Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics

Edited byJeffrey Haynes

Contents

v

List of figures viiiList of tables ixList of contributors xi

1 Introduction 1Jeffrey Haynes

Part I: The world religions and politics 9

2 Buddhism and politics 11Peter Friedlander

3 Christianity: protestantism 26Paul Freston

4 The Catholic Church and Catholicism in global politics 48Allen D. Hertzke

5 Confucianism, from above and below 64Michael D. Barr

6 Hinduism 79James Chiriyankandath

7 Islam and Islamism 92Andrea Teti and Andrea Mura

8 Shiism and politics 111Mohammad Nafissi

9 Judaism and the state 128Shmuel Sandler

Part II: Religion and governance 143

10 Secularisation and politics 145Steve Bruce

11 Religious fundamentalisms 159Jeffrey Haynes

12 Religion and the state 174John Madeley

13 Does God matter, and if so whose God? Religion and democratisation 192John Anderson

14 Religion and political parties 211Payam Mohseni and Clyde Wilcox

15 Religion and civil society 231David Herbert

16 Religious commitment and socio-political orientations:Different patterns of compartmentalisation among Muslims and Christians? 246Thorleif Pettersson

Part III: Religion and international relations 271

17 Integrating religion into international relations theory 273Jonathan Fox

18 Religion and foreign policy 293Jeffrey Haynes

19 Transnational religious actors and international relations 308Giorgio Shani

20 Religion and globalization 323David Wessels

Part IV: Religion, security and development 341

21 On the nature of religious terrorism 343Adam Dolnik and Rohan Gunaratna

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22 Conflict prevention and peacebuilding 351Atsuhiro Katano

23 Religion and women: Canadian women’s religious volunteering:compassion, connections and comparisons 366Brenda O’Neill

24 Religion and international development 385Gerard Clarke

25 Changing the climate of religious internationalism:evangelical responses to global warming and human suffering 403Noah J.Toly

Index 419

CONTENTS

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1Introduction

Jeffrey Haynes

1

Prior to the eighteenth century and thesubsequent formation and development ofthe modern (secular) international statesystem, religion was a key ideology thatoften stimulated political conflict betweensocietal groups. However, following thePeace of Westphalia in 1648 and the sub-sequent development of centralised statesfirst in Western Europe and then viaEuropean colonisation to most of the restof the world, both domestically and inter-nationally, the political importance of religion significantly declined.

In the early twenty-first century, how-ever, there is a resurgence of – often politi-cised forms of – religion. This trend hasbeen especially noticeable in the post-coldwar era (that is, since the late 1980s),notablyamong the so-called ‘world religions’(Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism,Hinduism, Islam and Judaism). Regardingimportant events in this context, manyobservers point to the Iranian revolutionof 1978-9 – as it marked the ‘reappear-ance’ of religion (in this case, Shii Islam) asa significant political actor in Iran, a coun-try that like Turkey, with its Sunni Muslimmajority, decades before had adopted aWestern-derived, secular developmentmodel.

Since the late 1970s, numerous otherexamples of the growing political influ-ence of religion have been noted – withthe partial exception of Europe, especially

its western segment. Europe is widely seenas an exception, because most regionalcountries are now very secular, with reli-gion squeezed from public life. Among‘developed’ countries and regions, how-ever, Europe’s position contrasts with thatof the USA. More than half of allAmericans claim regularly to attend reli-gious services, three or four times theEuropean norm. In addition, eight words –‘In God We Trust’ and the ‘United Statesof America’ – appear on all US currency,both coins and notes.The continuing pop-ular significance of religion in the USA isto some degree a cultural issue, deriving inpart from the worldview of the originalEuropean settlers in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, many of whomshared an Anglo-Protestant culture. Thishas stayed an important cultural factoruntil the present time.

Elsewhere in the world, since the late1970s we have seen increased politicalinvolvement of religious actors withinmany countries, as well as internationally.Much attention is often focused upon so-called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, particu-larly in the Middle East, to the extent thata casual observer might assume that theentire region is polarised religiously andpolitically between Jews and Muslims.Thisis partly because both groups claim ‘own-ership’ of various holy places, includingJerusalem, while conflict between them

is also a result of the plight of the continu-ing conflict between Israel and the (mostlyMuslim) Palestinians. There are also otherpolitical issues in the region – notably the large number of non-democratic gov-ernments – that have also encouragedwidespread political involvement of vari-ous Islamist actors.1 In addition, Islamistsare also active in, inter alia, Africa, CentralAsia, and South East and East Asia.

However, it is not only Islamists whopursue political goals related to religion. Inofficially secular India, there have been significant recent examples of militantHinduism; many stemmed from, but werenot confined to, the Babri Masjid mosqueincident at Ayodhya in 1992. This eventwas instrumental in transforming thecountry’s political landscape, to the extentthat a ‘Hindu fundamentalist’ political party,the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), swiftlygrew to political prominence. From themid-1990s, the BJP served in several coali-tion governments and until May 2004 –when the BJP lost power to a resurgentCongress Party - it was the leading partyin government.2 In addition, Jewish religious parties currently serve in theOlmert government in Israel, while theRoman Catholic Church was a leadingplayer in the recent turn to democracy in,among others, Poland, South Africa andseveral Latin American countries. In sum,there are numerous examples of recentreligious involvement in politics in variousparts of the world, in both domestic andinternational contexts.

Debates about the current politicalimportance of religion also include a focusupon various issues that can be groupedtogether under the rubric: ‘Religion,Security and Development’. What unitesthem is a common concern with theimpact of religion on conflict and devel-opment issues and outcomes. Amongthem can be noted Samuel Huntington’scontroversial thesis about ‘clashing civilisa-tions’, with religion and culture key

factors, while others stress the potential of religion to help resolve political conflictsand be a major component of peacebuild-ing. Scholars also focus upon the influenceof religion on various manifestations of ter-rorism and, more generally, the post-9/11‘War on Terror’ (now known as ‘The Long War’), as well as the significance ofreligion in relation to the develop-mental position of females. Finally, a newreligion-linked controversy has emerged: adebate between ‘religion and science’ onthe relative scientific merits of Darwin’sTheory of Evolution and ‘IntelligentDesign’.

In sum, a variety of religious actors andfactors are now involved in various politi-cal issues and controversies. For manyobservers, this ‘return’ of religion is bothnovel and unexpected: until recently, itappeared that religious actors could safelybe ignored in both politics and interna-tional relations because they appeared tobe collectively insignificant. Now, how-ever, governments, analysts and observerswould all agree that things have changedin various ways. This book examines therecent ‘return’ of religion to politics andinternational relations.

The book approaches this issue as fol-lows.The first part of the book compriseseight essays under the collective heading:‘The World Religions and Politics’.The fol-lowing religions are examined: Buddhism,Christianity: Protestantism, Christianity:Catholicism and the Catholic Church,Confucianism, Hinduism, Sunni Islam,Shia Islam, and Judaism.The overall aim isto illustrate the contention that in recentyears, around the world, each of these reli-gious traditions has engaged for a varietyof reasons with a variety of political issuesand controversies.

In the second part of the book, thefocus turns to the relationship between‘religion and governance’.The seven essaysthat comprise this section are on the fol-lowing topics: secularisation and politics,

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religious fundamentalisms, religion andthe state, religion and democracy, religionand political parties, religion and civilsociety, and religious commitment andsocio-political orientations.

The third part is concerned with ‘religion and international relations’, andcomprises four essays; religion and inter-national relations theory, religion and foreign policy, religious transnationalactors and politics, and religion and globalisation.

The final part of the book is made up of five chapters on the overall theme of‘religion, security and development’ andincludes the following topics: terrorism,conflict prevention and peacebuilding,religion and gender, faith-based develop-ment aid, and religion, climate change andhuman suffering.

In short, the overall rationale for theproject is to provide a definitive survey ofwhat is currently happening in relation tothe interaction of religion and politics,both domestically and internationally,withregard to a variety of issues.

Examining a more general and complexrelationship between religion and politicsin the contemporary world, the book discovers that, apparently irrespective ofwhich religious tradition we are con-cerned with, many religious ideas, experi-ences and practices are all significantlyaffected by the impact of globalisation on both politics and international rela-tions. The impact of globalisation isencouraging many religions to adopt newor renewed agendas in relation to a varietyof religious, social, political and economicconcerns. It is also stimulating many reli-gious individuals, organisations and move-ments to look not only at local andnational issues and contexts but also tofocus on regional and international envir-onments. We will see that in many casessuch concerns are focused in two genericareas: social development and human rights;and conflict and conflict resolution.

Social development and humanrights

Most analyses of religion and politics focuson economic, social and/or cultural issues,including the economic range and socialand cultural significance of the activities oftransnational corporations (TNCs). Thisoften leads to the perception that TNCs aretaking economic power both from govern-ments and citizens.This comes in the con-text of what is often understood assignificant downsides to economic global-isation: the apparent mass impoverishmentof already poor people, especially in thedeveloping world.These circumstances haveled to a new focus for numerous religiousorganisations, concerned with trying toredress these imbalances, reflecting moregenerally a concern with multiple – social,economic and human rights – concerns.This focus is manifested in various ways,including: new religious fundamentalisms,support for anti-globalisation activities, suchas anti-World Trade Organisation protests,and North/South economic justice efforts.In sum, recent religious responses to global-isation have often included a stress on socialinterests, manifested in various ways, whichtogether go way beyond the confines ofwhat might be called ‘church’ or more generally ‘religious’ life.

These concerns are now increasinglypursued within inter-faith contexts. Inrecent years, various inter-faith religiousforums have sought to bring sustainedconcern to social development issues –and by extension – human rights issuesthrough an inter-faith focus. For example,there is the well known World FaithsDevelopment Dialogue (WFDD), an ini-tiative that, encouraged by the WorldBank, sought to map areas of convergenceamong various separate religious faiths’development agendas. Many shared a focuson relationships of service and solidarity,harmony with the earth, and the vital but – necessarily limited – contribution of

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material progress to human developmentand satisfaction.

A senior World Bank figure, KatherineMarshall, delivered a speech in April 2005that seemed to be especially significant inemphasising that the World Bank nolonger believed ‘that religion and socio-economic development belong to differentspheres and are best cast in separate roles –even separate dramas’.This observation wasbased on a recognition that around theworld both religious organisations and(secular) development agencies often sharesimilar concerns: how to improve (1) thelot of materially poor people, (2) the soci-etal position of those suffering from socialexclusion, and (3) unfulfilled humanpotential in the context of glaring develop-mental polarisation within and betweencountries, which the World Bank nowaccepts, has arisen in part because of thepolarising impact of globalisation (Marshall2005). Marshall’s speech also emphasisedthat while in the past religion was under-stood by the World Bank to be primarilyconcerned with ‘otherworldly’ and ‘world-denying’ issues, it now accepted that reli-gion can play a significant role in seekingto achieve developmental goals for millionsof people, especially in the developingworld.The Bank also now recognises thatissues of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, as well as thoselinked to social and economic justice, arecentral to the teachings of all the worldreligions (that is, Buddhism, Christianity,Hinduism, Islam and Judaism).This realisa-tion is influential in highlighting: (1) howrelatively marginal most current manifesta-tions of religious fundamentalism are, yet (2)at the same time,potentially increasingly thelikelihood that disadvantaged people mightturn to various religious fundamentalismscompared to people who are happy andconfident in their developmental positions.

Reflecting such concerns, recent yearshave seen regular ‘Leaders’ Meetings’, con-vened to enable religious leaders to try toaddress these issues. One such meeting was

held in Canterbury, England, in October2002, hosted by James Wolfensohn, thenpresident of the World Bank, and DrGeorge Carey, at the time head of theworldwide Anglican communion ofaround 70 million people.The main pur-pose of the meeting was to bring togetheran important group of leaders ‘from theworld’s faith communities, key develop-ment organisations, and from the worlds ofentertainment, philanthropy and the pri-vate sector’. Linked to the MillenniumDevelopment Goals announced in 2000,with the aim of achieving them by 2015,key themes addressed at the meetingincluded: poverty, HIV/AIDS, gender,conflict and social justice. Participantsaccepted that poverty, HIV/AIDS, con-flict, gender concerns, international tradeand global politics explicitly link all theworld’s countries and peoples – rich andpoor – into a global community. Anothermain theme was the dualistic impact ofglobalisation,with its differential impact onrich and poor countries. The meetingrevealed a growing sense of religious soli-darity that highlights the urgency of devel-oping shared responsibility and partnershipto deal with collective problems facinghumanity.Yet it is crucial to move from talkto action: as much more needs to be doneto progress from expressions of shared reli-gious solidarity in response to shareddevelopment problems to a realisation ofpractical plans involving collaborationbetween the worlds of faith and develop-ment in confronting major developmentissues (Marshall and March 2003).

Conflict and conflict resolution

The second issue that informs many of the chapters of this book is also linked tothe impact of globalisation: religion’sinvolvement in both conflict and conflictresolution in various parts of the world.A starting point for our analysis in this

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regard was to note that globalisation bothhighlights and encourages religious plural-ism. But religious responses may well bedifferent. This is because some religions,including Judaism, Christianity and Islam(sometimes known as the ‘religions of thebook’, because in each case their authorityemanates principally from sacred texts,actually, similar texts) claim what Kurtzcalls ‘exclusive accounts of the nature ofreality’, that is, only their religious beliefsare judged to be true by adherents (Kurtz1995: 238).

As globalisation results in increasedinteraction between people and communi-ties, the implication is that not only areencounters between different religious tra-ditions likely to be increasingly commonbut also that there will be various outcomesas a result: some will be harmonious, otherswill not. Sometimes, the result is whatKurtz has called ‘culture wars’ (Kurtz 1995:168).These can occur because various reli-gious worldviews encourage different alle-giances and standards in relation to variousareas, including the family, law, educationand politics. As a result, conflicts betweenpeople, ethnic groups, classes and nationscan be framed in religious terms. Such reli-gious conflicts seem often to ‘take on“larger-than-life” proportions as the strug-gle of good against evil’ (Kurtz 1995: 170).This may be noted in relation to certainreligious minorities who may regard theirown existential position – for example,Muslim minority communities in Thailand,the United Kingdom, France, thePhilippines and India – to be unacceptablyweakened because of actual or perceivedpressure from majority religious communi-ties – Buddhists in Thailand, Christians inBritain, France and the Philippines, andHindus in India – to conform to the normsand values of the religious and culturalmajority.

There are many examples of religiousinvolvement in recent and current nationaland international conflicts. For example,

stability and prosperity in the Middle Eastis a pivotal goal, central to achieving generalpeace and the elimination of poverty in theregion.Yet the Middle East is particularlyemblematic in relation to religion – in partbecause the region was the birthplace ofthe world’s three great monotheistic reli-gions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism).This brings with it a legacy not only ofshared wisdom but also of conflict – acomplex relationship that has impacted inrecent years on countries as far away asThailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, theUnited States and Britain. A key to peacein the region may well be achievement ofsignificant collaborative efforts among dif-ferent religious bodies, which along withexternal religious and secular organisa-tions, for example from Europe and theUnited States, may through collaborativeefforts work towards developing a newmodel of peace and cooperation to enablethe Middle East to escape from what manysee as an endless cycle of religious-basedconflict. Overall, this emphasises that reli-gion may be intimately connected, andnot only in the Middle East, both to inter-national conflicts and their prolongationand to attempts at reconciliation of suchconflicts. In other words, in relation tomany international conflicts, religion canplay a significant, even a fundamental role,contributing to conflicts in various ways,including how they are intensified, chan-nelled or reconciled. In addition, we alsosaw that religion has a key part to play inresolution of conflicts in other parts of theworld, including South Asia (notablyIndia/Pakistan) and Africa (for example, inrelation to the recently ended civil war inSudan). We also noted its involvement inthe still simmering civil war in Sri Lanka,between the minority (Hindu) Tamils andthe majority (Buddhist) Sinhalese.

In sum, religion is becoming a moreimportant factor in relation to both politicsand international relations in many parts ofthe world; yet, it would be incorrect only

INTRODUCTION

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to focus on the links with conflict.To doso, would mean that we would be likely to overlook the many recent and currentexamples of religious involvement inattempts at conflict resolution. On theother hand, the fact remains that manycurrent international conflicts have reli-gious aspects that can exacerbate bothhatred and violence and make the conflictsthemselves exceptionally difficult toresolve. Hans Kung, an eminent RomanCatholic theologian, claims that

the most fanatical, the cruelest political struggles are those that have been colored, inspired, andlegitimized by religion. To say this is not to reduce all political conflictsto religious ones, but to take seriously the fact that religions share in the responsibility for bringing peace to our torn and warring world.(Hans Kung, quoted in Smock 2004)

Such concerns are echoed in SamuelHuntington’s (1993, 1996) controversialthesis of a ‘clash of civilisations’, a topicthat has filled international debates, espe-cially since 9/11. This thesis was erectedupon Huntington’s belief that there is aserious ‘civilisational’ threat to global orderthat has become especially apparent afterthe cold war. It is rooted in the idea thatthere are competing ‘civilisations’ thatengage in conflict that affects outcomes in international relations in various ways.On the one hand, there is the ‘West’(especially North America and WesternEurope) with values and political culturesdeemed to be rooted in liberal democraticand Judaeo-Christian concepts, under-stood to lead to an emphasis on tolerance,moderation and societal consensus. On the other hand, there is supposedly a bloc of allegedly ‘anti-democratic’,primarily Muslim, countries, believed to be on a collision course with the West.

A key problem with Huntington’sthesis, however, is that there are actually no‘civilisations’ that act politically or ininternational relations in uniform andsingle-minded ways. Instead, wherever welook – for example, the United States,Europe, Israel, the Muslim countries of theMiddle East – what is most notable is theplurality of beliefs and norms of behaviourthat are apparent even in allegedly cohe-sive and uniform civilisations. It is usefulto bear these concerns in mind whenthinking about the role of religion in rela-tion to conflict in both domestic andinternational contexts. It is important notto overestimate religion’s potential for andinvolvement in large-scale violence andconflict – especially if that implies ignor-ing or underestimating its involvementand potential as a significant source ofconflict resolution and peacebuilding. It isalso important to recognise that, especiallyin recent years, numerous religious indi-viduals, movements and organisations havebeen actively involved in attempts to endconflicts and to foster post-conflict recon-ciliation between formerly warring parties(Bouta et al. 2005). This emphasises thatvarious religions collectively play a keyrole in international relations and diplo-macy by helping to resolve conflicts andbuild peace. The ‘clash of civilisations’thesis oversimplifies causal interconnec-tions between religion and conflict, in particular by disregarding important alter-nate variables, including the numerousattempts from a variety of religious tradi-tions to help resolve conflicts and buildpeace. When successful, religion’s role in helping resolve conflicts is a crucialcomponent in wider issues of humandevelopment because, as Ellis and ter Haarnote: ‘Peace is a precondition for humandevelopment. Religious ideas of variousprovenance – indigenous religions as wellas world religions – play an important role in legitimising or discouraging violence’(my emphasis; Ellis and ter Haar 2004).

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Overall, the book’s chapters make itclear that religion has now reappeared asan important domestic and internationalpolitical actor in part because of theimpact of deepening globalisation, whichhas led to an expansion of channels, pres-sures and agents via which norms are diffused and interact through bothtransnational and international networksand interactions. As a result, religiousactors now pursue a variety of politicalgoals both nationally and internationallythat in many cases links their concerns tothe economic, social and political conse-quences of globalisation.

Notes

1 An Islamist is a believer in or follower ofIslam, someone who may be willing to usevarious political means to achieve religiouslyderived objectives.

