1993). To put in perspective the Pentecostal success in the 1986 ballot, it is enough to note that, between 1910 and 1982, this religious segment had elected only five federal deputies (Freston, 1994:30). But in the 1987– 1990 legislature, it immediately and unexpectedly took on a foremost political role in the Evangelical field. Such leading role continued in the following legislatures, spearheaded by both the Assembly of God and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. It should be remarked that in 2005 the Universal Church created the Brazilian Republican Party (Partido Republicano Brasileiro, PRB), while the Assembly of God has been engaged in a partnership with the Christian Social Party (Partido Social Cristão, PSC) since that same year. Such a sudden shift in these churches’ political orientation has demanded significant justification efforts. Pentecostal leaders and congressmen have justified their penetration in party politics by claiming to be defending their own religious freedom, preventing the Catholic Church from returning to its condition of official State religion, and standing against adversary groups such as homosexuals, feminists, Afro-Brazilian cults and others (Sylvestre, 1986). They argued that their participation in the Constitutional Assembly was key to prevent the

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de-criminalization of abortion and drug consumption, civil union between homosexuals, rampant immorality, as well as to defend ChrisÂ� tian morality, the family, and freedom of religion and cult. Therefore, entering and actively participating in party politics was needed in order to shore up the freedom to preach the Gospel and traditional Christian morality, as well as to directly oppose their religious and laic adversaries. Many pastors thus resorted to Manichean warnings to the faithful that to vote in a candidate from the church meant to support God in His struggle against the Devil and mundaneness. Since then, Pentecostal leaders and politicians have dedicated themselves to turning their religious flock into an electoral one by defending the need for electing “men of faith”, “soldiers of Christ”. In their enthusiasm, they act like real political canvassers stomping for votes. They evoke as a principle and as a way of justifying their political activism the centuries-old notion of constructing a new nation guided by God, guardian of a higher public morality and of political ethics because attuned to the Biblical formula: “Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 144:15). Finally, they spread the belief that “Brazil will be a different country when a man of God heads it” (Campos, 2000:21). Two decades after the Constitutional Assembly, the Evangelical caucus, led by the Pentecostals, further enhanced its political participation in the National Congress. This was not a linear process though, since the involvement of various Evangelical congressmen in corruption cases caused ups and downs, tarnishing their image. In 1990, the Evangelical caucus was reduced to 23 federal deputies due to scandals of patronage and corruption in which their Constitutional Assembly deputies had been involved. In 1994, it rebounded up to 30 congressmen, and in 1998 further rose to 49. In 2002, it reached its peak so far: 59 representatives. Four years later, during the campaign, almost half the members of the Evangelical caucus, most of whom from the Assembly of God and the Universal Church, were accused by the Bi-Cameral Parliamentary Inquiry Commission of participation in a scandal of overbilling and distribution of bribery in the competitive bidding for the purchase of ambulances by municipal administrations. The huge impact of the corruption charges in its electoral basis caused the Evangelical caucus to shrink to 49 deputies in 2006 (Oro, 2010). In 2010, Evangelicals gained new ground, electing 60 federal deputies and three senators (Oro and Mariano, 2010). For many Pentecostal leaders political action remains fundamental to defend their institutional interest, religious values, and morality.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 251 This is especially true where legal-political regulation has encroached into areas of the private sphere they wish to evangelize and homogenize according to Biblical mandates. These are areas that could eventually conflict with their morals and doctrines if shaped by the actions of state agents and the political influence of laic groups; thus, for instance, their dogged political struggle against proposals for changing legislation pertaining to the civil union between people of the same sex and against public policies punishing homophobia. In order to enhance their political articulation, Evangelicals created in 2003 the Evangelical Parliamentary Caucus, a supra-party and supradenominational block. The Evangelical caucus, however, is neither ideologically nor politically a cohesive and homogeneous parliamentary block; it cannot force its members to vote uniformly. Evangelical representatives belong to over a dozen distinct religious groups, and act concertedly only in matters involving the defense of traditional Christian morals – occasions in which they often ally with conservative Catholics – or of their churches’ institutional interests – when they experience strong pressure and tutelage by the ecclesial directors who appointed them as the denomination’s official political candidates. In order to secure future electoral support by the denomination and ultimately their own reelection, these politicians need to prove worthy of the trust placed upon them and of the authority delegated to them by their ecclesial leaders by performing per standards expected by their political sponsors and canvassers. They need to prove their intransigent defense of the Gospel, of the family and morals, as well as to behave as paragons of good practices and customs. This partly accounts for the radical moral conservatism of some Evangelical representatives in their defense of certain corporative banners. Even though the Pentecostals’ political and electoral mobilization incites fears of a fundamentalism potentially harmful to democracy, displeases the advocates of state laicism, and is openly criticized by political adversaries and the press, it is increasingly regarded as part and parcel of the dynamics of Brazilian democracy. It is also seen as a part of this minority religious group’s strategy in its search for political power, financial resources, privileges, recognition and legitimacy within a competitive religious market dominated by one hegemonic religion. In each new election in Brazil, the electoral support of Evangelical leaderships and their religious flock is requested, demanded, negotiated and disputed by candidates to executive and legislative offices of all ideological hues, including most of those running for the Presidency since

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the first presidential election after re-democratization, in 1989 (Mariano and Pierucci, 1992). Office holders and representatives demand political support during their term in office in exchange for granting public funds to Evangelical congressmen’s legislative amendments and pet projects, for implementing public policy in partnership with the churches, and for changing legislation beneficial to them. This augments and legitimizes the influence as well as the bargaining and lobbying power of these religious persons in the public sphere. The political de-Â�privatization of this religious movement is therefore bolstered not only by the Pentecostal leaders’ strong will for bracing their political activism. They also count on eager effort by candidates, parties and representatives in power to ensnare them in the party politics game, clientelistic relations, in sum, the Brazilian political representation system. Even though the supposed obedience of the Pentecostal electorate is often overestimated – in other words, there is a lot of mystification in the idea that this religious flock is easily converted into an electorate in each election – the fact is that the current electoral power of these religious men may eventually decide majority elections. Thus, political scientist Joanildo Burity has even declared that “the party and candidates who do not consider religious groups in their discourses and strategies run the real risk of jeopardizing their own electoral performance” (Burity, 1997:46). The Competition between Catholics and Pentecostals Encroaches on Politics and the Media The Catholic Church remained a key player in the Brazilian public arena during the entire twentieth century. Already in the 1934 Constitution, it was able to establish the principle of ‘collaboration for the public interest’ between Church and State, thus playing down the secularizing effects of the Republican disestablishment. From the late 60’s to the 80’s, at the height of the military dictatorship – but also of Liberation Theology and the grassroots Basic Ecclesial Communities –, it stood out politically in the struggle for re-democratization and defense of human rights. At the same time, the Catholic Church lost its exclusive direct relation with political and state leaders. Deprived of Catholic support, military dictators walked away from it towards alliances with Evangelical anti-communist groups supportive of the rigid national security regime apparatus.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 253 Since John Paul II’s pontificate, the ascendancy of theologically conservative clergy and Catholic groups did not incur in the political demobilization of Brazil’s Catholic groups and hierarchy, but rather in a political re-orientation. The defense of traditional Christian morality seems to have become the priority, in detriment of struggles against the so-called neoliberal economic policy, social inequality, and concentration of land, wealth and income. Today, such conservative political option clashes with an expanding human rights agenda – for instance, demands for reproductive and sexual rights championed by feminist and homosexual groups. During the last couple of decades, Catholic officers have recalibrated  their political action in order to face Evangelical competition in the political arena, as well as in the occupation of the public space. They began to monitor the actions of Evangelical congressmen, and to reinforce and organize their own political representation accordingly,  by holding orientation meetings for Catholic politicians in municipal city-council chambers, state assemblies, and in the National Congress. According to Dom Antônio Cheuiche, Bishop Emeritus of Porto Alegre, this is about constituting a “new space where parliamentarians can gather to pray, enhance their spiritual life, and deepen their consciousness and their knowledge about the Christian person’s political commitment”.2 This way, “Catholic caucuses” are being formed, even if timidly. Another reaction to the Evangelicals’ electoral success from the 90’s on was the appearance of candidates adopting “Catholic identity as their key electoral asset”. Several of them were supported by the Catholic Charismatic Renovation, even deploying slogans such as “Catholic votes for Catholic” or alerting the Catholic electorate to the danger of rising Pentecostal politics, the Universal Church in particular: “Beware, the moment is critical. Wake up, Catholics!” (Machado, 2004:41–42). CuriÂ� ously, candidates linked to the Charismatic Catholic Renovation who confessionalize their electoral candidacy while politicizing their religious option are getting closer to groups such as Liberation Theology, and have even affiliated to center-left parties. According to Machado (2004:43–44), this is a recent and growing trend in Brazil. Even though formally the Catholic Church abides by the Vatican’s guideline of disallowing clergy members to run for electoral office in 2

╇ Jornal Nova Versão, October 18–24, 2000, p. 5.

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order to avoid disunity and secularization, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB)’s Vocations and Ministries Section has confirmed a rising number of religious candidacies to public office in the 1990’s and 2000’s elections (Moreira de Oliveira, 2002:263). But in general, besides not being punished by the ecclesial hierarchy, these priestspoliticians even seem to enjoy the implicit support of many of their superiors. This could partly explain Pope Benedict XVI’s exhortation for priests to avoid personal involvement in politics during a meeting with Brazilian bishops in September, 2009.3 Competition between Catholics and Evangelicals in the public sphere is not limited to the political field, but also diffuses into the mediatic field. The Catholic Church is the religious institution owning the largest network of radio stations in Brazil; in 1991, it owned 122 (Della Cava and Montero, 1991:230). But the intensification of religious competition reinforced the Catholic efforts in this area. By means of further acquisition of stations and strong pressure on the federal government, in 2007 the Church totaled 215 FM and AM short and tropical waves radio station concessions, tantamount to 5% of Brazil’s 4,546 operating radio stations. Moreover, according to Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency, it owned 1,200 community radios.4 From the mid-90’s on, the Catholic Church began to invest heavily on television in order to counter the Pentecostal prevalence in this media. In the beginning of the previous decade, its participation in TV was limited to broadcasting masses and a few religious shows in 28 laic stations (Della Cava and Montero, 1991:222). Until 1995, it owned only one TV station. From then on, the miracle of the multiplication of CathÂ� olic radio and television stations was sparked, sustained and directed by groups close or directly linked to the Catholic Charismatic Renovation: Rede Canção Nova (founded in 1989), Rede Vida (1995), TV Horizonte (1999), TV Século 21 (2000), TV Nazaré (2002), TV Educar (2003), TV Imaculada Conceição (2004), and TV Aparecida (2005). Some of these are free-to-air and have regional and national geographic coverage. Others are partly paid, partly free but locally broadcasted. Even though their shows are not very attractive and command very low audience ratings, Catholic tele-evangelism is likely to expand in the upcoming years driven by the missionary ardor of new Catholic communities reacting 3 ╇http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/mundo/ult94u625424.shtml. Last access on October 20, 2009. 4 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, May 2, 2007.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 255 to the Pentecostal juggernaut. The time is now gone when the Church was distant from such media and broadcasted only Sunday service on Brazilian TV. In the wake of this growing Catholic investment in electronic evangelism in order to re-Catholicize Brazilian society, the singer-priests phenomenon has gained momentum. Veritable celebrities of the CathoÂ� lic Charismatic Renovation, they turn masses into massive religious spectacles, sell millions of CDs, appear on radio and television, and take part in secular auditorium shows, even becoming leading actors in religious movies. Pentecostal radio-evangelism, on its turn, exists since the middle of the last century, but it has advanced considerably from the 60’s and 70’s on. In the following decade, Pentecostals began to invest in television evangelism, replacing the tele-evangelism shows imported from the United States with their own. Since then, Brazilian tele-evangelists have risen to prominence, and various Pentecostal churches have set up radio and TV stations such as the International Church of God’s Grace (owner of the Rede Internacional de Televisão), Reborn in Christ (TV Gospel), and the Assembly of God (Rede Boas Novas). The highlight here is however the Universal Church, the country’s most controversial denomination and target of various accusations by Brazil’s Federal Revenue and Public Attorney’s Offices. It owns Rede Record, the second largest television station in the country. It also controls 78 AM and FM radio broadcasting stations, as well as the newspapers Hoje em Dia (from Belo Horizonte), Folha Universal (with a weekly circulation of two and a half million issues) and Porto Alegre’s Correio do Povo, the magazines Plenitude, Ester and Mão Amiga, publishers, web portals, and dozens of commercial enterprises (Corten, Dozon and Oro, 2003). Its striking religious and media success has even caused a certain mimetic effect over this religious segment, leading other churches to clone their proselytism strategies. Religion and Politics in the 2010 Presidential Election In the 2010 presidential elections, inter-religious competition and opposition gave way to a convergence of conservative positions at the moral and political level between the Catholic and Pentecostal leaderships. They mobilized to set the election’s agenda, to put pressure on and shape the campaigns, strategies and proposals by the three chief presidential

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candidates: Marina Silva, Dilma Rousseff, and José Serra.5 As a consequence, this bid for the Brazilian federal government showed unprecedented religious activism and its power over candidates and political parties. Of the three major aspirants to the presidency, former Ministry of the Environment in the Lula administration Marina Silva was the only one to publicly sustain a religious identity, as she had been doing for many years. A missionary of the Assembly of God, in the 2010 elections Marina Silva bore the burden of belonging to a minority and sectarian religious group. This posed significant electoral obstacles in a two-round national majoritarian election. After her candidacy for the Green Party (Partido Verde, PV) was made official, a group of militants broke away from it, accusing the party of forsaking the causes of abortion legalization and civil union between homosexuals.6 Part of the mainstream media and of the middle class electorate raised similar critiques against her candidacy. In order to shake off the stigma of being a “narrowminded, reactionary and conservative” person – prejudices of which she claimed to be a victim because of “professing the Evangelical Christian faith”7 –, Marina chose to stand by the secular state and oppose in the public sphere sectarian religious positions on abortion and homosexuals’ rights. In spite of her traditionalist Christian views, she defended a referendum on the de-criminalization of abortion, declared she would not oppose civil union between homosexuals were it approved by the National Congress, and countered the accusation that she had proposed to include creationism in public school curriculums. During her campaign, Marina went on extensive religious pilgrimage. She met with pastors and leaders from Evangelical churches, spoke from pulpits, and granted numerous interviews to Pentecostal radio stations and websites. With few chances of winning, however, she did not manage to obtain endorsement from neither of the largest denominations.8 Strategically, she made a commitment not to conflate religion and politics if elected. Marina asked her brothers and sisters not to demonize her competitors who “do not share the same faith in God”, and stood firm in her defense of state secularism. She deflected accusations of 5 ╇ The 2010 presidential elections took place in two rounds, the first on October 3, the second on October 31. 6 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, May 22, 2010. 7 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 16, 2010; Época Magazine, October 11, 2010. 8 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, April 26, 2010.

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 257 using her religion instrumentally for electoral purposes, and a suspicion that she would privilege Evangelicals while discriminating against other religions. Accused of belonging to a “fundamentalist” religious group, she held on to state secularism as an assurance that she would be an impartial ruler in matters of religious dispute. On the other hand, Marina’s religious identity did render her some electoral advantage among Evangelicals, a constituency which gave her proportionally more votes than the sum total. Marina ranked third in the first ballot, with 19.6 million votes, or 19.3% of all valid votes. Since she was hand-picked by President Lula to succeed him in 2008, former Chief of Staff and Workers’ Party (Partido dos TrabalÂ� hadores, PT) candidate Dilma Rousseff began an approximation with both Catholic and Evangelical leaders. In doing so, she was seeking redemption from her supposed religious “deficit”, as well as protection against potential discrimination stemming from her left-wing militancy, her Marxist orientation, and her participation in armed guerilla movements against Brazil’s Military Dictatorship. Of the presidential candidates, she was by far the one who tried harder to obtain approval from both Catholics and Evangelicals, and to avoid electoral rejection due to religious reasons. Dilma kicked off her religious tour in grand style, by taking part in a ceremony for signing an agreement between the Holy See and the Brazilian state at the Vatican on November 13, 2008. In 2009, as a pre-candidate, she attended Catholic and Pentecostal celebrations, cults and events. She met with bishops from the Permanent Council of the National Confederation of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), attended mass at the Lord of Bonfim’s basilica in Salvador, the Círio de Nazaré procession in Belém, the ceremony where the President signed into Law the National Day of the March for Jesus in Brasília, and spoke at charismatic masses and Pentecostal cults, where she cited and read the Bible from the pulpit. In 2010, besides moving on with her religious pilgrimage, Dilma beefed up her discourse on faith and religious belonging, after the press unearthed an interview she gave to Época magazine in 2007. On that occasion, when asked about the existence of God, she replied, “I am quite balanced this regard. I wonder if there is? If there isn’t?” Faced with growing electoral pressure, Dilma disowned her agnosticism and took on a Catholic identity. She began by affirming, in February 2010, that even though she did not belong to any religion in particular, she did believe in a “force greater than us”. In May, she declared to be “above all,

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Christian” and a Catholic.9 Dilma’s sudden religious “conversion” had a pragmatic drive: the perspective of losing the election due to religious reasons. According to a Datafolha survey carried out on October 26, 2010, 36% percent of the Brazilian electorate considered it very important that the President of the Republic be religious – an attribute valued especially by the eldest and the less educated.10 Catholic leaders remained, however, suspicious of the PT candidate in virtue of the federal government’s Third National Human Rights Plan (Plano Nacional de Direitos Humanos, PNDH). On January 15, 2010, a release by the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) opposed the de-criminalization of abortion, homosexual marriage, and child adoption by gay couples, besides considering “intolerant” the proposal of banning the ostentation of religious symbols in federal government offices. On the 28th, sixty seven bishops, assembled in Rio de Janeiro, signed a document against the Third PNDH. Faced with CNBB’s staunch opposition, Lula proposed a revision of the Third PNDH, maintaining a generic defense of abortion as a public health issue while suppressing the passage referring to “women’s autonomy to decide what to do with their bodies”.11 On May 12, a discontented CNBB recommended Catholics to vote “for those committed to unconditional respect for life”. That same day, the President – Dilma’s chief canvasser – received a CNBB committee and guaranteed that he would change the passage referring to the de-criminalization of abortion, and withdraw from the text the prohibition against the ostentation of religious symbols in the Union’s public offices.12 The President’s strategic retreat was not enough, however, to assuage the Catholics’ sharp discontentment with the Third PNDH, neither their suspicions against the government’s candidate. The press revealed that his former Minister had obdurately defended the de-Â�criminalization of abortion in 2007. Once again under pressure, Dilma chose to retract again, and began to support the maintenance of Brazil’s existing abortion legislation, which allows it only in the event of rape or threat to the woman’s life. She did not detract, however, from supporting the delivery of medical care to women having abortions – a problem which, in her ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, May 13, 2010. ╇Available at http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br/folha/datafolha/tabs/intvoto_pres _27102010.pdf 11 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, January 12, 2010. 12 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, May 13, 2010. ╇9 10

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 259 view, should be treated as a matter of public health rather than as a criminal offense. These actions were not enough to disarm conservative Catholic bishops’ and charismatics’ mistrust of the PT candidate. The worse blow came on July 19, when D. Luiz Gonzaga Bergonzini, Bishop of Guarulhos, put a letter up on the CNBB website recommending Catholics not to vote for Dilma, because her party defended the legalization of abortion and had sanctioned the Third PNDH. On August 26, bishops from CNBB’s South Regional 1 from São Paulo advised the faithful to vote only for candidates opposing the de-criminalization of abortion. Subsequently, a Youtube video by the Archbishop of Paraíba D. Aldo Pagotto accused Dilma and the PT of trying to instill in the country a “culture of death”.13 In the aftermath of the Guarulhos Bishop’s anti-Dilma manifesto, Lula entrusted the former seminarian Gilberto Carvalho – then the President’s Cabinet Chief – with the task of bringing Dilma closer to the Catholic leadership. Dilma began a new tour to Catholic masses, meetings, and events. Her campaign also intensified efforts to attract support from Evangelicals; in July, Dilma was endorsed by fifteen Evangelical denominations. In the following months, however, Catholic and Evangelical leaders reached out further by intensifying their campaign against Dilma on the internet and temples. They accused her of supporting abortion, Satanism, and a Bill of Law (number 122/2006) criminalizing homophobia currently running in the Senate – which, in their view, would severely curb freedom of speech and religion in Brazil. One of the hits in the moral and religious crusade against the PT candidate was a Youtube video of Baptist pastor Paschoal Piragine from Curitiba, watched over three million times. In this video, he criticized the Workers’ Party, advised the faithful not to vote for Dilma, and warned against the risk that her victory would bring about the de-criminalization of abortion. Strategists and marketing professionals from the Worker’s Party’s campaign were late on realizing the electoral damage to Dilma’s candidacy caused by religious opposition. Four days to the first ballot, they counter-attacked in order to staunch the wound or even revert it. They mobilized allied bishops, priests, pastors and religious politicians to help quell the rumors by recording video statements disavowing the moral and religious accusations against Dilma. She complained publicly 13

╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 12, 2010.

