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Article Excerpt
Starting from the puzzling effects of religion on conflict, both its escalation and deescalation, this article investigates the role of religion in maintaining boundaries (sacred/profane, clean/unclean, good/evil, etc.) that become constitutive of "self" and "society." The conceptual tools developed in this context are then applied to the issue of "fundamentalism" in contemporary politics. Keywords: Religion, conflict, reconciliation, boundaries, self.
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The intersection of religion and international relations has become a major focus for the analysis of contemporary international relations. The demise of the Cold War and the emergence of new patterns of conflict, often with a strong ethnoreligious dimension, as well as the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath, have all called into question prevailing notions about the secular nature of modernity. Moreover, even long before Samuel Huntington's fateful predictions of clashes between civilizations, (1) the Iranian "Islamic revolution" (2) had taken both policymakers and analysts by surprise. (3)
More disturbing still, the idea of an Islamic republic had wide resonance throughout much of the international system. It gave rise to renewed claims about anti-Western or antimodernist forms of political identity, claims that disrupted the settled assumptions shaping the prevailing traditions of IR theory. Neither the distribution of capabilities nor the preferences of groups and actors could be assumed to be a sufficient foundation for such theories. Moreover, the emergence of a state led by a militant clergy raised once again the old problem of the impact of "revolutionary" states on the stability of the modern international order. (4)
Given all these contexts, the conflict-enhancing potential of religion is familiar enough. Nevertheless, the problematic of religion and international politics is much broader. After all, we also find major efforts at peacemaking that have been undertaken by various denominations (5) and religious groups, (6) ranging from Cambodia to South Africa, as well as the painful efforts in Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Mozambique, and even Bosnia. (7) Even if these efforts were frequently unsuccessful and the resulting peace was very fragile, it would be foolish to neglect this potential of religion in regulating conflict, particularly since secular solutions have not done much better. Rather, the ambivalent effect of religion on politics and social life presents us with both practical and theoretical paradoxes.
Practically, we encounter the paradox that religion seems to be a cause of conflict as well as of conflict resolution. The effects of religion in both exhorting men to peace and of justifying violence in defense of the "sacred" has been widely noted. Such ambivalence, I argue here, is not accidental, but intrinsic to the experience of the sacred. (8) It cannot be eliminated or parceled out in order to make for a clearer, unambiguous, more "scientific" causal imputation of the factor of religion in social life.
This latter problem, in turn, issues in a challenge to our theoretical understanding, which represents the second paradox. It calls into question our conventional understandings of causality; that is, of explanations that are given in terms of antecedent (or efficient) causes. Since religion apparently can cause peace as well as conflict, no clear overall picture of the importance of religion emerges from a broad survey aiming at establishing some valid causal generalization or universal law.
This observation often leads to the argument that religion is no more than a form of rationalization for other factors, like material interests or power resources, that are taken to be the real causes. Such a stance misdiagnoses the problem for the following reasons. While the notion of "interest" is to some extent neutral in that it can comprise ideal as well as material factors (so that interests are nothing more than a black box for the goals being pursued under conditions of rationality), an interest-explanation is only nontautological when it specifies in advance what the interest in question is. For that we need a substantive theory able to specify the content of those interests that can serve as an explanans. And here we do see that people frequently seem to pursue nonsecular goals that are not reducible to modern or liberal notions of interest. Only if we assume that we, as outside observers, have privileged access to the true interests of a person (a notion that can hardly be squared with the essential liberal tenet that it is the individual who is the ultimate judge of his or her interest) can the argument that religion is merely a rationalization even be made. (9) Consequently, as I argue below, five distinct but interrelated problems need to be addressed.
First, the conceptualization of religion is faulty if we consider it to be some form of privately held belief, even if this interpretation has become very common. Even in the West, the privatization of religion was the result of a long political evolution that established toleration. But the historical nature of this development should alert us to the fact that a privately held religious belief is a contingent fact, not a feature defining the phenomenon.
Second, religion provides us with an important focus for analyzing the context of agents and structures through the constitution of communities and of the "self" (as a person), precisely because the "other" is often "God."