2 The secular Congress Party emerged as thelargest party following the elections ofApril/May 2004. The breakdown of seats inthe 542-seat Lok Sabha was: Congress andallies: 220; BJP and allies: 185; Others: 137.

Bibliography

Bouta, T., Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, S. and Abu-Nimer, M. (2005) Faith-based Peace-building:Mapping and Analysis of Christian, Muslim andMulti-faith Actors, The Hague: NetherlandsInstitute of International Relations

Ellis, S. and ter Haar, G. (2004) Religion andDevelopment in Africa, background paper pre-pared for the Commission for Africa.

Huntington, S. (1993) ‘The clash of civilisations?’,Foreign Affairs, 72, 3, pp. 22-49.

Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations,New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kurtz, L. (1995) Gods in the Global Village,Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Marshall, K. (2005) ‘Faith and development:Rethinking development debates’, June. Basedon a presentation at the Conference onReligious NGOs and Development Institutionsin Oslo, Norway, on 7 April.

Marshall, K. and March, R. (2003) MillenniumChallenges for Development and Faith Institutions,Washington, DC:The World Bank.

Smock, D. (2004) ‘Divine intervention: Regionalreconciliation through faith’, Religion, 25, 4.Available at http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/1190/3/, accessed 1 September 2005.

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11Religious fundamentalisms

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Contemporary manifestations of religiousfundamentalism are an aspect of a moregeneral religious resurgence in most butnot all parts of the world, with westernEurope an exception to the general trend(Hadden 1987; Shupe 1990; Bruce 2003;Norris and Inglehart 2004). It is useful to think of the various manifestations of contemporary religious fundamentalism as a counter-movement often militantlyopposed to what followers perceive as theinexorable onwards march of secularisa-tion, leading to political and public mar-ginalisation and privatisation of religion.To many observers and ‘ordinary’ people, afurther defining characteristic of any formof religious fundamentalism is its socialand political conservatism. Socially, reli-gious fundamentalism is regarded as back-ward looking, anti-modern, inherentlyopposed to change. Note, however, that if this was actually the case it would bevery difficult satisfactorily to explain thesometimes revolutionary political demandsand programmes of some religious funda-mentalist thinkers and activists. Some aim,particularly Islamists in the Middle Eastand elsewhere in the Muslim world, tooverthrow regimes that they regard as un-or anti-Islamic and replace them withmore authentically Islamic governments.On the other hand, some Christian funda-mentalists in the United States – peoplewho believe in the inerrancy of the Bible

and subscribe to a modern form of mil-lenarianism (that is, the teaching inChristianity that Jesus will rule for a thou-sand years on earth) may seem to fit moreclosely conventional wisdom.This is becausethey are often linked to conservative polit-ical forces, for example in the USA, whoseaim is to seek to undo what they judge tobe symptoms of unwelcome liberalisationand the relaxation of traditional social andmoral mores characteristic, they believe,of secularisation (Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly 2004).

Explaining religiousfundamentalism

According to Woodhead and Heelas,religious fundamentalism is a ‘distinc-tively modern twentieth-century move-ment’ albeit with ‘historical antecedents’(Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 32).Conceptually, the term has been widelyemployed since the 1970s to describenumerous, apparently diverse, religiousand political developments around theglobe (Caplan 1987). However, the termwas first used a century ago by conserva-tive Christians in the USA to describethemselves: they claimed they wanted toget back to what they saw as the ‘funda-mentals’ of their religion, as depicted inthe Bible. Such people typically came from

‘mainline’ – that is, established – Protestantdenominations, not usually the RomanCatholic Church. Now, however, the label‘religious fundamentalism’ has become a generic term, widely applied to a multi-tude of groups from various religious tradi-tions, comprising people who share adecidedly conservative religious outlook(Simpson 1992).

Generally speaking, both the characterand impact of fundamentalist doctrines are located within a nexus of moral andsocial concerns centring on state–societyinteractions. In some cases, the initialdefensiveness of ‘religious fundamentalists’came from a belief that they were underattack from modernisation and secularisa-tion and/or the intrusion of alien ethnic,cultural or religious groups. Sometimesthis developed into a broad socio-politicaloffensive to try to redress the situation,in particular targeting political rulers andlax co-religionists for their perceived inad-equacies and weaknesses. Informing theirreligious and political outlooks, religiousfundamentalists turn to core religious texts –such as the Christian Bible or the Quran –to find out God’s ‘opinion’ on various socialand political topics, often through the use ofselected readings which may form the basisof programmes of reform (Marty andAppleby 1991).

Contemporary religious fundamentalismsare often said to be rooted in the failedpromise of modernity, reactive against per-ceived unwelcome manifestations of mod-ernisation, especially declining moral valuesor perceived undermining of the family as a social institution (Haynes 2003). Tomany religious fundamentalists God was indanger of being superseded by a gospel oftechnical progress accompanying sweep-ing socio-economic changes. Around theworld, the pace of socio-economic change,especially since World War II, everywherestrongly challenged traditional habits,beliefs and cultures, and societies were underconsiderable and constant pressure to adapt

to modernisation. Not least, in an increas-ingly materialist world one’s individualworth was increasingly measured accordingto secular standards of wealth and status;religion seemed ignored, belittled or threat-ened. Thus to many religious fundamen-talists unwelcome social, cultural andeconomic changes were the root cause of what they saw as a toxic cocktail of religious, moral and social decline.

Religious fundamentalism:definitional issues

It is time to confront a significant analyti-cal problem. It is sometimes suggested that‘religious fundamentalism’ is an empty andtherefore meaningless term. It is said to beerroneously and casually employed, pri-marily ‘by western liberals’ in relation ‘to a broad spectrum of religious phenomenawhich have little in common except forthe fact that they are alarming to liberals!’(Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 32). Thisview contends that the range of peopleand groups casually labelled ‘fundamental-ist’ is so wide – from the revolutionarypolitical Islamism of the Iranian ideologue,Ali Shariati, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, thePakistani Maulana Maududi, and the SaudiArabian, Usama bin Laden, through tosocially conservative Christians in theUSA, such as Pat Robertson and the lateJerry Falwell – that the term lacks clarity,precision and meaning.As a consequence,Hallencreutz and Westerlund aver, thebroad use of the term ‘religious funda-mentalism’

has become increasingly irrelevant.In sum, viewed as a derogatory concept, tied to Western stereotypesand Christian presuppositions, thecasual use of the term easily causesmisunderstandings and prevents the understanding of the dynamics

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and characteristics of different reli-gious groups with explicit politicalobjectives.

(Hallencreutz and Westerlund 1996: 4)

We shall turn later to the various politicalobjectives of religious fundamentalists. Fornow, we can note that, despite such criti-cisms, the term ‘religious fundamentalism’is commonly found in both academic andpopular discourse. Numerous journal arti-cles and books on the topic have appeared,including important volumes in the 1990sby Marty and Appleby (1991, 1993a, 1993b,1994, 1995) and Lawrence (1995), whichused the term analytically.Thus by no meansall analysts and observers reject the use of theterm. Those accepting its analytical andexplanatory relevance do so because theyperceive contemporary religious fundamen-talist thinkers and movements around theworld – albeit encompassing very differentreligious traditions – as having some impor-tant features in common, including: corebeliefs, norms and values.These include:

■ a desire to return to the funda-mentals of a religious tradition andstrip away unnecessary accretions

■ an aggressive rejection of westernsecular modernity

■ an oppositional minority group-identity maintained in an exclu-sivist and militant manner

■ attempts to reclaim the publicsphere as a space of religious andmoral purity

■ a patriarchial and hierarchicalordering of relations between thesexes.(Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 32)

Drawing on data compiled from studies ofnumerous religious fundamentalist groupsfrom several religious traditions in differentparts of the world, Marty and Scott Apple-by arrive at the following definition of

religious fundamentalists. They are peoplewho hold a ‘set of strategies, by whichbeleaguered believers attempt to preservetheir distinctive identity as a people orgroup’. They see themselves acting inresponse to a real or imagined attack fromthose who, they believe, want to draw theminto a ‘syncretistic, areligious, or irreligiouscultural milieu’ (Marty and Scott Appleby1993a: 3). Following an initial sense ofdefensiveness as a result of perception ofattack from unwelcome, alien forces, funda-mentalists may well go on to develop anoffensive strategy aimed at altering radicallyprevailing socio-political realities in order to‘bring back’ religious concerns into publiccentrality.

In sum, it can be stated that religiousfundamentalists have the following incommon:

■ They fear that their preferred reli-giously orientated way of life is underattack from unwelcome secular influ-ences or alien groups.

■ Their aim is to create traditionallyorientated, less modern(ised) societies

■ As a result, many pursue campaigns inaccordance with what they believe aresuitable religious tenets in order tochange laws, morality, social normsand – in some cases – domestic and/orinternational political configurations.

■ Many are willing to contest politi-cally with ruling regimes in variousways if the latter’s jurisdiction appearsto be encroaching into areas of life –including education, gender relationsand employment policy – that reli-gious fundamentalists believe areintegral to their vision of a religiouslyappropriate society, one characterisedby a certain kind of ‘pure’ moral climate

■ They may also actively oppose co-religionists who they believe areexcessively lax in upholding theirreligious duties – as well as followers

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of rival or opposing religions whothey may regard as misguided, evil,even satanic.

Even those rejecting the general use of theterm ‘religious fundamentalism’ mightaccept that it has relevance in one specificcontext: self-designated Christian funda-mentalists in the United States. Emergingover a century ago, such people – believingimplicitly in the inerrancy of the Bible –sought to resist what they saw as the un-acceptable inroads of secular modernity.Until the 1970s, US Christian fundamen-talists were often apolitical, even in somecases excluding themselves from thepublic realm. Over time, however, manybegan to realise that retreating from theworld was actually self-defeating – becauseas a result they could not hope to alterwhat they saw as catastrophically unwel-come developments intrinsically linked to modernisation and secularisation. Inrecent years, Christian fundamentalists in the USA have become increasinglyvociferous, an influential political con-stituency. Leaders of the movement haveincluded the late Jerry Falwell, foundingleader of the organisation Moral Majority(formed in 1979, dissolved in 1989), aswell as two recent but unsuccessful presi-dential candidates: Pat Robertson and PatBuchanan. However, usage of the term hasbeen rather flexible, sometimes used inreference to the broad community of reli-gious – mostly Christian – conservativesand at other times to denote a small subsetof institutionalised organisations pursuingexplicit goals of cultural and economicconservatism. Many Christian fundamen-talists in the USA coalesce in a movementknown initially when it was founded inthe 1970s as the ‘New Christian Right’;now it is referred to as either ‘theChristian Right’ or ‘the Religious Right’,with the latter term implying that otherreligious traditions are also present. Inshort, the Religious Right is an important

religious/social/political movement in theUSA,not exclusive to but generally linkingconservative American Christians (Bruce2003; Dolan 2005).

The use of the Bible by the Christianconservatives in the USA draws attentionto the fact that religious fundamentalistsgenerally use holy books as a key sourcefor their ideas. However, drawing on theexample of American Christian conserva-tives, many analysts who employ the termreligious fundamentalism suggest that it isonly properly applicable to Christianityand the other ‘Abrahamic’ religions of the‘book’: Islam and Judaism.This is becauseChristian, Islamic and Jewish fundamen-talists all take their defining dogma fromwhat they believe to be the inerrancy ofGod’s own words set out in their holybooks. In other words, singular scripturalrevelations are central to each set of funda-mentalist dogma in these three religions.

‘Islamic fundamentalism’/Islamism

Bealey defines religious fundamentalism interms of a

religious position claiming strictadherence to basic beliefs. This fre-quently results in intolerancetowards other beliefs and believers inone’s own creed who do not strictlyobserve and who do not profess tohold an extreme position. ThusProtestant fundamentalists scornProtestants who fail to perceive a danger from Catholicism; Jewishfundamentalists attack Jews withsecularist leanings; and Muslim fun-damentalists believe that they have a duty to purge Islam of any conces-sions to cultural modernisation.A political implication is the tendency of fundamentalists to turn to terrorism.

(my emphasis; Bealey 1999: 140)

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While the Muslim world, like the Christianuniverse, is divided by religious disputes,it is also the case that many Muslimswould accept that they are linked bybelief, culture, sentiments and identity,collectively focused in the global Muslimcommunity, the ummah. It is also the casethat there were clear international mani-festations of what we might call ‘Islamicresurgence’, especially after the humblingdefeat of the Arabs by Israel in the Six-dayWar of June 1967 and the Iranian revolu-tion a dozen years later.

Like their Jewish and Christian counter-parts, Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamists,the term many analysts prefer), take as theirdefining dogma what are believed to beGod’s words written in their holy book,the Quran. In other words, singular scrip-tural revelations are central to Islamic fun-damentalist dogma.We have also noted that a defining character of all religious funda-mentalisms is social conservatism.As alreadynoted, however, this does not imply a cor-responding political conservatism, charac-terised by an unwillingness to countenancesignificant political changes. But what ofBealey’s most contentious claim, that reli-gious fundamentalists, including Islamicfundamentalists, are noted for a political‘tendency’ to ‘turn to terrorism’?

Let’s start by noting that Islamist groupswork to change the current social and polit-ical order by the use of various politicalmeans.These include incremental reform ofexisting political regimes by various means,including, if allowed, taking part in and win-ning elections through the auspices of a political party, as well as the use of politi-cal violence or terrorism in some circum-stances. But what might these circumstancesbe? And is this course of action linked to thevery nature of their fundamentalist beliefs?As a way of answering these questions, it isuseful to refer to some of the ideas expressedby several noteworthy twentieth-centuryIslamist thinkers: Maulana Maududi, SayyidQutb,Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini.

Born in India, Maulana Maududi(1903–79) was one of the most influen-tial Muslim theologians of the twentiethcentury. His philosophy, literary produc-tivity and tireless activism contributedimmensely to the development of Islamicpolitical and social movements around theworld. Maulana Maududi’s ideas pro-foundly influenced Sayyid Qutb of Egypt’sJamiat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (the MuslimBrotherhood), another leading Muslimphilosopher of the twentieth century.Together, Maududi and Qutb are consid-ered the founding fathers of the globalIslamist movement. Maududi’s ideas aboutthe Islamic state are widely regarded as the basic foundation for the political, eco-nomical, social and religious system of anyIslamic country that wishes to live underIslamic law (sharia). This is an ideologicalsystem that, while intentionally discrim-inating between people according to theirreligious affiliations, in no way prescribesthe acceptability of political violence,much less terrorism.

Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) was an Egyptian,a prominent Islamist and member of theMuslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’soldest Islamist group, which advocates anIslamic state in Egypt. Qutb’s politicalthinking was deeply influenced by therevolutionary radicalism of a contempora-neous Islamist, Maulana Maududi. Qutb’sideological development fell into two dis-tinct periods: before 1954, and following a sojourn in the United States, from 1954until his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966, after imprisonmentand torture by the secularist governmentof Gamal Abdel Nasser. Following anattempt on Nasser’s life in October 1954,the government imprisoned thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood,including Qutb, and officially banned theorganisation. During his second, moreradical, phase, Qutb declared ‘Western civil-isation’ the enemy of Islam;denounced lead-ers of Muslim nations for not following

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Islam closely enough; and sought to spreadthe belief among Sunni Muslims that itwas their duty to undertake jihad todefend and purify Islam. Note howeverthat in this conception jihad does not necessarily imply anti-western conflict;instead, it refers to an individual Muslim’sstriving for spiritual self-perfection.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–89)was Iranian Shi’ite leader and Head of Statein Iran from 1979 until his death in 1989.He was arrested (1963) and exiled (1964)for his opposition to Shah MuhammadReza Pahlavi’s regime. He returned to Iranon the Shah’s downfall (1979) and estab-lished a new constitution that gave himsupreme powers. His reign was marked by a return to strict observance of the Islamiccode. Iran’s revolution was divided into twostages: the first saw an alliance of liberal, left-ist and Islamic groups oust the Shah; thesecond stage, often named the ‘IslamicRevolution’, saw the ayatollahs come topower. During the second stage Khomeiniachieved the status of a revered spiritualleader among many Shi’a Muslims. In Iran he was officially addressed as Imam1

rather than as Ayatollah. Khomeini wasalso a highly influential and innovativeIslamic political theorist,most noted for hisdevelopment of the theory, the ‘guardian-ship of the jurisconsult’.

The Iranian, Dr Ali Shariati (1933–77),was another influential Islamist. Shariati wasa sociologist, well known and respected forhis works in the field of the sociology of religion, including Mission of a FreeThinker and Where Shall We Begin? (http://www.shariati.com/). He was strongly influ-enced by the work of the West Indianauthor and revolutionary, Franz Fanon(1925–61). Shariati urged Muslims to ‘aban-don Europe’ and ‘end the impossible task of acting as intermediaries between themand the forces at work in the colonisationproject’. In this respect Shariati’s ideas reflectsimilar concerns in Asia, the Middle Eastand Africa, that echoes and reflects what

might be called a shared ‘Third World con-sciousness’ and a growing resentment at theoutcomes of current and historical episodesof western involvement and interaction(Milton-Edwards 2006: 81).

In sum, the various concerns expressedby Maududi, Qutb, Khomeini and Shariatireflect in somewhat different ways a sharedfocus on Islamist ‘growth, exploration andgeneration of discourse of protest againstthe West’ (Milton-Edwards 2006: 81).Whatthey have in common, in other words, is ashared sense that the West – because of itsexpansionism and perceived disdain forreligion in general and Islam in particular –is a key problem for Muslims around theworld.

This concern with inequality and injus-tice, with its perceived roots in a historicalWestern hegemony manifested in an earlierperiod by colonialism and imperialism and now via global capitalist economiccontrol, is said to be a key factor encour-aging the growth of Islamism throughoutthe Muslim world (Akbar 2002).The endof World War I in 1918 coincided bothwith the demise of the Turkish Ottomanempire and the onset of Arab nationalism.Throughout, the Middle East nationsbegan to demand political freedom fromde facto British or French colonial rulethat, as a result of League of Nations man-dates, replaced Ottoman power. Thenationalist struggle was also informed bythe extent to which emerging, predom-inantly Muslim, states in the Middle Eastshould seek to employ the tenets of Islamiclaw (sharia) in their legal and political systems. The issue of the Islamicisation of polities in the Middle East had a prece-dent in some parts of the Muslim world in the form of anti-imperialist and anti-pagan ‘holy wars’ ( jihads) which had peri-odically erupted from the late nineteenthcentury, especially in parts of West Africaand East Asia (Akbar 2002). These wereregions where conflicts between traditionand modernisation, and between Islam and

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Christianity, were often especially acute,frequently fuelled by European colonialismand imperialism.

Going further back, to the emergenceof Islam fourteen hundred years ago,Muslim religious critics of the status quohave periodically emerged, opposed towhat they perceive as unjust, unacceptableforms of rule. Contemporary Islamists can be seen as the most recent examples ofthis trend.This is because they characterisethemselves as the ‘just’ involved in a jihad(‘holy war’) against the ‘unjust’, primarilybut not exclusively their own domesticpolitical rulers. Sometimes, as with thecurrent Al-Qaeda campaign, a key enemyis located internationally (Haynes 2005a,2005b). Overall, there is a dichotomybetween the ‘just’ and the ‘unjust’ in thepromotion of social change throughoutIslamic history that parallels the tension inthe west between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’.In other words, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’, like‘state’ and ‘civil society’, are mutuallyexclusive concepts where a strengtheningof one necessarily implies a weakening of the other. The implication is that the‘unjust’ inhabit the state while the ‘just’look in from the outside, seeking toreform political and social systems andmores that they regard as both corrupt andinsufficiently Islamic. ContemporaryIslamic fundamentalists regard themselvesas the Islamic ‘just’, striving to achievetheir goal of a form of direct democracyunder the auspices of God and sharia law.In some conceptions of Islamic rule, a reli-gious and political ruler, the caliph, wouldemerge, a figure who would use his wisdomto settle disputes brought to him by hisloyal subjects and rule the polity on God’sbehalf (Fuller 2003: 13–46).