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against the slanderous rumors, reasserted her opposition to abortion, and made a commitment not to propose changes to the existing Â�abortion legislation.14 In her last day of free radio and TV time, Dilma committed herself to “respect people’s faith, religions and convictions, as well as life in its full dimension”.15 Two days before the election, on October 1, she attended the baptism of her grandson in the Porto Alegre cathedral, in order to reinforce her “Catholicity”. Nonetheless, the wave of religious accusations had a visible effect in the first poll. Ibope surveys showed that, between August 26 and September 23, Evangelicals’ intention to vote for Dilma fell from 49% to 42%, eight points below that of the total electorate. On the other hand, her rejection index jumped from 17% to 28% in this religious segment. The anti-Dilma religious crusade contributed to the need for a run-off, and benefited both her competitors: among the Evangelicals, intention to vote for José Serra went up from 21% to 31%, and for Marina Silva, from 13% to 18%. In the second round, issues related to the de-criminalization of abortion and “defense of life”, homosexual civil union and marriage, and religious freedom became central to the campaign of both Dilma Rousseff and José Serra. They also came to populate the headlines of print and other communication media. On October 4, the day following the first ballot, the PT campaign leaders decided to boost allied religious leaders’ and parliamentarians’ political activism, in order to soothe the wave of religious “deception, calumny and slander” against Dilma.16 An “elite squad” of Evangelical deputies and senators was deployed to take action on the streets, electronic media, and temples. Baptist senator Walter Pinheiro, from the Workers’ Party, recounted the mobilization of Dilma’s religious allies: we contested the “vile rumors against Dilma on the internet”, put forth “public declarations and marketing actions”, “spoke with Catholic priests, leaders from various religions”, “went to almost all state capitals”, and “distributed almost 40 million copies of Dilma’s message about religion”.17 Dilma went on a new tour to Catholic and Evangelical churches. On her first free TV time during the second round, she made a Â�commitment to defend “our most sacred values”, and showed a photograph of herself ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, September 30, 2010. ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 1, 2010. 16 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 4, 2010. 17 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, November, 9 2010. 14 15

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 261 wearing a veil, standing next to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican.18 In a visit to the Aparecida sanctuary on the eve of Brazil’s patroness day, Dilma declared she had developed “a special devotion for Our Lady Aparecida, due to recent happenings in my life” – thus making an implicit allusion to a cancer she faced the year before.19 In the second week of October, 51 representatives from Evangelical churches supportive of the federal government took advantage of Dilma’s campaign’s weaknesses in the moral and religious arenas to scale up their demands. They personally held Dilma and the campaign coordinators to a commitment to secure religious freedom, to veto any eventual project approved by the National Congress that would “go against life and family values”, and to reject homosexual marriage, the Bill criminalizing homophobia, child adoption by homosexual couples, and the regularization of sex workers as a profession.20 Given the escalation of religious accusations and heightened demands by religious allies, the government candidate’s campaign – which had, during the first round, released a newsletter targeting Evangelical electors called “To the People of God”, which included an insert called “Thirteen reasons for a Christian to vote for Dilma Rousseff ”, as well as statements from Pentecostal pastors – issued a new Message to the religious public. In this message, Dilma declared to be personally against abortion, committed herself not to “propose changes in any points related to the abortion legislation, nor to other themes concerning the family and the free expression of any religion in this country”. She also affirmed that the Third PNDH was being revised and that, if elected, she would not sponsor “any initiative jeopardizing the family”. Moreover, Dilma guaranteed that, if the Bill criminalizing homophobia were approved in the Senate, she would only sign into Law those “articles that do not violate the freedom of belief, cult, expression, and other basic Constitutional guarantees”.21 The former Minister of Health and former governor of São Paulo state José Serra, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (Partido da SocialDemocracia Brasileira, PSBD) candidate, did as in his 2002 campaign: a pilgrimage from North to South of Brazil to Evangelical temples and events, as well as to Catholic celebrations, masses, and processions. ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 9, 2010. ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 12, 2010. 20 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October, 15, 2010. 21 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 15, 2010. 18 19

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He read the Bible, prayed, chanted and took communion in charismatic Catholic masses. From the beginning, the opposition candidate’s campaign managers had a strategy for captivating religious leaders, nessmen, rural producers, and conservative constituencies by busiÂ� emphaÂ�sizing religious freedom and the right to life and property.22 In the struggle for the religious electorate, Serra gained the support of leaders of the General Convention of the Assemblies of God in Brazil – the largest of the kind in the country – as well as of other, smaller churches. On his last free TV time during the first round, Serra appeared reading the Bible to a voter. During the run-off, Serra’s campaign radicalized its appeal to the moral, religious and politically conservative electorate. Serra opposed the de-criminalization of abortion and took on a good versus evil manichean religious rhetoric. He became more and more like a devotee, strictly committed to a traditionalist Christian morality. Serra’s first time on TV showed a “God fearing” candidate, guardian of “the family” and of “Christian values”, a public man that has “always condemned abortion”. The show brought images of six pregnant women, and Serra’s promise to “take care of the babies even before they were born”.23 His campaign associated Dilma with the de-criminalization of abortion, and sought to panic Evangelical and Catholic voters about the risk of approving the Third PNDH and the Bill criminalizing homophobia, which was thought to constrain religious freedom.24 It should be noted that, despite all this, both Dilma and Serra declared to be favorable to the civil union between homosexuals, probably due to the estimate that about half the Brazilians support this proposal. On October 6, Serra’s campaign managers, assembled in Brasília, received the copy of a leaflet containing instructions for spreading an anti-Dilma campaign on the internet and recommendations to visit the Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira Institute’s website25 – which criticized the Third PNHD for seeking to legalize abortion, abolish private property rights, constrain religious freedom, and persecute Christians.26 ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, April 26, 2010. ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 9, 2010. 24 ╇ Most Evangelicals consider homosexuality to be anti-Bible, sinful, immoral and pathological; they are the most homophobic religious group in Brazil (Bohn, 2004). 25 ╇ Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira founded the ultra-conservative Catholic group Tradition, Family and Property (Tradição, Família e Propriedade, TFP). His institute, however, does not hold the legal right to use the acronym TFP. 26 ╇ Available at http://uolpolitica.blog.uol.com.br/arch2010-10-03_2010-10-09.html 22 23

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 263 Riding the wave of conservative and persecutory religious rumors, Serra’s campaign spread apocryphal accusations against the Lula administration, the PT candidate and the Workers’ Party, turned moral and religious issues into electoral and political weapons, and nourished an inquisitional electoral atmosphere. On October 28, Serra’s campaign received indirect support from Pope Benedict XVI. In a meeting with bishops from the North of Brazil, the Pope declared it was a duty of Brazilian bishops to issue moral judgment over political questions, in order to defend the right of life since conception.27 The Pope thus underwrote the conservative Catholic clergy’s political stance as well as its activism in electoral disputes, while legitimating the presence of religious and moral debates in presidential campaigns. Taking advantage of the occasion, Serra’s last free radio time explored the Pope’s discourse against abortion. Even before the Pope addressed the public, on October 21 CNBB’s President D. Geraldo Lyrio Rocha argued that abortion should indeed be an issue in the presidential election. He rebuffed the accusation that the Catholic Church was meddling in a sphere outside of its jurisdiction, or trying to “impose its dogmas” on the state, by claiming that “a secular state is not synonymous with an atheist or anti-religious state”.28 In Brazil, the Catholic Church was never restricted to the private sphere. But the 2010 elections witnessed an almost unprecedented influence of the Church’s conservative wing in national politics. The conservative wing enjoyed longstanding prevalence in Catholic political activism, for instance during the 1930’s and incidentally in the 1970’s, when it fought fiercely against the Law which instituted divorce in Brazil. In 2010, the balance shifted again. This was largely due to changes in the high Catholic clergy during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The fact of the matter is that the conservative wing currently prevailing in Brazilian Catholicism, together with Evangelical – especially Pentecostal – leaders and politicians, set the tone of the presidential campaigns and caused the two chief presidential candidates to abandon their secular perspectives on public health and the so-called reproductive rights regarding abortion. They were thus able to pose significant obstacles to the secularization of the debate on the decriminalization of abortion, criminalization of homophobia, and the rational and humanitarian treatment of women having abortions. 27 28

╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 29, 2010. ╇ Folha de S. Paulo, October 22, 2010.

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A Datafolha survey carried out on October 29 and 30 showed that the Pentecostals’ intention to vote for Dilma remained below that of the general electorate; but the campaign was able to redress her decline in this religious segment since the end of the first round. Mobilization of the Evangelical and Catholic “elite squad” was, therefore, effective in shielding her candidacy against religious rumors and calumny, thus staunching and reverting her fall during the run-off. Dilma won the final ballot with 56.05% of valid votes, while Serra ended with 43.95%. Conclusion Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, hitherto hegemonic Catholicism has been losing ground in Brazil. On the other hand, Pentecostals and those without religion have advanced, religious pluralism has been consolidated, a competitive religious market has taken shape, and national identity has been dissociated from Catholicism. Political leaders are increasingly forced to take into account such religious pluralism, and to consider the interests and demands of other religious groups, above all of Evangelicals’. The central position occupied today by Pentecostalism in the Brazilian religious landscape, and its successful and disciplined performance in party politics, have made of it an active player in the national political game. Their ecclesial leaders and parliamentary representatives have multiplied and deepened their relations with governmental bodies and state officials to such an extent that today it is impossible to analyze and understand Brazilian democracy without taking into account the participation of Evangelicals in elections, party politics, labor unions, and other civil associations. Pentecostal political activism does not necessarily mean a “Â� regression” of republican democracy. Up to a point, it seems to encourage democratic values and practices (Dodson, 1997:25–26) by incorporating into the political game social subjects that would otherwise be kept at a distance from it. This might result in political learning and in reinforcement of democracy, rather than threatening or disqualifying it. It is a fact however that the Evangelicals’ homophobia, political opposition to the rights of minority groups such as homosexuals, and demonization of Afro-Brazilian cults do diverge from basic citizenship values and from the spirit of contemporary democracy. The main focus of this study was to show the intensification of the religious occupation of the public sphere in the relations between religion and politics in Brazil. This was shown to have resulted, on the

the instrumentalization of religion and politics in brazil 265 one hand, from the pluralization of the religious field and intensification of religious competition between Evangelicals and Catholics and, on the other, from the political instrumentalization of religion – in special the Pentecostal – furthered by parties, political candidates, and government officials. Catholic and Evangelicals have indeed sought to enhance their political capital through several means, in order to face competition, collect benefits from public powers, and bolster their influence in the public sphere. Accordingly, they will go the extra mile to impose their religious and moral demands on candidates to the Parliament and to the Executive, as in the 2010 presidential elections. Parties and candidates to elective offices have reciprocally demanded and negotiated with Pentecostal leaderships the votes of their religious flock. Such votes are sometimes earmarked exclusively for the official candidates of certain religious denominations – a strategy which allows them to secure greater fidelity from their parliamentary representatives and strengthen their pressure and tutelage over them. It is also common for those in power to demand political support for their administrations in exchange for granting broadcasting rights to radio and television stations and, more frequently, funds for religious groups carrying out their welfare works, as well as other privileges; they even propagandize this as a way of maintaining and expanding their religious allies. Finally, it should be stressed that in Brazil secularism is not a pivotal republican dimension – as is the case, for instance, in France. Neither is the Brazilian society as secularized as its French counterpart; it has never been taken over by radical anti-clericalism. Brazil’s situation is closer to that of Portugal, Spain and Italy, Catholic countries in Southern Europe where a “quasi-secularism” prevails – to use a term by historian Fernando Catroga (2006). Also in these countries, secularization is less salient than in France. Furthermore, as in the Southern European Catholic countries, the Catholic Church in Brazil, besides being hegemonic, enjoys significant temporal power – even though, in contrast to its European counterparts, it has never obtained it from dictators by means of concordats. With a competitive religious market, Brazil also stands in contrast with these European countries in terms of the intensification of inter-religious disputes between Catholics and Pentecostals unfolding in the public sphere, especially in the political arena and the electronic media. Thus, separation between Church and state, established at the end of the nineteenth century in a remotely secularized socio-cultural context, albeit it is a beacon for political action by religious and laic groups in certain controversies, does not show enough force to secularize neither society, nor party politics.

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ricardo mariano and ari pedro oro References

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THE REINVENTION OF CUBAN SANTERÍA AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY Elena Zapponi Che Guevara and the Santeros: The Resistant Spirit of an Army of Light « Somos un ejercito de luz y nada prevalecerá contra nosotros ». This sentence by José Martí (1853–1895), the poet and leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, promoter of Cuban independence from Spanish and North American rule and very well known among Cuban and foreign people,1 strongly expresses the mystical afflatus and spirit of resistance elaborated on by Cuban culture. This historic national character, which radiated into society since the fight for independence that led to the constitution of the Republic, is still alive and concrete in contemporary Cuba. As Cuban semantics reveals, everyday life is conceived as a « lucha » in which people have to “resolve” concrete matters Â�fundamentally linked to the precarious economic situation. But this idea of lucha marking the individual and collective horizon of everyday Cuban life now expresses both a tired, protesting sense of hardship and a daily militant commitment which reflects an adherence to the ideology of revolution, as the different opinions of revolucionarios and antirevolucionarios show. A walk through contemporary Havana from Vedado, the residential quarter frequented by tourists, to the magnificent Habana Vieja and passing trough the beautiful and decadent Habana Centro allows not just the anthropologist but every attentive observer to notice the constant representation of Cuba’s revolutionary ideals and national revolutionary construction. Apart from the monumental architecture which in Havana assumes a particular importance with a pedagogical logic of 1 ╇ “We are an army of light. There is no surprise or discourse that can check our march to victory”. The sentence appeared in August 1983 in The New York Times, in a document reproducing a call to arms for the freeing of Cuba from the Spaniards made by José Martí some days before in San Antonio, Texas. Cf. « For the freedom of Cuba », The New York Times, August 18, 1893. The document circulated among Cuban sympathizers in Mexico, the United States and Cuba. José Martí distributed it at the end of July among the different presidents of the clubs comprising the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The Spanish version is reported in José Martí 1963–1975: 359.

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revolutionary education expressed by stone or iron, statues and icons2, a less formal urban language, the murales, attract the attention. In the Vedado, a huge and impressive poster hung on the side of the famous Hotel Habana Libre represents the profiles of three revolutionary heroes: Ernesto Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Julio Antonio Mella and reports the slogan: « Todo por la revolución ». Going downtown along the Malecón and entering the Habana Centro neighborhood, the view is conquered by other murales, warning: « Fieles a nuestra historia » (« Faithful to our own history »), « Con la guardia en alto » (« Stay on high guard »), « Seguimos el combate » (« We must struggle on »). These sentences painted on city walls in bright colors and accompanied by the Cuban flag do not correspond to the kind of anti-Â�institutional and spontaneous graffiti art diffused in New York, Los Angeles Paris, Berlin or Mexico City. These murales are most often signed by the Cdr, the committees for the revolution. This informal and cool style was adopted by the institution and these messages accompany the everyday life; part of the urban landscape, they transmit an official message and contribute to the political construction of Cuban revolutionary identity, history and memory. Do Cubans believe nowadays in the message these murales advertise? Is the message perceived as alive and not as residual ideals of past decades, as many North American and European antirevolucionarios would affirm? Rather than answering by a sharp yes or no to this question, which would open a long investigation of the revolucionarios and dissidents’ points of view, I will try to draw an itinerary through contemporary Cuban culture, focusing not just on political beliefs but on the more general Cuban people’s beliefs. Considering the historical mixture of races that characterize Cuban culture, the religious perspective seems to be an important access point to the national identity. Moreover, the recent religious revival in a state which fiercely claims its laical basis suggests the need to consider the demand people address to the spiritual sphere and to reflect on the connection between political and religious faith in the isla de la revolución. To introduce my analysis, which will focus on the territory of Havana, I will also consider some details of the urban landscape.

╇ On the collective construction of memory and urban space see Halbwachs 2002: 197–201. 2

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A constant iconographic representation spread into the city and all over the island gives the sensible impression that Ernesto Guevara, El Che, is concretely alive. His image, beloved and respected by Cubans, watches over the crossroads, observes the city from the top of the buildings, accompanies from an old cracked wall people diligently queuing for the bus. Che Guevara, stands in Cuba as the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus or icons of saints in the « edicole », gently watching the street corners of central Rome. Like the Roman Counter-Reformation CatholÂ� icism, the revolution needed to mark its territory by a genius loci, a good companion, a helpful friend (Brown 1983), reminding the collectivity both of their faith and identity. But the observation of everyday life in Havana shows another iconographic leitmotif, particularly present also due to commercialization and folklorisation of national culture in the capital city. This consists in signs referencing Afro-Cuban religions and especially the very diffused Santería. In fact, one can identify in the same spatial perimeter the presence of El Che represented by the murales and Cubans, or sometimes foreigners, completely dressed in white, from the head to the socks. These are the so-called iyawós, people having gone through the initiation in Santería called the « coronation » or asiento ritual. Iyawós are newborn in religion and, according to the infant ritual state they acquire, must observe different taboos and religious rules such as being dressed in white for one year – the Year of the White – following initiation. A willing eye can recognize a large number of initiated in Havana where the white silhouette of women, men and also little children recur. The image I observed of Che Guevara overlapped by the white figures of new born santeros well expresses the analytical purpose of this article: the interaction of two different logics, the political and the religious, each expressing a worldly transcendence sense3. The next pages analyze the articulation in everyday life of these two logics, with special attention to the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santería or Regla Ocha. This is generally described as the result of a process of transculturation between the Yoruba slaves’ original religion and the Spanish evangelizers’ baroque Catholicism and is based on the Â�adoration and incorporation of sacred entities corresponding to a whole of forces or principles, called orichas or the Spanish santos. Usually manifesting themselves through possession during dance or divinatory rituals, 3 ╇ The sense of this expression, referring both to the mystical aspect of Cuban communism and to the Santería worldly relief system will be clarified in the next paragraphs.

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orichas represent, Â� under anthropomorphic forms, control of a particular domain within the cosmos, nature, human experience and society. Santería, as other Afro-American religions in continuity with both African practices and the baroque Catholicism, is a religion of feasts and joy, expressed by the bodies, the minds, the movements and the action of devotees dancing and acting their beliefs (Motta 2009: 401– 402). Dance, trance and sacrifice spring from this logic and represent an overflow of identity, saturating the cognitive and affective faculties of devotees (Motta 2009: 400–401). Keeping charge of the believer “from the cradle to the thumb”4, Santería represents today in Cuba a system of rules for a better life, still expressing the values of resistance to social discriminations and cultural conformism implicated in its original syncretic form, as the terms “fight (luchar), win, develop oneself ” currently utilized in the contemporary religious semantic reveal (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 85). In the Havana landscape, both the Che Guevara icons and the white Santería devotee’s profile seem to express, through two different but often melting belief orientations, the political and the religious, the resistant spirit of an army of light. The Plaza5 is Crowded: True Santeros, Charlatans and Functionaries In Havana nowadays it is quite easy to get in touch with a santero/a, the priest or devotee of the oricha, or with a babalao, known as the “father of the secret”, who is a male initiated member of the order of diviners in the Ifá system, the highest hierarchical position in Cuban Santería. These ritual figures can be met entering some now institutional places of transmission and diffusion of Santería, such as the Yoruba Cultural Association, La Casa de Africa or the Conjunto Folklorico6, but also walking through the city and asking around it is not unlikely to get in ╇ This sort of motto recurrs in Cuba. ╇ The marketplace where devotees buy ritual ingredients in Havana or the mat under a throne upon which fruits and sweets are offered to the orichas. 6 ╇ This artistic company, formed by initiated to Santería was born in 1962. In its head office in the quarter of Vedado it is possible to follow a large variety of courses and seminaries concerning Afro-Cuban culture, especially on dance and music. This ensemble has moreover become a sort of real institution in Havana. The spectacles of the Conjunto Folklorico in the Mella theatre are very appreciated by a public much larger than devotees and black people, and the weekly Saturday afternoon street representation called the Sábado de la rumba, a sort of pedagogical representation of orichas dances, have become a notorius beloved public show (Argyriadis 2006: 58–68). 4 5

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touch with Santería devotees and priests. This recent diffusion and visibility of Santería, generically called in Havana la religión (Argyriadis 2000), is criticized by many santeros/as and babalaos protesting the recent commercialization of Santería, its folklorisation, and the concurrence of false ministers described both as charlatans and merchants or functionaries of the government too much engaged in politics (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 88–95). The first critic, very frequent, especially warns not to be confidant in any kind of santero/a and babalao, expressing a protest against a loss of the “true sense of the religion”. The increasing occurrence becomes a subject of discussion between priests and devotees belonging to the same religious family, and the debate is easily opened when an outsider, especially an anthropologist willing to know about the religion, is introduced to the context of Santería. In this milieu in Havana I constantly heard this kind of discourse during ritual ceremonies and encounters such as a cumpleaños de santo7, a tambor,8 or a thanks-giving party dedicated to an oricha, but the claim also comes out in intimate conversation with practitioners. Mentioning the argument over the true, pure and authentic religion is not un-useful to illustrate the evolution of Santería, and this debate will  be the leading undercurrent of this analysis. First, however, it seems necessary to look at the history and social participation of this religion. The Transculturation Process in Santería and its Evolution through the Colonial and Neocolonial Periods To begin, it should be noted that criticisms about the loss of tradition are linked to the growing diffusion of Santería. This belief system, often defined in the anthropological debate as a transculturation process (Ortiz 1991) between the baroque, Spanish Catholic cult of saint and the Yoruba slaves’ ancestor cult, although today very diffused on the island, was however strongly discriminated during the colonial and republican neocolonial periods and was often considered as brujeria9, the sorcery knowledge of an inferior social class, the slaves’ own.

