Category: General

When I mention religious tolerance in contemporary India to people, I still get startled reactions: Isn’t this the land of Gandhi, peace and pluralism?  Yet the latest news is another reminder of a very different picture.  Hindu nationalist forces, whose political party now governs India, have been planning mass “reconversion” ceremonies, including one for Christmas Day intended to “reconvert” thousands of Christians “back” to Hinduism.  Fraud, bribery, and deceit typically accompany the conversions.  Now the government has decided to ban the Christmas conversions for the sake of public order.  See a BBC story here.

Across India’s northern border, religious repression and accompanying violence continues.  See the latest piece of Knox Thames, who is always good on Pakistan.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture brings back with renewed force the debates of the previous decade about the use of torture in fighting terrorism.  The three main conclusions I draw from the report are that first, the CIA’s use of torture in fighting terrorism was far more widespread than previously known; second, that torture was never effective in eliciting information for capturing active terrorists; and third, that the CIA deceived many, including the public and even the president, about both of these facts.  Defenders of the techniques even now say that they kept us secure.

Insofar as the debate deals with the morality of torture, it proceeds on consequentialist grounds: was torture really effective in stopping terrorism?  Obscured is the position that torture is intrinsece malum — always, everywhere, inherently wrong.  This is the position of the Catholic Church, articulated in the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et Spes, the Catechism (1994), and Pope Saint John Paul II’s great encyclical on morality of 1993, Veritatis Splendor.

The Church acknowledges its own complex past on the matter, having sanctioned torture in the Middle Ages.  The contemporary Catechism says this:

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture.  Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy.  She forbade clerics to shed blood.  In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person.  On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading.  It is necessary to work for their abolition.  We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

Let us pray indeed.

For an excellent explication of the Church’s views, including a historical perspective, see this article in 2010 by Steve Colecchi in America.  For an excellent natural law argument against torture, see this piece by Chris Tollefsen.

Previous posts here have covered the religious dimension of the protests in Hong Kong.  Now the police have arrested Cardinal Zen, one of the great Catholic dissidents in China.  See here.

Behind religious terrorism are . . . restrictions on religious freedom.  Thus argue Nilay Saiya and Anthony Scime of the State University of New York – Brockport.  Here writes Saiya:

What is the relationship between religious liberty and faith-based terrorism? Some argue that restrictions on religion, though morally problematic, are at times justified in order to prevent or curtail religious violence. This logic gained increased traction in certain circles following the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001 and then again in the tumult associated with the so-called “Arab Spring.” In the Middle East, many secular dictators have long defended their repressive policies on the grounds that they were at least able to keep to forces of religious extremism at bay.

In a forthcoming article in Conflict Management and Peace Science, my coauthor, Anthony Scime and I argue that this line of thinking is incorrect. On the contrary, restrictions on religion actually work to generate religious terrorism by radicalizing religious actors, weakening moderates, and increasing the support of extremists. Often embattled religious communities, perceiving their faith to be under attack, subscribe to a ubiquitous narrative of communal disillusionment, sometimes leading to violence against those perceived to be responsible for their marginalized and suppressed status. When religious groups find themselves ostracized through laws or violent suppression, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence as well. In short, regimes that hinder the knowledge or pursuit of the supernatural play with fie when they interfere with peoples’ innate aspiration for transcendent and eternal truth.

Using classification analysis, we find that government regulation of religion is by far the most significant variable predicting the onset of religious terrorism—more than twice as important as any other variable included in our model. Generally, religious terrorism increases dramatically as the level of restrictions also increase. Religious repression becomes especially problematic in countries with large populations and unstable political regimes. We also find that when governmental restrictions on religion are low, religious attacks seldom occur and that the values of other variables have no effect in explaining the absence of religious terrorism.

Our findings suggest certain policy recommendations. The inclusion of religious groups and individuals in political processes and the protection of their religious rights serve to negate the claims of extremists that violence is necessary to challenge the status quo. The findings also buttress the accumulating evidence that the relaxation of religious restrictions and protection of religious liberty nurtures peaceful competition of religious groups in society, thus contributing to a wide array of positive externalities that come from widespread freedom. It is time for policymakers around the world to take religious freedom seriously, if not for moral reasons, then at least for the sake of peace and stability.