Shared beliefs, relating to culture, senti-ments and identity, link Muslims in theglobal ummah.As a result, it is unsurprisingthat certain international events appear toinfluence the contemporary Islamic resur-gence – of which Islamism is an important

although not the only aspect (Milton-Edwards 2006).Among them, we can notetwo: the humbling defeat of Arab countriesby Israel in the calamitous Six-day War ofJune 1967 and the Iranian revolution(1979).The sense of inferiority and defeatthat the Six-day War engendered was tosome extent lightened by the Iranian rev-olution a dozen years later (Saikal 2003).Since then, a lethal combination of oftenpoor government, high unemploymentand apparently generalised social crisis inmany Muslim countries has interactedwith growing inequalities and injusticesat the global level to encourage Islamistmovements throughout much of theMuslim world (Akbar 2002).This develop-ment can also be associated more generallywith widespread, failed attempts at mod-ernisation and the impact of globalisation,Western hegemony and American domina-tion (Milton-Edwards 2006).

Islamists are of course also concernedabout domestic political, social and eco-nomic issues.Throughout the Middle Eastmany rulers appear content to receivelarge personal incomes from the sale oftheir countries’ oil for US dollars – withlittle in the way of beneficial developmenteffects for the majority of their citizens.In addition, many such leaders do little to develop more representative polities,plan successfully for the future, or seekmeans to reduce un- and underemploy-ment. In short, there has been a skewedmodernisation process featuring, on the onehand, urbanisation and limited industrialisa-tion and, on the other, growing numbers ofdissatisfied citizens, some of whom turn toIslamist vehicles of political change to reflecttheir strong opposition to incumbent rulersand their developmental failures (Nasr2001; Esposito 2002).

The contemporary Islamic revival, ofwhich Islamism is a key aspect, is gener-ated primarily in urban settings (Esposito2002; Juergensmeyer 2000).The key issueis what can Islam do for Muslims in the

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contemporary world? Can the faith rescuecommunities and societies from decline,purify them and help combat both inter-nal and external forces of corruption andsecularisation? For many Islamic radicalsthe Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a par-ticularly emblematic event in this regard(Saikal 2003: 69–88). This is because therevolution enabled Ayatollah Khomeini,after the revolution the supreme political,religious and spiritual authority, to put intoplace and enforce sharia law as the law of the land, to pursue a proclaimed com-mitment to social justice, and to try beginto roll back western hegemony at theinternational level with its economic,political and cultural influences. Overtime, however, despite western fears, whilethe revolution undoubtedly energisedIslamic radicals throughout the world,it was not followed by a consequential rev-olutionary wave affecting the Muslimworld. Instead, governments in manyMuslim-majority countries – such asAlgeria, Egypt and Libya – responded to real or perceived Islamist threats with a variable mixture of state-controlled re-Islamicisation, reform and coercion (Husain1995). In response, many grassroots Islamistmovements turned attention to local socialand political struggles, with the overall aimof a re-Islamicisation of society ‘from below’,focusing on the requirement for personaland social behaviour necessary to beIslamically ‘authentic’, in line with religioustradition. Political violence was not rare,although not eschewed, for example inAlgeria and Egypt, if judged necessary bythe radicals for their community’s ‘purifica-tion’. In addition, from the 1980s and1990s, movements within countries soughtto develop transnational networks that wereoften difficult for states to control, con-tributing to conditions of social, politicaland economic instability in many Muslimsocieties (Voll 2006; Casanova 2005).

An interesting example comes fromAlgeria.There was much western concern

in the early 1990s as it appeared that Algeriawas about to be taken over by Islamic fun-damentalists who, it was believed, wereabout to win parliamentary elections.Thisfear led the governments of France and the United States to support a successfulmilitary coup d’état in early 1992 to pre-vent this feared outcome.The assumptionwas that if the radical Muslims achievedpower they would summarily close downAlgeria’s newly refreshed democratic insti-tutions and political system as they hadearlier done in Iran. Following the coup,the main Islamist organisations werebanned, and thousands of their leaders andsupporters incarcerated. A civil war fol-lowed which finally fizzled out in the early2000s; over its course an estimated120,000 Algerians died (Volpi 2003).

While the political rise of radical Islamin Algeria had domestic roots, it wasundoubtedly strengthened by financialsupport from patrons such as the govern-ment of Saudi Arabia. In addition, therewere the mobilising experiences ofAlgerian mujahideen (‘holy warriors’), whoserved in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s. On return-ing home, many such people were nolonger content to put up with what wasregarded as an un-Islamic government.There was also a large cadre of (mostlysecondary) school teachers from Egyptworking in Algeria at this time.Many wereinfluenced by the ideas of the EgyptianMuslim Brotherhood or its radical off-shoots, and they were believed to haveintroduced similar radical ideas to Algerianyouth (Volpi 2003;Tahi 1992).

The overall point is that the emergenceand consolidation of Islamism since the1970s has had both domestic and interna-tional causes. On the one hand, in manycountries its domestic appearance wasoften linked to failures of modernisation todeliver political and developmental prom-ises.As a result, Etienne and Tozy argue, theIslamic resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s

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carried within it Muslim ‘disillusionmentwith progress and the disenchantments of the first 20 years of independence’(Etienne and Tozy 1980: 251). Faced witha state power that sought to destroy orcontrol formerly dominant Muslim com-munitarian structures and replace themwith values, norms, beliefs and institutionsfocusing on the concept of a national citizenry – based on the link between thestate and the individual – popular (asopposed to state-controlled) Islamist move-ments emerged in many Muslim countries.In short, the Muslim political ‘re-awaken-ing’ expressed in various expressions ofIslamism can usefully be seen primarily inrelation to its domestic capacity to opposethe state:‘It is primarily in civil society thatone sees Islam at work’ (Coulon 1983: 49).In addition, there are significant interna-tional issues that have also encouragedIslamist worldviews, notably the perceivedunjust impact of globalisation and westerneconomic and cultural power.

Christian fundamentalism

We have seen that for some Muslims,poverty and declining faith in the devel-opmental and political abilities of their governments led to their being receptiveto Islamist arguments. In such circum-stances, poverty and feelings of hopelessnessmay be exacerbated by withering of com-munity ties – especially when peoplemove from the countryside to the town in a search for paid employment. Whentraditional communal and familial ties areseriously stretched or sundered, religion-orientated ones may replace them, oftenappealing to the poor and dispossessed.In the United States, on the other hand,Christian fundamentalists are found amongall strata of society – including affluent,successful people (Wald 1991: 271). Clearly,it would be absurd to argue that poverty andalienation explain the widespread existence

of Christian fundamentalists in the USA.In fact, as we noted earlier, Christian fun-damentalism in the USA is quintessentiallymodern, offering a response to contempo-rary conditions and events.

It is not however only in the UnitedStates that one finds significant groups ofpeople that are classified as ‘Christian fundamentalists’. Africa has millions ofsuch people who, like their Muslim coun-terparts, see a religious fundamentalistworldview as a necessary corrective tofailed modernisation. In regard to Africa,some scholars link the failed developmen-tal promises of independence in the 1960s to the rise of Christian fundamentalismseveral decades later (Gifford 2004; Haynes1996). In such views, Christian funda-mentalism is reactive against unwelcome manifestations of modernisation – such as poverty, marginalisation and insecurity.In addition, in some cases, such as Nigeria,a turn to Christian fundamentalist world-views has coincided with a perception thatmany local Muslims are increasingly bel-ligerent and assertive (Isaacs 2003).

The recent growth of Christian funda-mentalism in various parts of the developingworld, notably Latin America and Africa, issaid to be the result of a merging of twoexisting strands of Christian belief – pente-costalism and conservative Protestantism(Gifford 1990).American television evangel-ists, such as Pat Robertson, Jim and TammyBakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts,were instrumental in bringing together the two strands in the 1970s and 1980s.Such people often call themselves ‘bornagain’ Christians. They may either remain in the mainline Protestant denominations(for example, Episcopalian, Presbyterian,Methodist, Baptist and Lutheran), or in theCatholic Church (where they are known as‘charismatics’), or who worship in their owndenominational churches (Gifford 1991).

Generally, ‘born again’ Christians stressreligious elements associated with pen-tecostalism: that is, experiential faith, the

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centrality of the Holy Spirit, and the spiri-tual gifts of glossolalia (‘speaking intongues’), faith healing and miracles. Suchpeople are ‘fundamentalist’ in the sense ofwishing to get back to the fundamentals ofthe faith as they see them.The ‘born again’worldview is embedded in certain dog-matic fundamentals of Christianity, withemphasis placed on the authority of theBible in all matters of faith and practice;on personal conversion as a distinct ex-perience of faith in Christ as Lord andSaviour (being ‘born again’ in the sense of having received a new spiritual life);and, evangelically, in helping others have a similar conversion experience.

To this end, some churches sponsormissionaries who are required to look to‘God alone’ (by way of followers’ contri-butions) for their financial support. Theymay believe that their church is a loneforce for good on earth, locked in battlewith the forces of evil; the latter may evenmanifest itself in the form of Christianswho do not adhere to the ‘born again’worldview. Unsurprisingly, such ‘bornagain’ conservatives are often stronglyopposed to the ecumenical movement –because of its more liberal theologicalviews, which may include a concern forsocial action in pursuit of developmentalgoals, in tandem with spiritual concerns.

‘Born again’ Christians typically seekGod through personal searching ratherthan through the mediation of a hierarchi-cal institution.The aim is to make benefi-cial changes to one’s life spiritually and lifechances through communion and otherinteraction with like-minded individuals.To this end, groups may come together to pray and to work for both spiritualredemption and material prosperity, some-times perceived as inseparable from eachother.When the latter goal – that of materialprosperity – is seen as paramount, this canlead to charges that it is in fact little morethan a ‘mindless and self-centred appeal topersonal well-being’ (Deiros 1991: 149–50).

In sum, ‘born again’ Christians may seethemselves as offering converts two mainbenefits: worldly self-improvement andultimate salvation, within a context ofwhat are perceived as Christian ‘funda-mentals’, including a strong belief in theperceived inerrancy of the Bible.

Some accounts suggest that members ofsuch ‘born again’ groups are politicallymore conservative than those in the main-stream churches and that such people arewilling to submit, rather unquestion-ingly, to those in authority (Moran andSchlemmer 1984; Roberts 1968). In addi-tion, they are said to assimilate easily to the norms of consumer capitalism whichhelps further to defuse any challenges tothe extant political order (Martin 1990:160). In addition, in theological and aca-demic debates they are often judged inrelation to two other issues: their contri-bution to personal, social and political ‘lib-eration’, and their potential or actual roleas purveyors of American or other foreigncultural dogma in non-western parts ofthe world. It is also claimed that the ‘bornagain’ doctrine may offer converts hope –but it is a hope without practical manifes-tation in the world of here and now;it does not help with people’s concreteproblems nor in the creation of group andclass solidarities essential to tackle socio-political concerns (Martin 1990: 233).The reason for this political conservatism,it is alleged, is that conservative evangelicalchurches collectively form an Americanmovement of sinister intent (Gifford 1991).

Cognisant of such concerns, the spreadof conservative American-style ‘born again’churches in Africa, Latin America andelsewhere was greeted with concern byleaders of the established Protestant andCatholic churches, who saw their follow-ers leaving for the new churches in largenumbers. Often sponsored by Americantelevision evangelists and local churches,thousands of born-again foreign crusaderswere seen to promote American-style

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religion and, in some cases, conserva-tive politics from the 1980s. Ardently anti-communist, they worked to convert asmany ordinary people as possible to a con-servative Christian faith and in the process,it is argued, to promote America’s politicalgoals (d’Antonio 1990).

It was also alleged that a new religio-political hegemony emerged as a result ofthe impact of American fundamentalistevangelicals. Pieterse asserts, for example,that the so-called ‘faith’ movement gainedthe cultural leadership of Christianity inmany parts of the ‘developing’ world,largely because of its social prestige andideological persuasiveness (Pieterse 1992:10–11). It was said that norms, beliefs and values favourable to the interests ofthe USA were disseminated among thebelievers as a fundamental part of reli-gious messages. What this amounts to isthat individuals who converted to theAmerican-style evangelical churches were,it was claimed, victims of manipulation bythis latest manifestation of neo-colonialism;the objective was not, as in the past, tospirit away material resources from colo-nial areas, but rather to deflect popularefforts away from seeking necessary polit-ical and economic structural changes,in order to serve American strategic inter-ests and those of American transnationalcorporations.

Jewish fundamentalism

Since the establishment of the state ofIsrael as a homeland for the Jews in 1948,there has been intense controversy in thecountry over whether the state should bea modern, western-style country – that is,where normally religion would be priva-tised – or a Jewish state with Judaist lawand customs taking precedence over secularones. Luckmann noted several decades agothat the state of Israel was characterised by a process of bureaucratisation along

rational business lines, reflecting for manyJewish Israelis, he argued, accommodationto an increasingly ‘secular’ way of life(Luckmann 1969: 147). According toWeber’s well-known classificatory schema,Israel would be judged a ‘modern’ state,that is, with a powerful legislative body(the Knesset) enacting the law; an executiveauthority – the government – conductingthe affairs of the state; a disinterested judi-ciary enforcing the law and protecting therights of individuals; an extensive bureau-cracy regulating and organising educational,social and cultural matters; and with secu-rity services – notably the police and the armed forces – protecting the statefrom internal and external attack (Weber1978: 56).

Yet, to many people, Israel is not ‘just’another western state. This is largelybecause in recent years religion seems to have gained an increasingly centralpublic role. Religious Jews warn of thesocial catastrophes that they believe willinevitably occur in their increasingly secu-lar, progressively more ‘godless’, society,while many non-religious Jews see suchpeople as intolerant religious fanatics:Jewish fundamentalists. Such matters cameto a head in November 1995. The thenPrime Minister,Yitzhak Rabin, was assas-sinated by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Jewishfundamentalist, because of Rabin’s will-ingness to negotiate with the PalestineLiberation Organisation (PLO) to end itsconflict with the state of Israel. Rabin’smurder led some Israelis to fear that violence would increasingly characterise the already tense relationship betweenreligious and secular Jews. Yet whatappeared initially to some observers to bethe onset of a religious war among theJews eventually only had a limited impactin Israel, a setting where, despite muchintense political and social conflict, religiousinterests were not consistently powerfulenough to determine major issues of publicpolicy (Sandler 2006: 46–7).

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On the other hand, the murder of Rabinby a Jewish fundamentalist appeared to bea clear manifestation of the willingness of‘Jewish fundamentalists [to] attack Jewswith secularist leanings’ in pursuit of theirreligious and political agendas (Bealey1999: 140). The killing of Rabin alsoserved to focus attention on the growingpolarisation in Israel between, on the onehand, non-religious or secular Jews,and, on the other, highly religious or ‘fun-damentalist’ Jews. The latter are charac-terised by a determination personally tofollow the ‘fundamentals’ of Judaism asthey see them – and work towards gettingthem observed in both public and privatelife (Silberstein 1993; Ravitsky 1993).Contemporary Jewish fundamentalism –manifested by organisations such as GushEmunim – is believed, in part, to be a resultof the impact of Israel’s victory over theArabs in the 1967 war (Sprinzak 1993).For many religious Jews this was a partic-ular triumph as it led to the regaining of the holiest sites in Judaism fromArab control, including Jerusalem, theTemple Mount, the Western Wall, andHebron.This was taken as a sign of divinedeliverance, an indication of impendingredemption. Even some secular Jews spoke of the war’s outcome in theologicalterms.

Jewish identity has long been under-stood as an overlapping combination ofreligion and nation. Put another way, theJews of Israel tend to think of themselvesas a nation inhabiting a Jewish state createdby their covenant with God (Ravitsky1993).The interpretation of the covenantand its implications gave rise to the char-acteristic beliefs and practices of theJewish people. Vital to this covenant wasthe promise of the land of Israel.Following their historical dispersionsunder first the Babylonians and thenRomans, Jews had prayed for centuries forthe end of their exile and a return to Israel.

However, except for small numbers, Jewslived for centuries in exile, often in sepa-rate communities. During the Diasporawhile awaiting divine redemption toreturn them to their homeland, manyJews’ lives were defined by halacha (reli-gious law), which served as a nationalcomponent of Jewish identity. The Jews’historical suffering during the Diasporawas understood as a necessary continua-tion of the special dedication of the commu-nity to God. In sum, Jewish fundamentalistgroups in Israel are characterised by anutter unwillingness to negotiate withPalestinians over what they see as landgiven by God to the Jews for their use in perpetuity. In addition, especially sincethe Israeli government cleared the Gazastrip of Jewish settlements in August 2005,there has been another issue of massiveimportance to many Jewish fundamental-ists. Sandler puts it like this: ‘Who or whatprevails? Is it the law of God or the law ofthe State?’ (Sandler 2006: 47). For Jewishfundamentalists, the issue is especially significant and difficult to resolve as boththe contemporary State of Israel and thebiblical ‘Land of Israel’ have importantreligious associations.

Conclusion

The concept of popular religious interpre-tations, including religious fundamentalistones, is not new; there have always beenopponents of mainstream religious inter-pretations. What is novel, however, is that in the past manifestations of popularreligion were normally bundled up withinstrong frameworks that held themtogether, serving to police the mostextreme tendencies, as in the Christianchurches, or were at least nominally underthe control of the mainline religion – aswith popular sects in Islam. In the con-temporary era, however, it is no longer

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possible to keep all religious tendencieswithin traditional organising frameworks.This is primarily a consequence of twodevelopments: (1) widespread, destabilisingchange after World War II – summarisedhere as modernisation and secularisation;and (2) religious privatisation, in both thedeveloped and developing worlds.

Religious fundamentalism is particularlyassociated with the Abrahamic ‘religions ofthe book’ (Islam, Christianity and Judaism).Scriptural revelations relating to political,moral and social issues form the corpus offundamentalist demands. Sometimes theseare markedly conservative (most US orAfrican Christian fundamentalists), some-times they are politically reformist or evenrevolutionary (some Islamist groups), andsometimes they are xenophobic, racist andreactionary (some Jewish fundamentalistgroups, such as Gush Emunim, Kach andKahane Chai, and various Islamist groups).

While secularisation is the ‘normal’ –and continuing – state of affairs in mostsocieties away from western Europe, thevarious fundamentalist groups examinedin this chapter tend to share a disaffectionand dissatisfaction with established, hier-archical, institutionalised religious bodies;a desire to find God through personalsearching rather than through the media-tion of institutions; and a belief in commu-nities’ ability to make beneficial changes to their lives through the application ofgroup effort. This desire to ‘go it alone’,not to be beholden to ‘superior’ bodies,tends to characterise many of the groupswe have examined. For some, religionoffers a rational alternative to those towhom modernisation has either failed oris in some way unattractive. Its interactionwith political issues over the medium term is likely to be of especial importance,carrying a serious and seminal message of societal resurgence and regeneration in relation both to political leaders andeconomic elites.

Note

1 The term Imam means a male spiritual andtemporal leader regarded by Shi’ites as adescendant of Muhammad, divinely appointedto guide humans.

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d’Antonio, M. (1990) Fall From Grace: The Failed Crusade of the Christian Right, London:Deutsch.