╇ Anniversary of the initiation of santeros or babalaos. ╇An oricha festival of drumming, dancing and possession through ritual trance. 9 ╇ On this point and on the rehabilitation of Santería as a religion, see the work of Rómulo Lachatañeré, Fernando Ortiz’s pupil (Lachatañeré 2007). 7 8

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Although Catholicism, the official religion allied with the Spanish crown, tried to gain the religious monopoly, the Cuban religious field since this period assumed a plural trait that would become specific to Cuba in the more general Latin America evangelization process. This was mostly due to the scarce success of the evangelizers’ mission and to the kind of Catholicism that evangelizers brought to the island (Marconi 1996: 38–44; Calzadilla and Ciattini 2002: 42, 45–46). This was already itself an hybrid product in which Arab and Jewish influences as well as medieval superstitions blended. A Catholicism in which the cult of saint and the popular-magical aspect was very lively, evidently different from the Catholic Reform trend, was the one with which the black slaves had to deal10 while trying to maintain their own religious beliefs. During the baroque period, as Stevens Arroyo points out: the Africans identified on the basis of their own beliefs which of the saints and practices of the Catholic Church best expressed their anomalous existence as brothers in faith but simultaneously their property in the socio-economic system. (Stevens-Arroyo 2002: 46)

This transculturation process gave origins to the cult of orichas or santos, the deities venerated in Santería. Each deity having both an African and a Catholic avatar, a synthesized religious system representing the merging of two beliefs was born11. However when the market for sugar and new methods of production appeared at the half-way point of 18th century, the slaves’ religious autonomy took on a different meaning: the syncretism that had allowed a commonality of belief was now conceived by the dominant class, according to the Enlightenment rationalism, as a confused mixing of religion and a possible source of danger to the socio-economic order (Ortiz 2007). This historical change away from the baroque syncretism that had knit together disparate classes and social groups (StevensArroyo 2002) expressed the social circumstances of slavery in the 18th century and the division between white and black groups.

10 ╇ In Cuba the evangelization process was mostly directed to slaves, native society having been virtualy eliminated, culturally if not biologically, unlike in Meso-America and the Andes where the native societies have survived. 11 ╇ This process and its hermeneutics enlightens a debate today in Cuba, especially linked to a new ethnicization of Santería expressing a tendancy to the disyncretization of this religion.

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In that context, syncretism became an othering term12 and the transculÂ�turation process revealed itself as an on-going process explaining contradictions in society. Discrimination towards Afro-Cuban religions (Santería, Palo-Monte, Abakuá societies) continued through the neocolonial republican period (1902–1959), but at that time and beyond white people’s interest began to spread even though Santería’s practitioners were still mostly black descendants of slave families. This change in participation in Santería, once the blacks’ religion, is described in the Biography of a runaway slave by Miguel Barnet (Barnet 1998), which reports the life story of Esteban Montejo, a 103-year-old Cuban man of African descent who had lived in captivity as a slave, escaped and lived in the mountains and fought as a soldier in the Cuban War for Independence: For a black the most important thing was the goodfather or the goodmother, because they initiated them to the cult. The feasts in the casas de santo were beautiful. Only the blacks went in; the Spanish didn’t like it. But over the years things changed. Nowadays you also see white babalaos with red cheeks. Before it was different because the Santería is an African religion. Even the Spanish civil guards not meddled. They passed and asked “What’s going on?” And the blacks answered “We are celebrating saint John” They said saint John but it was Oggún. Oggún is the deity of war13.

During the neo-colonial period the condition of the general Cuban religious landscape changed: because of the influence of North American culture, new religious expressions such as Protestantism, Pentecostalism and Spiritism were introduced in Cuba, and the Catholic effort to constitute itself as the institutional religion was in vain. Moreover, the antidogmatic and anticlerical spirit developed during the anticolonial Spanish War was spreading in collective sensibility and contributed to the scarce legitimacy of Catholic religious hegemony in Cuban society. The primary attribute of the Cuban religious landscape is thus once again its diversity. The contemporary interpenetration between different expressions such as pragmatic Catholicism, Santería, Spiritism and Palo-Monte must not be interpreted as a recent novelty but as a traditional feature of Cuban culture, according to which believers freely move between one religious expression and another.

12 ╇ For an analysis of the history of this concept and its changing positive and negative connotations see Stewart and Shaw 1994. 13 ╇ Translated by the author.

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The Mambisas Constitutions of the Republic in Arms and the Political Value of the Struggle for the Freedom of Religion As mentioned, religion’s instrumental function in colonial interests produced an anticlericalism that became a specific trait of Cuban society evident in the national think and in the practice of cubanidad. Since the origins of the nation, the history of ideas in Cuba was characterized by a free, anticlerical and laical thought. This critical ideology towards a dominant religion is expressed by legislation and the different constitutions as well by the intellectual production and nationalist thought, such as by José Martí in 19th century, which marked the conscience of the following generation. This long tradition favored the radical critic of the political role assumed in Cuba by the Catholic Church and acceptance of religious plurality. According to José Martí, a laical thinker although not an atheist, “men invent gods according to their image” and the Catholic Church “is the best ally of the powerful” (Calzadilla 2009: 30). Fernando Ortiz, one of the representatives of the 1930s generation with Julio Antonio Mella, analyzing the clergy’s behavior during conquest and colonization, describes this hierarchy as intransigent, ignorant, poor spirited and egotistical (Ortiz, 2007). Freedom of religion in Cuba was first established by republican constitutions such as the one approved at Guaimaro, Camaguey in the middle of the Independence War. The constitution ratified at Yaya (also in the region of Camaguey) the 29 November 1897 affirmed the law’s protection of religious opinions and of personal cult exercise for both Cubans and foreigners. This mambisas14 constitution of the Republic in arms, established against the Patronato Regio and the hegemony of Catholicism, inaugurated a new season, marked by the explicit claim for religious pluralism.  However the United States’ influence during the Independence War and the Neocolonial Republic frustrated these ideals: while the Catholic  Church still proposed itself as the hegemonic religion, Protestant churches, recently penetrated in Cuba under North American influence, contributed to promote the United States’ presence in the island. In that context, the 1901 first Republican Constitution was then less revolutionary in the matter of religious freedom than the ones enacted 14

╇ Mambís was the name given to Cuban independents.

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during the Independence War. In this 1901 constitution, in which the “favor of God” was invoked, it was in fact established by article 26, line 4: Everybody is free to profess his choice’s religion and cult without any other limitation than the respect of the Christian moral and of the public order.

And further it reads: Church will be separated from the State, this could not subvention any cult, in any case (Calzadilla 2009: 169).

This latest affirmation, producing dissatisfaction in the Catholic milieu, was remarkable: although Cuban independence was late in the context of Latin America, the constitution established the separation between Church and State15 before many others countries of the continent. However despite the constitutional proclamation of religious Â�freedom, Afro-Cuban religions were still discriminated against and conceived by most of the hegemonic class as the cause of criminality in Cuba. Fernando Ortiz witnesses this social perception in the reporting in Los Negros Brujos of some chosen press news about sorcery corresponding to different months of the years between 1902 and 1905 and different regions of Cuba (Ortiz 2007: 167–199). The fact mainly reported in this news is the denunciation of single persons accused or suspected of practicing sorcery and healing: 1902, Mayo, Habana At 69 San Joaquín street, yesterday evening the moreno Onofre C. C., born in Pinar del Rio, a cook, was arrested because of his activity as a healer using herbs and of the many objects used by sorcerers which were found in his home. This Onofre assumed that he was a healer following the custom of his ancestors which were Lucumí, Gangá and Arará. (Ortiz 2007:169)16

15 ╇ After a long struggle with the Catholic Church, the strong liberal and massonic Uruguay’s tradition obtained State-Church separation with the 1917 Constitution. On the privatization of religion in Uruguay see Caetano and Geymonat 1997. Also in Mexico, where a first laical and liberal constitution was promulgated in 1857, a hard contention for the control of the social space went on between Church and State. The Mexican constitution of 1917, (same year as Uruguay), confirms the laicality of the State and the effort of national militant Jacobinism to eradicate Catholic religious fanaticism and superstition. See Blancarte 2001: 81–94. 16 ╇ Translated by the author.

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The news at the time also constantly referred to the incursion of policy in houses where there were ongoing female and male mixed-sex reunions, described by the press as acts of brujeria happening before improvised altars enriched by ritual offerings such as white and black stones, shells, coconuts, cocks, ducks, lamb meat, corn, herbs, mirrors, locks. This changing list of objects, always present in the press articles, is mentioned to witness the slaves’ primitiveness, the immorality of their rituals and the dangerousness of their brujeria, as this 1905 article from Santiago de Cuba referring to Afro-Cuban secret Abakuás societies witnesses: Santiago de Cuba The Cubano Libre of the mentioned city, publishes: The rumors circulating in town about the presence of many ñáñigos among the population is getting every day more alarming. According to our sources, in the night between Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (20th March 1905), one of these ñáñigos, with the complicity of darkness, tried to kidnap a child, the daughter of a well-known man and, despite the lack of details, the news is certain that a child disappeared in a San Antonio street. (Ortiz 2007: 193)17

The second republican constitution, enacted in 1940, invoking as the first one « el favor de Dios », around which much controversy arose, again established religious freedom but nevertheless imposed respect of Christian morals on non-Christians and non-believers. But an innovation was then introduced: the unique validity of laical weddings and the laicality of official education. However, this juridical confirÂ� mation of the previous constitutional principles did not change the concrete attitude and collective stereotyped opinions on Afro-Cuban religions. The Revolutionary Turn The revolution marked a new turn in the relation between State and Religion as well as in the collective conscience in relation to the transcendent. During the first years of the revolutionary stage, a difficult confrontation occurred between the new State and the Christian churches. The revolutionary government criticized especially the different churches 17

╇ Translated by the author.

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for their elitism, their connections with foreign interests and the foreign character of the clergy operating in Cuba as well as the lack of openness of both Catholic and the Protestant churches. Meanwhile, Afro-Cuban religions and Spiritism became the object of many studies aiming to reevaluate the past religious associations of the slaves (the cabildos) as symbols of resistance towards colonialist Catholicism and Yankee Protestantism. These works, in line with the Cuban Fernando Ortiz’s perspective, stressed Cubanity as the result of a transculturation process in which the African aesthetic and religious expressions were particularly important (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 83). During the Cold War climate of the 1960s and 1970s, the revolutionary struggle against religious obscurantism, the departure of a consistent number of priests and pastors, and the concrete perspectives opened by the revolution to popular demand determined a drop in supernatural recourse and in the presence of religion in society. The Socialist Constitution of 1976, approved by a referendum of 98 percent of Cuba’s population, eliminated the mention of an official Christian moral, affirmed the right to religious freedom and practice, and for the first time admitted the right not to believe. The juridical guarantee of this right affirmed a Cuban specificity which would have marked the following decades (Calzadilla 2009), but during the 1980s a tendency to the dialogue between castrismo and the Catholic Church appeared. In this period, Revolutionary Theology, the national version of the Latino-American theology of liberation, issued both from Catholic and Protestant churches, including the Pentecostals18, represented a new anti-liberal and anti-capitalistic front of struggle that claimed new options for the poor in accordance with the socialist perspective. In 1985, the book Fidel y la religión, in which the leader maximo entertains himself in conversation with Frei Betto, one of the founders of the Theology of Liberation, was a bestseller in Cuba. Believers expecting Fidel’s personal declarations were deceived. In any case, the affirmation that religion could be considered as “people’s opium” only when it was

18 ╇ After a strong opposition during the fisrt revolutionary stage, the Protestant and Pentecostal churches differenciated their positions and many of them, during the 1970s, approached the social transformation promoted by the revolution, concretly collaborating with it by voluntary work or international cooperation. See Juana Berges Curbelo and René Cardenas Medina 1993; Juana Berges, René Cardenas Medina, E. Carillo Garcia 1994: 273–291.

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utilized by men to exploit other men (Castro, 1985: 333) introduced a different nuance into castroism’s relation to religion in Cuba. At the same time the Church renewed its position toward Cuban socialism by recognizing the social justice revolutionary value as descending from the Catholic value of charity, as stated in 1986 on the occasion of the National Ecclesiastic Cuban Encounter (Calzadilla 2009: 172–175). Some years later, in 1991, the IV Congress of the Communist Cuban Party introduced a new institutional position towards religion. At that moment, in fact, the Party admitted believers into its ranks: it was then officially possible to be a creyente revolucionario. This official opening, based on the government’s diplomatic goal to approach Christian movements in the context of the fall of the USSR (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 85), allowed the population and many revolucionarios to freely express their beliefs (Calzadilla and Ciattini 2002). In 1992, a constitutional reform specified the secular but not atheistic character of the State19 and the right to religious freedom and introduced a new argument, considered unnecessary and then absent in the 1976 constitutional text: the legal prohibition of discrimination for religious beliefs. According to Cuban sociologist Jorge Ramirez Calzadilla, this institutional attitude and the State egalitarian laical attitude towards religions would favor the social diffusion of Afro-Cuban beliefs and their public affirmation. According to this author, Afro-Cuban religions benefited from the socialist process and its social transformations, especially because of two factors: on the one hand, the progress of the standard of living for lower classes and the instauration of new conditions to eliminate social and racial discriminations; on the other hand, the new institutional policy of the promotion of African roots through folkloric culture and public events (Calzadilla and Ciattini 2002: 92–94, 179). Nonetheless, it is interesting to compare Jorge Ramirez Calzadilla’s point of view with the one expressed by Kali Argyriadis and Stefania Capone in a recent study on Cubania, Santería and religious transnationalisation which focuses, among others, on the relationship between castroism and religion. 19 ╇ The Constitution of 1976 established that the socialist State based its public education according to the scientific materialist conception. For further details see Calzadilla 2009.

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While Calzadilla, from within his own culture, underlines a revolutionary process of liberalization toward religions and especially the benefits that Afro-Cuban religions earned from the socialist process and its struggle for justice, Kali Argyriadis and Stefania Capone point out the sharp contrast between the castroist revolutionary ideology of the new man and the Santería devotees’ logic of behavior. In particular, Argyriadis and Capone, considering the anti-dogmatic organization of Santería and the constitutional creativity characterizing this orally transmitted tradition, allowing both the individual or the religious family to introduce invention and accommodations, underline the contrast between the Party’s militant logic and the individualistic Santería devotee’s logic, focused on the development of personal potential: La religion, loin d’être un opium du peuple (les religieux n’obéissent que à eux-mêmes) induit un comportement social en inadéquation avec la notion « d’homme nouveau » glorifiée par le Parti (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 85).

On the contrary, the militant’s duties imply a sacrificial life: au détriment de son épanouissement personnel et même de sa vie familiale. Il y a dix ans, il était encore tenu, par exemple, de rompre toute relation avec ses parents exilés. Un militant doit être un travailleur exemplaire et se proposer systématiquement pour le travail volontaire. Il doit s’affirmer comme patriote: faire les patrouilles du Comité de défense de la révolution de son quartier, donner son sang régulièrement, accepter de partir seul à l’étranger pour accomplir diverses tâches mises en œuvre par le gouvernement révolutionnaire, comme les missions diplomatiques, humanitaires ou militaires: “Mourir pour la Patrie, c’est vivre” scande l’hymne national. (Argyriadis and Capone 2004: 85).

However besides these contrasts, a massive diffusion of religion spread during the revolution and many revolucionarios had to arrange the different aspects of a “double morality”20 based both on political and religious beliefs. The beginning of the so called “Special Period in Time of Peace” in 1991, an economic depression that resulted from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Comecon and from the hardening of the United States’ embargo contributed to the religious revival. In a context 20 ╇ According the IV Congress of the Communist Party, the militant should fight the bourgeois ideology, the petit-bourgeois individualism, the lack of faith in socialism, the conservative tendencies as well as opportunism, simulation and double morality. (Cuarto Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba 1992: 79–80).

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of growing precariousness, religious demand increased (Calzadilla and Ciattini 2002), orienting on the different traditional expressions populating the plural Cuban religious landscape and participation in AfroCuban religions, especially Santería. Often identified as Candomblé and Voodoo, as a “religion of the immediate”, very much inner-worldly, oriented toward the relief of worldly afflictions and merging with health and wholesomeness, this form of belief showed a growing consent. According to Roberto Motta, for people making up the large informal sector of the economy, devotion to such Afro-American religions is “a means of manipulating disorder” (Motta 2009: 400). Orichas are turned to practical, everyday life and problems such as health, employment, money, love. Santería not as a rationalized program of asceticism and contrary to those western religions in which sacrifice is transposed to the “intimate sphere of the control of the believer’s behavior and of the repression of his spontaneity” (Motta 2009: 402) seems to respond to a concrete social demand. Santería as an Expression of a New Foundation of the National Identity While Calzadilla’s explanation of the religious revival in Cuba centers mostly on the need, derived from social precarity, to search for a transcendent supernatural dimension (Cazadilla and Ciattini 2002), Roberto Motta, who also insists on Santería’s short-term relief religious character (Motta 2009), stresses the identity seeking process as the basis for the renewal of the symbolic and religious markets. Considering the AfroAmerican religions’ wide expansions in some big cities of the United States and Canada (especially Cuban Santería and Haitian Voodoo) or in South America (the spread of Candomblé not only in Brazil but also in Argentina and Uruguay), Motta points out the paradox of the deethnicization of ethnicity: While ethnicity is asserted at one level, it seems to be simultaneously denied at another. Whereas faithfulness to “authentic” African origins (largely as reinterpreted by social scientists and popularized thorough a copious literature produced by babalorixas and journalists) is proclaimed on one hand, new converts are recruited without distinction  regarding color, ethnicity, or national origin, on the other. (Motta 2009: 406).

This recuperation of Africanness separated from Blackness and conceived as “a source of personal identification and of communal life and pride” (Motta 2009: 407) transnationally advancing in Afro-American

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religions has also gained territory in Cuban society. This identitophagy (Motta 2009: 407), a sort of absorption and mix of identities process that interprets ethnicity as authenticity, is radiated and diffused in Cuba on the tracks of a particular history, marked since the Independence period by the apology of national multicultural traits. According to this Cuban traditional sensibility, the nation, as José Marti stated, is made up of a mixture of races, and being Cuban is more than being White, Black or Mulatto. Argyriadis and Capone’s analysis of the revaluation of Yoruba tradition, once again presenting a different point of view from that of CalzaÂ� dilla, a militant intellectual living in Cuba, insists on the political stakes of Santería’s renewal. The contextualization of the production of myths, institutions and religious rules in Havana enlightens the relationship between religious practice and the national identity, the cubanidad. On the one hand, Santería devotees tend to produce and recognize in the political discourse and in Castro’s action signs adequate to the religious moral and notion of persona through a specific hermeneutic; on the other, Castro’s government employs references to Africa and to Santería, thus evaluated as a most noble and pure Yoruba tradition and participating in the Cuban national building process. This political move, which separates Santería’s religious and cultural components, revaluated the first as a cultural national patrimony. The history and memory of this slaves’ religion thus become a repertory of struggle for freedom and anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist resistance as well as a knowledge to be studied and transmitted because of the richness of its musical, aesthetic and artistic aspects. In this perspective, Santería is a Cuban authentic ancient tradition and, as the visitors’ guide of the Yoruba Association21 claims “Cuba is the cradle of the ancient African Yoruba knowledge attracting people to be initiated from all over the world, including Brazil and the same Africa”. Santería, and especially its claim of authentic Havana and Matanzas tradition, furthermore serves as a new foundation of Cuban identity because of the antagonistic networks of the orichas religion increasingly spreading in Miami and the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia. This religious system and the readjustment of its religious memory in response to its transnationalization, appears then as a complex and

21 ╇ It is useful to remember that the Yoruba Association, standing in Centro Havana in front of the Capitolium, is officially approved and promoted.