Elizabeth Sperber, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and one of the most creative young scholars today in the study of religion and politics, posts on the political dynamics created by Born Again Christians in Nigeria:

When western journalists cover religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, they tend to focus on politicized Islam. News about Boko Haram’s violence in northern Nigeria, for instance, has dominated recent reporting on religion and politics in the region. Yet, in Nigeria as in other sub-Saharan countries, Christians and adherents of African traditional religions are also engaged in dynamic and increasingly politically relevant movements. In fact, the region’s fastest growing religious groups are born again Christian (see an influential Pew Forum study). These movements are increasingly visible in the public sphere.

Moreover, in many parts of Nigeria, religious conflict has arisen not as a result of conservative Muslim movements, but rather due to the aggressive evangelization of Muslim areas by ‘militant’ Nigerian born again Christians. Siyan Oyeweso (Osun State University) presented an important paper on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association last weekend. He was joined by Insa Nolte (University of Birmingham) and Olukoya Joseph Ogen (Osun State University), who presented preliminary findings from a joint, five-year study of religious encounter in southwest Nigeria. Nolte and Ogen’s findings explore the infuence of local Pentecostal movements on “traditional” religionists in the region. Taken together, these papers underscore the complexity, dynamism, and political significance of religion in Nigeria, even in areas far from the headline news of Boko Haram.

ArcU blogger Maryann Cusimano Love published an insightful piece on five myths about Pope Francis at the Washington Post.  I would only add that the unifying theme of his pontificate is (arguably) mercy.

A telling indicator of what people care about is what they’ll turn up for.  Check out the largest gatherings in human history.

Forgiveness in politics?  Forgiveness can surely be extended to a skeptic for doubting it.  In the West, forgiveness had played little role in the history of political thought and is seldom voiced in contemporary politics.

A couple of years ago I published a book on reconciliation in global politics whose last chapter argued for the possibility of forgiveness in the wake of civil war, dictatorship, and even genocide.  Barry Gewen, reviewing the book in the New Republic, offered a broadly favorable assessment but questioned forgiveness.  Admitting to a “frisson of doubt,” he worried that exemplars of forgiveness are rare saints, should not be imitated, and manifest a zeal that undermines a politics of compromise.  Other skeptics of forgiveness – most prevalent in the West – take the practice to task for violating victims’ autonomy, for being religious (and hence not having a place in politics), being pressured on victims, undermining just punishment, and being just too difficult.

I wanted to prove otherwise.  But it could only be done empirically.  I had to go to a country, talk to ordinary victims of violence, and then assess how common forgiveness is.  With financial support from the Fetzer Institute, I traveled to Uganda over this past year and carried out a survey of 640 respondents, 10 focus groups, and 27 interviews with individuals.  The Refugee Law Project was my able partner and organized the project logistically.  We conducted the research in five different districts were war has taken place. 

The initial results are startling.  First, I looked at attitudes.  61% of respondents would forgive rebels; 54% would forgive members of the Ugandan military.  Neither number approaches unanimity but both are far higher than the “rare saint” account would suggest. 86% said that “it is good for victims to practice forgiveness in the aftermath of armed violence.”  They did not only advocate forgiveness and also gave heavy support for trials, accountability, and apology.  They did not think forgiveness and punishment were contradictory,

I then looked at the practice of forgiveness among those who had experienced violence, who turned out to be some 90% of the respondents.  68% said that they had forgiven their perpetrator.  Things got a bit more complex in that only 28% of practitioners of forgiveness had forgiven through words; others forgave “from the heart,” meaning that their perpetrator was no longer around to be forgiven face to face.

Despite this complexity, though, Ugandans support forgiveness in attitude and practice for more commonly than the “rare saint” model would predict.  Why do Ugandans forgive?  82% pointed to their religious beliefs, in contrast to 45% tribal traditions and 22% political beliefs.  Other questions showed Ugandans to be a very religious people.  They also cited psychological benefits such as making them less anxious and angry.   Interestingly, 58% said that they forgave because it would help the perpetrator to heal.

While some 70% said that they were encouraged to forgive by a religious leader, very few (less than 7%) said that they felt pressured to forgive by anyone – one of the key charges of the skeptics – whether it be a friend or family member or a religious or political leader.

I have only begun to analyze the results.  I would like to argue, though, that they point to much greater potential for forgiveness in political life than is ordinarily allowed in the West.