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12Religion and the state

John Madeley

There is, it seems, no Archimedian pointfrom which the relationships between reli-gion and the state can be observed.Whilein the early twenty-first century themodern state is the key template for polit-ical organization across the globe, its formand function remain matters of ongoingdispute. Responsibility for the manage-ment of affairs affecting the physical andmaterial security of citizens is generallyaccepted but on wider issues – includinghow it should relate to religious concerns –radicals, liberals, conservatives and reac-tionaries of various hues continue toengage in seemingly unresolvable contro-versy. The liberal democratic option ofruling that such concerns are no properbusiness of the state and should as far aspossible be kept off the political agendahas failed to attract general agreementeven in the more prosperous parts of the first world (Madeley 2003a).Elsewhere, where material conditions aremuch less favourable, issues of state–religion relations often appear to occupycentre stage. The existence of differentworldviews encapsulated in, or extrapo-lated from, contrasting religious traditionscontinue to make for incommensurableand, even, non-compossible standpointson important issues.

Any survey of the relations betweenreligion and the state has to take accountof the enormous variety of traditions,

institutional forms and ethical drives to be found in each of the two spheres. Evenoperating with mainstream Western con-ceptualizations of the principal terms therange of combinations identifiable acrossworld history is as vast as it is in detailcomplex. Traditionally, most treatmentshave reduced the scope and range of thesecomplexities to manageable proportionsby addressing them through the Westernlens of ‘church–state relations’ where theterm church is taken to represent all religious bodies and organizations (and so,in addition to actual churches: denomi-nations, sects, cults, religious orders etc.) and the term state is assumed to representinstances of the modern state conceived in Weberian terms as based on successfulclaims to territorial sovereignty. However,this foreshortening of focus with its dis-tinctly ethnocentric underlying assump-tions as to what counts as religion and thestate systematically underestimates the actualrange of variation to be found in the otherparts of the world and at other times.

Within political science attention to thecontemporary political significance of reli-gious traditions and how they relate to dif-ferent forms of the state has been a relativelyrecent phenomenon.When in the 1950s thefield of comparative politics was extendedfrom a concentration on Western politicalsystems to address the major changes occur-ring in the then newly independent states

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of the developing world, the subjectremained peripheral. This peripheral-ity was reinforced by that fact that one of the principal organizing concepts whichcame to dominate comparative politics at the time was modernization, understoodcrudely as the process whereby ‘traditional’societies became ‘modern’. Modernizationtheory rested on evolutionary assumptionswhich postulated that interlinked trends of economic, social, cultural and politicaldevelopment combined to make for thedifferentiation of structures and specializa-tion of functions thought to be character-istic of modern societies.

Some attempted to refine the evolution-ary scheme which underlay moderniza-tion theory by identifying stages whichcould explain the observed variety of different cultures in terms of their havingstabilized at different stages. Thus Bellahdeveloped a classification of five stages ofreligious development: primitive, archaic,historic, early modern and modern, eachmarked by combinations of distinct fea-tures of belief, ritual practice and organ-izational type (Bellah 1964).A particularlyimportant threshold in this developmentalsequence was seen to have occurredbetween the so-called archaic and historicphases. Prior to this transition the begin-nings of priesthood could be found as specialists in healing and shamanistic prac-tices began to emerge. With the shift tothe historic stage, however, religionbecame increasingly transcendental in itsreference as the gods and the sacred realmwere understood more and more as sepa-rate from the natural world and a moreelevated concern with salvation took hold.Coincidentally the emergent institution ofa priesthood achieved a degree of auton-omy, the political and religious spherestended to become distinct and the possi-bility arose for the first time of tensionsand conflict between holders of authorityin the two spheres.This change appears tocorrespond to what Karl Jaspers identified

as the great Axial Shift, occurring acrossmuch of the globe from about the sixthcentury BCE (Eisenstadt 1986).

For all its relevance to the emergence of separate spheres of religion and the stateand the relation between them, evolution-ary conceptual schemes of this sort sug-gested that variations between thedifferent religious traditions of the worldarose principally from the level of devel-opment each attained. For Weber, however,many important variations could not beexplained in this fashion (Gerth and Mills1948). Thus his key distinction betweenthe traditions of Oriental mysticism andOccidental asceticism could not be takento imply that the other-worldly salvation-ist orientation of Hinduism, for example,indicated that it had developed to a higherlevel than the this-worldly asceticism whichemerged within the context of Judaismand some branches of Christianity. Despitethe evolutionary bias of the moderniza-tion paradigm some texts produced fromwithin it attempted to take account ofthese dimensions of difference.Thus D.E.Smith in 1970 examined the connectionsbetween religion and ‘political develop-ment’ in the context of the process ofmodernization understood characteristic-ally as ‘fundamentally one of differentia-tion, by which integralist sacral societiesgoverned by religiopolitical systems arebeing transformed into pluralist desacral-ized societies directed by greatly expandedsecular polities’ (Smith 1970: 1). Despitethe claimed commonality of sacral politi-cal systems as recently as 1800 however,Smith also pointed to important ideationaland structural contrasts to be foundbetween Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim andCatholic traditions and how these con-trasts made for distinctive orientationstowards the state.

A growing appreciation of the signifi-cance of qualitative contrasts contributedto the virtual abandonment of moderniza-tion theory and directed attention instead

to the role of episodic change occurringaround critical discontinuities in the historyof particular societies, cultures and tradi-tions. Weber’s analogy comparing decisivehistorical junctures with the points on railway tracks which send trains off in onedirection or another (with unavoidable‘path-dependent’ consequences) highlightedthe importance of these discontinuities forexplaining contrasting patterns of institu-tional and cultural change, not least in thearea of relations between religion and thestate (Gerth and Mills 1948). Taking the case of Christianity, the variety of stateforms with which it has been confrontedover its two millennia of existence as a dis-tinct tradition has spanned Roman colonialadministration in first-century Palestine, topagan empire, to Christian empire(s) ofcontrasting types, to feudal lordships, city-states, principalities (both civil and ecclesi-astical), papal states, republics, kingdoms,authoritarian dictatorships, both sympa-thetic and antagonistic, and to a variety offorms of (liberal) democracy. In some of these formations, particular Christiantraditions have been marginal and activelypersecuted and in others overwhelminglydominant and influential, while in mostthey have been located somewhere in between – and in each case attitudestoward, and linkages with, the temporalauthorities have varied markedly.Certainly,with regard to the Christian case it is dif-ficult to argue that there has been a uni-form trend of development from someundifferentiated pristine community culttowards its current condition in most ofthe West, as an enclave of religiosity in otherwise largely secular environments.Rather, the picture is one of cyclicalmovement through many phases, startingfrom: sectarian separation and persecution,rising to imperial church, then claimant tosupreme source of all authority temporaland spiritual, followed by a decline intoserving as an instrument of temporalauthority under the early-modern state

and, finally in the modern era, being madeserially to relinquish its claims to exerciseauthority anywhere except within its ownincreasingly circumscribed religious juris-diction.The trend line of the developmentof the state can also be seen as cyclical onlyin the obverse to that of the church(es):when state power has waned, as at varioustimes in the middle ages, the religiousinstitution’s claims to authority waxed andvice versa.

One important strand of evolutionarymodernization theory has maintained a stubborn – if more and more embattled –resistance among sociologists of religion:secularization theory. According to JoséCasanova (1994), by the 1960s seculariza-tion theory had achieved the rare feat in the social sciences of attaining virtualparadigm status. Nor have its continuingrearguard defenders been lacking, despiteretractions from some of its most distin-guished expositors, such as Peter Berger(1999), while other analysts have adoptedmore nuanced stands. In 1978 DavidMartin presented a dense analysis whichwas one of the first systematically to stressthe role of critical historical junctures inbringing about, deflecting and occasion-ally reversing secularization trends in theterritories of particular states (Martin1978). In 1994 Casanova argued in similarvein that secularization theory should notbe treated as a coherent set of propositionsbut as three distinct ones,only one of which(secularization as differentiation) could bedefended as the valid core proposition.

For many normative theorists of liberaldemocracy separation of religion and state(reflecting the differentiation between thetwo spheres) was until recently a matter ofwidespread consensus: a system that didnot institutionalize this basic requirementcould scarcely qualify as a liberal demo-cracy at all.The ongoing resurgence of thereligious factor in politics across the worldhas, however, led to a re-examination ofthe empirical link between church–state

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separation and liberal democracy. Forexample,Alfred Stepan points out that ‘vir-tually no Western European democracynow has a rigid or hostile separation ofchurch and state’ (Stepan 2001: 222).Normative disagreements about state–religion separation in the liberal democra-cies is, however, as a distant echo comparedto the din heard elsewhere in parts of theworld, especially following the impact ofsuch ‘frame-setting events’ as the 1979Iranian revolution and September 11, 2001(‘9/11’). As Halliday put it, the Iranian revolution posed a particular challenge toobservers of world affairs, that of explain-ing how for the first time in modern history (that is, since the great French revolution of 1789), ‘a revolution tookplace in which the dominant ideology,forms of organization, leading personneland proclaimed goal were all religious inappearance and inspiration’ (Halliday1995: 43).Although the Iranian revolutiondid not, as feared by many and hoped bysome, spread widely to other countries, ashad occurred in the wake of the Frenchrevolutionary wars two centuries earlier, itdid occur at a time when the resurgence ofthe religious factor in politics was evermoreevident in many places around the world.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart(2004) have shown convincingly that sec-ularization, understood as the progressivedecline in levels of belief and observancein the principal mainstream forms of organ-ized religion, has clearly progressed only inthe world’s most economically developedcountries, except for the United States.However, since these societies currentlyaccount for a decreasing proportion of the population of the planet and other,less well-favoured, societies generallyexhibit a resurgence of religious belief andobservance, it can be said that overall theworld is becoming in an important sensemore, not less, religious. In this context the political mobilization of fundamental-ist forms of many of the world religions,

including Christianity, has made the issueof state–religion relations increasingly oneof practical concern as well as academicinterest.What the French call the ‘integral-ism’ of fundamentalist movements standswitness to the continuing possibility thattrends of secularization (whether as decline,differentiation or privatization) can undercertain circumstances be stopped dead intheir tracks and reversed by projects ofradical de-differentiation, even on occa-sion under the literal ‘presidency’ of reli-gious figures and institutions, as in Iran.In this context it is interesting to examinethe case of Europe: in most of its Westernpart, one of the most secular parts of theglobe and yet, as noted by Stepan (2001),one marked by sets of religion–state rela-tions across all its fifty-odd territorieswhich the Supreme Court of the USAwith its separationist rule would not toler-ate in even one of its fifty constituent states.

Religion and the state inmodern Europe

The record of the relations between reli-gion and the state over time and space inEurope illustrates perhaps better than anyother, the decisive role critical junctureshave played in marking the shifts betweenoften radically contrasting patterns of state–religion relations. While it can be claimedthat it was in the USA that the constitu-tional format of the secular state wasinvented, it was in medieval Europe that theunderlying distinction between the reli-gious and the secular was first elaborated(Ward 2000). From the time of its birth as a distinctive religious tradition, Christianityfamously distinguished between what wasdue to Caesar and to God, somethingwhich it was easier to do for as long asCaesar was both pagan and, occasionally, anauthor of persecution.When the Emperorbecame the supporter and enforcer of theChristian cult, however, the distinction

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became progressively blurred – only toreassert itself when the papacy in theeleventh-century bid for recognition as thefount of all power on earth; this occurredwhen Pope Gregory VII reiterated thelong-standing claim to the precedence ofpapal over royal authority at a time whenit seemed there was, at least briefly, thepossibility of making a reality of this pre-tension. It was arguably at this time thatthe concept of the distinction betweensecular and religious took a decisive form,becoming fixed in a way which identifiedthe church with a superordinate religiousand spiritual sphere and the state with thesubordinate secular and temporal sphere(Badie and Birnbaum 1983: 87). One ofthe perversities arising from this invidiousdistinction is that the state itself could nolonger be seen as a subject of seculariza-tion because of the declaration that it wasdefinitionally secular – and could not there-fore itself be subject to secularizing trends.Yet it is obvious that the instrumentalitiesof state power and authority can – andindeed often have been – dedicated to andutilized for religious ends in ChristianEurope as much as in other parts of theworld: in other words, that states have attimes been and in a number of cases remainin some non-trivial sense religious.

In the West European case during themiddle ages when the papacy attempted toassert its claims to feudal precedence,monarchs were routinely consecrated attheir coronations by high church officials,usually archbishops, bishops, metropolitansor even, as in the case of Charlemagne,by the pope in Rome.Church involvementin these ceremonies was transparentlyintended, inter alia, to ensure by theadministering of oaths that the crownedmonarchs would undertake to recognizethe authority of the popes and support thechurch in its divine mission. While thechurch was itself always careful to distin-guish the separate spheres of the spiritualsacerdotium from the temporal regnum, and

to assert its claim to sole jurisdiction in theformer, it also maintained the duty of thetemporal authorities to aid it in serving itsreligious ends, however indirectly. Nor didthe Reformation, despite the seismicchanges which it wrought in church–staterelations in the sixteenth century, put anend to the notion that the temporalauthorities had religious as well as temporalresponsibilities. Indeed, on one view, theReformation can be seen in the countrieswhere it became institutionalized as greatlyextending the scope of religious duties toall holders of public office. From a Catholicpoint of view it represented the disastroustriumph of the secular over the religioussphere:‘If before, it was the religious realmwhich appeared to be the all-encompassingreality, within which the secular realmfound its proper place, now the secularsphere will be the all-encompassing reality,to which the religious sphere will have toadapt’ (Casanova 1994: 15).The alternativeview, stressed by Weber (Gerth and Mills1948), was that the removal of the barriersbetween religious and secular spaces had the effect of releasing the religiousimpulse from its previous confines, therebyallowing it to permeate the wider society,so that, for example, the idea of God-given vocations was extended to cover alllegitimate roles in society – to ploughmenand princes, as much as to priests andprelates.This radical shift was all the moresignificant since it coincided with andcontributed (not least by the transfer ofchurch property and wealth to the coffers of the state authorities) to the emergenceof the modern state. In both ideological andmaterial terms this particular critical junc-ture was, it is interesting to note, both mod-ernising and radically de-differentiating.

The emergent pattern of the modernstate was in fact from its beginnings in sixteenth-century Europe a confessionalinstitution committed to its favoured reli-gious tradition. The birth of the modernstate system, which is conventionally dated

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from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, didrequire the signatories henceforth to desistfrom attempts by diplomacy or war fromchanging the religious adherence of targetpopulations but this secularizing require-ment only affected the external relationsbetween states. Internally by contrast,Westphalia buttressed the prohibitionagainst religious war by insisting on thesovereign right of the state authorities of a given territory to impose a particularconfession on their subject populations onthe basis of the cuius regio eius religio rule(literally, whose the region, to him thereligion), inherited from the 1555 Treatyof Augsburg and now, finally, set in stone.In fact, from 1648 onwards, recognition of the exclusive authority of the state inmatters of religion led to a new and deci-sive phase in the consolidation of churchsettlements aimed at enforcing conformityto the locally established religion andpenalizing or expelling those who refusedto conform.This process of the ‘confession-alization’ of populations continued after1648 for a long time, signified by such no-torious episodes as the Revocation of theEdict of Nantes,which ended the tolerationof Protestantism in France in 1685, and theexpulsion of many thousands of Protestantsfrom the archbishopric of Salzburg in the1720s. As Rémond points out under the ancien régime governments which ruledover most of the European Continent untilthe French Revolution of 1789, a so-calledregalist tradition obtained virtually regard-less of confessional differences: ‘It assertedthe superiority of the secular power overthe churches. … It did not necessarily pro-ceed from animosity towards the church;the same power that closely controlled theclergy held them in honour and showedconsideration and respect for religion.Ancien régime governments shared the con-viction, then generally held, that society wasunable to do without religion and that thestate had authority and responsibilities inthe matter’ (Rémond 1999: 79–80).

More than a century after the 1789French Revolution had made the firstdecisive departure from the entrenchedtradition of state confessionalism inEurope, it is remarkable that church estab-lishment of one sort or another remainedfirmly in place across most of Europe. In1900 as Table 12.1 illustrates, despite theprogressive de-linking of citizenship fromchurch membership, the largest churchesalmost everywhere continued to benefitfrom advantageous arrangements with thestate authorities.This was most particularlythe case in the three mono-confessionalblocs which occupied the Lutheran north-ern, Roman Catholic southern andOrthodox eastern parts of Europe(Madeley 2003b; Knippenberg 2006).Even in Italy, where since 1870 the Vaticanhad refused to accept the loss of the PapalTerritories and recognize the legitimacy ofthe then newly-united Kingdom of Italy,the Catholic Church’s overwhelminglydominant position persisted. In the multi-confessional belt which spannedfrom Ireland in north-western Europethrough Britain, the Netherlands, south-ern Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia andHungary all the way into the Transylvanianpart of Romania, relations between thedifferent religious institutions and the statewere complex not least because of thecoexistence within many individual terri-tories of substantial populations of differ-ent confessional adherence. Even in thoseterritories, however, the predominant pattern was one of establishment of thehistorically dominant confession twinnedwith the more or less de facto toleration of the principal religious minorities.

In addition to their confessional affilia-tions the actual forms of establishmentvaried a great deal. In France, where theRoman Catholic Church had been restoredunder the terms of the 1802 Concordat andthe associated Organic Articles,Catholicismwas recognized not as a – or the – statereligion but as the religion of the great

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Table 12.1 The religiosity of states in Europe (de jure), 1900–2000

Empire groups National I: 1900 II: 1970 III: 2000 IV:Absolute conf.as of 1900 territories majority % in 2000

Andorra RC RC RC RC: 89Belgium R R R RC: 81Denmark RL RL RL RL: 86

Iceland RL RL RL RL: 99France R S S RC: 70Germany R R S No abs. maj.Greece RO RO RO RO: 93Italy RC RC RC RC: 85Liechtenstein RC RC RC RC: 80Luxembourg RC RC RC RC: 97Netherlands S S S No abs. maj.(Poland) R A RC* RC: 92Portugal RC RC RC RC: 97Romania RO A RO* RO: 77Spain RC RC RC RC: 99Sweden RL RL R** RL: 84

Norway RL RL RL RL: 95Switzerland R R R No abs. maj.(Yugoslavia) R A RO* RO: 60

United Kingdom Britain RA RA RA RA: 53Ireland RC RC R RC: 92Malta RC RC RC RC: 91

Russian Empire Russia RO A S RO: 52Armenia OO A OO OO: 92Azerbaijan RI A RI RI: 95Belarus RO A RO RO: 70Ukraine RO A RO RO: 54Estonia R A S No abs. maj.Finland RX RX RX RL: 89Georgia RO A RO RO: 75Latvia RO A S No abs. maj.Lithuania RO A S RC: 85Moldova RO A RO RO: 70

Austria-Hungary Austria R S S RC: 78Czech Rep. R A RC No abs. maj.Bosnia-Herz. R A RI No abs. maj.Croatia RC A RC RC: 89Hungary R A S* RC: 58Slovakia R A S RC: 67Slovenia RC** A RC** RC: 76

Ottoman Empire Turkey RI S S RI: 100Albania RI A S RI: 65Bulgaria R A RO* RO: 82Cyprus R R R RO: 78/RI: 99Macedonia RO A RO RO: 59

Sources:Barrett et al. (1982) and Barrett et al. (2001) supplemented by 2005 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom:Europe and the New Independent States (US Dept of State, Sept. 2005); Inglehart and Norris dataset for the last column.

Notes:* These attributions changed (from A) on the basis of information culled from the more recent source (see below).** Changed attribution: formal disestablishment of the Lutheran church occurred in January 2000.*** Corrected attribution (in Barrett (2001) listed as RO).

Codes: A Atheistic; R Religious (unspecified); RA Anglican; RC Roman Catholic; RI Islamic; RL Lutheran; ROOrthodox; RX (Finland only) Lutheran and Orthodox; OO (Armenia only) Oriental Orthodox; S Secular.