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fertile laboratory in which to study Cuba’s socio-cultural and political transformations. Changó, Ochún and Yemayá between the Cubans’ Homes and the Habana Libre Hotel In November 2010, thanks to the meeting with José, a 56 years old white babalao married to a mulatto santera residing in Habana Centro and earning his living on religion, I was introduced to a Sunday ceremony in the embassies neighborhood of Miramar. A young black lady of 25, belonging to a santeros family, had the flat lent to give a tambor in honor of Elegguá, the oricha syncretized with the Spanish infant of Atocha22. This ceremony, lasting about eight hours, started at three in the Â�afternoon in a living room populated just by the young lady’s close family – her mother and grandmother – and her close religious family (her godÂ� father and godmother and their relatives) and ended at night with a very crowded room. The batá tambor’s players, three young  black babalaos and a white dancer enacting Elegguá were contracted. ThroughÂ� out the ceremony everybody kept dancing, singing and praying the liturgical Yoruba formulas. In the middle of the afternoon, being the tambor consecrated to the infant oricha Elegguá, presents were offered to the many children participating in the feast together with their parents and grandparents. More than once, the adults attracted children’s attention on a candies shower game raising great enthusiasm. In the late afternoon, the bailarino started to dance and after falling in trance he came back dressed in Elegguá’s shining black and red dresses, a cigar in his mouth and some pesos cubanos rolled on his ears. Welcomed with great enthusiasm, he started passing through the crowd, embracing some people to perform a ritual purification (limpieza) on them by rubbing his hands on their bodies or entertaining himself with some others, giving advice about their present and future on the basis of personal characteristics and their own behavior. Little by little after this talk, proffered by an affected actorial proxemics helped by rum, the money held on his ear or under his hat was distributed. In the meantime, people knelt or lay front of Elegguá’s altar, positioned in the left corner of the living room, while on the right drums 22 ╇ Elegguá, deity owner of the crossroads, which opens and closes the roads or way in life, is also syncretized with saint Anthony of Padua.

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constantly played, and people answered in chorus to one musician who had assumed the ritual singer role. Because of the length of the tambor, two batá’s players were substituted by two other young men to keep the ceremony rhythm high. The ceremony, envolving all the spectators’ senses, was completed by the movement of male and female bodies falling into trance (about nine persons in two hours), one of the last being the young lady dedicating the tambor to Elegguá. The festivities concluded with a criollo collective dinner, heartening the exhausted participants. This ceremony had two characteristics that made it a moment of strong social cohesion, remembering the cabildo’s tradition: often three family generations were present, and the event was ethnically connoted by the exclusive presence of Black people, with the exception of the dancer and myself. But Santería practice in Havana corresponds to a plurality of social interpretations and meanings that express themselves Â�differently. SanterÂ�os reunions and networks do not always imply familial or ethnic ties and santeros ritual families can also link and meet on the basis of other common traits, such as a shared acceptance of homosexual behavior. Such was the character distinguishing a reunion in the neighborhood of Nuevo Vedado in a 60-year-old santera’s flat, once an orichas’s dances interpreter, married with a non-believing Italian architect who came to live in Cuba to participate, as he stressed, in what he felt at the time was a “young revolution” going on. The people present were five homosexual men, three of them lawyers, one actor, one working in the movies milieu and three women. The lady of the house, as I said, was once a dancer and actress. A 62-year-old woman lawyer was also from Nuevo Vedado, and the third woman was an Havana Museum functionary. These two women, especially the latter, referred to themselves as santeras as well as spiritists. My participation in this party in honor of Ochún showed a configuration often mentioned in analytical works on Santería and, in general, on Afro-American religions (Bastide 1958; Motta 2009): the importance of the interaction between the anthropologist and the Santería hierarchy in the reinvention and transmission of this belief systems’ memory (Brown 2003). My presence, about which the eight santeros present were previously informed, was ironically welcomed by the lady of the house, by saying: “Welcome to this reunion of sorcerers and santeros!”. What followed was a long conversation, sometimes reaching high pitches, on the evolution of Santería, its commercialization and devaluation because of the many charlatans in town presenting themselves as

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santeros or babalaos despite not belonging to any tradition, neither having respected the initiation rite stages and, most of all, cheating people. Especially the 62-year-old female lawyer, both spiritist and santera, was constantly underlining: “Here we are all santeros, but we are all lawyer or intellectuals. We don’t live on religion, this is not our profession”. This was repeated many times as an issue of great importance for the proper transmission of religion. The conversation also assumed a kind of pedagogical-academic tone: the origins of Santería, the controversial notion of syncretism and the one of transculturation, the work of Fernando Ortiz and Rómulo Lachatañeré were mentioned, among others. Especially one of the men, a mulatto lawyer, led the conversation in exchanging opinions with the 62-year-old santera. His points of view reflected, beside his belief, his knowledge of anthropological debate on Santería syncretic character as revealed in affirmations such as: “Let’s end up with this. Santería is not a thing of Black, neither a thing of White. It is a thing of Cubans, made up by Cubans”. The examples of the tambor situation in Miramar and of the party for Ochún in Nuevo Vedado show two very different kinds of ritual situations expressing the devotees’ socio-economic, racial and cultural diversity. But Santería in Havana, as an orally transmitted and moving tradition, is linked to people’s concrete and immediate problems (Motta 2009) and, to paraphrase the mentioned sentence of José Martí, it can assume as many forms as people and their life’s context. And still it gets different connotations according to Cuba’s regions and towns. Havana people, for example, refer with much respect to Matanzas’ tradition, which they constantly describe as ancient, very powerful and lively, while a visit to the town is considered as a sort of pilgrimage to an holy city. Still these different kinds of Santería, which form different schools of thought or traditions, result in a compact front if this complex and internally heterogeneous system is compared to Santería for outsiders. The latter can also be seen as an institutional product directed to foreigners curious about Cuban culture and looking for a generic religious approach and experience. Today, many tour operators organize excursions on the tracks of the orichas while travel guides indicate the institutional places to visit, such as the Yoruba Association and its orichas museum, the Virgen de Regla church in Havana, or the famous cabildos in Matanzas. In Havana, where under the shadow of the cathedral walls picturesque women dressed as cigar smoking santeras propose to buy a

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picture with tourists, commercialized versions of ritual objects are often for sale. In the boutique of Hotel Habana Libre, one of the big historical hotels in Vedado, dolls reproducing Yemayá or Ochún are displayed in a shelf beside the one where t-shirts of Che Guevara, rest with colored maracas, beach outfits and equipment, and the poster of the famous Cuban movie Fresa y chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea 1994). The paradigmatic space of this boutique and the categories of objects for sale perfectly condense the contradictory image of Cuba offered to tourists: revolution is here, represented by its eternal hero, together with salsa, the Caribbean sea, intellectual Cuban movie production and Santería. While the new foundation of the internal cubanidad seems a hard job based on continual accommodations to maintain everyday live and utopian horizon with institutional choices, the foreigner’s recipe  of Cuba seems to be made up of these few tasty and intriguing ingredients. And while the Habana Libre, a popular Cuban nickname to refer to rich strangers, can buy his Yemayá dolls in CUC (foreigners’ money), Cubans in hidden shops in the streets of Habana Centro pay coconuts, candles, doves, white flowers and black market eau-de-vie by their moneda nacional to sacrifice to the spirits and the orichas.

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Argyriadis, Kali. 2006. “Les batá deux fois sacrés. La construction de la tradition musicale et chorégraphique afro-cubaine.” Civilisations, 1–2 (LII): 45–74. Argyriadis, Kali, Capone, Stefania. 2004. “Cubanía et santería. Les enjeux politique de la transnationalisation religieuse (La Havane – Miami).” Civilisations 1–2 (L1): 81–137. Argyriadis, Kali. 2000. “ Des Des Noirs sorciers aux babalaos: analyse du paradoxe du rapport à l’Afrique à l’Havane.” Cahiers d’Etudes africaines 160 (XL-4): 649–674. Barnet, Miguel (edited by). 1998. Autobiografia di uno schiavo (Biografia de un cimarrón). Torino: Einaudi. Bastide, Roger. 1858. Le candomblé de Bahia. Paris: La Haye, Mouton. Berges, Juana, Cardenas Medina, René, Carillo Garcia, E. 1994. “Le pastorat du protestantisme historique à Cuba; ses approches socio-religieuses et la nouvelle théologie cubaine.” Social Compass 41(2): 273–291. Berges Curbelo, Juana, Cardenas Medina, René. 1993. « El pastorado protestante y la Nueva teologia Cubana » in La religión. Estudio de especialistas cubanos sobre la tematica relgiosa, La Habana: Edit. Politica. Blancarte, Roberto. 2001. « Laicité et sécularisation au Mexique ». Pp. 81–94 La modernité religieuse en perspective comparé: Europe/Amérique Latine edited by Jean-Pierre Bastian, Paris: Karthala. Brown, David. 2003. Santeria Enthroned. Art, Ritual and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Peter. 1983. Il culto dei santi. L’origine e la diffusione di una nuova religiosità. Torino: Einaudi. Caetano, Gerardo, Geymonat, Roger. 1997. La secularización uruguaya (1859–1919). Catolicismo y privatización de lo religioso. Montevideo: Taurus. Calzadilla, Jorge Ramirez. 2009. « Cuba. Laïcité, liberté de religion, Etat laïque », Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 146:157–182. Calzadilla, Jorge J. Ramirez, Ciattini, Alessandra. 2002. Religione, politica e cultura a Cuba. Roma: Bulzoni. Castro Ruiz, Fidel. 1985. Fidel y la religión. La Habana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado. Cuarto Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba. Santiago de Cuba, 10–14 de octubre de 1991. Discursos y documentos, 1992. La Habana: Ed. Politica. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás. 1994, Fresa y chocolate. Halbwachs, Maurice. 2002. La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel. Lachatañeré, Rómulo. 2007. El Sistema religioso de los afrocubanos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Marconi, Silvio. 1996. Congo Lucumi. Appunti per un approccio sincretico al sincretismo culturale. Roma, Euroma, La Goliardica. Martí, José. Obras completas, 1963–1975, vol. II. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Motta, Roberto. 2009. “New World African Religions.” Pp. 390–404 in The World Religions: Continuities and Transformations edited by Peter B. Clarke and Peter Beyer, London and New York: Routledge. Ortiz, Fernando. 2007. Los negros brujos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Ortiz, Fernando. 1991. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar, La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony M. 2002. “The contribution of Catholic Orthodoxy to Caribbean Syncretism: The Case of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in Cuba.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des religions, 117: 37–58. Stewart, Charles, Shaw, Rosalind. 1994. Syncretism/anti-Syncretism. The Politics of Religious Synthesis. New York: Routledge.

A SECULAR CANCELLATION OF THE SECULARIST TRUCE: RELIGION AND POLITICAL LEGITIMATION IN AUSTRALIA Marion Maddox* Secular Australia and Public Religion Like a self-willed actor who insists on adlibbing, the secularisation thesis seems forever creating headaches for its authors. One can feel, reading secularisation literature, as if overhearing a series of late-night script develÂ�opment meetings, where increasingly exasperated Â�writers and direcÂ� tors exclaim: ‘Well, of course the general storyline still works, but now there’s the subplot with the US creationists to accommodate! And how do we build in the affaire foulard?’ Local developments have given the theoretical literature on the secularisation thesis an ever more sophisticated texture as it accommodates greater complexity. One persistent question with which analysts have grappled is the phenomenon of religion assuming a more prominent public role, even as its public presence, at least based on numerical representation in the population, would be expected to weaken. Several studies have observed the seeming oddity that, as population levels of religious commitment in western nations decline, Christianity often seeks out increasingly public roles. Here I concentrate on two significant contributions, fifteen years apart: José Casanova (1994) and Peter Achterberg and his collaborators (2009). In their concerted efforts to deal with the theoretical complexity of secularism, they go furthest into the tangled webs of privatisation and deprivatisation, the territory that I explore further here. Among the secularisation paradigm’s many twists, turns and tweaks, Australia only partly fits existing privatisation or deprivatisation accounts of public religion in the modern world. In Australia, as in so many other Western countries, Christianity has seized a more urgent public and political voice as its numerical strength has declined. Unlike the patterns uncovered by other scholars of religion and public life, however, the driver for the shift in the Australian case is not primarily the remaining religiously committed population. Its effects are felt overwhelmingly at *╇ I thank Shirley Maddox for Research assistance.

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the level of formal politics—that is to say, in the world of party political rhetoric and the implementation and selling of government policy; yet the significant push comes from politicians who often do not, themselves, have strong – or any – religious commitments. Over the last fifteen years, Australians have experienced unusually frequent political appeals to ‘Christian values’ and the idea of Australia as a ‘Christian nation,’ pitched to voters who overwhelmingly lack specific religious commitments but for whom an ambiguous (and necessarily vague) Christian rhetoric appeals not despite, but because of the bulk of the population’s distance from religious enculturation. The fine-grained and interacting effects are easily missed if the interpretation is limited to statistical analysis of declining church attendance measured against, say, rising numbers of mentions of God in political contexts. Such statistical data are available, but they take us only a little way towards the more interesting question of causation. To find out why God’s political profile is growing in Australia while her worship declines, we turn to a range of qualitative methods, including media analysis and analysis of politicians’ statements and personal declarations. To account for this phenomenon requires marshalling an assemblage of characteristics as diverse as the nation’s religious and political culture, the continuing sensitivity to certain incidents in recent political history and features of the federal voting system which cause aspects of electoral politics to play out in unusual ways. Public Religion and Secularisation Casanova (1994) argued that the essential feature of secularisation in modernity, whether or not church attendance fell, was differentiation, so that religion ceased to occupy the formal public role epitomised in caesaropapism, becoming instead a collection of voluntary organisations among the many competing for citizens’ attention. Casanova puts forward as his ‘central thesis and main theoretical premise’ that secularisation is not unitary, but, rather: what usually passes for a single theory of secularization is actually made up of three very different, uneven and unintegrated propositions: secularization as differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms, secularization as decline of religious beliefs and practices, and secularization as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere. (1994: 211)



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He insists that the three propositions manifest unevenly and in unintegrated ways, and that, for example, it is simply fallacious to argue … that the permanence or increase in religious beliefs and practices, and the continuous emergence of new religions and the revival of old ones in the United States or anywhere else, serves as empirical confirmation that the theory of secularization is a myth. It only confirms the need to refine the theory by distinguishing between the general historical structural trend of secular differentiation and the ways in which different religions in different places respond to and are affected by the modern structural trend of differentiation. (1994: 212)

To that end, he is adamant that his first thesis, secularisation as differentiation remains ‘the valid core of the theory of secularization’: The differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms remains a general modern structural trend. Indeed, this differentiation serves precisely as one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of modern structures. Each of the two major modern societal systems, the state and the economy, as well as other major cultural and institutional spheres of society—science, education, law, art—develops its own institutional autonomy, as well as its intrinsic functional dynamics. Religion itself is constrained not only to accept the modern principle of structural differentiation of the secular spheres but also to follow the same dynamic and to develop an autonomous differentiated sphere of its own. (1994: 212)

Casanova takes the second trend, the decline of religious beliefs and practices, to be ‘manifestly not a modern structural trend’, although evidently a ‘dominant historical trend’, particularly in Europe—and, we might add, Australia. Casanova chides fellow sociologists of religion for placing too much weight ‘as a theoretical and as a general empirical proposition’ upon what is, for him, the secularisation paradigm’s ‘most questionable’ component, with the result that many have questioned ‘uncritically and unjustifiably the entire theory of secularization’ when numerical decline fails to fulfil predictions. He generalises from American and European experience that religions which begin with caesaropapist establishment but resist differentiation (his first trend) inspire their opponents to develop the Enlightenment critique of religion, which in turn produces declining attendance (the second trend). On the other hand, religions ‘which early on accept and embrace the modern principle of voluntarism … will be in a better position both to survive the modern process of differentiation and to adopt some form of evangelical

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revivalism as a successful method of religious self-reproduction in a free religious market’ (1994: 213–214). Peter Achterberg and five colleagues analysed data from the InternaÂ� tional Social Survey Program in 1998 and other data from the NethÂ� erlands over the period 1970–1996. The study, entitled ‘A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing Religious Deprivatization in the West’ (Achterberg et al 2009) finds that, the fewer Christians remain in a secularising nation, the more intensely they feel their faith and the more strongly they aspire to see their religion assume (or perhaps resume) a prominent public role. They conclude: Though Christians in the West have experienced substantial declines in terms of sheer numbers, our findings hence suggest that they have become less rather than more likely to accept the ‘secularist truce’—the secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom, yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm. (Achterberg et al 2009: 696–697)

Since 2005, a steadily expanding literature (Maddox 2005; Lohrey 2006; Simons 2007; Warhurst 2007; Sobey 2008; Crabb 2009; Maddox 2009) has discussed the collapse of the secularist truce in Australian politics. Yet, for reasons given below, very little of this collapse can be attributed to religious activism. Moreover, the fact that it has been most evident in the formal political field, where majority support is the sine qua non, coupled with distinctive features of Australia’s voting system, points towards further complexities. Faith and Decline in Australia The modern nation of Australia was founded once the European project  of differentiation was already well advanced. Differentiation, in Casanova’s sense, was written into the nation’s founding documents. Never having had a state church, and with disestablishment enshrined in its constitution since Federation (the wording of the relevant section, s. 116, modelled almost word-for-word on the no-establishment clause of the US First Amendment), Australia might be expected, according to Casanova’s prediction, to have generated little in the way of an EnlightÂ� enment critique of religion. The prediction is broadly correct. As numerous commentators have observed, Australians have historically been less antipathetic to religion than indifferent to it: religion has seldom



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loomed as the kind of thing of which one would bother mounting a critique. ‘Humanist’ and ‘rationalist’ societies have remained miniscule; the Secular Party of Australia, founded in 2005, fielded its first federal candidates in 2010, polling 0.1% of the vote; no public intellectual has made a name primarily for work criticising religion. On Casanova’s second criterion, Australia’s postwar religious identification peaked in 1954, and church attendance estimates for the late 1940s and early 1950s range from over one-third attending at least once a month (eg Piggin 2004: 127, based on Gallup poll data) to 47 per cent (Smith 2001: 255). These figures roughly accord with the estimated thirty percent of Australians likely to be in church on a normal Sunday (Hilliard 1991: 401). Adults in the 1950s married earlier, and at higher rates, than had their parents, so Sunday school enrolments reached their numerical peak in the early 1960s. Church property committees embarked on a building boom, before the malaise of the late 1960s and 70s sent church attendance figures in the same direction as in western Europe, Canada and New Zealand. In the first decade of the new millennium, weekly church attendance had fallen below eight per cent of the population and monthly or more was below twenty per cent. Only 64% of Australians claimed Christian affiliation in the 2006 census, compared to 89% in 1954. Non-Christian religions rose, the largest non-Christian grouping being Buddhists, at 2.1% of the population. The entire part of the population identifying with a religious tradition other than Christianity in the 2006 census was 5.6%. Showing clear evidence of religious decline, in 2006, 18.5% of Australians designated themselves ‘No religion’, compared to 6.7% in 1971, the first year in which census respondents were specifically offered the option, ‘If no religion, write NONE’. In 2008, an international study by the Christian Science Monitor found Australian youth among the developed world’s least religious or spiritual (Lampman 2008). As far as attendance is concerned, then, Australia fits a standard European-style secularisation trajectory. To summarise, then: Australia’s assumptions at Federation were (largely) those of Casanova’s first trend, differentiation, and the nation has subsequently followed Casanova’s second, declining religious belief and practice. At his third, the story gets more complicated. Casanova’s third component of the secularization paradigm is privatisation, which, as he famously and convincingly shows, often gives way to Â�deprivatisation, as religious organisations claim a public voice. On the privatisation-Â� deprivatisation axis, Australia at first glance seems to follow the trajectory that both Casanova and Achterberg’s team would predict from

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the attendance pattern, namely, of organised religion seeking a more public role as religious attendance dropped in the second half of the twentieth century. We have seen that religious adherence did indeed drop from the 1950s; and we shall shortly see that Christianity gained a sharply increased political profile from the mid 1990s and through the first decade of the new millennium. But, delving deeper, we shall find that its political rise differs substantially from either Casanova’s, Achterberg’s or other standard secularisation accounts. This is evidenced, in part, from a recent study of the faith of Australian prime ministers (Warhurst 2010), to which I here respond and, in places, augment. Privatisation, Deprivatisation and Secularisation in Australia Between Federation in 1901 and the overthrow of Labor leader Kevin Rudd in 2010, four prime ministers were ‘articulate atheists or aÂ� gnostics’, according to Warhurst, while a fifth’s atheism or agnosticism, though not explicitly articulated, could be inferred from his statements and actions. Warhurst classified eight prime ministers as observant ChrisÂ� tians, understood as attending church at least monthly during their prime ministership, two as conventional (occasional churchgoers) and nine as nominal (attending only for formal and official occasions). Warhurst observes that the hardest part of conducting his research was the difficulty of finding reliable data about Australian leaders’ faith. Members’ and Senators’ religion is not a matter of official record, and must, in some cases, be inferred from sources such as marriage and funeral records and whether the subject attended a denominational school. As Warhurst notes, ‘This shows that for some prime ministers, and for their biographers, their faith is almost irrelevant’. (Warhurst 2010: 4) The early post-war period was dominated by the sixteen-year reign of Australia’s longest-serving (and nominally Presbyterian) prime minister Robert Menzies, who, after a brief war-time term lasting just over two years, regained office for the long haul in 1949. Nevertheless, as Warhurst points out, Menzies was a ‘merely conventional’ Christian, and his conservative successors, Holt, Gorton and McMahon, were at least as disconnected from any Christian tradition, with Holt ‘best described as an agnostic’. All in all, Warhurst summarises, ‘This means that for the best part of fifty years between Chifley’s loss in 1949 and when Howard took office in 1996 Australia was led by prime ministers (nine of them) who

Dates in Office

July 1945 – December 1949 December 1949 – January 1966

January 1966 – December 1967 January 1968 – March 1971 March 1971 – December 1972 December 1972 – November 1975 November 1975 – March 1983 March 1983 – December 1991

December 1991 – March 1996 March 1996 – December 2007

December 2007 – June 2010 June 2010 -

Prime Minister

Ben Chifley Robert Menzies

Harold Holt John Gorton William McMahon E. Gough Whitlam Malcolm Fraser Bob Hawke

Paul Keating John Howard

Kevin Rudd Julia Gillard

Labor Labor

Labor Liberal

Liberal Liberal Liberal Labor Liberal Labor

Labor Liberal

Party

Anglican Atheist

Catholic Anglican

Agnostic Anglican Anglican Agnostic/Atheist Anglican Agnostic

Catholic Presbyterian

Religious Affiliation

Observant Articulate

Conventional Observant?