Third, in taking the historical nature of our conceptual apparatus seriously, we are also called upon to correct our traditional concepts of secularization and of modernity (with which it seems to go hand in hand) as an unproblematic ordering scheme based on exclusion. Two observations are here in order that cast serious doubt on such a taxonomy. One is reflected in de Tocqueville's analysis of the United States and the role religion plays there in public life, a role that seems counterintuitive given the strict formal separation of church and state. The other concerns the more recent discussion of "political religions" and the allegedly "Gnostic" roots of modern totalitarian movements. Both deserve a brief discussion.
To Tocqueville we owe the insight that the banning of religion from public life on the basis of a rigid separation of church and state remained in the United States, much more than in Europe, grounded in a larger intersubjective understanding informed by Christianity. Thus Tocqueville draws attention to the fact that in the United States "it is not only mores that are controlled by religion, but its sway extends over reason." (10) That this sequestering of religion within modernity was far from a definitive solution to the problem is evidenced by the periodic reopening of the same issues by "secularist" figures as far removed from each other as Carl Schmitt and John Rawls. Schmitt believed not only that all significant concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized religious concepts, but that a functioning state cannot do without the religious aura of these concepts, even though they have to be purged of their theological underpinnings. Rawls, on the other hand, firmly stands on Kantian grounds, dredging out "of public life as much cultural density and depth as possible so that the muddy 'metaphysical' and 'religious' differences don't flow into the pure water of public reason." (11)
For Eric Voegelin (12) and Karl Lowith, (13) on the other hand, it is precisely the secularization of the sacred that represents the danger. Here Voegelin sees the crucial distinction within the religious discourse itself--that is, the difference between religion as the experience of the sacred and religion as a gnosis, or doctrine of self-redemption. When this "knowledge" gets transferred to the political realm, it replicates itself there as the difference between political thought and (totalitarian) ideology. Lowith, on the other hand, sees in the very ordering scheme provided by the philosophy of history a "secularization" of the biblical conception of time and history that was foreign to classical political thought. It decisively shaped modernity in that it claims that all events can be considered within one frame of reference, within the collective singular of "history," (14) whether as the Hegelian Spirit coming into its own, the Marxian idea of a future communism, or as Francis Fukuyama's more recent popularization of claims about the end of history. (15)
Lowith's interpretation was hotly contested in turn by Hans Blumenberg, (16) who saw modernity developing as a response to the reemergence of the problem of the will in the Middle Ages and its crucial role in the formation of Protestant theology. A new understanding of God as the wilful creator of a contingent world rather than as the source of order in an already existing and everlasting cosmos provided an opening for new scientific insights and new political projects no longer rooted in an unchangeable order of things.
Whatever position we take on such claims, it seems clear that, paradoxically, secularism appears to be not an entirely new or alternative symbolic form to religion but represents its continuation, whether by avowedly providing a universal and transhistorical perspective on the world, by endowing state structures with a sacred character, or by promising redemption on the basis of an all-encompassing foundational lore.
Thus we return to our previous discussion and reach the fourth point: religion as a symbolic system and set of collective representations enriches our understanding of the impact of ideas on action. In traditional accounts, in which ideas (17) become independent or intervening variables, many of the important functions of ideas are passed over as they concern not causal attributions but rather questions of how something was possible and what it was a case of. As already mentioned, these questions have a different status (18) and require different logical and empirical operations for answering them, as I show below.
Finally, by dealing with the phenomenon of religion largely in terms of ideas--that is, of "doctrine" only--while neglecting the lived practices emerging from the interpretation of religious prescriptions, one commits the same fallacies that occur when law is analyzed only as a "system of norms," rules, and principles. The notion of a static and logically closed system of norms misrepresents law in important respects. By abstracting the norms from their application to concrete "cases," in which frequently multiple decisions are logically possible, one misses the fundamental point that closure occurs only in the application, and thus that this operation might require analysis and justification beyond logic and even "the law" (or the scripture). (19)
Similarly, to consider only the doctrinal aspect of religion and neglecting the important role that teachings and interpretation play in actual practice, is to mistake the "word" for the "spirit." It would be to neglect, for example, the important role played by the clergy in political mobilization strategies, and how conflict escalation can be avoided on the basis of nonscriptural precepts or reconciliation practices. In other words, even the recognition that religion as a cultural system is not causative but constitutive of our social practices is not sufficient for an adequate analysis as long as we remain on the level...
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