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majority of the French nation. Alongsideit, furthermore, Protestants and Jews eachreceived official recognition and state sup-port. In the United Kingdom the Anglicanstate church retained full and formal estab-lished status in England and Wales and thePresbyterian Church of Scotland remainedthe officially recognized national church.Other systems of multiple establishmentcould be found at or below state level in the multi-confessional territories – inSwitzerland, for example. Finland, whichstood at the northern end of a secondmulti-confessional belt running north–south along the border between EasternOrthodoxy and the other confessions,a unique system of dual establishment –Lutheran and Orthodox state churchesalongside each other over the same un-divided territory – existed. In those partsof Europe where the eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment had impacted eitherthrough the action of the so-calledEnlightened Despots such as Frederick theGreat in Prussia, Joseph II in Austria andCatherine the Great in Russia or throughthe later, and more forceful, interventionof the French revolutionary armies,systems of religious establishment had onthe whole made a successful, if partial,return after 1815. In the case of Austria,for example, the 1855 Concordat with theVatican abandoned the policy which has been inaugurated by Joseph II andremoved all Catholic education from statecontrol, placing it again under the exclu-sive jurisdiction of the bishops. Around1900 in Eastern Europe the trend was alsotowards reinforcing the principle of reli-gious establishment; in the RussianEmpire, for example, under the influence ofthe reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev(Overprocurator of the Holy Synod from1880 to 1905) Russian Orthodoxy wasruthlessly promoted even in the peripheralterritories where Lutheranism (in thenorthern Baltics) Catholicism (in Poland)and Armenian Orthodoxy (in Armenia)

had previously enjoyed a measure of toler-ation and even privilege.

As Table 12.1 indicates, in 1900 all butone of Europe’s 45 territories were occu-pied by states which could still be judgedde jure ‘religious’; that is, officially commit-ted in one way or another to the supportof either a particular religion or religions(31 cases) or to religion in general (14cases).The one exception identified is theNetherlands which is labelled de jure ‘sec-ular’. In that country a series of constitu-tional and other enactments in thenineteenth century had progressivelyextended the reach of individual and cor-porate religious freedoms. The DutchReformed Church had been disestablishedin the 1790s but this had not ushered in full religious freedom; the 1801Constitution required, for example, that at the age of 14 every independent personof either sex must register with a churchdenomination (Bijsterveld 1996: 209).In 1815, when the United Kingdom of theNetherlands incorporated the southernCatholic provinces (until 1830), the previ-ous state church was not re-established;instead, the principle that the state shouldnot interfere in the internal affairs of religious organizations was laid down.In 1848 when constitutional amendmentsopened the way for the Roman CatholicChurch to restore its hierarchy, a new arti-cle was adopted which allowed religiousprocessions only under a set of restrictiveprovisions which effectively amounted to a de facto ban (Bijsterveld 1996: 211).Other marks of state secularity in 1900were the ban on clergy celebrating a reli-gious marriage prior to a mandatory civilmarriage and the facts that no concordathad been negotiated with the Vatican andthat no specific ministry for religiousaffairs had existed since 1871.The state didhowever continue to make a contributionto the salaries and pensions of churchministers and maintained theological faculties in the state universities in addition

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to subsidizing a number of free theologicalcolleges.

The foundations of the inherited systemsof church establishment, which still survived across almost all of Europe,were by 1900 nonetheless under threat.In most countries religious freedoms hadexpanded, albeit at different paces andoccasionally with reversals, so that estab-lishments could rely for their maintenanceless on the negative penal disciplines withwhich state authorities had once supportedthem. In France where tensions betweenclericals and anticlericals had run espe-cially high in the 1890s, as reflected forexample in the storm around the Dreyfusaffair, matters came to a head soon after1900 and issued in a decisive change whichmade France Europe’s first laïciste (or secu-larist, as opposed to merely secular) state.The Law of Separation of 1905 proclaimedthat henceforth the Republic would nei-ther recognize nor subsidize, any religiousconfession or cult whatsoever, thereby interalia unilaterally annulling the Concordatof 1802 (Rémond 1999: 149). In Britain at around the same time non-conformistagitation for Anglican disestablishment inWales was rising on the back of a disputeabout the funding of religious education,a classic issue wherever church–state ten-sions arose, and in 1914 the decisive votewas taken to disestablish, something whichfinally came into effect in 1920.

If the principle of formal church estab-lishment was already being pegged back inparts of Western Europe before 1914, theFirst World War and its outcome acted as a major ‘extinction event’, especially inEastern Europe where the great landempires were finally broken up. In Russiathe Orthodox Church was disestab-lished three months after the Bolsheviksseized power in late 1917; it was therebyreduced to the status of a mere religiousassociation with no corporate personalityand thus prevented from owning property.Accordingly, all lands and buildings which

had previously belonged to it were nation-alised. In Georgia and Armenia theOrthodox churches were also disestab-lished after a brief experiment with inde-pendence from the Soviet Union but in the parts of the Russian Empire whichsucceeded in gaining their independencearound this time (Finland, Estonia, Latvia,Lithuania and Poland) establishment of the locally dominant confession was eitherconfirmed or reinforced. The end of theAustro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 alsospelt the end of church establishment inAustria itself, Hungary, and the territorieswhich became part of the ‘Kingdom of theSerbs, Croats and Slovenes’ (from 1921Yugoslavia). Similarly in Germany theWeimar constitution of 1919 formally dis-established the state church while allowingfor cooperation in matters of religiouseducation in the public schools, the raising of the Kirchensteuer (a church taxcollected by the state tax authorities), andmilitary chaplaincies (Robbers 1996: 58).And, finally, at the south-eastern corner ofEurope after the collapse of the OttomanEmpire the Kemalist regime not onlyabolished the caliphate in 1923 but alsolaunched a radical campaign of state-enforced secularization which prohibitedthe use of conspicuous religious dress(including the hijab for women and the fez for men) in public, while subjecting all religious bodies to close state controlunder a Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Some contemporary commentatorsconcluded that all these developmentsindicated that church establishment hadfinally been consigned to the dustbin ofhistory (Wyduckel 2001: 169). Its survivalin different confessional guises in theNordic countries, the Iberian peninsula,and the Orthodox states of the continent’ssouth-east were seen as anomalous andlikely soon to suffer the same dismal fate asthe necessary lessons of modernity werefinally absorbed. In Catholic thinking statechurches – despite their virtual existence

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in the small overwhelmingly Catholicstates of Liechtenstein,Malta and Monaco –had never been fully legitimate institu-tional forms, often having come into existence on the back of an unwelcomeentanglement with the local temporalauthorities. The arrangement preferred by the Vatican was instead friendly cooper-ation between church and state within a particular territory on the basis ofConcordats, that is, treaties which werenegotiated to protect the autonomy of thechurch within the spiritual sphere and to provide favourable conditions for itsmission within civil society. It was on sucha basis that relations between the Vaticanitself and the Italian state were finally settled with the Lateran Pact of 1929 – aseries of Concordat agreements which also finally regularized the existence ofEurope’s only remaining church–state:the State of Vatican City. Four years latermajor concordat agreements were alsosigned in 1933 with Germany and Austria.In Spain, where the Latin pattern of clerical–anticlerical confrontation wasstarkly exemplified in a series of violentpolitical oscillations, 1931 saw the estab-lishment of a Second Republic, the separa-tion of church and state, the nationalizationof church property, the abolition of statesupport, the secularization of the educationsystem and the expulsion of the Jesuits. Bythe end of the decade, however, after threeyears of bitter civil war, Franco’s authori-tarian regime had reversed the situationonce again and firmly entrenched a systemof National Catholicism.

Following World War II in 1945, a waveof democratization swept Western Europeas complete disenchantment with theauthoritarian and totalitarian alternativesof fascism, Nazism and communism set in.Christian Democratic parties were amongthe beneficiaries of this rejection of bothextremes of left and right alternatives onthe continent and it was largely undergovernments dominated by them that

post-war reconstruction was taken forward.Aside from the critical economic revivalover which they presided they were alsoresponsible for ensuring conditionsfavourable to the principal religious insti-tutions in their several countries. Unlike in 1918 and largely because of the strengthof the Christian Democratic parties, therewas no appetite for further measures ofdisestablishment. Instead, in WesternEurope churches tended to be restored totheir former places of honour and privi-lege. In Germany and Italy the interwarconcordats remained in force while inFranco’s Spain, a new concordat in 1953reinforced the system of NationalCatholicism. In Eastern Europe the end of the world war produced radically differ-ent outcomes as Soviet-installed regimesintroduced strict controls on the churchesand other religious bodies and the stateatheism which had been pioneered in Russia after the Bolshevik takeover in1917 was imposed – thus, in Poland, forexample, the government abrogated theconcordat.This occurred more often thannot in the context of constitutional provi-sions which ostensibly guaranteed religiousfreedom in accordance with the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights of 1948 andother international legal instruments(Boyle and Sheen 1997). By 1970 how-ever, as Table 12.1 indicates, all 22 coun-tries of Central and Eastern Europe whichlay behind the Iron Curtain could be designated Atheistic de jure, committed inBarrett’s terms to ‘formally promotingirreligion’.This meant typically that whilethe state was ostensibly separated from allreligions and churches, it was also ‘linkedfor ideological reasons with irreligion andopposed on principle to all religion’,claiming the right ‘to oppose religion by discrimination, obstruction or evensuppression’ (Barrett 1982: 96). Separationin these states meant exclusion from publiclife and the cutting-off of most of theresources required for religion to flourish;

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it emphatically did not mean that the statewas debarred from interfering in the fieldof religious provision – rather that,as in Turkey, the state and its organs shouldexert maximum control and surveillance.In the extreme case of Albania, finally, theattempt was openly made from 1967 to1991 to abolish religion altogether.

In very different ways the decades after1945 can be seen then as a time when theconnections between, and mutual involve-ment of, religion and the state was actuallyreinforced in both Western and EasternEurope.

Thirty years on however, Europe’s thirdwave of democratization began with theApril 1974 military overthrow of Portugal’sauthoritarian regime and the transition todemocracy which followed shortly after-ward upon the death of Franco in neigh-bouring Spain. This wave spread to LatinAmerica and parts of Asia before washingback across Eastern Europe in the late1980s, finally putting an end to the com-munist or state socialist regimes. Churchesand religious groups were in some of thesecountries, for example and most notablyin Poland, of considerable significance inthe campaigns for liberalisation anddemocratisation which – along with thewithdrawal of Soviet guarantees – precip-itated the shift to more open democraticregimes. As Table 12.1 indicates, by 2000all the states which were coded as Atheisticin 1970 had either returned to the cate-gory of de jure Religious states providingsupport to the locally dominant religioustradition (15 cases) or had opted to be dejure Secular (7 cases: Russia, the threeBaltic states, Hungary, Slovakia andMacedonia), that is, officially promotingneither religion nor irreligion.

It is remarkable how little Europe’s con-fessional geography has changed despite theturbulence and violence of the twentiethcentury.Column IV of Table 12.1 illustrateshow the division of Europe along confes-sional lines which was inherited from the

Latin-Orthodox schism and, in WesternEurope, from the period of Reformationand Wars of Religion, was still evident inthe proportion of countries’ populationswhich retained confessional or denomina-tional identities. Of the 45 countries listed,fully 38 (84%) continued in 2000 to exhibitsingle-confession absolute majorities, 33(72%) had super-majorities (that is, popula-tions where more than two-thirds shared a single confessional identity), while in 12countries (27%), more than 90% of peopleshared a single religious identity. Howevercrude, these figures can be taken to demon-strate that the early-modern confessionalstate continues to throw a long shadowacross contemporary Europe.

In 1999 canon lawyer Silvio Ferraripresented the thesis that despite surface,legalistic differences there actually existeda common model of relationship betweenthe state and religious faiths in WesternEurope. He argued that the conventionalfocus on ‘outmoded’ typologies ofchurch–state relations, which stressed, forexample, the differences between sepa-ratist, concordat-based and national (orstate–church) systems, obscured the exist-ence of real commonalities at the level of‘legal substance’. The model was charac-terized first by a common commitment to the recognition of individuals’ rights to religious liberty. Anomalies in this area – such as the continuing constitu-tional ban in Greece on proselytism – weregradually being eliminated, although novelproblems in connection with the tolera-tion of unconventional ‘cults’ such as theChurch of Scientology or the Mooniescontinued to pose a challenge. What dis-tinguished Ferrari’s common Europeanmodel, however, was its deliberate privi-leging of religion:

A religious sub-sector is singled outwithin the public sector.This may beunderstood as a ‘playing field’ or‘protected area’. Inside it the various

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collective religious subjects (churches,denominations, and religious com-munities) are free to act in conditionsof substantial advantage compared tothose collective subjects that are notreligious.

(Ferrari 1999: 3)

One question-begging feature of Ferrari’smodel centres on what he saw as theessentially secular nature of the modernstate: ‘the fundamental principles of thecommon European model of relationshipsbetween the state and the religious com-munities … are quite rigid. … [They] havebeen summed up in the formula “the sec-ular state” ’ (Ferrari 1999: 11). A glance atthe data presented in Table 12.1 suggests,however, that what distinguishes theEuropean model is not so much state sec-ularity as state religiosity, particularlywhen contrasted with the separationistmodel in the USA (Krislov 1985).This is apoint that emerges even more clearly fromthe analysis of Jonathan Fox’s large world-wide data collection mapping church–stateconnectedness (Fox and Sandler 2005; Fox2006). If the secularity of the state is to beseen as a fundamental principle of theEuropean model, then, it is surely one morehonoured in the breach than the obser-vance (Barro and McCleary 2005).

The record in Eastern Europe is instruc-tive. None of the eight former Communistcountries of Central and Eastern Europethat joined the EU in May 2004 (in alpha-betic order: the Czech Republic, Estonia,Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,Slovakia and Slovenia) formally adopted a state–church model after the end of theCold War; nor, on the other hand, did anyof them adopt a rigid separation modeleither despite the claim of some that it constitutes a sine qua non of liberaldemocracy. Most instead chose ‘benevo-lent separation’ or ‘cooperation’ modelsand all, including those that did not havesignificant Catholic populations, negotiated

some kind of concordat settlement withthe Vatican.This is all the more remarkablesince of the 15 previous EU membersonly 5 (Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugaland Spain) had existing concordats. InGermany the fall of the Wall in 1989 alsoled to a new wave of church–state treaties,as the Eastern Länder were again openedfor free religious activity.

Beyond Europe: contemporaryreligion–state relations in therest of the world

In the red dawn of the third millenniumof the Common Era it is a nice irony thatdebates about secularization continueunabated; the rising trend line of contro-versy itself would seem to mock the veryidea that religion is declining in politicalsignificance.As in the case of Europe, indi-cations reflecting the mutual entangle-ments of states and religion across theworld point Janus-like in both directions:while the parliament of Tuvalu in 1991approved legislation establishing the[Congregationalist] Church of Tuvalu asthe state church, at the end of 2007Nepal’s provisional parliamentary assemblyvoted to abolish the monarchy whosekings were held to be reincarnations of theHindu god Vishnu.With the developmentof the Fox (2006) dataset measures for thedifferent components of state–religionrelations between 1990 and 2002, it is nowpossible to review the contemporary situ-ation using empirical indicators for all statesof one million or more inhabitants.

As was noted above in the case ofEurope, secularizing trends, have failed tomake for anything like a clear separationbetween state and religion, even in thosecountries where critical political changeshad for much of the previous centuryplaced anti-religious elites in power. AsTable 12.2 indicates, the hostile pattern ofstate–religion juxtaposition had in fact by

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2002 become a rarity across the wholeglobe. The number of remaining cases ofregimes judged by Fox (2006) to be either‘hostile’ or ‘inadvertently insensitive’ toreligion had reduced to only five; thesewere respectively Vietnam and Cuba, andChina, North Korea and Laos. An equallyremarkable finding is the failure of separa-tionism to have made significant headway:only nine states in 2002 could be countedas having separationist regimes – inEurope, only France and Azerbaijan,and, in the Americas, only Mexico andUruguay.1 Fully 92% of all cases (161 outof 175 countries) were coded as havingstate–religion regulatory regimes whichranged from full religious establishment to‘accommodationism’ (understood as involv-ing a posture of benevolent neutralitytowards religion).2

The largest single category, accountingfor over a quarter of all countries, is theone which most positively favours not just religion in general but a particularreligion – or, as in the anomalous cases ofthe United Kingdom and Finland, twoparticular religions: this is the category ofcountries which still maintained systemsof Established Religion(s). As Table 12.2indicates, this pattern is to be found in allconfessional traditions, although it is mostcommon in those countries where Islamhas been historically dominant, where it

accounts for almost 60% of all cases. In traditionally Catholic countries the mostcommon state–religion regulatory regimeis that of Endorsed Religion where thereis an official acknowledgement thatRoman Catholicism has a special place inthe country’s traditions, as for example inthe cases of Ireland, Spain, Portugal,Poland and Croatia. Finally, among thecountries where ‘Other Christian’ –mainly Protestant and Orthodox – confes-sional traditions have been historicallydominant, Accommodationist regimes arefound to be most common.