Low Nominal Nominal Articulate Nominal Articulate

Observant Conventional

Strength of Position

78.6 (1976) 76.4 (1981) 73.0 (1986) 74.0 (1991) 70.9 (1996) 68.0 (2001) 63.9 (2006) Not yet available (2011)

88.0 (1947) 89.4 (1954) 88.3 (1961) 88.2 (1966) 86.2 (1971)

% of Population Identifying as Christian by Census Year

Table 1.╇ Post-World War II Prime Ministers of Australia (excluding caretaker terms of less than one month) by religious affiliation and religiosity (after Warhurst 2010) and percentage of the population identifying as Christian during their term of office (Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au/ausstats)

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were not observant Christians’. This is a markedly weak current, so that, as Warhurst observes, The number of agnostic and secular prime ministers, while fewer than the religious believers and perhaps even fewer than their percentage of the population, is quite high in comparison with British Prime Ministers and American Presidents. (Warhurst 2010a)

The most striking feature of Warhurst’s analysis, as far as its alignment with a secularisation trajectory is concerned, is that he classes only two post-1950 prime ministers as ‘observant’; and those are the most recent in his sample: John Howard (1996–2007) and Kevin Rudd (2007–2010). The latest prime minister in Warhurst’s sample, Kevin Rudd, made no secret of his faith, a mainstay throughout his adult life. A feature of his prime ministership became the press conferences held outside the Canberra Anglican church he attended with his family each Sunday when Parliament was sitting. Rudd prominently identified himself, not only with progressive Christianity (Boer 2009), but with one of its most famous theological heroes, the German theologian and Nazi-era martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, launching his bid for the Labor leadership with an essay in a national current affairs magazine about Bonhoeffer’s influence on his values (Rudd 2006; for the most perceptive analysis so far of Rudd’s theological reliance on Bonhoeffer, see Boyce 2010). Turning from prime ministers to consider Rudd’s opponents only strengthens the impression. Although his prime ministership lasted only two and a half years, it encompassed three leaders of the opposition  (Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott), each of whose faith made up a more or less prominent part of his political persona in a way which, before Howard, would have been quite remarkable in Australian politics. Of these, the longest serving, and the one who survived Rudd to fight the 2010 election against his successor, Julia Gillard, was Tony Abbott. Abbott had previously been considered unelectable due to his high-profile conservative Catholic views, including his strong stance against abortion, his role as health minister in keeping the abortifacient drug RU486 illegal in Australia long after it was available in many other western countries (Jackson 2010), and what were perceived as frequent public gaffes about matters of gender and sexuality (AAP 2010). Observing the political climate in Australia in the late 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, then, readers of the secularisation



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literature might discern a paradigm case, in which Achterberg et alia’s most-religious rump seek an ever-greater role in national life, as the less-committed fall away. Prime Minister Howard Yet, on closer scrutiny, the Australian pattern introduces intriguing variations. We begin with John Howard, whose prime ministership inaugurated the collapse of Australia’s secularist truce. According to his own account, and those of people close to him, by the end of his prime ministership, he appeared as a fairly devout person. Warhurst (personal communication, 5 January 2011) arrived at his ‘observant’ cÂ� ategorisation on the basis of a sympathetic biography, written with Howard’s cooperation (Errington and van Onselen 2008) and autobiography (Howard 2010), both published after Howard had lost office, and both describing him as ‘still’ attending a local Anglican church, implying a continuation of established practice. This is not readily verified; indeed the available sources suggest alternative interpretation. In 1998, after two years in power, Howard described to a national television special, ‘What Our Leaders Believe’, a faith that sounded less than central to his life: When I go, I tend to go to an Anglican church … but it matters not to me. I would just as easily go to another Christian church, right across the religious spectrum … certainly within what I would call the ProtestantCatholic-Anglican traditions it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I would just as easily go to a Catholic mass, and their liturgy is not all that different, now, is it? (Compass, ABC TV, 20 September 1998)

In a follow-up broadcast with the same interviewer, under the same title, before the 2004 federal election, Howard described religious faith as being ‘in the background’ rather than ‘at the core’ of his values and those he tried to pass on to his children. He described his churchgoing as ‘more often than Christmas and Easter, but certainly not once a week’, and reiterated that ‘When I do go to church now … I tend to go to an Anglican church. I don’t really care what denomination it is’ (Compass, 3 October 2004). His self-description during his prime ministership, in other words, sounds much more like Warhursts’s ‘conventional’ or even ‘nominal’ category than the ‘observant’ portrayal it acquired in hindsight. This impression of reading increased religiosity back into his past is piqued by the fact that his autobiography, Lazarus Rising, contains a

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separate index subheading for ‘Howard’s churchgoing’, inviting readers to pinpoint his devoutness over its 658 pages. A social scientist looking for evidence of ‘observant’ regularity in office risks disappointment, however, finding his parents’ funerals, public ceremonial occasions and the Sunday mornings after election victories or losses. Other recent accounts appear to talk up the religiosity of Howard’s more distant past. For example, Errington and van Onselen mention that ‘as an adult [in his early twenties], he was secretary of the Earlwood Methodist Sunday school for two years’ (2008, 16). That is borne out by the church’s records, held in the Uniting Church Archives in Sydney. However, the only mention of his service in the minutes of the church Leaders’ Meetings is from 4 April 1962, under the heading Sunday School: ‘No satisfactory report presented. Messrs Brown and Ward to have a word with the Secretary’, which suggests more than an isolated lapse. His resignation is noted on 30 January 1963, with no minute of appreciation. Self-reported frequency of church attendance in even the recent past is notoriously unreliable (Hadaway, Marler and Chaves 1993; Hadaway and Marler 1998), and perhaps prime ministers are no less liable than other citizens to muddle their memories of such matters. At any rate, Howard’s descriptions while in office of his religious practice seem to suggest less devotion than do his recollections at the end of his time in office, looking back over that same period. By the time of Howard’s departure from office, his later accounts of his churchgoing had blended in public perception with a further aspect of his prime ministership, his contribution to the deprivatisation of religion in Australian policy and political culture. Speeches in Parliament exhibited a rapid rise in religious references and allusions, peaking in 2004 (Crabb 2009). Politicians, including people whose political personae had never previously hinted at religious fervour, began to speak warmly of their faith and that of their Â�constituents (Maddox 2009: 357). Prime Minister John Howard, who held office from 1996 until 2007, talked repeatedly of Australia as a Christian nation founded on Christian values, while priming the electorate to respond to an anti-Muslim fear campaign well in advance of the September 2001 terrorist attacks (Maddox 2005: 166–173); exhorted Australians to honour Jesus of Nazareth as the most significant figure of human history; castigated state schools for being too ‘values neutral’ while greatly expanding government subsidies to religious schools; established the National School Chaplaincy Program, at a cost of A$165 million, to



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fund chaplains in state and private schools, and massively increased transfers of public money to Christian schools (Bonnor and Caro 2007; Maddox 2011). He also oversaw the progressive dismantling of what had previously been government welfare services, their work outsourced, overwhelmingly to church agencies, anticipating the ‘faith-based’ initiatives under George Bush in the USA and Tony Blair in the UK (Maddox 2001: 181). Alongside the changes to welfare delivery, his government undertook a substantial restructure of the tax and benefit system, changing the structure of family assistance so that two-parent families with a single wage-earner (nearly always the father) enjoyed a significant financial advantage over families where both parents share caring and wage-Â� earning responsibilities (Maddox 2005: 71–108). Such developments, in turn, contributed to a political culture in which other aspects of national self-understanding, including the national anthem, became subject to Christian revisionism (Maddox 2009: 358–359). Howard and his senior ministers, visited conservative megachurches, made public appeals for more Christian celebrations at Christmas, upbraided schools for not teaching “values,” and talked up Australia’s “Judeo-Christian culture.” Despite surface similarities to US-style religious politics, the Australian version is no straightforward importation of American ‘family values’ ideas with a Christian gloss, for at least two reasons. First, as discussed above, Australia simply does not have the religious voter base which, in the USA (even accepting the more modest American attendance estimates advanced by Hadaway et al 1993), retains the capacity to swing election results. Second, and at least as importantly, Australia has compulsory voting. One of the most vital tasks that religious campaigns have achieved in certain pivotal US elections is to bring out the vote. Under Australia’s compulsory voting system, church-based get-outthe-vote campaigns are redundant; conservatively inclined Christians would be voting for the conservative Coalition parties without additional encouragement. Voter turnout in federal elections is typically around ninety-five per cent nationally (Australian Electoral Commission 2009). An overtly religious campaign in an electorate which census after census and poll after poll consistently shows to have small and declining numbers of religious believers would seem a risky political strategy, to say the least. Moreover, those religiously-committed voters are far from a uniform block, politically. Australia’s religious left has gained far less media attention in recent decades than its religious right, but, both historically and today, it makes nonsense of any easy equation between

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religion and conservatism (Smith 1998; Maddox 2001: 6–10). A further interpretation would see the appeal might be to a particular, necessary demographic in marginal electorates. This was in fact an explanation given for Rudd’s 2007 success in electorates with high numbers of Lutherans and Pentecostals (Australian Development Strategies 2008; Young 2010); however, corroborating evidence for the existence of a ‘Christian vote’ is decidedly weak (Smith 2009). Prime Minister Julia Gillard In addition to the religiosity of prime ministers, another way of gauging the importance of ‘public religion in the modern world’ is by cÂ� onsidering public reaction to prime ministers’ declarations of unbelief. The Prime Minister whose lack of religious belief attracted the greatest public notice, however, came after the conclusion of Warhurst’s sample: Rudd’s successor, Julia Gillard, who took office when levels both of personal faith and adherence to a denomination among the general population had reached historic lows. On 29 June 2010, shortly after succeeding Rudd to the Labor leadership, she answered ABC Radio interviewer Jon Faine’s ‘Do you believe in God?’ with a straightforward: ‘No, I don’t’. Gillard’s declaration of atheism made headlines. It was contrasted with her conservative opposite number Tony Abbott’s well-known CatholÂ�icism, which translated, in government, into support for that church’s teaching on abortion and euthanasia. Gillard symbolically reversed Kevin Rudd’s theological essay-writing and Sunday morning church-door-stops, and John Howard’s invocation of Australia as a ‘Christian’ (or sometimes ‘Judeo-Christian’) nation. On the Achterberg model, we would expect the anxiety about an atheist prime minister to come from the most strongly religious citizens. Gillard, in announcing her atheism, made a direct address to such voters: I am not going to pretend a faith I don’t feel, and for people of faith I think the greatest compliment I could pay to them is to respect their genuinely held beliefs and not to engage in some pretence about mine. (ABC Radio 774, 29 June 2010)

However religiously-committed voters may have responded to her declaration in the privacy of their hearts, churches and online communities, publicly-articulated interest in the prime minister’s atheism ran highest among mainstream media commentators, fascinated by its



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potential effects on what the journalist in the interview just quoted had called ‘the vital Christian vote’. Gillard was by no means the first prime minister to question aspects of Christian doctrine, or to do so in a public forum. The difference, in Gillard’s case, was the high degree of media attention which her declaration generated and the fact that it occurred in the face of further slides in religious attendance and adherence. In this respect, it is salutary to note that, of the four prime ministers whom Warhurst designates ‘articulate atheists or agnostics’, two (Hughes, 1915 and Curtin, 1941) were elected before 1950. That both periods of office coincided with a world war, with all the religiously-inflected public mourning rituals and conventions those conflicts involved (discussed in Hunter 2007) is a further pointer to the marginal status of religion in Australian political culture from very early in its history. Gough Whitlam (elected 1972) described himself, with an ironic nod to cold war rhetoric, as a ‘fellowtraveller’ with Christianity, while Bob Hawke (elected 1983) made his loss of his Congregationalist faith, triggered by his shock at the inequalities he encountered at a World Conference of Christian Youth in India in 1952, into a touchstone of his political narrative (Hawke 1994: 20–24; d’Alpuget 1984: 44–49). The attention paid to Gillard’s announcement of unbelief was a reaction to the tone of the prime ministerships of the immediate past, rather than (as many of those making the comments assumed) to long-standing tradition. The novelty in 2010 was less that a Prime Minister lacked faith, than that Australia’s commentariat now cared. Much of the commentary anticipated that Gillard’s announcement might be a precursor to unwinding the more reactionary aspects of her predecessors’ religiously-inflected conservative policies. As not only a self-described atheist but also the nation’s first female prime minister and the first to live with her partner out of wedlock, many expected that she might, like a majority of her fellow citizens (according to consistent opinion polls in 2010, see http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2010/12/ 06/public-opinion-on-same-sex-marriage/), announce herself in favour of same sex marriage. Instead, within days of her atheism affirmation, she stated that opposition to same sex marriage was not only her party’s, but also her own personal view (Nader 2010). Fellow-atheists were surprised, that August, when Gillard pledged A$1.5 million of commonwealth funding to the celebrations for the canonisation of Australia’s first saint, Mary Mackillop, and offered tax deductibility for the church’s fund-raising effort for the occasion,

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although the anticipated economic benefits from such a major tourist event are surely a sufficient explanation. More perplexing was her decision in relation to Howard’s National School Chaplaincy Program, which he established in late 2006 at the tail-end of his prime ministership. Although Howard had stated that it would be open to state and private schools, the majority of chaplains—1915—are employed in state schools, of whom 85% are supplied by Christian organisations Â�belonging to the National School Chaplaincy Association (Hughes and Sims 2009). In November 2009, Kevin Rudd announced a further A$42.8 million to extend it until December 2011, and established a review to consider provision of pastoral care in schools beyond that date. On Gillard’s succeeding him, however, she pre-empted the review by confirming a further increase, of A$222 million, to extend the program to 2014 and include a further 1000 state schools. When asked whether the program would retain ‘its unique flavour linked to the faith, the Christian faith’, she assured the nation that it would remain ‘a chaplaincy program, with everything that that entails’ (Stephens 2010). Faith and Political Culture The idea that Australian politics includes a block ‘Christian vote’ goes back only to the aftermath of the 2007 election. Until then, the traditional, albeit dwindling, Catholic support for Labor had provided Australia’s nearest thing to a religio-psephological chestnut. But now one piece of market research purported to show that Rudd Labor had performed particularly well in electorates with high proportions of voters of particular denominations, especially Pentecostal and Lutheran (Australian Development Strategies 2008; Young 2010). Identifying voter preference with denomination is, however, highly problematic (Maddox 2001: 2–10) and attempts to target a supposed ‘Christian vote’ for electoral gain no less so (Smith 2009). Not only do regular attenders make up only a small proportion of the Australian population, but Christians in Australia have never voted as a block; many have historically voted Labor; and little evidence supports the notion that a candidate’s belief or lack of it is a vote-deciding factor. On the contrary, in interviews with some fifty retired and sitting federal Members and Senators in 1999 and 2000, I asked whether they considered a publiclyidentifiable religious commitment to be an electoral advantage, disadvantage or something that did not matter. Not one interviewee regarded it as an advantage to them personally. One or two speculated that



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it might be an advantage to colleagues in ‘Bible belt’ seats, although members actually representing such seats (including non-believers) disclaimed any need to present themselves as believers. The overwhelming majority felt that a public religious commitment was neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, and a small number felt that Australians’ suspicion of overt religiosity would make a public religious Â�identification an electoral disadvantage. At least until very recently, Australians tended to be suspicious of too-overt religiosity, shying away, for example, from American-style civil religion and avoiding anything resembling ‘God bless America’ political rhetoric. With hindsight, the 1999–2000 interviews took place towards the close of a long phase of secularist consensus in Australian politics. The secularist truce received a strong helping hand, in Australia, not only from a generally secular culture, but also from the backwash of a specific watershed trauma, the Labor Party split of 1955. It was a period so painful that, even today, it is still remembered on both sides of politics simply as ‘the Split’. After several years’ agitation by an anti-communist group inside the trade union movement called the Catholic Social Studies Movement, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) divided, with a significant portion of its Catholic right wing breaking off to form a new party called the Democratic Labour Party (DLP). For nearly twenty years, DLP preferences flowed to the conservative parties, helping to keep the ALP out of office for a generation. The divisions involved were cold war anti-communist rather than theological; nevertheless, that the dividing line was roughly between Catholic and non-Catholic party members, and the DLP’s organisational and intellectual base was within the Catholic church, gave the events an indelible religious marking. The grief, and political damage, engendered by the Split contributed to a political environment in which both sides saw religion as too divisive to risk bringing to political attention. So profoundly was it etched on the minds of the older generation of Labor politicians that, when I approached retired members and senators for interviews, explaining that I was researching religion in Australian politics, several replied, ‘Oh, I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you much—that was all a long time ago and I don’t remember it very well’. To veterans of that generation, mentioning religion and politics in the same sentence only meant one thing: the Split. During the decades of secularist truce, both sides of politics made few religious appeals. Churches were most likely to be heard on matters of social justice and environmental concern. For example, mainline churchÂ�es were active in campaigns for Aboriginal land rights, opposition to

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uranium mining and to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war and support for industrial relations protections. But this pattern was disÂ� rupted from 1996, for reasons that I investigate in Maddox 2001 and 2005. To understand the religious transformation of Australian political culture, though, we need to look well before 1996, to look more closely at the differences between the relatively small part of the population with active religious commitments and the much larger part which professes a vague connection to some form of Christian tradition but has neither active involvement in a religious community nor much knowledge about the religion it professes. It is this latter group which, I contend, is overwhelmingly the target of religiously-inflected political discourse, frequently initiated by politicians little (or no) more religiously literate than the population they address. My analysis draws on a series of studies of Australians’ religious beliefs and practices, and helps us to understand to whom the anti-secularist discourse in Australian politics is directed. In a study conducted in 1966, towards the beginning of Australia’s phase of rapid secularisation, sociologist of religion Hans Mol found regular churchgoers had generally more conservative political and moral attitudes than non-attenders. The more frequently respondents went to church, the more likely they were to oppose abortion and support capital punishment, to disapprove of gambling and to admire patriotism. But the association broke down with questions designed to detect racism. The more religiously active respondents were the most likely to feel ‘friendly and at ease’ with members of ‘outgroups’, including Japanese, Italians, Catholics, Jews and alcoholics. Only communists and atheists risked churchgoers’ disapproval. Mol also asked how respondents felt about someone who wanted to keep Asians out of Australia. The more regularly Mol’s subjects went to church, the more likely they were to disapprove of such prejudice. Less regular attenders were increasingly likely to approve of, or at least tolerate, someone wanting to keep Australia Asian-free. The pattern was consistent across denominations. Mol found regular attenders ‘spearheading a more liberal attitude to Asian migration than those who do not attend’ (Mol 1971: 69–71). Following up in 1981, Mol found the relationship repeated between churchgoing and anti-racism, including a sympathetic attitude to refugees. The 1981 study added a further correlation: in addition to regular churchgoers, the other group most accepting of people of different races and most in favour of helping refugees was those of no religion. ‘Nominal’ Christians, attending irregularly or not at all, had the most exclusionary racial attitudes. On many other questions, Mol Â�emphasised,