While Table 12.2 provides a summaryoverview of state–religion relations in termsof alternative models it cannot show therange of variation in scope and intensity ofthe regulatory relationships which are to befound within and across the individual cat-egories (Fox 2006: 538). For example, casesof the Established Religion(s) model arefound in Catholic Malta, Protestant UnitedKingdom and Muslim Saudi Arabia, yeteven without quantitative measures todemonstrate the fact it is evident that the‘weight’ of religious establishment, as it is expressed in regulatory arrangementsaffecting the established religion itself andother religions, varies widely betweenthese three cases. Similarly the fact thatboth France and Azerbaijan are coded ascases of separationist regimes obscures vast

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Table 12.2 State–religion regimes in 2002, by historically dominant confession

Catholic Other Muslim Other TotalsChristian

Established religion(s) 7 (16.3%) 6 (14.1%) 27 (57.4%) 4 (12.5%) 46 (26.2%)Endorsed religion(s) 18 (41.9%) 10 (18.9%) 6 (12.8%) 2 (6.3%) 36 (20.6%)Cooperationist 9 (20.9%) 14 (26.4%) 5 (10.6%) 10 (31.3%) 38 (21.7%)Accommodationist 6 (14.0%) 20 (37.7%) 5 (10.6%) 10 (31.3%) 41 (23.4%)Separationist 3 (7.0%) 1 (1.9%) 4 (8.5%) 1 (3.1%) 9 (5.1%)Insensitive/hostile 0 0 0 5 (15.6%) 5 (2.9%)Total 43 (100%) 53 (100%) 47 (99.9%) 32 (100.1%) 175

Notes: I have chosen to adapt Cole Durham’s (1996) original labelling for this table, shortening his coding by combin-ing the Cooperationist (T = 35) and Supportive (T = 3) and the Inadvertent Insensitivity (T = 4) and Hostile (T = 1)categories.The source of the data is Fox (2006).

differences in their internal arrangements.Fox’s government involvement in religion(GIR) index, however, provides a usefulsummary indication of these variations.3

Table 12.3 shows the banded scores forGIR in 2002 across all 175 countriesarranged by world region. In manyrespects the picture which emerges isunsurprising.The fact that the mean GIRscore for the countries of the Middle Eastand North Africa, which are overwhelm-ingly Muslim (the exceptions being Israel

and Lebanon) is much the highest (over50) is consistent with the finding in Table12.2 that a large majority of countrieswhere Islam has been historically dominanthave systems of religious establishment.Equally, the fact that Saudi Arabia (78) andIran (67) score first and second in thismeasure of governmental regulatoryweight in the sphere of religion accordswith what is widely known about theirtheocratic or hierocratic systems of gov-ernment given their treatment of certain

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Table 12.3 Government involvement in religion scores in 2002, by region

GIR score Western Former Asia M. East Sub-Saharan Latin Totalsdeciles democracies Soviet bloc and Africa America

N.Africa

0.00>9.99 USA Estonia Taiwan Congo-B. Guyana 38 Netherlands Albania S. Korea Lesotho Ecuador (21.7%)Australia Mongolia Namibia BahamasCanada Solomon Is. Benin Brazil

Philippines Angola BarbadosJapan Burkina-F. Trinidad

Burundi, & TobagoGambia SurinameS.Africa UruguayZaireSwaziland Liberia Senegal Malawi Mozambique Ghana Botswana Rwanda

10.00>19.99 Luxembourg Tajikistan Fiji Mauritius Mexico 41 New Zealand Slovenia Papua NG Guinea-B. Jamaica (23.4%)Sweden Bosnia-H. Vanuatu Sierra L. GuatemalaItaly Yugoslavia Gabon NicaraguaIreland Latvia Cape Verde ColombiaGk Cyprus Lithuania Togo Tk. Cyprus Czech Rep. CameroonGermany Kyrgyzstan Mali

Slovakia ZimbabweUkraine Tanzania

Central Af.Rep.MadagascarNiger UgandaIvory Coast

Continued

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Table 12.3 Continued

GIR score Western Former Asia M. East Sub-Saharan Latin Totalsdeciles democracies Soviet bloc and Africa America

N.Africa

20.00>29.99 Switzerland Poland Thailand Lebanon Ethiopia Belize 42 Portugal Croatia India Guinea Chile (24.0%)France Hungary Nepal Nigeria ParaguayAndorra Romania Cambodia Chad HondurasAustria Macedonia Singapore Equat. HaitiBelgium Guinea PeruMalta Kenya VenezuelaNorway Eritrea El SalvadorDenmark Zambia PanamaLiechtenstein Domin.UK, Spain Rep.Iceland

30.00>39.99 Finland Russia Sri Lanka Israel Djibouti Argentina 20 Greece Azerbaijan Bangladesh Bahrain Somalia Costa Rica (11.4%)

Kazakhstan Laos BoliviaMoldovaGeorgiaBelarusBulgariaTurkmenistan

40.00>49.99 Armenia N. Korea Syria Comoros Cuba 18Uzbekistan Bhutan Oman Mauritania (10.3%)

Indonesia KuwaitBurma TurkeyChina LibyaAfghanistan Yemen

W. Sahara50.00>59.99 Pakistan Morocco Sudan 11

Brunei Qatar (6.3%)Vietnam AlgeriaMalaysia Iraq

TunisiaUAE

60.00>69.99 Maldives Jordan 4Egypt (2.4%)Iran

70.00>79.99 Saudi 1Arabia (0.6%)

Mean scores 19.17 24.24 30.71 50.82 15.82 17.88 175(100.1%)

Source: The source of this data is the RAS (Religion and State) dataset developed by Jonathan Fox. A full descrip-tion is available in J. Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) andfrom the Religion and State project website: http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/po/ras/

religious minorities, their patterns of reg-ulation of the majority religion, and theirprivileging of religious legislation. Israel’sGIR score (37) which is by contrast lowfor the Middle East/North Africa region isshown also to be relatively high in a worldcontext. The overall GIR score for theWestern liberal democracies with a meanwell under half that of the MiddleEast/North Africa is considerably lower.Here the interesting point to note is, how-ever, that when all the elements of govern-mental involvement in the sphere ofreligion are taken into account only fourout of 27 score under 10 and only the USAscores zero, reflecting its history untilrecently of strict separationism. Interestingly,the median case is Portugal (22), where asTable 12.1 indicated 97% of the populationare, formally at least, Roman Catholic andCatholicism has been the established reli-gion throughout the twentieth and into thetwenty-first century.

This brief statistical survey of state–religion institutional arrangements can takelittle account of the turbulent struggleswhich have revolved, and in many parts ofthe world continue to revolve, aroundthem and been involved in constructingthem. Thus, Islamists following the linemarked out by radicals including theEgyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and the Pakistani Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi(1903-79) regard many of the politi-cal regimes, which incorporate forms ofIslamic religious establishment in, say,Egypt or Algeria or Saudi Arabia, as cor-rupt, in practice anti-Islamic and worthyonly of violent overthrow. And contem-porary Islamists’ sometimes-violent cam-paigns against such regimes and those inthe West who are seen to support them,such as the USA and Britain, have tippedmuch of the world into the turmoil of theso-called War on Terror. In those countrieswhere Islamists have, for a time at leastgained power – Iran, Afghanistan andSudan, for example – and attempted to

craft fully Islamic polities with the stateunder the authority of religious officials,the resulting struggles have been no lessturbulent, while in others where the con-test between rival factions remains unde-cided – Somalia, Iraq and Pakistan, forexample – the threat or reality of state fail-ure with the complete breakdown of thestate’s ability to rule is present. While theworld of Islam presents the most dramaticattempts by religious forces to assert theirprecedence in the exercise of state powersit is not alone. In India and Sri Lanka, forexample, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist fun-damentalists also struggle to reorder onreligious lines the political arrangementsset in place at the time of independence.

Conclusion

Located in a world context, the situationin Europe is increasingly seen as excep-tional. In spite of – or, perhaps, because of – the maintenance there of importantstate–religion linkages, the secularity ofEuropean societies and cultures hasseemed to resist the sacralizing trendsevident elsewhere. Even in the USA suchtrends are evident, although in one mani-festation they can be seen as pressing forchanges which would bring state–religionrelationships closer to those obtaining in Europe (Monsma and Soper 1997).Europe is far from immune to the trends,however (Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006).Nor is it clear that the European state–religion model of benevolent neutralitywill prove sufficiently robust to accommo-date and so ‘domesticate’ the more difficultchallenges that face it (Madeley 2006a,2006b). Olivier Roy has argued that ‘neo-fundamentalist’ Islam, which, he avers,increasingly appeals to Europe’s rootlessand materially disadvantaged Muslimyouth, is associated in one of its formswith support for the militancy of extremegroups such as Al-Qaeda. Even in less

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threatening variants, which typically seekreassertion of strict or ‘pure’ Islamic valueswithin the minority communities, deterri-torialized Islam can be seen as embracingmulticulturalism – principally as a meansof resisting, rather than easing, integrationinto the European host societies (Roy2002: 1). Both cases, however, wouldappear to represent a radical integralistchallenge to both state and society inEurope, and place a large question markover secularization as differentiation. Theviolent events of 2004 in the Netherlands,including the murder of the film director,Theo van Gogh, by an avowed Islamist,stand as a cautionary tale from modernEurope’s first largely secular state and thesite of many of its most progressive socialexperiments:‘What happened in this smallcorner of northwestern Europe couldhappen anywhere, as long as young menand women feel that death is their onlyway home’ (Buruma 2006: 262).

Notes

1 The others so identified were Tajikistan,Kyrgyzstan, Niger, Eritrea and Singapore.

2 It is particularly noteworthy in this contextthat the USA, the world’s first state to intro-duce church–state separation, was judged tohave ceased to count as separationist and ranksinstead as accommodationist. In line with theFox finding, Cole Durham points out thatmany scholars, McConnell for example, arguethat the USA is now to be regarded as accom-modationist rather than separationist not leastbecause ‘[a]s state influence becomes morepervasive and regulatory burdens expand,refusal to exempt or accommodate shadesinto hostility’ (Cole Durham 1996: 2).

3 The index scores represent an overall measureof GIR obtained by combining six narrower-gauge measures for: (1) state support for oneor more religions either officially or in prac-tice; (2) state hostility toward religion;(3) comparative government treatment of different religions, including both benefits andrestrictions; (4) government restrictions on the practice of religion by religiousminorities; (5) government regulation of the

majority religion; and (6) legislation of reli-gious laws.The figures given are simply sum-mations of the number of positive instances of GIR.

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Ferrari, S. (1999) ‘The new wine and the old cask: tolerance, religion, and the law in con-temporary Europe’, in A. Sajo and S. Avineri(eds), The Law of Religious Identity: Models forPost-Communism, The Hague: Kluwer LawInternational, pp. 1–15.

Fox, J. (2006) ‘World separation of religion andstate into the 21st century’, Comparative PoliticalStudies, 39, 5, pp. 537–69.

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Halliday, F. (1995) Islam and the Myth ofConfrontation, London: I.B.Tauris.

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13Does God matter, and if so whose God?

Religion and democratisation1

John Anderson

The question of how, or if, religious tradi-tions might affect the possibility of suc-cessful democratisation has been hotlydebated for several decades. During theimmediate post-war years many writersstressed the importance of political culturein explaining the success or otherwise ofdemocratisation and some focused on theways in which religious traditions fed intothe making of any country’s political cul-ture. More recently a ‘new orthodoxy’ hasemerged which concentrates on institu-tional or economic factors in the makingof democracy and tends to see the impactof cultural factors as marginal or irrele-vant. Few authors analysing the ‘thirdwave’ give much space to religion, exceptin discussing countries such as Polandwhere institutional religion played a rolein undermining authoritarian regimes.Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, analysing theEast European experience, suggest thatreligion is a hypothesis that one can dowithout because other factors are suffi-cient to explain the differential results ofdemocratisation in the region (Linz andStepan 1996: 452–453). In similar veinFred Halliday argues that the barriers to democracy in Islamic countries have todo with ‘certain other social and political

features that their societies share. …Though some of these features tend to belegitimised in terms of Islamic doctrine,there is nothing specifically “Islamic”about them’ (Halliday 1996: 116). By wayof contrast Samuel Huntington has seenreligion as crucial in defining the civilisa-tional blocs into which he claims the worldis divided and has argued that religioustradition does have an impact upon thelikely success of democratisation efforts(Huntington 1991, 1996).

This chapter offers a brief review of thekey debates and points to the main argu-ments of the new orthodoxy which stress:the impossibility of essentialising religioustraditions, the multi-vocal nature of allreligious discourses which can provideresources for both supporters and oppo-nents of democracy, and the secondarynature of cultural factors in explainingsuccessful or failed democratisation. Thischapter accepts many of these argumentsbut simultaneously argues that religion isnot entirely irrelevant to understanding theevolution of democratic experiments. Inparticular, it suggests that religious traditionsdo have core elements – just as does demo-cracy, contrary to cultural relativist critiques;that religious traditions may, in Stepan’s

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words be multi-vocal (Stepan 2001:252–253), but that at any point in time thedominant voices within them may provemore or less receptive to pluralistic devel-opment; and that intertwined religiousand cultural traditions as expressed throughpublic discourse and in the positionsadopted by key religious actors, thoughnot decisive, may have some marginalimpact upon the success or otherwise ofdemocratic consolidation. In other words,the (rather weak) argument is not that reli-gion determines political outcomes, orthat religious emphases cannot change, orthat the world is divided into inevitablyclashing civilisational blocs – though myfocus (for reasons of space) on Islam andEastern Orthodoxy as partially problem-atic traditions may superficially appear tosupport such an approach – but simplythat religion is not irrelevant to evaluatingthe prospects for democratisation.

The debate

The Protestant connection

Many of those writing about the precondi-tions for democracy in the decades follow-ing 1945 noted that the first countries to democratise tended to have a Protestantreligious tradition – the USA,Great Britain,Scandinavia, Holland – whilst, as SteveBruce notes in his contribution to this col-lection, these were also the countries thatavoided the authoritarian embrace duringthe twentieth century. Of course there wereexceptions – intermittently in some LatinAmerican countries and in India after inde-pendence – so there was no suggestion thatProtestantism was a necessary condition,but the argument was made that there wereelements within this religious tradition thatwere more suited to the emergence of plu-ralist politics. For some this affinity lay ineconomic developments within these coun-tries, for others democracy stemmed from

certain ideological features of the Protestanttradition, whilst yet others saw democracy as a largely ‘accidental’ by-product of certainaspects of the Reformation process.

Those who focused on the economicconnection tended to see democracy as aconsequence of economic modernisationand, because the most developed countriestended to be Protestant in tradition, it wasperhaps inevitable that democracy shouldemerge first in these countries. MaxWeber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism had suggested that certain psy-chological conditions contributed towardsthe creation of the modern capitalistsystem, and that these were created in largepart by religious change. Here he linkedthe urge to accumulate to the peculiarlyCalvinist notions of ‘calling’ and ‘predes-tination’ which gave birth to a ‘worldlyasceticism’ that encouraged the pursuit of wealth so long as it was not used forworldly pleasure (Weber 1930: chs 4, 5).Needless to say,Weber was far too sophis-ticated to posit a deterministic relation-ship, warning that ‘we have no intention ofmaintaining such a foolish and doctrinairethesis as that the spirit of capitalism …could only have arisen as a result of certaineffects of the Reformation, or even thatcapitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation … we canonly proceed by investigating whether andat what points certain correlationsbetween forms of religious beliefs andpractical ethics can be worked out’ (Weber1930: 91). Equally, it should be stressedthat he was not at this point making anargument about democracy as such,though some of the implications of histhesis have been extended to suggest aconnection between Protestantism anddemocracy. In particular, it has beenargued that the Reformation helped tobreak down the traditional cultural bar-riers to economic modernisation which inturn created a growing division of labourand a degree of egalitarianism.

The link to democracy was also seen inthe ideological nature of Protestantismwith its emphasis on the individual’s rela-tionship with God, an idea that was inher-ently egalitarian in nature. At the heart ofLuther’s vision was the notion of thepriesthood of all believers which, at leastin the spiritual sphere, made no distinctionbetween prince or pauper when it cameto one’s relationship with God. SimilarlyCalvin’s ‘calling’ was something that couldcome to any member of a society and onpaper his congregational politics could beseen as a prototype of democratic forms of governance. Of course, in practice noneof the leading Reformers were democratsin the modern sense of the word. Lutherstressed the naturalness of the given socialorder, relied heavily on princes for thedefence of the new teachings, and vigor-ously denounced the peasants who roseagainst their masters (for a general surveyof Luther’s thinking on politics, see Cargill1984). Equally, Calvinist congregationalpolities were often heavily dominated bytheir pastors and Calvin’s own experienceof struggling with Geneva’s notionallyrepresentative assembly rendered himsceptical about the conformity of any par-ticular form of government to the divineideal (Kingdom and Linder 1970; Wuthnow1989: 126–128).

Nonetheless, there emerged out ofReformation discourse several ideas thatwere to contribute to the emergence of democracy in the modern sense: thenotion of rule as a convenant betweenrulers and ruled, the acceptability of resist-ance to rulers under some circumstances,and the idea of tolerance. During the latterhalf of the sixteenth century various writ-ers explored the question of when it mightbe acceptable to resist tyranny and whohad the right to overthrow evil rulers. Byand large, the reformers were conservativebut by the end of the century there hadbegun to emerge an emphasis on rule asthe product of a covenant between people

and monarch, an idea perhaps best set out in the Calvinist-inspired Vindicae contra tyrannos (1579). Here it was suggested thatshould the prince flout God’s law he wouldlose divine approval and the mutual obliga-tion implicit in the covenant would be undermined. In such circumstances thecommunity had a right to encourage achange in behaviour and in the last resort toremove an erring leader (Kingdom 1991).

With regard to tolerance, this was not a virtue initially much discussed by theReformers and religious liberty was oftenseen in terms of ‘freedom in Christ’ orfreedom from the ‘mire of Catholicism’(Benedict 1996: 69–93). In consequencethey generally advocated acceptance of theirown right to differ from Catholic ortho-doxy but were often unable to accept dif-ference within communities and states thatthey ruled.Yet perhaps inevitably the reli-gious fragmentation that followed on fromthe Reformation helped to undermine thenotion of a single-faith community domin-ating the political order.This was certainlynot the intent of the Protestant reformersbut, in Steve Bruce’s words, an inadvertentby-product of the social and theologicalchanges they initiated. In particular, risingprosperity attendant upon economic mod-ernisation, the changing relationshipbetween the individual and the community,and the rise of religious diversity helped tobreak the organic connection of religionand community and to push religion intothe private sphere.With increasing religiousdiversity, enforcing orthodoxy became moreexpensive for emerging nation states and inconsequence they organised their activitieswith decreasing reference to religious insti-tutions or ideas (Bruce 2003: 144–254).Thus the acceptance of religious diver-sity which gradually emerged following the Reformation contributed to a wideracceptance of diversity and the need forconsent in constructing the political order,which was later institutionalised in liberal-democratic forms.

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‘Undemocratic’ religions

If Protestantism was seen as a key contrib-utor to the emergence of democratic ordersor at the very least a particularly ‘suitable’religion for democracy, nearly all otherreligious traditions tended to be viewed asin some sense incompatible with pluralistpolitics. Initially, much of the discussionfocused on Roman Catholicism whichhistorically had been deeply hostile todemocratic ideals and which, during thefirst half of the twentieth century, seemedto find it easy to live with authoritarianpolitical systems.The fact that democracyhad largely emerged within the Protestantworld meant that for some time theRoman Catholic Church did not have toengage directly with democratic forms of rule. The excesses of the FrenchRevolution, ostensibly committed togiving citizens the right of political parti-cipation, reinforced the Church’s view thatdemocracy was in some sense associatedwith chaos, anarchy and hostility towardstrue religion. Moreover, the very notion ofpopular sovereignty appeared to contradictthe sovereignty of God, whilst genuinetolerance was viewed as threatening to theChurch’s ideological hegemony. In conse-quence, Gregory XVI was quick to con-demn the erroneous concept of ‘freedomof conscience’ whilst the Syllabus of Errors(1860) rejected the view that the Churchshould compromise with ‘progress, liberal-ism and modern civilisation’ (Sigmund1987:530–548).Though Leo XIII’s encycli-cal Rerum Novarum (1891) promoted avision of social Catholicism, the Vaticanclung to its rejection of democratic poli-tics till the perceived threat of commu-nism led it to re-think its position. Eventhen Catholic hierarchies in practice con-tinued to remain ambiguous in their rela-tionships with authoritarian regimes,whether the fascist rulers of CentralEurope during the 1930s or the corpo-ratist leaders of Iberia and Latin America

during the post-war years.And, as Sigmundnotes, the Vatican’s view of all politicalorder as provisional and its willingness toadapt to all regimes so long as they did notdirectly threaten the Catholic conceptionof the common good encouraged a ten-dency to accept the status quo (Sigmund1987: 531).

It was the experience of the Iberian andLatin American countries from the 1930sthrough the 1960s that led some scholars tosuggest the incompatibility of Catholicismand democratic governance. So long asthese regimes protected the institutionalinterests of the Church, whose bishopsoften came from the same social groups asthe political elite, there was little reason forclergymen to oppose authoritarian rulers.In most cases such regimes provided legalsupport for Catholic hegemony, promotedCatholic education in education and per-mitted the censorship of works critical ofreligious teaching. More importantly, therewere key elements within the Catholicorganisational and ideological tradition thatchimed in well with the authoritarian andpaternalistic political traditions of thesestates. These included its monarchical andhierarchical structure, its emphasis on sub-mission to the authority of the clericalestate, and its intolerance of diversity withinpredominantly Catholic states. Dealy pointsout that in North America the foundingfathers sought to disperse power,whereas inLatin America the rulers who broke awayfrom Spain and Portugal sought to unifypower, and he sees the roots of this monis-tic vision in the common Catholic cultureof the region and springing out of theCatholic notion of the common good,something which is distinct from the sumof many private interests and tends to viewthe pursuit of particular interests as invari-ably divisive (Dealy 1992: 40–60). Thus elements within the Catholic traditionreinforced and strengthened Iberian–LatinAmerican predispositions towards hierarchy,paternalism and authoritarianism.

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The primary focus of academic discussionin the 1950s and 1960s was the CatholicChurch, and the limited attention paid toother religions suggested that few scholarstook seriously the possibility that theymight prove supportive of democraticdevelopment. Many scholars focused on‘Islam’ and ‘Confucianism’ as religions thatcontained elements within them that sat uneasily with democracy. With regard to Islam it was suggested that reliance on a fixed religious text and quasi-legalordinances, the emphasis on divine sover-eignty, and the supposed lack of distinctionbetween the religious and the politicalrealms, all worked against democratic devel-opment. Moreover, in practice democracyhad by and large, and with the partialexceptions of Turkey and Pakistan, failed to take root in any predominantly Muslimcountry in the decades following the war(Vatikiotis 1987; Kedourie 1992). In similarvein several writers argued that theConfucian culture that dominated parts ofEast Asia, with its emphasis on hierarchy,order and consensus also worked againstdemocracy (on Confucianism, see Pye1985). Other religions barely rated a men-tion in these early discussions, the assump-tion perhaps being that Eastern Orthodoxywith its long tradition of dependence uponthe state (Koyziz 1993: 267–289) andBuddhism with its alleged passivity offeredfew resources to would-be democratisers.More interesting is the relative absenceuntil recently of any significant discussionof Judaism, or of Hinduism whose pluralityof divinities and broad tolerance of reli-gious difference in an earlier period mighthave been seen as underlying India’sunlikely adoption of democratic gover-nance post-independence. Conversely itmight be noted that the attempt of Hindunationalists to develop a more coherent‘scriptural’ model of Hinduism has beenaccompanied by a partial rejection of thepost-independence pluralist model of polit-ical order (Hansen 1999; Batt 2001).

The thesis revised

The suggestion that certain religious tradi-tions were more suitable for democracycame under increasing attack from theearly 1980s onwards with criticism takingtwo forms.The first argued that in practicethe position adopted by political actors inpushing for democratisation was generallydecisive and culture largely irrelevant orsecondary – if external pressures, politicalelite activity or bottom-up pressure wassuch as to encourage or compel authori-tarian leaders to stand down then demo-cratisation was more likely to happen.A second approach argued that culturalisttheories over-emphasised the role of reli-gion in shaping contemporary politicalcultures and equally that they had toostatic a view of religious tradition whichmade no allowance for resources withinreligious traditions that might be support-ive of democracy.

Nonetheless, several authors continuedto focus on the suitability of different reli-gions for democratic development, albeitrevising the thesis in the process. Perhapsthe most notable revision was put forwardby Samuel Huntington in his book ondemocratisation’s ‘third wave’. Here heargued that changes in five independentvariables during the 1960s and 1970s had made possible the new democraticwave, and that these included religiouschange, most notably within the CatholicChurch. Huntington starts by noting theongoing relationship between democracyand Protestantism, quoting a 1960s studywhich suggested that, in 91 countries stud-ied, the greater the proportion of Protestantsthe higher the level of democracy.Moreover, he argued that to some extentthis relationship still held, pointing to the experience of South Korea as the onecountry where Christianity in general andProtestantism in particular had expandedrapidly during the 1960s and 1970s,with Christians making up about 1% of the

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population in 1945 and maybe 25% by themid-1980s. In turn, Christianity created ‘a surer doctrinal and institutional basis foropposing political repression’by promotingideas of equality and respect for authoritybeyond that of the state (Huntington 1991:73–74). Later discussions of the rapidexpansion of Pentecostal Christianity inLatin America have also revolved aroundthe question of whether this might rein-force a Protestant work ethic that wouldcontribute to economic development anda deepening of democratisation, thoughGill’s contribution to this collection sug-gests the need for caution in suggesting a distinctive Protestant contribution tosocio-political life (Martin 1990).

Of greater significance, however, wasthe fact that according to Huntingtonaround three-quarters of the countriesundergoing transition prior to 1991 had apredominantly Catholic tradition – thisfactor appears to have been less significantin the wave of the 1990s. By then mostpredominantly Protestant countries werealready democratic and therefore any newdemocratisations had to be in countrieswith another religious tradition, but whyCatholic? Though Huntington saw this as in part a product of the fact that thesecountries had higher rates of economicgrowth than traditionally Protestant coun-tries, he also suggested that changes withinthe Catholic Church itself were of crucialimportance. Prior to the 1960s the Churchand its national hierarchies generallyproved supportive of authoritarian ordersbut from that time onwards the institutionas a whole became increasingly critical of such regimes. At the global level thisstemmed from the changes in Catholicsocial teaching and theological ‘style’ em-anating from the Second Vatican Councilheld in the early 1960s which led theChurch to defend human rights and pro-mote democracy. At the local level a newgeneration of priests, often with Europeaneducation but also with more experience

of working amongst the marginalisedwithin their own societies, came to seetheir role in terms of defending the inter-ests of their flock against the economicallyand politically powerful. All this was rein-forced in the late 1970s by the election ofJohn Paul II who, though sceptical aboutthe radicalisation of the clergy, remainedcommitted to the defence of the dignityof the individual and supported thosenational hierarchs who promoted humanrights or got involved in mediatingbetween regimes and political opposition.All this not only changed the position of akey institutional actor but also had animpact upon regional political by promot-ing a more participatory and less hierar-chical vision of the political order (Martin1990). Hence the thesis of religious influence was effectively modified withHuntington suggesting that it was notProtestantism that was crucial in the pres-ent period but Western Christianity moregenerally – or even maybe any religious tra-dition so long as it became ‘Protestantised’by reducing hierarchical elements andfocusing more on the individual. Othershave been more sceptical of this argumentwith Jeff Haynes, for example, suggestingthat in Africa senior religious leadersjumping on the democratic bandwagon topreserve their own ideological hegemonywithin society (Haynes 1996: 104–133).

Much of the voluminous literature onreligion in Latin America tended to sup-port the view that the Catholic Churchhad by and large shifted its position infavour of a more pluralistic vision of theideal polity, though rational-choice ana-lysts such as Anthony Gill thought this hadmore to do with responses to ideologicaland organisational competition – prima-rily from expanding Protestant communi-ties – than ideological shifts within theCatholic Church (see, for example,Sigmund 1994; Kleiber 1998; Gill 1998).Linz and Stepan, who generally rejectexplanations rooted in religion, argue that

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the Catholic Church’s ability to promotepluralism in authoritarian and especiallytotalitarian countries comes from

its transnational base.The papacy canbe a source of spiritual and materialsupport for groups that want to resistmonist absorption or extinction. …This source of higher internationalpower is not available in a politicalsystem (such as Bulgaria, Romaniaor the former Soviet Union) whichhas Orthodox churches that arenational but not transnational inscope and that historically haveaccepted a form of ‘caesaropapism’.…It is also not available in a predom-inantly Islamic society because Islamas a religion is a community ofbelievers in which all believers canbe preachers and where there is notransnational hierarchy.

(Linz and Stepan 1996: 260–261)

In his 1991 book Huntington appeared toaccept that cultural constraints on demo-cracy were not fixed for ever and that justas Catholicism changed so might otherreligious traditions that help to shaperegional political cultures.Yet in the laterClash of Civilisations (1996) he appears totake a much stronger view which seesIslam in particular as providing infertileground for the development of demo-cratic institutions, especially in a globalcontext where democracy is associatedwith Western dominance.And in analysingpost-communist Europe he argued that:

The most significant dividing line inEurope, as William Wallace has sug-gested may well be the easternboundary of Western Christianity inthe year 1500. … The peoples to thenorth and west of this line areProtestant or Catholic; they shared thecommon experiences of Europeanhistory – feudalism, the Renaissance,

the Reformation, the Enlightenment,the French Revolution, the IndustrialRevolution: they are generally eco-nomically better off than the peoplesto the east; and they may now lookforward to increasing involvement ina common European economy and to the consolidation of democraticpolitical systems. The peoples to theeast and south of this line areOrthodox and Muslim: they his-torically belonged to the Ottoman orTsarist empires and were only lightlytouched by the shaping events in therest of Europe; they are generally lessadvanced economically; they seemmuch less likely to develop stabledemocratic political systems.

(Huntington 1996: 105)

In somewhat less deterministic fashionInglehart has posited the existence of cul-tural zones that have been shaped in partby religious differences. In his view thishas less to do with present religious affili-ations than with the legacy of the pastwhich means, for example, that even in countries such as the Netherlands orGermany which now have as manyCatholics as Protestants value systems tend to be ‘typically Protestant’ (Inglehartand Carballo 2000: 341). Consequently,though religious tradition does not deter-mine democratic outcomes, these authorsrestated the argument that belief systemsmay create a value and even structural bias that can work for or against successfuldemocracy building at the present momentin time.

The thesis challenged

By the late 1980s and early 1990sapproaches which sought to explain polit-ical transition in terms of political cultureand religious tradition were coming undersustained attack.‘Transitologists’ increasingly

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questioned the ‘pre-conditions’ approachwhich suggested that democracy couldonly be constructed where the conditionswere ‘right’ and argued that in principledemocratisation could take place in vary-ing circumstances.The experiences of the‘third wave’ – and some would say ‘fourthwave’ – pointed to the possibility of creat-ing democratic governance in virtuallyevery corner of the globe, though the Muslim countries of the Middle Eastand Central Asia appeared to be laggingbehind, and in a variety of cultural set-tings. This led a succession of scholars toemphasise the importance of agency. Inconsequence the focus of study was less oncultural and economic pre-conditionsthan on the choices made by key socialand political actors.There was, however, anawareness of the need to separate out thecauses of democracy – why it emerges –from what makes it flourish, a distinction I will suggest later creates an opportunityto bring religion back into consideration(see, for example, Potter 1997).

Leaving aside the actor focus, muchcriticism was levelled at the way in whichreligion had been used in explaining polit-ical development. For Beetham, the trou-ble with all such ‘negative’ hypothesesabout religion and democratisation is thatthey treated ‘religions as monolithic, whentheir core doctrines are typically subject toa variety of schools of interpretation; andas immutable, when they are notoriouslyrevisionist in the face of changing circum-stances and political currents’ (Potter 1997:29). In a wide-ranging essay published in 2001 Alfred Stepan suggested that allreligious traditions were multi-vocal,containing organisational and intellectualresources that could be called upon insupport of democratic forms of gover-nance. Thus, whilst Singapore’s leadersmight utilise ‘Asian values’ in defence ofauthoritarianism, Kim Dae Jung in SouthKorea could appeal to those same values in seeking to promote democratisation.

At the same time he noted that even polit-ical orientations that have sometimes beenseen to work against democratisation can,on occasion, work the other way, as in thecase of the Greek Orthodox Church whosetradition of subservience to the politicalauthorities led it to become supportive ofdemocracy once the political elite optedfor pluralism (Stepan 2001) – though aswe shall note later the attitude of thatChurch towards genuine pluralism is, onoccasion, rather ambiguous even today.

Much of the discussion, however, hasfocused on Islam in response to the obser-vation that the Muslim-dominated regionsof the world have proved particularlyresistant to democratisation. Whereasauthors such as Huntington and FrancisFukuyama have stirred up considerablepublic debate with their tendency to see the religious and civilisational aspectsof Islam as barriers to the inaugurationand development of democracy, manyscholars of the Middle East remain scepti-cal about the role of Islam (Huntington1996; Fukuyama 1992: 44–45). For FredHalliday,

to be drawn into an argument aboutany necessary incompatibility, or forthat matter compatibility, betweenIslam and democracy, is to acceptprecisely the false premise that thereis one true, traditionally established‘Islamic’ answer to the question, andthat this timeless ‘Islam’ rules socialand political practice. There is nosuch answer and no such ‘Islam’. …If there are in a range of Islamiccountries evident barriers todemocracy, this has to do with cer-tain other social and political fea-tures that their societies share. …Though some of these features tendto be legitimised in terms of Islamicdoctrine, there is nothing specifically‘Islamic’ about them.

(Halliday 1996: 16)

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Ray Hinnebusch (2000) takes a similarview in arguing that developments inpolitical economy provide much betterexplanations for the failures of democrat-isation in the Middle East than appeals tocultural exceptionalism.

For many writers, there is no such thingas a single Islamic political tradition (Filali-Ansary 1999), and they suggest that withinthe varying Islamic traditions there wereample intellectual resources for those seek-ing to promote democratic governance.Though Ernest Gellner argued for a‘Muslim exceptionalism’ he also recognisedthat ‘by various obvious criteria – universal-ism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism,the extension of full participation in thesacred community, not to one, or some, butto all, and the rational systematisation ofsocial life – Islam is, of the three greatWestern monotheisms, the one closest tomodernity’ (quoted in Bromley 1997: 233)and, by implication therefore, the one clos-est in principle to democracy. Esposito andVoll point out that democracy was a con-tested term in the West, and it might well bepossible to draw on Islamic traditions thatwere loyal to the core concern of demo-cracy with participation whilst allowing itto take into account the specific concerns ofMuslims for recognition of ‘special identitiesor authentic communities’ (Esposito andVoll 1996: 17). Like others, they pointed tothe concepts of shura (consultation), ijma(consensus) and ijtihad (independent reason-ing) as providing some intellectual basis forthe development of Muslim democracies(Esposito and Voll 1996: 27–32).That suchdebates are not confined to the academy isdemonstrated by recent political develop-ments in Iran where during the 1990s a number of respected imams have joinedleading academics in arguing that thepoliticisation of religion and its associationwith authoritarianism have only under-mined the spiritual essence of Islam withits emphasis on righteous living by theindividual, the promotion of justice by the

state and the right of all to participate inpolitical life (Menashri 2001). One mightalso note the variety of organisational formswithin Islamic societies, some of which haveallowed for degrees of popular consultation,or point out that up to 40% of the world’sMuslims do in fact live in countries that are more or less democratic – often asminorities – and that this might well en-courage a more positive view of the demo-cratic model (Stepan 2001: 236–237).

This more critical approach had almostbecome a new orthodoxy by the late 1990s.For Bromley, ‘the very idea that religiousbelief can operate as an insuperable obstacleto a particular kind of politics, democracy,has been challenged on the grounds that allreligions require interpretation to give themmeaning in specific contexts. In this sensereligious belief is socially and politicallycontingent, it does not and cannot deter-mine or prescribe a certain kind of politics’(Bromley 1997: 321–344). In such circum-stances, even if a specific religious traditionhad historically helped to shape a particularcountry’s political culture, one could notmake assumptions about whether this waslikely to favour or hinder democratisation.And this argument tied in with the growingassumption of many ‘transitologists’ thatpolitical culture was unhelpful in explaininganything, tended to serve as a ‘residual’explanation for developments that institu-tional analysis or political economy hadfailed to comprehend. In other words, evenif there were problematic elements withinreligious traditions, which few nowaccepted given the existence of ‘positive’ aswell as ‘negative’ elements in each tradition,these were largely irrelevant to the out-comes of democratisation processes.

Correlations and explanations:the debate re-opened

In view of this critique, is there any sensein trying to factor religion into explanations

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of democratic outcomes? Clearly, there areproblems with the thesis that certain reli-gious traditions in themselves are more orless likely to contribute to transitionprocesses or democracy promotion duringthe transition phase. Whilst religiousgroups have contributed to the undermin-ing of authoritarian regimes, there arealways counter-examples to be found, as inthe support given to Central Americandictators by some Protestant groups, or thefact that democratisation took place inArgentina and Chile despite the fact thatthe Catholic hierarchies in the two coun-tries adopted very different positions withregard to military rulers. Contingent fac-tors often play a key role, as in the Iberianpeninsula where a highly conservative andanti-democratic Spanish Church, initiallyhorrified by the outcome of Vatican II,underwent considerable personnel changeas a result of the intervention of thepapacy and the resident nuncio. In conse-quence, numerous auxiliary bishops sym-pathetic to liberalisation were appointedduring the 1960s and went on to play a key role in shifting the Church awayfrom its uncritical support for the Francoregime. By way of contrast, the papalnuncio in Portugal sympathised with thetraditionalist approach of the hierarchyand the Catholic Church was largely mar-ginalised during the events of the 1970s.There is also a certain mechanistic feel tothe argument about any necessary linkbetween religious adherence and demo-cratisation, rather like Adam Przeworski’scaricature of the position that universalsuffrage was achieved in Western Europewhen the proportion of the labour forcesoutside agriculture reached 50% and thatsuch a social development might have sim-ilar consequences elsewhere (Przeworski1986: 48). The religious corollary of thismight be to suggest that the best ways toadvance democratisation was via a renewalof the Crusades so as to promote WesternChristianity.

Equally problematic are culturalist expla-nations which focus less on the immediateactivities of religious groups than on theoverall contribution of religious traditionsto political cultures which may reinforceor undermine old authoritarian ways ofdoing politics. Even those who retain theview that political culture matters haveproblems isolating the ways in which reli-gion may have contributed to its historicaldevelopment. Did religion, particularlythrough the medium of a lettered clerisy,serve to shape the culture and ways of a nation, or was it religion that was shapedby the culture within which it found itself –or, more likely, both? For example, accord-ing to the Russian chronicles, PrinceVladimir of Kiev went looking for a reli-gion that suited the character of thepeople of Rus’ – and promptly rejectedIslam because Russians like to drink! Andeven if religion was central to the forma-tion of a country’s political culture, towhat extent is it relevant today, especiallyin those countries where religious adher-ence and participation has declined dra-matically?

And yet, whilst it remains impossible tospeak of some linear causal relationshipbetween religious tradition and successfuldemocratisation, there remains a naggingdoubt that the seeming connection betweenreligious inheritance and the success ofdemocratisation goes beyond simple cor-relation. That there is a correlation is notin question.Though it is far too early fordefinitive conclusions, an impressionisticview of the post-communist world, forexample, shows that as a general rule thosecountries with an Orthodox Christian orIslamic tradition have found it harder toconsolidate their democratic experimentsthan those with a Western Christianinheritance. A more substantial analysismight be offered utilising the democracyratings offered by Freedom House overrecent years. Using their 2002 report I have divided countries into a variety of

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religious categories – inevitably my assign-ments will be contestable – assuming asingle dominant tradition where over 60%of the population nominally adheres to asingle-faith community. Inevitably, someof the categorisations are problematic – forexample, in Africa the combinations varyconsiderably and include Catholicism,Protestantism, Islam and indigenous reli-gious traditions in a variety of mixes – andthe results are crude but they produce theresults shown in Table 13.1, where thelower the score the freer the country.

Whilst it is difficult to disagree thatdemocracy is strongest in countries of aWestern Christian tradition and that it isgenerally weakest in those of a majorityIslamic tradition, the question remains asto whether there is any causal relationshipat work. As already noted, most writershave taken the view that:

■ all religious traditions are multi-vocal and that would-be democratsand authoritarians can find or inter-pret elements within the traditionto support their own political pref-erences. Thus, just as Catholicismhas adapted to democracy overrecent years so might other tradi-tions in areas of the globe currentlyunder authoritarian rule;

■ in any case religion is secondary inexplaining democratisation to a host

of other factors.For example, in post-communist Europe the Orthodoxand Islamic countries have foundtransition problematic but they arealso the countries in which com-munism was most secure, wherecivil society was weakest and eco-nomic development lagged behindthat of ‘Western Christian’ CentralEurope – though equally it mightbe argued that the reason they‘lagged’ was because of their culturaltraditions;

■ that the argument is predicated on amodel of democracy created withinWestern society and built onassumptions about individualismand value-free politics which mightbe inappropriate in areas of theworld where religious worldviewspredominate.