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regular churchgoers and those of no religion stood ‘poles apart’, disagreeing intensely over, for example, the acceptability of single parenthood and a woman putting her husband and children ahead of her own career. As one explanation for why the devout and the religionless end up as bedfellows on questions of race and welcome to refugees, Mol argued that both are themselves ‘outgroups’ vis-à-vis the nominally Christian mainstream: ‘Obviously the committed Christians feel more responsible for the disadvantaged, and those with no religion (similarly on the fringe of society) favour many enlightened causes.’ (1985: 159) He further explained the parallel in terms of the two groups’ connections to wider associations and sources of information: In Australia the Christians who, through church going, are regularly exposed to information disseminated by religious bodies, feel responsible for those suffering from injustice and persecution in other countries. One can therefore expect them to favour the intake of refugees more than others. The international awareness of the ‘no religion’ intelligentsia and their proclivity for worthwhile (sometimes even ‘trendy’) causes leads in the same direction. By contrast the nonchurch going, modal Australians tend to look less beyond their shores and more to what is of immediate advantage to them personally. (1985: 160–161)

Here, Mol offers a hint as to the appeal of a conservative, religiouslyinflected politics to a highly secular electorate. The appeal was unlikely to be to the small, politically engaged and also politically divided body of the religiously committed, whose votes were, in any case, likely to be relatively firmly locked in with one side of politics or the other. Instead, it was mainly to the much larger part of the Australian electorate that, while remaining personally uncommitted with respect to religion, regarded Christianity as a benign, if vaguely-conceived, force for some conservatively-understood notion of social good. To bring Mol’s equivocal, ‘modal’ voters forward to the disruption of the secularist consensus in the Howard era: these were the voters who responded quickly Howard’s rush to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, while churches—with very few exceptions, from across the theological spectrum—expressed deep reservations about the invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of Islamophobia which followed the September 11 2001 attacks. Highly publicised police raids on Muslim homes during Ramadan (ostensibly to catch terrorist suspects, but producing not a single arrest), denunciation by Howard of aspects of Muslim practice and vilification of mainly Muslim asylum seekers also contributed to a pitch to these voters which drew a sharp line between ‘our’ Christian civilisation and ‘their’ dangerous Muslim way of life which threatened it

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(Maddox 2005: 166–194). These were also the voters who made their presence felt electorally by supporting social policies like outsourcing welfare services to church agencies, following then Treasurer Peter Costello’s assessment that those on society’s margins need not only material help but also moral uplift. Similarly, many nominal Christian or uncommitted parents sent their children to conservative Christian schools (Campbell et al 2009: 160–179), seemingly undeterred by the fact that many such schools require their teachers to sign a statement of belief that asserts that non-Christians cannot be saved, while some actively promote the idea that God’s rule trumps the law of the land or the power of the state (Maddox 2011). The attraction of such schools to minimally- or non-religious parents was often that they imparted “values,” something children were perceived to need and the wider society to lack. Indeed, given that a significant number of parents sending their children to such schools are not doing so out of a commitment to the school’s religious vision, and that the more extreme religious positions of some such schools would be likely to deter uncommitted parents with sufficient religious literacy to discern it, we could say that the parents’ religious naïveté appeared to be at least a partial condition for the schools’ success. A similar point can be made about the particular groups with which Howard and some of his senior ministers chose to associate themselves. Treasurer Peter Costello became known for his close association with Catch the Fire Ministries, a controversial Victorian group whose senior pastor, Danny Nalliah, became involved in legal action for having allegedly vilified Muslims during a church seminar. (Costello told a gathering co-sponsored by Catch the Fire that religious vilification problems should not be resolved in court, adding the confusing advice that Christian-Muslim relations are best addressed by a national return to ‘Judaeo-Christian values’ (Costello 2004)â•›). Nalliah is also known for urging his followers to ‘tear down Satan’s strongholds’—such as bottleshops, betting shops, mosques and Hindu temples—and for prophesying, incorrectly as it turned out, that Howard would win the 2010 election and Costello would succeed him as prime minister. Several of these attributes would strike most Australian churchgoers as bizarre, to say the least. Read as an appeal, not to churchgoers, but to the barelychurched mass who pick up generalities rather than following the detail of religious practice, however, they convey enough life and colour to catch the attention and convey the impression of someone who, if nothing else, takes his religion seriously.



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If Costello’s chosen connections seem rather boutique (he was, after all, raised a Baptist and married an Anglican), some of Howard’s religious associations in office seem still more so. The Exclusive Brethren are a pre-millennialist sect, based in Australia, whose international leader, Bruce Hales, lives in what was Howard’s own electorate. For years, the sect enjoyed privileged access to Howard and were able to negotiate special arrangements in school funding, tax exemptions and exemptions from regular industrial relations provisions which, together, amounted to millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded concessions (Bachelard 2008). Whatever Howard’s motive for granting this special treatment, it was not vote-seeking: believing all government to be divinely ordained, the Exclusive Brethren do not vote. They do, however, fund election campaigns, sometimes for as much as half a million dollars, or even more. Their campaigns typically focus on vague, allusive qualities such as ‘Christian values’, ‘family values’ and so on, whose content can be heavy on hints without ever spelling out a specific content (Maddox 2005a). In Australia, religious rhetoric in the political sphere seems designed almost specifically not to speak first, or most directly, to the religiously committed, who are likely to be already quite politically engaged and to have fixed their vote fairly firmly to one side of politics or the other. Instead, its appeal seems aimed mostly at what Mol called the ‘modal’ Australians who identify vaguely with tradition, do not go as far as to declare themselves atheist (like Gillard) or agnostic (like Hawke) but for whom religious categories speak of a nostalgic sense of safety and security. A final question is why the secularist truce should have collapsed at the particular time that it did. A paper of this scope permits no more than a brief speculation; but a striking feature of the timing of the emergence of up-front religious discourse in Australia was that it coincided with a sharp decline in party differentiation by political ideology. As both major parties embraced the neoliberal consensus, religion became a convenient short-hand for politicians to demonstrate their commitment to a set of values that transcended the grim creed of balancing the budget. Conclusion Understandably, studies of secularisation and deprivatisation have concentrated on religious responses. It seems reasonable to assume that

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religious institutions and persons have most to lose when religion loses its public standing and assumed position of cultural hegemony. In an additional move, as Casanova noted, in the face of ‘differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’ (1994: 212), churches are not the only ones with a motive to resist: ‘states may still find it useful to master established religions for the sake of integration of their political communities’ (213). Australia’s case, however, fits neither picture. The significance of the Australian cancellation of the secularist truce only becomes clear when we turn the analysis around and examine not the religious—either individuals or institutions—but the unchurched, or barely-churched, mass of the population. Achterberg et alia conclude by drawing attention to their findings’ potential implications for the culture wars debate. The culture wars debate in Australia has already been profoundly shaped by the phenomenon of religiously-inflected categories playing to a religiously naïve population (Maddox 2005, 2011). A vital front in the culture wars, and the one with the most profound and longterm consequences to date, is visible in the shift of federal government funding away from universal, free, secular education towards an increasingly religiously-segregated education system with pockets of government-funded, anti-state extremism (Maddox 2011). More research is needed to document and analyse the extent of these effects.



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Lampman, Jane. 2008. ‘Global survey: Youths see spiritual dimension to life’ Christian Science Monitor 6 November. Lohrey, Amanda. 2006. Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia Quarterly Essay 22 Melbourne: Black Inc. Maddox, Marion. 2001. For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Maddox, Marion. 2005. God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Maddox, Marion. 2005a ‘Step to the Right as Brethren Gather Force’ Sydney Morning Herald 14 September. Available online, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/09/13/ 1126377310179.html [Accessed 7 February 2011]. Maddox, Marion. 2009. ‘An Argument for More, Not Less, Religion in Australian Politics’, Australian Religion Studies Review 22(3) 345–367. Maddox, Marion. 2011 (in press). ‘Are Religious Schools Inclusive or Exclusive?’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 17(2). Mol, Hans. 1971. Religion in Australia Melbourne: Thomas Nelson. Mol, Hans. 1985. The Faith of Australians Sydney: George Allen & Unwin. Nader, Carol. 2010 ‘No Change on Gay Marriage: Gillard’ Age 1 July. Available online, http://www.theage.com.au/national/no-change-on-gay-marriage-gillard-20100630 -zmul.html [Accessed 7 February 2010]. National Day of Thanksgiving 2011, Available online, http://thanksgiving.org.au/ [Accessed 7 February 2010]. Rudd, Kevin. 2006. ‘Faith in Politics’ The Monthly 17, October. Available online, http:// www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics–300 [Accessed 7 February 2010]. Simons, Margaret. 2007. Faith, Money and Power: What the Religious Revival Means for Politics Melbourne: Pluto Press. Smith, Rodney. 1998. ‘Religion and Electoral Behaviour in Australia: The Search for Meaning’ Australian Religion Studies Review 11(2) 17–37. Smith, Rodney. 2009. ‘How Would Jesus Vote? The Churches and the Election of the Rudd Government’ Australian Journal of Political Science 44(4) 613–637. Sobey, Gareth. 2008. ‘Ticking the Faith Box: Reinterpreting the Place of ConservaÂ�tive Christianity in Australian Electoral Politics’ Traffic 10, November. Available online, http://www.gsa.unimelb.edu.au/Traffic10/Traffic_10_contents.shtml  [Accessed 7 February 2011]. Stephens, Scott. 2010. ‘The Prime Minister Puts Her Faith in Chaplaincy’ ABC News, 10 August. Available online, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/10/2978352 .htm [Accessed 7 February 2011]. Warhurst, John. 2007. ‘Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade’ Australian Journal of Political Science 42 (1) 19–32. Warhurst, John. 2010. ‘The Faith of Australian Prime Ministers 1901–2010’, Paper presented at the Australasian Political Studies Association annual conference, University of Melbourne, 27–29 September. Warhurst, John. 2010a. ‘The Religious Beliefs of Australia’s Prime Ministers’, Eureka Street 11 November. Available online, http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx? aeid=24159 [Accessed 7 February 2011]. Young, Graham. 2010. ‘Christian Tide Flows Back’, What the People Want 20 August. Available online, http://www.whatthepeoplewant.net/polls-blog/august-2010/christian -tide-flows-back.html ([Accessed 7 February 2011].

THE CONCEPT OF IMPLICIT RELIGION: WHAT, WHEN, HOW, AND WHY? Edward Bailey The Conceptualisation of Implicit Religion: A Trio of Happenings While an apprehension may sometimes seem unmediated, its concep­ tualisation cannot but be contextual. So, before turning to a more con­ ceptual account of the idea in question, a sequence, indeed, a trio, of contingent memories that illuminate the setting, may facilitate the com­ prehension of the apprehension that was intended to be communicated by the conceptualisation of Implicit Religion. The first of the three stages was epitomised in, and came to a head in a “presenting” interpretation of, a particular discussion. In 1968 the highly insightful head of a major independent British school commis­ sioned the newly-appointed senior chaplain (and myself, as a newlyappointed assistant chaplain, and the other assistant chaplain), and a cross-section of the staff, to consider together the various possible futures for the communal worship that had been part of the life of the school since its foundation in 1843. The convivial sharing of possibly pent-up individual philosophising was no doubt encouraged by the dozen of us imbibing a quartet of bottles of red wine between 8 pm and midnight, on the first (and most instructive, and, to me, most revealing) of our three evening meetings. Initially, a mathematician (with a triple-first at Cambridge, I recall), who was a Lay Reader (licensed preacher) in the Church of England, and who described himself (somewhat unusually, in those days and in that ╇ The capitalisation (“Implicit Religion”) of the formula that is used to refer to the concept, is adopted in order to avoid the repeated use of inverted commas. While their use would clearly demonstrate the hypothetical (and temporary?) character of the con­ cept, and would avoid the tendency of capitals to reify and/or magnify the formulaic code that is used in order to refer to a simple hypothesis (however frequent the appre­ hension that it articulates), their continual use would both disrupt the flow required for ready comprehension, and may appear so repeatedly didactic as to run the risk of tedium. The use of capitals is therefore intended to denote the concept; the actual phenomena that it purports to understand in this way, are likely to be described without capitals (and adjectivally), as being “implicitly religious”. 1

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context) as “an Evangelical,” said that he was “in favour of maintaining [the existing practice of] compulsory [daily] worship, because, on any one occasion, a boy [the school was single-sex in those days] might be converted.” This prompted another member of the group, who was also a Lay Reader and also a self-confessed “Evangelical,” to suggest, equally clearly, that in his opinion “compulsory worship” was “a contradiction in terms.” The contrast caused me to wonder whether, in Pauline theological terms, a gospel of law was encountering a gospel of grace or spirit. More certainly, however, it served to confirm my long-held opinion that the labels customarily bestowed by historians (and I had read history since I was seven) were as likely to hinder as to help any accurate estimate of any actual individual’s opinion on any real particular issue. It had been apparent even to a teenager that it was the (theoretically “individualist”) “Evangelicals” who had led such social, and indeed societal, reforms in the previous century as the abolition both of the slave trade and of slavery; and it was the (officially “community-minded”) Catholics who were observed, during school holidays on the European continent, to come and go during Mass, each in accordance with their own individual needs or whims. More could be said, of course (for instance, about the way in which a strong sense of community may enhance, rather than diminish, individuality, either directly, as in the armed forces, or by reaction, as in a boarding school). That, however, was an additional point: even if it also needed to be said. The next main input to the discussion of the group’s topic was of a kind which the “brighter and younger” clergy of the time (and their subsequent lay disciples, in the 1970s and ‘80s) were inclined to dismiss with a laugh. For a senior member of the staff, who had himself been a pupil at the school, offered his personal reflection upon the experience, which was no less significant for its (culturally appropriate) rather low key: “Well, having to go to Chapel never did me any harm, and it some­ times helped, during the [Second World] War.” Despite my efforts to cite this reflection in a neutral and factual manner, decades later it has still sometimes been met with laughter.2 2 ╇ The spontaneity, as well as the frequency, of the laughter on this type of occasion, themselves invite analysis: illogicality (like, to cite the title of the late Duchess of Windsor’s autobiography, “the heart”) “has its reasons”. It may be an immediate putting to one side, of what too clearly calls for empathy if it is to be understood: it is less demanding to look down on it, than to under-stand it. The laughter is also, however, a moment of shared communication, providing those who scoff with an example of real



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No doubt it is possible to distinguish between the sentiment and the speaker, and so to enjoy the one without disparaging the other; and, on the other hand, no doubt it is possible to fall into the trap of being so serious and moral as to become sententious and moralistic. In my own case, however, I confess that I am reminded of Malcolm Muggeridge’s title for his autobiographical account of his own changing attitudes: Tread softly, for you tread upon my jokes. The senior teacher’s willingness to share his individual reflection was both a gift and very personal: the special value of this particular piece of data (“things given”), indeed, lay in its being subjective, as well as objective. However, it was the third of the general inputs into the discussion that gave rise to the specific notion of implicit religion. It came from a highly cultured classicist: perhaps it is significant that, although he prob­ ably taught the classics of the Greek and Latin civilisations, and was simply conversant with the French and German classics of the eight­ eenth century, it may be that memory has reversed the sequence, and that in fact he taught the latter, and was simply conversant with the former. Describing himself, in the then contemporary terminology, as a “humanist”3 (and I never recall seeing him in the Chapel, during my three years at the School), he nevertheless approved of (even compul­ sory) worship, “as it is part of the boys’ heritage.” Now, it seemed, we were really entering into (in the words of the title of a then-recent vol­ ume by Ninian Smart) “a dialogue of religions.” The frequent assertion (at least in Britain at that time) that non-Churchgoers had no beliefs and no commitments of their own, seemed to be as inaccurate, and therefore misleading, as the conventional and unthinking use of labels such as “Evangelical”, and akin to the laughter already mentioned: unexamined, ritualistic, and, possibly, fear-full. Naturally, there was a (contingent) background to the posited appli­ cation of “religion” to such a clearly secular approach. It consisted in the experience, over the previous two years, of being an “assistant curate”

community, through the experience of spontaneous communication and instant com­ munion. Historically, it may be seen as the reaction of “science” (seen in terms of its results, rather than of an attitude) to “romanticism” (seen in terms of emotion, rather than of intersubjectivity); politically, as a coalition between the super-naturalist dualism of a Barth or Bultmann, and the monistic totalitarianism of a Dawkins or Dennett. 3 ╇ A far preferable term to the now current “atheist”, not only because it is positive, but also because the latter invites such definitions as “not believing in the existence [sic] of God” (or, even, of “a God”); as though the appellation (with a capital letter) of in-finite divinity could ever be applied to any existent phenomenon.

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(apprentice minister) in a parish church in the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne. Almost entirely without previous experience of the ordinary life of a parish and its church, I had concluded that, so far from religiosity being epiphenomenal (as the brighter and younger clergy suggested, along with their friends in the academy and journalism), at least the 200 whom I had come to know in some depth, among the 300 regular wor­ shippers who came back to the church by bus from the suburbs to which they had been moved, could not be understood, as the real and sentient beings they were, if their religion was ignored. Whether or not one agreed with (let alone approved of) it, it was “a fact of [their own per­ sonal] life,” and therefore a fact of [empirical, social] life. While its influence was often obvious, as in such outwardly observa­ ble behaviour as the effort required to attend public worship, it also appeared to be present in ways of which they were hardly, if at all, aware. Conversation suggested, for instance, that two friends (domestic clean­ ers, in their early-sixties) who had experienced years of listening to ser­ mons by a succession of trainee clergy, would have “sensed it in their bones” if one of us had preached out of accordance with the Christian message (and probably did practise forgiveness, whenever our conver­ sation was out of kilter with our proclamation). Likewise, the Church’s treasurer, a retired Chartered Secretary in his mid-seventies, not only kept his accounts, but kept (and moved) himself, in a way that seemed to express (far beyond anything that he would have acknowledged) a faith that, in this parish’s tradition, was consciously and deliberately sac­ ramental. In the light of such experience, the phenomenonal reality of each of the nouns in the expression a dialogue of religions, was available for phenomenological recognition, regardless (of course) of how either of them was esteemed or valued. The second and third of the trio of contingent happenings may be more briefly told.4 The second was the suggestion (by my wife), at the end of a year of studying what I had so far called “secular religion”, that it would be better described as Implicit Religion: a suggestion I seized on, partly to avoid the instructive but ambivalent paradox of describing any religion as secular, and partly because it tended to release the Â�posited conceptual phenomenon from its Western post-Enlightenment strait­ jacket. The revised expression allowed the influence of an explicit form

4 ╇ They have, in themselves, less “ethnomethodological” potential or implicit-religious significance, it is suggested.