The argument here, however, is that:

■ democracy in general (as well asWestern liberal democracy in par-ticular) does have core meaningsand that some religious traditionsmay have problems reconcilingthemselves to these;

■ religions are indeed multi-vocal but that at any point in time theremay be a dominant discourse andpractice that renders them more or less supportive of certain patternsof political development;

■ though critics are right in arguingthat religious tradition is not centralor determining, indeed often mar-ginal, religion is not irrelevant tooutcomes, and that in the shortterm what tradition is dominant ina country may – subconsciously oras deliberately fostered by religiousand/or secular leaders – help toshape the outcome of democratisa-tion processes.

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Table 13.1 Religions and freedom

Religious tradition Freedom House score(no. of countries)

Protestant (23) 1.65Catholic (50) 1.83Mixed: Prot.–Cath. (12) 1.83Orthodox (12) 3.25Hindu (2) 3.25Mixed:Asian (12) 3.96Mixed:African (30) 4.12Buddhist (4) 4.63Islam (39) 5.39

Democracy for all occasions

Esposito and Voll (1996) remind us thatdemocracy is a contested concept in theWest and that therefore it should in prin-ciple be possible for other types of society,in particular Muslim, to come up withparticipatory schemes that allow for therecognition of ‘special identities andauthentic communities’. Moreover, inWestern systems of liberal democracythere are tensions between the liberal anddemocratic elements that are reflected insome Muslim writings. Whilst mostMuslim thinkers would accept somenotion of the rule of law, fewer would behappy about the notion of those lawsbeing created by the will of a majority ina democratically elected legislature. Or ifpermitted there would be, as remains thecase in contemporary Iran, some provisionfor the religious elite to over-rule the legislature by retaining control over candi-dacies or the effective right to veto unde-sirable legislation – though arguably theUS Supreme Court does the same thingwith reference to America’s own founda-tional documents.

So, of course, the Western model is notthe only possible line of development for forms of democratic governance.Nonetheless, democracy does have somecore meanings and a dangerous conceptualstretch may creep in, allowing virtually anypolitical order to be described as in somesense democratic. All understandings ofdemocracy have at their heart notions ofparticipation, competition, consent andthe protection of individual and minorityrights. How these are organised or struc-tured may not matter but that they arepresent in some form does. In all existingdemocracies this raises dilemmas, but itmay create far more in some cultural andreligious contexts than others. Hence itmay be possible to find structural formsthat recognise communal identities, but if

these are accompanied by restrictions onthe rights of other communities or groupsor individuals it is not clear that this iscompatible with a meaningful evolutionof democracy in the long term. And ifthose with a direct line to the divine,which in principle should be all believersin traditional Protestantism and Islam butin practice is often limited to a clerical(often male) elite, claim the right to‘trump’ democratic decision-making thenwe have a problem.This is a discussion foranother context, but clearly whilst thepossibility of an Islamic model of demo-cracy should not be ruled out, it becomesmeaningless, as in Soviet-style ‘socialistdemocracy’, if its practice blatantly contra-dicts the core elements of liberal demo-cracy in denying participation or rights tosections of the population.

The limits of religious multi-vocality

Many authors have stressed that all reli-gious belief systems contain within themresources that can be used to promote dif-ferent visions of the most appropriatepolitical order, with Bromley noting thatall religions require interpretation ‘to givethem meaning in specific contexts’(Bromley 1997: 333). In Stepan’s words allreligious traditions are multi-vocal andcontain intellectual and organisationalresources that might be used to promotepolitical pluralism. Though correct, sucharguments tend to focus on ‘theological’debates or rely on interviews on religiousleaders out of power and as such offer onlya partial aid. In the political ‘real’ worldone has to deal with ‘actually existing’ sys-tems and ideological tendencies, not theinterpretations of a handful of ‘liberally’inclined intellectuals. During the ColdWar there were those who argued thatMarxism had never been tried properly,

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which may or may not have been true, butthe bottom line was that virtually all of thefunctioning ‘Marxist’ systems had ended inauthoritarianism of one form or another.What was important was not whetherthese were false applications of the theory,but the fact that these were the type ofpolitical orders that had actually emergedin these societies. In just the same way wehave first to deal with ‘actually existing’Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy,Islam, Judaism, Confucianism etc. AsHalliday points out in the case of Islam,there is no monolithic system that one can isolate but, as Bruce has countered,there are surely core elements that help todifferentiate one religious tradition fromanother (Bruce 2003: 216–218). In conse-quence – and without denying the possibil-ity of major changes, as happened withinCatholicism during the post-war years - wehave to look less at what might be than atwhat in practice are the dominant themesor arguments within a religious traditionat any particular time and how thesemight impact upon the political order. Forreasons of space our focus here will be onEastern Orthodoxy and Islam.

We have already suggested that in thepost-communist world democratic gover-nance has struggled to take root in thosecountries with an Orthodox tradition,and several writers have argued that thereare elements within the Orthodox tradi-tion that sit uneasily with democratic politics, and that have thus preventedOrthodox Churches from making a signif-icant contribution to democratisation.With a theology geared more towardsliturgy than social practice, and towardsheaven rather than earth, the OrthodoxChurch has tended intellectually (if notalways in practice) to treat the social orderwith a degree of disdain – the troubles of this time are as nothing when comparedto the centuries in which the Church thinks.Consequently, Orthodox churches havebeen able to adapt to a variety of political

regimes, from the Ottoman Empire of thepast to the communist regimes of thetwentieth century.

In the Russian case the OrthodoxChurch on the eve of the revolution stilllacked many of the ‘potentialities’ enjoyedby the Western churches. Social theologywas weakly developed and, as RichardSakwa has pointed out, the core notion of ‘sobornost’, with its implicit rejection ofthe distinction between separate spheres of state and society – an absence that somewould argue is also found in much Muslimsocial thought – worked against the cre-ation of a liberal-democratic ideology(Sakwa 1994).The Church also lacked thewide array of clerical and lay institutionsand associations that underlay the creationof Christian social movements in WesternEurope at the end of the nineteenth century.In 1917, as today, the Russian OrthodoxChurch had a mass nominal following, butwas largely cut off from the broad currentof social change and found it hard tomobilise would-be adherents.And then, aslater, the Church’s reputation had beenweakened by past compromises with thestate order. During the communist periodthe Church was forced by circumstancesto fall back on liturgical celebration andthe struggle for survival in the face of ahostile regime. Despite some involvementwith the ecumenical movement, the EastEuropean Orthodox churches had limitedopportunities to develop a social theologyand there was no equivalent of Vatican IIto galvanise the church into rethinking itsrelationship with the world in the modernera. The 1918 Church Council (Sobor)might have served that purpose but this possibility was removed by theBolshevik revolution. Thus the religiouscomponent of Russian and Balkan politi-cal culture experienced little change, andwas perhaps reinforced by the hierarchic,authoritarian and collectivist nature ofcommunist rule which in turn developedquasi-religious rituals for its own mobilising

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and legitimising ends. At the same time,Soviet rule destroyed the last opportunitiesfor religious influence over political devel-opment and created an extremely defensivechurch. The institution that survivedthrough 1991 in many ways remainedrooted in the past, hierarchical and paternal-istic, and suspicious of diversity (Anderson1994).This is not to deny the difficulties thatthe church faced or the presence ofreformist trends within the institution,but to note that the dominant voices withinthe Orthodox churches of Russia and theBalkans remained wary of the new orderbeing created and its consequences forthemselves.This stemmed in large part froman ideological suspicion and critique of theconsequences of pluralism and liberalismwhich were seen as in some sense under-mining Orthodoxy’s very ‘way of being’(Witte and Bourdeaux 1999: 19–20).

Such reactions were not confined to thepost-communist Eastern churches, for inGreece religious identity questions againsprang to life at the turn of the century.Despite Stepan’s comments about theadaptation of the Greek Orthodox todemocracy (Stepan 2001: 247–250), thereaction of leading hierarchs and churchorganisations to issues of religious liberty,the removal of the religious question fromGreek identity cards, and debates over theEuropean Union during the 1990s andbeyond (Anderson 2003), indicate that the Church remains defensive and wary ofsome of the consequences of democraticpolitics.What all this suggests is that whilstOrthodoxy social teaching does not pre-clude or oppose democratisation, there areelements within its actual outworkings atthe present moment – focusing on theunity of society, the necessary linkbetween faith and nation, distrust of dif-ference – that are not always helpful fordemocratic development.

In many respects similar things can besaid about the role of Islam in societieswhere it remains the sole or dominant

religious tradition. As noted earlier, manyscholars have argued that there is nosingle, monolithic or essentialist Islam towhich one can refer and that Islamicteachings contain resources that could beused to promote pluralistic politics. Islamhas all too often been coopted by author-itarian leaders for their own ends – andAyubi points out that, historically, Muslimregimes were built on the remnants of theauthoritarian empires they conquered andthat this inheritance, rather than Islam,accounts for the type of political ordersthat emerged in much of the Middle East(Ayubi 1991: 32).At the same time, plural-ism of a sort has emerged in a number of predominantly Muslim states – mostnotably Turkey, Indonesia and, to someextent, in Iran. Quite rightly such authorspoint to various red-herrings utilised topromote the view of Islam as inherentlyanti-democratic, notably the idea thatIslam has no tradition of the separation ofthe religious and the political spherewhich tends to underlie contemporarydemocratic orders. Nonetheless, it mightstill be argued that there remain elementswithin ‘actually existing Islam’ – withinthe tradition as presently constituted andrealised in the world – that are problematicfor democratic development.

At the ideological level there remainfeatures of contemporary Islam that maybe unhelpful for processes of democratisa-tion. For Steve Bruce, one fundamentalproblem lies in the focus on way of liferather than theology, on orthopraxy ratherthan orthodoxy:

Rule bound religions are inevitablymore conservative than ones that donot embed divine revelation in alegal code.This follows simply fromthe fact that rules were written inthe past. … Putting it bluntly … asociety governed by rules writtenten centuries ago will be less pleas-ant than a society that can evolve. …

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The centrality of shariah to Islamdoes not prevent interpretation butit does restrict it. In contrastChristianity has no choice but to bemetaphorical about its teachings.

(Bruce 2003: 243–238)

This distinction is perhaps too facile, insofaras medieval Catholicism and New EnglandPuritanism could be pretty unbendingtowards those who transgressed moralrules as well as theological orthodoxy, butit does isolate a structural feature of many,though not all, variants of the Islamicistvision. Many such movements claim to be seeking a ‘restoration’ of an idealisedpast where sharia rules dominated andwhere, unlike in the New Testament, thereis as much emphasis on what one shoulddo as on what one should not do.

There is also some suggestion that thegreater emphasis given to the communityover the individual may be problematicfor, whilst democratic governance canencompass forms of communal or grouprepresentation, defining which groupsshould be represented remains fraughtwith difficulty. Of particular concern to most observers of Islamic thought andpractice are issues relating to individualand minority rights. Whatever the argu-ments of liberal Muslim thinkers, thereremain deep ambiguities about the extentto which minority rights are guaranteedand protected in those countries whereIslam dominates. This is not just a case of authoritarian leaders utilising Islam tojustify their own abuses but somethingmore fundamental. As Ann Mayer hasshown, many of the major thinkers whohave influenced emerging Islamicistmovements as well as the constitutions andproclamations of Muslim states on humanrights issues tend to hedge guarantees toright with qualifications when it comes to issues relating to gender, minorities and religious difference.Whilst the popu-lations of these countries generally aspire

to human rights protection, those whorule or aspire to rule, and many within the‘clerical’ elite, would argue that so-calleduniversal principles of rights are beingimposed from a Western cultural contextand have to be adapted to local circum-stances and value systems (Mayer 1995).This may well be, but liberal democracy ascommonly understood requires not justparticipation and competition but, cru-cially, protection of the rights of minoritiesand individuals.Whilst there may be legit-imate debate about the boundaries ofrights in different cultural contexts, thegeneral assumption of international decla-rations and mainstream democratic thoughtis that rights should be extended even tothose who the majority find alien or evenabhorrent. So whilst many Muslims mayaspire to democracy and intellectuals mayfind supportive elements within the tradi-tion, the dominant ideological trends at present remain problematic and tendnot to offer strong support for democraticchange – which is not to say they mightnot do so in the future.

There may also be problems at thepolitical level in the weakness of thoseforces committed to democracy withinthe Muslim countries. Recent years haveseen the emergence of human rightsgroups in a number of these countries anda number have liberalised to some degree,allowing the appearance of an embryoniccivil society if not full political participa-tion (Norton 1995, 1996). But the realityremains that these groups are weak inmost cases and ‘liberal’ intellectuals gener-ally have limited influence, especiallywhen they find themselves in competitionwith more radical groups. Formally manyIslamicist opposition groups claim to becommitted to a more genuinely demo-cratic order than currently exists in theirown countries though, as suggested above,ambiguities remain when explaining howtheir visions will affect those who dissentor differ – and the experience of the three

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purportedly Islamicist states (Iran, Sudanand Afghanistan) has not been positive inthis respect. More important may be thefact that they often reject the implantationof political forms created in a West theyincreasingly despise for both its corruptlifestyles and perceived negative impactupon their own region or countries. In sodoing they repeat the mistakes of thosesocialists during the immediate post-waryears who in legitimately criticising thefailures of ‘bourgeois democracy’ neg-lected the importance of the civil rightsguaranteed by such orders. Instead, theylook to an idealised past.At the same timewriters such as Graham Fuller have sug-gested that in the long term recognition ofthe limits of revolutionary adventurism aswell as participation within partially liber-alised political orders may in some sense‘tame’ Islamicist groups or, as has happenedin Iran, demonstrate that the guarantees of liberal democracy are not without pos-itive benefit for their respective causes andpopulations (Fuller 2003: 193–213).

Where does religion make adifference?

Even if at certain points in time the dom-inant voice in a religious tradition is morelikely to promote or inhibit democratisa-tion does this really matter given religion’smarginality in most democratisationprocesses? After all, most sources see tran-sition coming as a result of changes in eliteconfigurations and perceptions, as a prod-uct of socio-economic development, or in response to crises. Religious communi-ties or leaders may play a role in under-mining authoritarian regimes but theiractivism may in turn come as a response towider social change, or arise from the needto protect their economic, class or institu-tional interests. So whilst one can arguethat specific religious groups made con-tributions to democratisation in some

circumstances (Poland, the Philippines,or perhaps Brazil and Chile) this tells usnothing about the impact of broad tradi-tions rather than specific organisations orhierarchies. Even the Catholic contribu-tion to the ‘third wave’ has to be treatedwith some caution because, whilst manyCatholic hierarchies took a prominent roleas critic of authoritarian regimes anddefender of civil society, some (e.g. inArgentina) adopted an ambiguous posi-tion in relation to authoritarian regimes.Though a majority of these transitionstook place in ‘Catholic countries’, this mayhave had more to do with their similarlevels of economic development and placein the world economy than the fact thatthey were ‘Catholic’. Nonetheless, it is thecase that the 1960s and 1970s witnessedsignificant changes in Catholic thinkingon the political order and pluralist politicswhich led to changes in the relationshipbetween national hierarchies and the statein many Catholic countries and which inturn may have impacted upon local polit-ical cultures. In many those cultures werepredominantly hierarchical and authori-tarian, a tendency reinforced by pre-Vatican II-style Catholicism. Changeswithin the religious institution and itsmore ‘democratic’ way of functioning – atleast at lower levels – may have con-tributed towards an undermining of polit-ical cultures which had long inhibited,though in themselves prevented, demo-cratic political change.

Conversely, in virtually no countrieswhere Eastern Orthodoxy or Islam pre-dominated – with the possible exceptionof Indonesia – have religious establish-ments or oppositions emerged as promi-nent promoters of democratisation. In theOrthodox case, a few individual priests orbishops may have spoken out abouthuman rights abuses or called for the obser-vance of human rights under the commu-nist regime, but leaders of these churchesgenerally collaborated in suppressing such

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voices and did not publicly argue for lib-eralisation. In the Islamic context, variousgroups have promoted their own visionsof the good society but they have not generally been prominent actors in stress-ing transition to more pluralistic politicalorders as amongst their key priorities.In other words, we would appear to havesome of Weber’s ‘correlations betweenforms of religious beliefs and practicalethics’.

The significance of these ‘correlations’is harder to assess. It does appear to be thecase the religious tradition, as it hasevolved at certain points in history, playssome role in determining whether ‘eccle-sial’ actors will actively promote demo-cracy, sit on the side lines or actively opposedemocratisation – though it does notguarantee that they will do the same inevery case. It is perhaps more important topursue the notion that specific traditions,as opposed to particular institutions orindividuals, may have more of an impacton the ‘consolidation’ phase.Though thereare many other factors at work in explain-ing the problems of democratisation insome of the post-Soviet countries – eco-nomic decline, poor institutional design,lack of elite commitment – historical andcultural inheritances often make the taskharder. To the extent that religious tradi-tion has contributed to the formation of that inheritance, religion may continueto have an influence even in societieswhere religious practice and politicalinfluence are significantly diminished.Assessing the role of political culture isalways problematic, as is evaluating reli-gion’s contribution to that culture, butarguably both Eastern Orthodoxy andIslam in most of the countries of theformer Soviet Union and Balkans havereinforced communalist and authoritariantraditions that are wary of social and religious pluralism. And the behaviour ofreligious elites since 1990 – in seeking tocurtail religious freedom, acquire political

influence or engage in rather dubious eco-nomic activities – has tended to reinforcethese older patterns rather than those thatmight be supportive of democratic devel-opment. It is not that practising believers –who in these countries generally make up a small minority of the population –are less favourably disposed to democracythan other citizens (White, et al. 1994;Vorontsova and Filatov 1994; Fletcher andSergeyev 2002), but that the way in whichreligion has fed into the wider politicalculture over time has up to now tended to favour the ‘wrong’ elements within the political culture of some of thesecountries.

My argument, therefore, has not beenthat religious tradition determines the like-lihood of democratisation or its successfulimplementation in any specific country orregion, nor do I deny that in most casesother factors are far more important inexplaining both transition and the successor otherwise of democratisation. Instead it has been to suggest that the ‘correla-tions’ that do exist are not purely acciden-tal and that, though religious traditions aremulti-vocal, at any one point in time thedominant voices and practical political cir-cumstances may work more or less in sup-port of democratisation efforts.That this isstill a live debate is evident in the contin-uing and often heated discussions over therole of Islam in inhibiting democratisationbut also in recent debates over the likelyimpact of Protestant–Pentecostal expan-sion in Latin America,Africa and Asia. ForDavid Martin, it may be the case that thisnew ‘enthusiastic’ religion ‘will perform a service akin to Methodism in preparingworking and lower middle class people forthe frugal enjoyment of prosperity, politepublic discourse and democratic citizen-ship’ (Martin 1990) – though Gill (1998)sees little attitudinal difference betweenCatholics and Protestants on public issues.Others are more wary, seeing the circum-stances as very different from those of late

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eighteenth-century Britain, and stress thedeeply ‘conservative’ political style of theneo-Pentecostal movements (Brouwer,et al. 1996: 230). Here is not the place toexplore this particular debate but it servesas a useful reminder that there are stillinteresting problems that need furtherexamination in assessing whether particu-lar religious traditions do impact upon theprospects for successful democratisationand, if so, how. For the time being, therather weak conclusion of this chapter isthat religious tradition still matters, albeitoften indirectly, and does so as much by ruling out certain ways of ‘doing poli-tics’ or setting cultural constraints onpoliticians seeking to advance the cause ofdemocratisation as by prescribing any spe-cific political form. Religious traditioncannot determine outcomes, but when thefactors working for or against democrat-isation are finely balanced, then whose godis prevalent may just make a difference.

Note

1 First published in Democratization, 11, 4 (2004).

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