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of Â�religion to be acknowledged as “implicit” (as we sometimes say), that is, present and at work throughout the ordinary life of, for instance, the two ladies or the elderly gentleman, and allowed this fact to be itself recognised as being in natural accord with the logical expectation con­ sequent upon such frequent exhortation, rather than its being approached as though it was a surprising coincidence (or else, its reality being denied or ignored). The third of the trio of contingent happenings that, it is hoped, will shed some light on the meaning of the concept, was the (worrying) real­ isation that I was unable to choose (with any reasoned integrity, rather than random arbitrariness) which one of three possible “definitions” of it to use, when first making a sustained and formal presentation in my doctoral thesis. (Years later, I realised that I had used each of the three in turn, when describing the three “experiments” comprising the initial study.) I might now suggest that the inability to make a reasoned choice between them was a sign (not, of course, a proof), that the verbal expres­ sion in actuality points to a reality beyond itself. For a concept may be capable of definition, and may indeed be intentionally invented (fourness can be defined as being twice two-ness), but actual phenomena (such as apples, but regardless of their degree of materiality) can only truly be described, even from the overall sum of the points of view of their various dimensions, however numerous those may be. The Description of Implicit Religion: A Trio of Synonyms “Commitment” has become the most commonly used of the three descripÂ�tions, then, that, almost from the start, have been offered as nearly synonymous with the concept of Implicit Religion. No doubt this is partly because it is the briefest, and so most easily portable (it can most easily be inserted into the context as a substitute). However, in fact it is not quite so simple and straightforward as that, for the precise form that is preferred as a description, is “commitment(s).” This is in order to avoid giving the impression that any body (any individual person, or social group), is assumed to have only one, single, commitment. Indeed, should the expectation of specific findings be impossible altogether to avoid, then it seems more realistic to antici­ pate a plurality of commitments on the part of any but the most excep­ tional, individual or social, body. Such pluralities could, theoretically at least, take the form of a perfectly integrated hierarchy, in which one over-riding (or “under-lying”, if that be preferred, or “implicit”)

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commitment finds unified and complementary expression in all of the other commitments. Usually, however, a variety of commitments coexist in any particular body, with varying degrees of distinction (or sep­ aration), and varying degrees of integration (or conflict). Indeed, of such situations is drama, of whatever form, made. The particular value of this description, however, is its lack of speci­ ficity regarding the level of consciousness that is involved in the practice of such commitment(s). It allows, and indeed encourages, the study, on an equal footing, both of the most articulate and self-conscious young convert to a particular worldview, and of the never-articulated, habitual way of life of an elderly peasant who imbibed his religion on his moth­ er’s knee, with her milk. Advantage can, and so should (if we are to understand humans, as well as concepts), be taken of its simultaneous ability to refer to the sub­ conscious and unconscious, as well as to the conscious, including of course the self-conscious, and (why not?) to those rarer (but necessarily exceptional) moments, which we may call the sur-conscious. In this way, we may combine consideration of, on the one hand, both Pettazzoni’s comments about the lingering influence of “a hundred thousand generations” of homo sapiens (and the Kluckhohns’ comments about the continuing presence of palaeolithic trends), along with Stanley Cook’s regarding the religious character of the experience of the foetus; and on the other hand, Alister Hardy’s, and the subsequent Religious Experience Research Unit’s, studies of experiences of transcendence (along with Marghanita Laski’s study of moments of “ecstasy”). Likewise, on the one hand, we can combine Jeff Astley’s “ordinary theology”, or Giuseppe Giordan’s “common sense”, or Michael Pye’s “minimal”, or Tim Jenkins’ “everyday”, religion, with, on the other hand, that strato­ sphere of “ultimate reality and meaning” which Tibor Horvath, and his subsequent international network for the Study of Human Ideas of Ultimate Reality and Meaning, describe as “those facts, things, ideas, axioms, persons and values which people throughout history have con­ sidered ultimate (i.e. worldviews in the light of which humans under­ stand whatever they understand), or as supreme values (i.e. for which someone would sacrifice everything and which one would not lose for anything).” The second near-synonym is “integrating foci.” If “commitment” is pictured as operating at varying heights or depths of consciousness, then “integrating foci” can be pictured as involving varying widths or breadths of sociality. So the focal points can be variously seen as



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integrating the life of the individual or of the family or other small group, of the inherited community or of the voluntary association, of the legal corporation or of the general citizenry, of the nation or of humanity at large, of the species, planet or cosmos. The third of the three alternative descriptions runs, “intensive con­ cerns with extensive effects.” The likely pluralism, either of the Â�individual or of the group, continues to be catered for, as with “commitment(s)” and “foci,” but the polarity between the particular and the whole, between the focus and the field, which is simply implied in “commitment(s)” and in “integrating foci”, is here specifically spelled out. With the implicitly Â�religious, as with the explicitly religious, the “intensive concern” must be the commitment or focus of more than itself (must have “secular” components), if, indeed, it is actually to be religious (in any way) at all. A concern that lacks extensive effect may be tolerated as a hobby (or dismissed as a hobby-horse), but, as religion, in losing its facility to focus, it has lost its definitive, qualifying feature. This applies, whether the direction of the commitment and focus is from intensive to exten­ sive (as in the practice of a profoundly sacramental worldview, through a plethora of social activities), or from extensive to intensive (as with a variety of political activities, giving rise to a unifying moral belief). Thus the adjectival status of Secular would appear to be significant. It is not diminished by the invention of such nouns as Secularity, or Secularisation: they are abstractions or gerunds formed to describe a quality or process which is itself the true point of reference. However, it is relative, to the Religious. By contrast, the Religious is itself capable of being defined, as that which pertains to the Religious or monastic life (of the regulars professing the Regula), leaving the secular as simply the non-religious (non-monastic), as that ordinary which does not profess any (recognised) Rule. Yet, just as Plutarch asked whether anyone had ever discovered a city without a temple, so we may ask whether anyone has yet found a religion that was not concerned with the secular, a monastic profession that did not require practical habits, a Rule of Life that confined itself, at least in intention, to less than the whole of life. So a Ministry of Cults that hopes to cover all that is meant by the Religious appears to be as counter-cultural in the present as in the past. Its apparent agenda would be monastic life; its consequent remit would be the whole of (at least human) life. It is as untrue to reality (as unem­ pirical) as suggesting that the whole process of learning and education is restricted to the school curriculum, or health to medicines, or econom­ ics to money. Mis-understanding the nature of the Religious (and hence

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of the Secular) may succeed in obscuring many of the issues that they present, but cannot hope to solve problems that are real. The members composing a (successful, real) school, can no more be present, and yet pretend that they have left all their commitments and signs of loyalty somewhere else, than can the members of a (successful) football team. If the first of these three descriptions be aligned with psychological models, and the second with sociological or social-anthropological models, then this third description can be seen as reflecting the Study of Religion. It is aligned in particular with East Asian models, in which, in contrast to the would-be exclusiveness of Semitic religions, individuals are acknowledged as belonging to (or, making use of) multiple religions, which co-exist, socially and/or individually, notwithstanding their vary­ ing degrees of harmony or conflict. Not only does this approach appear more empirically fruitful, it also seems more empirically accurate, not least insofar as the Christian tradition is concerned. For only by over­ looking Jesus’s teaching regarding the competing claims (presumably not just for his contemporaries) of “God and mammon”, or by ignoring Paul’s subjective self-description (“data”) as still “striving”, and as still a “wretched” victim of competing desires, can the present situation be seen as exhibiting (what has been jocularly referred to, as) an “over-realised eschatology”, in which people have only one single faith. Currently at least, identity and integrity require recognition as “ideal ideas”, as “con­ summations, devoutly to be desired”. Meanwhile, in  empirical experi­ ence, they are no more single than they are all-embracing; whether their carriers are singular or plural, they remain both divided and incomplete. In addition, however, to these three synonyms for Implicit Religion, experience suggests the need for a trio of more explicit caveats, if only “for the avoidance of doubt,” as the legally-minded sometimes say. First, the concept of implicit religion is no more to be identified with a concept of implicit Christianity (such as Rahner spoke about), or indeed with any implicit version of any other particular existing reli­ gion, than it is, necessarily, to be identified with any particular existing form of irreligion. So, only their over-lapping character prevents there being more forms of implicit religion than there are individuals and groups on the face of the planet. Secondly, the possession of (or, one’s possession by) one or more implicit religions is neither admirable, in itself, nor regrettable. A dimen­ sion, simply, of human being, akin to the social or economic, to physi­ cality (and to spirituality) or secularity, its particular form(s) may invite intense approval or disapproval. However, as a general attribute of being



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or becoming human, we can “rejoice that we are not like the brute beasts,” only so long as we likewise rejoice regarding the development of consciousness and language, of meaning and choice, of all of which it is an inevitable part. It opens up opportunities: our opinion as to whether they are used for good or for ill, is another matter. Thirdly, the care taken to avoid identifying the concept of Implicit Religion with any particular expression or aspect of human nature, such as belief in gods, a moral sense, or a proclivity to devotion, in advance of the particular investigation and consideration of specific situations, is sim­ ply the wider application of what would appear to be a standard anthro­ pological approach. Briefly expressed as “any thing may be religious,” it by no stretch of the imagination implies that “every thing is religious”. That, indeed, would be as illogical and meaning-less as suggesting (as some seem to do), either that “nothing is religious,” or that “every thing is secular.” Indeed, the obvious difference between “any” and “every” thing, and between “may” and “is,” suggests that the curious elision of “any thing may be” into “every thing is,” is more of a psychological problem than a philosophical one. Comparable with the avoidance of personal data (described in footnote 2), it brings to mind the etymological origin of the description of one school of Greek philosophy as that of the Cynics: as dogs might seem to do (to those who lack the patience to try to observe, empathise and reason, and so understand), they immedi­ ately (and unproductively) merely bark. However, this more conceptual account of the idea of Implicit Reli­ gion, requires two further explanatory comments. The first is in answer to the question, Why call it Religious? Is this not an unwarranted expan­ sion of that term’s reference? The answer is rather simple: that, phenomenologically, this “Commit­ ment” is what the word meant, historically, and still means, in general usage (which, interestingly, is frequently more objective and neutral than much customary academic usage). For current usage is typified in such common sayings as, “I read the [news]papers religiously”; mean­ ing, I read them regularly (even if I am unable to practice my ideal per­ fectly), and yet voluntarily (my “compulsion” to do so is a moral one and voluntarily chosen, rather than automatic, like breathing, or inherited, like skin-colour); it is my intended (rather than inevitable, or enforced) way of living, at least for the present, but possibly for life, adopted as a possible way to the sort of life to which I aspire. This understanding of what “being religious” entails, is entirely in keeping, it will be noticed, with what “being [a] religious” meant in the

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Middle Ages (and still means, in canon law, so that most clergy are still properly described, not as religious, but as secular). Presumably the assumption, by the philosophes and their ideological successors, that the etymological origins of the term lay in classical rather than medieval Latin, reflects a worldview that also christened the “interval” since the classical period as the merely “Middle” Ages (and sought for personal ancestors among the patricians of ancient Rome), and looked to a con­ cordat that (despite so much evidence) gave (Roman Catholic) “reli­ gion” a monopoly of sacrality, and secularity a monopoly of rationality. It was the other side of that process of monasticising Christendom that began with Cluny and its reforming hildebrandine Popes. The answer to the other possible question, Why use such an emo­ tive  term as “religion”?, is simply because it raises more questions (regarding practice, for instance, as well as ideals). But any who cannot lay aside their personal reactions are welcome to speak of worldview, value system, core mission, etc: “better half a loaf than no bread at all”. The quest for absolute perfection should not be allowed to impede rela­ tive progress. The Testing of Implicit Religion: A Trio of Experiments Once “religion” had been granted substance, (by a naturally secular mind that was trying to explore its possible meaning(s)), then, as already indicated, it was a relatively short step to see its potential applicability (as a hypothesis), not only to the phenomenologically abhorrent, or to the ideologically irreligious, the blasphemous or truly “profane” (in the native English understanding of that word), but also to the out­ wardly nonreligious, the apparently secular (which Durkheim’s transla­ tors unforÂ�tunately misuse the word “profane”, to describe). Such an approach seemed to offer the advantages of seeing persons as persons (from their inside, so the speak): as possessing, not simply causes of their living and dying, but also as possessing (or even being possessed by) Causes for which they were living, and might possibly die; as being internally Determined about, as well as being externally determined by. Following this sensitisation towards what might loosely be called both the totality of the religious and its necessarily subjective core, both the unconscious and the intentional in human behaviour, at both the individual and the group level, it came as a surprise that no one else (at least, who was contacted in Britain) either seemed to be adopting



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this approach, or was aware of its potential. A combination of pertinac­ ity and serendipity, however, led to an invitation by Fred Welbourn (an anthropologist, or, rather, an Africanist, at the University of Bristol, and also an Anglican priest) to initiate such study.5 Philosophically deficient, and wishing to sow a seed in a pragmatically-inclined environment, it seemed best to conduct an experiment: would a search, for what in that initial year was still called “secular religion,” enhance an understanding of individuals, through the bringing into view, and casting of light upon, aspects of their behaviour and intentionality that might otherwise have remained unnoticed? So, firstly a hundred individuals were interviewed, over one, two, or even four hours, using fifty stimuli, beginning with, “What do you enjoy most in life?,” and ending with, “Who are you?” The earlier description of that fruitful discussion regarding compulsory worship in a boys’ school, may be allowed as a sample of the kind of methods involved, rather than repeating the full description given elsewhere.6 The conclu­ sions that were drawn, however, were (and remain) enlightening, at least to this student. The overwhelming impression given was of the awe that partici­ pants felt in regard to their own Selves (hence the initial capital): neces­ sarily inarticulable, nevertheless it functioned as the basis of both their ethic and their epistemology. To quote but a single, yet repeated, telling example: “I don’t object to being ticked off, if I’ve made a mistake at work, but I do object to being ticked off in front of other people”; and, (implied), “if that’s how I feel, then that must be how other people feel, so I should take note”. The results of the Interviews could be questioned on three counts, however: firstly that they were based primarily on verbal behaviour, which (secondly) had itself been susceptible to influence by the inter­ viewer, and thirdly that they depended upon its interpretation. In reply it could be said that the responses which were interpreted were, and are

5 ╇ Neither I, nor (probably) Fred, was familiar at that stage with the then very recent work of Thomas Luckmann and of Robert Bellah, in particular their (respective ) essays, The Invisible Religion: the problem of religion in modern society (London: MacMillan 1967), and Civil Religion in America (Daaedalus: Journal of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, XCVI (1), Winter 1967). 6 ╇ A full account is given in Edward Bailey, Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1997, and Leuven: Peeters, 2005). A report with a shorter com­ mentary appears in Edward Bailey, Implicit Religion: an Introduction, (London: Middlesex University Press,1998).

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still, available for others to examine; that the interviewer took care, by the way in which he introduced the interview and conducted it (burying his head in his writing-down of every spoken word, for instance) to avoid any apparent reaction, other than one of total fidelity to the data that they shared; and that the amour-propre of those interviewed also required that their data be both accurate and autonomous. Thus they often concluded by saying, “That’s what I think now, but you know you should come back in six months [or, “in a year”], to see what I say then.” Nevertheless, the prevailing tendency at that time among sociolo­ gists, and their followers in the media and Churches, was to assume that they alone were both self-aware and committed to searching for objec­ tivity in the data. So the choice of a second trial of the hypothesis that was implicit in the concept itself, made allowance for the possible exten­ sion of scientific and would-be universal questioning into a slightly smug or arrogant scepticism that amalgamated personal with imper­ sonal data, and failed to grasp that their very subjects had already like­ wise been recruited into the search for objectivity, and not least (for this was one of their central concerns), regarding their own selves. So the choice of the life of a public house (the stereotypical British “pub”) as the venue for the second study was primarily influenced by the desire to balance the necessarily individualistic character of the interviews with a setting that was inevitably more social. If the (concur­ rent and subsequent) observation, understanding and interpretation of human behaviour was, again, necessarily subjective, it is also always unavoidably restricted by the student’s own subjective potential. Never­ theless, although every public house no doubt has its own unique char­ acter, in this study the scene that was observed and described is capable (allowing for the intervening changes) of recognition and assessment by others, without their being dependent on access to the precise data of specific interviews. Both relatively full and relatively brief accounts of the life of the public house, in which the student worked as an assistant barman for about a hundred four-hour sessions, have been published, in the same contexts as the reports of the Interviews. So here it must suffice to cite the identification of a number of integrating foci, whose categorial une­ venness it was considered important to retain. They were: the embar­ rassment occasioned by the ritual of the individual’s “entrance” into the Â� “busy pub itself; the “trans-action” of buying the drink(s); the climactic time,” between 9.30 and “closing time,” which in those days was usually



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at 10.30 pm; the Â�independence, and yet inter-dependence, of the “pub­ lic” and “lounge” “sides,” epitomised by the door-less “doorway” between their actual bars; the handsome and carefully maintained (altar-like) two “bars” (which contrasted with their cheaper supports, against which cigarettes could be stubbed out), along with the “reredos” of illuminated and colourful (but virtually unused) bottles behind and above them; the manager, whose (“episcopal”) role consisted above all in being not roleridden but personal; the myth (in both the popular and technical senses) that “you get all types in a pub”; and the guiding ethos of “being a man [sic]”, with its essential criterion, of allowing others to be “their own man,” which was epitomised (negatively) when a stranger once bought drinks for all those standing with him at the bar, without allowing time for the development of reciprocity in his relationships with any of them (and so virtually preventing their “buying him one back”). The arena for the third experiment was also chosen with a slight regard to its communicative value, for the appeal of three-ness, with its convincing solidity, had long been observed, in areas as diverse as funny stories, tripod furniture, and Tripos exams (and Trinitarianism?). Notwithstanding this beneficial side-effect, the main motive was again a desire for balance; for the “public” in a public house is in fact self-Â� selecting. A residential community of 6,000 people, on the other hand, was far less select or transitory. Called Winterbourne (for no obvious reason: such stream(s) as it had, were hardly restricted to any one sea­ son), it is the only one, of the 30 or so communities of that name in Britain, whose name stands without prefix or suffix, or that has more than a few hundred people. An identifiable area and community, during the 36 years of observation (1970–2006), it was still an ecclesiastically autonomous parish, and the largest of the three communities of which the civil parish had long been composed. The observer’s role as Rector mandated an agenda of relationship (in theory, because of the constraints of time; nevertheless, officially, potentially, and ideally) with every one of the six thousand inhabitants. Thus, for instance, any one living in the parish was entitled to be buried in the churchyard, with, indeed, a funeral Service in the church, and likewise (assuming they were legally free to do so) to be married, or Baptised, in the parish church, in accordance with “the rites and cere­ monies” of the Church of England. It was not considered odd, therefore, for a resident in the Almshouses (of which, ex officio, the Rector was chair of Trustees) to ask him about her personal insurance policy; or for

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a member of the Methodist Church (the only other church in the par­ ish) to enquire about the location of a Buddhist centre in Bristol, for a visiting student. So the individual interviewees in their armchairs, and their succes­ sors standing at the bar or seated in upright chairs around the tables in the public house, were themselves succeeded by at least a degree of rela­ tionship with an extremely wide cross-section of individuals, by the continuous leadership of small groups, and by the exercise of a role that related both to the whole community and, for instance, to the various individual schools and as many as possible of the other organisations within it. Such roles have often been suspected of leading to the trim­ ming of others’ behaviour. However, whatever the case elsewhere, the members of this community maintained the independence for which they had historically been noted. Such individual autonomy was no doubt fortified by the public and continuing character of so many of the occasions of contact with the observer: any alternative behaviour would have been condemned as an example of “hypocrisy”, which lay at the very nadir of the national value-system. A number of “intensive concerns with extensive effects” emerged during the period of observation. Thus children were seen to be “the wilful divinities” (ultimate in value, but unpredictable in behaviour) of the community; experiences of someone (especially someone whose role gave them authority) being friendly, worked, like the blessing bestowed by sunshine, as a “revelatory ethic,” in a situation whose “profoundest solidarity” lay in a bedrock of mutually recognised individualism (on a par with the situation in the pub). Buildings provided a “sacramental language”; so that vandalism (e.g. of public benches) was met with (reit­ erated) “speechless-ness,” akin to the (similarly incomprehense-able) abomination of child-abuse. Surprisingly, at least to this observer, the church (both the building and all it contained and represented) remained, de facto, a (if not the) major symbol, both of the community as a whole and of many of its members. Also to this observer’s surprise, they were able to encapsulate their core commitment in a way that (ironically, in view of the comment that they were devoid of commitment), was remi­ niscent of Mass Observation’s 1948 report, Puzzled People, whose quali­ fying adjective has been described as possibly more applicable to the observers than to the people they observed: for many in the community described themselves in an avowedly credal way. They said, “Well, you see, I believe in … Christianity.”



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To repeatedly witness such a confession suffices to replace any doubt as to their individual sincerity, with the rather more fruitful question as to what is actually meant either by “Christianity”, or by “believe”, in this creed. The way in which “believing in” is being used, and so the meaning which is understood by it (say, “the symbol of that to which I give my overall allegiance”) seems to be closer to the canonical tradition than the understanding that usually seems to be simply assumed by many of the western world’s “intelligentsia”, in their failure to distinguish believing in from believing that. Yet it is implicit in the very word “creed”: credo, “I give [my] heart”. Likewise (if we may continue with this short exercise in “comparative religion”) this “ordinary” (i.e. popular, untutored) under­ standing of “Christianity” would seem to be both more spiritual, and more canonical, than that of those who suppose that the Christianity “in” which some of them say they do not believe, refers to a philosophy that is more ontological than moral, or (better) conative. If “the wisdom of the simple” consists in their ability to see through to the heart of complexity, perhaps they were expressing a longing for a “heavenly kingdom” of “righteousness”, in which peace and goodwill would prevail. Such a conclusion would seem to be in keeping with both the awe-full regard for the Self that ran through the Interviews, and the ethos of “Live and Let Live” (to quote the name of a pub in the neigh­ bouring parish) that underlay the life of the public house. The Study of Implicit Religion: A Trio of Developments When (to borrow Jay Demerath III’s description) this particular “entre­ preneur” of Implicit Religion was first introduced to Fred Welbourn (by Kenneth Grayston, Professor of Theology at the University of Bristol), in February 1968, it was with an explanation: that he (Fred) had for some years been advocating just such social-anthropological study of the “real” (i.e. widespread, but either ignored or else misunderstood) reli­ gious trends within western societies. Both the potential student and his supervisor felt that until such time as those who were better qualified were willing to take over, someone should set the ball rolling. So, when, within days of gaining an academic credential, he consulted David Martin about arranging meetings for any with similar interests, Fred must have been well pleased (even if he was too English, or Anglican, to say so). However, he did subsequently confess to surprise at the ability of

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(anthropologically untrained) Church of England clergy to tease out, for instance, the “sacramental” quality of the village hall, fruitfully com­ bining studious observation with neutral understanding (an empathetic subjectivity with a sophisticated objectivity). So the first of what became the “Denton conferences” (so named because they are held at Denton Hall, near Ilkley in Yorkshire) was held in 1978: the 35th will be held 11–13th May 2012. In 1983 also began two other series of gatherings that had always been anticipated as spin-offs from their academic progenitor: a short annual course for religious edu­ cationists, concluding with the 20th in 2002, and a thrice-annual study day for churchpeople, concluding with the 65th in 2004. Running along­ side these opportunities for others to contribute conceptually and empirically, their facilitator has himself been invited to speak in a vari­ ety of settings, from universities (including a students’ bar!) to church halls, mostly in Britain, Europe and North America, but also in New Zealand and South Africa, and in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangalore. A related yet distinct developmental stream can also be identified in the receipt of a number of academic invitations (in particular, three vis­ iting professorships), and in a number of academic sponsorships, both formal (in particular, of four scholars at four institutions, and of an endowed post at Cambridge University), and informal. A third stream, again related but distinct, consists of a fairly steady sequence of publications, mostly of chapters in books but sometimes of reports in less formal contexts, and in particular including (at this point in time) a quartet of single-authored volumes and a quartet of edited ones, to which was added in 1998 the serial journal Implicit Religion: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality (CSIRCS) (www.equinoxpub.com), which in 2011 moved up to four Issues a year. The growth of activity and interest in the concept of Implicit Religion may itself be seen as confirming the value of the original apprehension and initiative. However its potential is also vividly illustrated by first the recognition, beginning in the 1980s, of the validity (as a factor within intentionality), of the Spiritual as a dimension of human being, and then, taking off in the 1990s, by its practical application, especially (so far) in the fields of health, education and management, above all as a secular phenomenon. For, while the Spiritual has always been seen as a possible description of one aspect of Implicit Religion, the breadth of the latter concept should allay any remaining suspicions that the Spiritual is to be identified only either with the subjective or with the individual.



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That, however, could just be the beginning. Religion itself could, one day, be fundamentally seen as referring to the manner in which intentionality is exercised (monasticism having played the part of a prototype); and the various particular Religions that have so far been identified, may then be seen as the initial, explicit forms, among a bur­ geoning series of stereotypical ways in which human beings have exer­ cised their multifarious intentionalities. Such developments, may, or may not lie in the future. Meanwhile par­ ticipation in the exploration of the width and depth of this distinctively human facet in human being, conceptualised at present as their Implicit Religion, will be welcome!

List of Contributors Peter Achterberg is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His main research interests include processes of political, cultural, and religious change. His most recent research has appeared in Social Forces, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Socialisme en Democratie. Lubna Al-Kazi is professor of sociology and the Director of the women’s studies unit at Kuwait University. She has published and taught on wom­ en’s studies in the Arab Gulf Region. Stef Aupers is Associate Professor in Sociology at Erasmus Univer­ sity  Rotterdam. Much of his research deals with tendencies of ‘re-enchantment’ in the modern world. He has published in Dutch and international journals such as Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Contemporary Religion and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion on New Age spirituality, conspiracy culture and Internet culture. He is currently working on a monograph on online computer gaming and on a translation of his dissertation, entitled Under the Spell of Modernity: Sacralizing the Self and Computer Technology (forthcoming with Ashgate, 2010). Edward Bailey As a newly-ordained priest in Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1963–1965 (when the secularisation thesis was in its hey-day), Edward Bailey saw the significance of their professed religion in the lives of, at least some, “ordinary” people. As a school Chaplain in 1965–1968, he saw a similar role being played in other people’s lives, by beliefs, loyalties and commitments that were usually seen as “merely” secular. Few (if any) others seemed to see them as being similarly significant, so in 1968 he began their systematic study under the title of “secular”, or “implicit”, religion. In 1978 he held the first of the annual academic Conferences on Implicit Religion at Denton Hall, Ilkley, U.K., and in 1983 the first of the long-running, but now discontinued, meetings applying its insights within education and church life. Since 1997 he has been Visiting Professor at Middlesex, Staffordshire and Glyndwr Universities, and, since 1998, editor of Implicit Religion. In 2010 he was also elected President of the newly-founded British Association for the Study of Spirituality.



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Peter Beyer is professor of religious studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His specializations include religion and globalization, socio­ logical theory of religion, religion and migration, and religion in Canada. Publications include Religion and Globalization (Sage, 1994), Religion in the Process of Globalization (ed., Ergon, 2001), and Religions in Global Society (Routledge, 2006), Religion, Globalization, and CulÂ�ture (ed. with Lori Beaman, Brill, 2007), and Religious Diversity in Canada (ed. with Lori Beaman, Brill, 2008). He is currently completing a series of research projects on the religious expression of second generation immigrant young adults in Canada. Shun-hing Chan is an associate professor of religion and philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research focuses on sociology of reli­ gion, church-state relations, religion and social movements, and reli­ gions in Hong Kong and mainland China. He is editor and author of A Carnival of Gods: Studies of Religions in Hong Kong and Changing Church and State Relations in Hong Kong, 1950–2000 (with Beatrice Leung). Franco Garelli is Full Professor of Sociology of Culture and Sociology of Religion in the Political Science Faculty of the University of Turin, of which was the Dean for six years (2004–2010). He has carried out an intense program of studies and researches organized at both national and inter­ national level concerning two prevailing themes: the analysis of life styles and behavior models of the young in advanced modernity; and the study of the religious phenomenon in contemporary society, with particular attention to underline not only the changes that take place in the traditional religious confessions but also the new forms of religious expression and aggregation. He is a Fellow of the Italian Association of Sociology and he was a member of the Board of the International Society of Sociology of Religion (in the period 2001–2006). Alessandra L. González is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology of Reli­ gion Program at Baylor University in central Texas. She is the principal investigator of the Islamic Social Attitudes Survey Project (ISAS) which was made possible with support from the Baylor Institute for the Studies of Religion. Zhaohui George Hong is Professor of History at Purdue University Calu­ met and Co-Director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Religion at Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA. Earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland at College Park, USA, and has authored

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three books, edited and co-edited five books, and published more than eighty refereed articles and book chapters in the fields of modern China and economic history. Supported by major U.S. federal, state, private and international funding agencies, he has directed and/or co-directed 30 research, teaching, and programmatic projects in advancing interdis­ ciplinary research. Dick Houtman is Professor in Cultural Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and member of the editorial boards of Politics and Religion and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The “spiritualization” of religion and the “culturalization” of politics constitute his principal research interests. Recent papers have been published by Social Forces, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, British Journal of Criminology, Politics and Society and European Journal of Political Research. Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow CNRS-France. He has served as Director of the Centre for the International Studies and Research (CERI), Sciences Politiques, Paris. Current Director of the journal Critique Internationale. Member of the steering committee of ASPEN-France. Recent publications: Inde: la démocratie par la caste, Paris: Fayard, 2003; Indian’s Silent Revolution, London: Hurst, 2003; Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, New Delhi: Sage, 2008 (co-edited by Peter Van der Veer); Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, New Delhi/Princeton: Permanent/Princeton University Press. Willem de Koster (1984) is a Cultural Sociologist at Erasmus Univer­ sity  Rotterdam. He is finishing his Ph. D. thesis on the question how participation in online forums can be understood from offline social life. Along with Internet research he is interested in processes of cul­ tural, political and religious change in the West. His research has appeared in British Journal of Criminology, Information, Communication and Society, International Political Science Review and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Dr. Mohammed Maarouf is a progressive ethnographer, a leading Moroccan culturalist and author of a definitive recent ethnographic study on popular cultural and religious practices in Morocco, “Jinn



list of contributors

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Eviction as a Discourse of Power: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Moroccan Magical Beliefs and Practices” (2007). Ever since 2006, he has been working on the cultural embedding of political Islam and the awakening of subalterns in Morocco. Scenarios of cultural resistance are discussed in some of his works in press such as “The Cultural Foundations  of Islamists’ Practice of Charity in Morocco” (forthcom­ ing) and in some other works already published such as “The Islamist Spirit of capitalism” (2010) co-authored with Paul Willis, ‘Āšūrā’ as a Female Ritual Challenge to Masculinity (2009), and “Saints and Social Justice in Morocco” (2010). Marion Maddox is Director of the Centre for Research on Social Inclu­ sion at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She holds PhDs in Theology (Flinders, 1992) and Political Philosophy (UNSW, 2000) and has taught religious studies and political science in Australian and New Zealand universities. She has held several distinguished fellowships, including the Australian Parliamentary Fellowship (1999–2000), where she wrote her first book, For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics. She was a visiting professor at the Observatoire du Religieux, Sciences-Po-Aix in 2010. Her most influential book is God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 2005). Ricardo Mariano is professor of sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre city, Brazil. He took his doctorate at the São Paulo University in 2001. Professor Mariano is the author of Neopentecostals: Sociology of the new Pentecostalism in Brazil (Neopentecostais: Sociologia do novo pentecostalismo no Brasil, Loyola, 1999), and published several scientific articles on Pentecostalism, with special attention to relations between religion and public sphere. He is currently investigating the public debates on laicity involving the Concordat between the Holy See and the Brazilian government. Peter Mascini (1968) is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on cultural change as well as the legitimization, application, and enforcement of public policy. Recent papers have been published by Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Law and Policy, Regulation and Governance and International Migration Review.

330

list of contributors

Patrick Michel, sociologist and political scientist, is a Senior Research  Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Â�(CNRS – National Scientific Research Center) and a full Professor (Directeur d’études) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS – School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) (Paris). Former deputy scientific director of the Department of Human and Social Sciences at CNRS from 2002 to 2006, Patrick Michel is the direc­ tor of the Centre Maurice Halbwachs in Paris (a Research Unit affiliated with the CNRS, the EHESS and the ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure) and since 2008, the chairman of the section n° 40 (Power – Politics – Organization) of the Comité National de la Recherche  ScienÂ�tifique. In addition to his primary interest in  Central Europe, his research focuses on the theoretical aspects of the relation between politics and religion. His latest book [in collaboration with Jesús García-Ruiz], Comment Dieu sous-traite le salut au marché – Éléments pour une socioanthropologie politique des mouvements évangéliques à partir du cas latino-américain (provisional title), will be published in September 2011 (Economica, Paris). Ari Pedro Oro is Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. He took his doctorate at SorÂ�bonne Nouvelle, in Paris, in 1986. He has published the following books Avanço Pentecostal e Reação Católica (1996), Axé Mercosul (1999), Religião e política no Cone-sul (2006), Latinidade da América Latina (2008) and América Latina: identidades e representações em cinco países (2010). He also has been publishing several scientific articles on religion in Brazil and abroad. He is currently researching the relationships between religion and politics in Brazil as well as the transnationalization of Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal religions in Brazil and the Mercosur countries. Enzo Pace is Chair, Sociology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Padova (Italy). Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Past-President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR/SISR). Recent Publications: Los fundamentalismos, Mexico City, El Siglo XXI, 2006; “Salvation Goods, the Gift Economy and Charismatic Concern”, Social Compass, 2006 (47); Religion as Communication: The Changing Shape of Catholicism in Europe, in Na ncy Ammermann (ed.), Everyday Religion, New York, Oxford University Press; Introduzione alla sociologia delle religioni, Roma, Carocci, 2007;



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Globalization and the Conflict of Values in the Middlee Eastern Societies, in P. Beyer, L. Beaman (eds.), Religion, Culture and Globalization, Leiden, Brill 2007; Raccontare Dio. La religione come comunicazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008 (English forthcoming, Ashgate 2011), and Le religioni pentecostali, Roma, Carocci, 2010 (with A. Butticci). Johan Roeland (1977) is Postdoc Researcher in Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Assistant Professor in Sociology of Media, Religion and Culture at VU University Amsterdam. His research inter­ ests include religious changes in Northwestern Europe, evangelicalism and popular culture. His dissertation on subjectivization tendencies among Evangelical youth in the Netherlands, entitled Selfation: Dutch Evangelical Youth between Subjectivization and Subjection, was Â�published in 2009 by Amsterdam University Press. Jörg Stolz is professor of the Sociology of Religion at the University of Lausanne and Director of the Observatory of Religions in Switzerland (ORS). He currently serves his second mandate as a council member of the ISSR. Substantively he works on description and explanation of different forms of religiosity, Evangelicalism, secularization, and com­ parison of religious groups across religious traditions. Methodologically, he works with quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches. Theoretically, he works in a tradition of comprehensive and explanatory sociology. He has written « Die Zukunft der Reformierten. Gesells­ chaftliche Megatrends – kirchliche Reaktionen » (together with Edmée Ballif), has edited an issue of Social Compass on “Salvation goods and religious markets” and has co-edited the book La nouvelle Suisse religieuse. Risques et chances de sa diversité (with Martin Baumann). He is the author of many articles in leading sociology journals, among them “Explaining religiosity. Towards a unified theoretical framework” in the British Journal of Sociology. Jeroen van der Waal is currently finishing his PhD thesis entitled Unravelling the Global City Debate. Economic Inequality and EthnocenÂ� trism in Contemporary Dutch Cities, at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Besides the issues addressed in this thesis, his main research interests include the influence of cultural change on value orientations and voting behavior in the West. He has published in British Journal of Criminology, International Political Science Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Politics and Society and Urban Studies.

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Elena Zapponi, PhD in Sociology at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is currently an assistant researcher in anthropology of religion, University of Rome, La Sapienza. Her works are focused on the evolution of Santeria in Cuba and on syncretism and antisyncretism. She also worked on the reinvention of Catholic memory, identity, spirituality, religion and politics and Italian emigra­ tion in Argentina and Uruguay. Among her publications: Pregare con i piedi. In cammino verso FinisTerrae, Roma, Bulloni, 2008; Marcher vers Compostelle. Ethnographie d’une pratique pèlerine, Paris, AFSRHarmattan, in print.

Index Abortion, 218, 250, 256, 258–263, 294, 298, 302 Accommodation, 109–110, 166–168, 279, 285, 287 Afro-Cuban religions, 269, 273, 275–280 American slaves, 172, 173 Apocalyptic rhetoric, 44, 45 Assimilation, 109–110 Atheist, 263, 274, 292, 298, 299, 302, 305 Australian politics, 290, 294, 296, 299–302 Australian prime ministers, 292–300 Authoritarianism, 142–144, 146–148, 152–156, 190, 191 Believing, 21, 49, 52, 57, 59, 60, 305, 323 Brazil, 245–265, 280, 281, 329, 330 Brazil’s 2010 presidential election, 245, 255–265 Catholic associations, 217, 228 Catholic church, 10, 142, 177–191, 218, 219–221, 222, 224, 238, 241, 242, 246, 249, 252–254, 263, 265, 274, 275 fn. 15, 277, 301 Catholicism, 23, 191, 203, 216–219, 221, 222, 224–231, 234, 236, 240, 241, 242, 245–247, 263, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 277 Catholic values, 220, 222, 223, 225, 230, 231, 278 Christen principles, 173 Christianity, 6, 11, 12, 16, 22, 33, 38, 40, 41, 120, 124, 130, 162, 164, 165, 171, 173, 197, 198, 200–202, 207, 208, 217, 287, 291, 292, 294, 299, 303, 316, 322–323 Church, 6, 51, 74, 88, 120, 142, 160 fn. 2, 177, 203, 216, 246, 272, 288, 309 Church organization, 9, 14, 187, 189 Church registration, 168–169, 186, 187 Civil religion, 11, 16, 18, 22, 23, 301 Collective memory, 186 Conversion, 31, 36–43, 56, 58, 197–213, 248, 258 Crisis of the believable, 57

Cuba, 267–285 Cultural resistance, 140–141 Culture, 21, 53, 64, 74, 76, 94, 95, 103–105, 107, 108, 111, 136–141, 146, 148, 155, 156, 166, 202, 220–221, 222, 228, 233, 234, 240, 242, 246, 259, 267–270, 273, 278, 279, 284, 288, 296, 297, 299, 300–306, 311 Delocalized religious, 51 Democracy, 42, 49, 61, 69, 136, 216, 222, 229, 251, 261, 264 Desecularization, 3–5 Discrimination, 85, 97, 99, 100, 103, 105–106, 108, 110, 111, 172, 202, 257, 270, 273, 278 Electronic evangelism, 254–255 Evangelical churches, 256, 260, 261 Explanation, 35, 79, 86–88, 93–94, 100–111, 186, 280, 298, 300, 303, 323 Friend-enemy, 30, 31, 35, 38 Fundamentalisms, 3, 21, 22, 34, 60, 61, 97, 251 Gender, 64–83, 101, 105, 294 Generation, 45, 69, 74, 76, 83, 99, 101–102, 106–107, 274, 283, 301, 314 Gillard, J., 293, 294, 298–300 Globalization, 3, 5–16, 18–20, 21, 49, 55, 57, 59, 64, 221, 241 Habana, 267–268, 282–285 Howard, J., 292–298, 300, 303–305 Human rights, 136, 177, 191, 201, 205, 252, 253, 258 Immigration, 45, 49, 101–103, 106–107, 111, 140, 241 Implicit religion, 309–325 Integration, 56, 59, 85–111, 222, 228, 241, 306, 314 Interaction, 79 fn. 3, 79 fn. 4, 91, 93, 99–100, 102, 108–109, 111, 143, 148, 180, 182, 187–189, 190, 269, 283

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Inter-religious competition, 255–256, 2245 The Invisible Religion, 319 fn. 5 Islam, 8, 12, 16, 22, 23, 24, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 48, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57, 58–59, 70–72, 74–75, 77, 79–83, 104, 120, 124, 136–140, 142, 144, 145, 155, 156, 171, 197, 200 Islamism, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 152–156, 202 Islamist leadership, 135–156 Italy, 124, 216–219, 221–226, 231, 234, 238, 241, 242, 265 Kuwait, 64–83 Maraboutism, 137, 147, 155, 156 Martyrdom, 30–45 Modernization, 16–18, 21, 64, 65, 67, 217, 246 Monarchism, 14, 135, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 155 Morocco, 135–156 Multiculturalism, 140, 241 Myth, 36, 37, 59, 139, 145, 148, 152, 154, 156, 208, 209, 281, 321 National Congress, 250, 253, 256, 261 National identity, 42, 56, 264, 268, 280–282 Nation-state, 14–16, 18, 24, 27, 55, 220 Neo-Pentecostalism, 50, 56, 60 Norm, 45, 57, 64, 68, 74, 80, 85, 92, 94, 101, 103–105, 106, 111, 306 Orichas, 269–272, 280–285 Pentecostal churches, 249, 255, 277 fn. 18 Pluralisation, 3–27, 57, 245–248, 265 Pluralism, 42, 216–219, 223, 227, 229, 240, 241, 264, 274, 315 Political affiliation, 76, 82, 229 Political attitudes, 69, 79, 83, 231–240 Political Catholicism, 224–231, 242 Political deficit, 54 Political fundamentalism, 60 Political religion, 9, 24, 60 Politics, 30–45, 50, 61, 64–83, 89, 120, 135, 139, 140, 197–213, 216–242, 245–265, 267–285, 288, 290, 294, 297, 300–303, 305 Popular culture, 137, 156

Popular Islam, 83, 137–138, 140, 156 Post-secular, 3–5, 132 Post-Westphalian, 3–27 Poverty of rights, 160–173 Property rights, 172, 262 Protestant house church in China, 160–173 Public aspirations, 121–131 Public revitalization, 119–132 Recognition policy, 109–110, 111 Reenchantment, 48 Regla Ocha, 269 Reinvention of tradition, 39 Religion Religion in public life, 121, 125 Religion in public sphere, 22, 24, 50 fn. 6, 105, 122, 216–224 Religiosity, 69, 70–71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 102, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 217, 219, 231–240, 290, 295, 296, 298, 301, 312 Religious belonging, 21, 38, 58, 69, 91, 95, 99, 106, 222, 234–240, 247, 256, 257, 271, 282, 284, 316 Religious diaspora, 106–107, 224–227, 229 Religious freedom, 24, 109, 160–163, 165, 166, 168, 172, 177, 180–186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 200, 203, 204, 231, 242, 249, 250, 260–262, 274–278 Religious minority, 10, 16, 23–24, 236, 251 Religious pluralism, 219, 264, 274 Religious (de-)privatization, 58, 125, 287, 290–296, 305 Religious violence, 32, 35, 40, 97, 105, 145, 170, 173, 207–211 Religious voting, 122–123, 125–126, 128–130, 131, 242, 288, 290, 297 Rights protection, 172 Santería, 267–285 Secularism, 5, 18, 21, 23, 42, 136, 256, 257, 265, 287 Secularization, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13, 16–22, 48, 52, 107, 119, 120–121, 130, 132, 217, 219, 223, 242, 254, 263, 265, 287–295, 302, 305, 315 Secularization thesis, 17, 18, 287, 289 Secular religion, 312, 319 Separation between church and state, 15, 162, 246, 265, 275

index 335 Social closure, 97 fn. 19, 102 fn. 22, 105–106, 108, 111 Social mechanism, 85–111 Spirituality, 22, 25, 120, 137, 139, 142, 197, 316 Syncretism, 272, 273, 284 Three-Self Church (TSC), 161, 162, 164, 165, 167 Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), 160 fn. 2, 161, 162, 167 “Time of simultaneity,” 55, 56 Transculturation, 269, 271–273, 277, 284 Transterritoriality, 56 Unconscious religion, 314, 318

Varieties of secularisms, 18, 21, 23 Vatican, 182, 188, 216, 219, 225, 246, 247, 253, 257, 261 Vatican Council II, 177 fn. 1, 191, 218, 226 Voting behaviour, 122, 123, 125–126, 128, 129, 131 Westphalian, 9, 10, 12–16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25 Workers’ Party, 257, 259, 260, 263 World religions, 12 Yoruba tradition, 281