I invited Beth Hurd to respond to my post of yesterday on her post of Monday morning in Religion Dispatches.  She graciously took up my offer.

I would like to respond to Daniel Philpott’s reaction to my piece on the politics of promoting religious freedom in the Middle East by situating my argument in the two broader research projects from which it emerged. My intention in doing so is to offer interested readers and critics an opportunity to understand how my RD intervention fits into a broader attempt in my current work to understand how and with what consequences the category of “religion” has been taken up nationally and internationally as an object of law and other forms of collective governance. I’ll say a few words about my collaborative research project, and then offer a brief introduction to the argument of my forthcoming book.

Over the past several years I have co-organized the Politics of Religious Freedom project, a collaborative research effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. These efforts are now bearing fruit, and in 2015 our project team will publish a volume, Politics of Religious Freedom, with the University of Chicago Press. This volume brings together a collection of essays that emerged out of an edited set of blog posts on the SSRC’s online discussion forum The Immanent Frame. Together, the essays collected in that series, the PoRF volume, and other publications, including a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly and a recently published symposium “Re-thinking Religious Freedom” in the Journal of Law and Religion, work to unsettle in significant ways the assumption that is so ubiquitous in many academic and policy circles—and that is reflected in Dan’s response to my RD essay—that religious freedom is a singular achievement, an easily understood state of affairs, and that the problem lies in its incomplete realization. Our collaborative project has sought to understand the different conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories.

Neither my work nor our project takes a position for or against religious freedom. To assume that it does is a misunderstanding of what is in fact a much broader and more encompassing set of research aims and objectives. We are interested in laying out the kind of work advocacy for religious freedom has done, and continues to do, in various societies, and in exploring the political and legal worlds created by and through religious freedom. Our basic assumption is that, before either championing religious freedom or rejecting it, we need to understand the complex social and legal lives of this concept.

In engaging in this work, and learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume and our other publications, and underlying my own public interventions on these issues, include: What happens when religious freedom is imagined only through the lexicon of liberal rights as a set of discrete freedoms claimed by individuals or groups from an assumedly neutral state? What claims can and cannot be made regarding religion, personhood, and freedom? What modes of religiosity, notions of religious difference (or non-difference), and idioms of social order and harmony are rendered unintelligible or incoherent?

My forthcoming book, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, also opens onto a broader set of questions involving the politics of religion in international relations. The book is a study of recent state-sponsored efforts to promote religious freedom, religious engagement, and the rights of religious minorities. It brings together the study of contemporary religion and global politics in a new way, charting the lives of these projects in specific contexts and developing a critique of their consequences. Uncovering and exploring the gap between the religion that is promoted through these efforts and the rest of the world’s religion leads me to challenge the prevailing assumption that the legalization of freedom of religion, engagement with faith communities, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to emancipating society from persecution and discrimination. Instead I argue that these efforts generate social tensions by making religious difference a matter of law, enacting a divide between the religion of those in power and the religion of those without it. This leads to a politics defined by religious difference, favors forms of religion authorized by those in power, and excludes other ways of being and belonging.

While Dan starts with the assumption that “in a country with robust religious freedom, everyone’s religion is protected,” I would encourage him to think further about what exactly is meant by this, and to understand that my book begins from a different premise. I suggest that when governments take up “religious freedom” in the sense that Dan advocates, this requires that they decide which “religions” are “protected” and how, and which individuals and communities have which “religious” “rights” enshrined in law. This places states and the religious freedom advocates who seek to mobilize them in the position of determining what counts as a legitimate “religious” practice, right, or community, granting the latter special status above the others. It thus gives governments more tools for disempowering those whom it dislikes, disagrees with, or refuses to recognize, creating political spaces and institutions in which state-sponsored religious distinctions are not only inevitable but also publically and politically salient. My book creates a space in which to explore these kinds of questions by charting the blurred boundaries and dizzying power dynamics that characterize relations between “official religion,” “governed religion,” and “lived religion.” In the process, it uncovers a different story about the politics of religion. This story is in many ways continuous with the argument of my first book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, which argued that religion never left public life but has assumed different forms and occupied different spaces under modern regimes of governance, many of which are described as secular.

My forthcoming book also discusses the political economy of the “religionization” of global politics, which I’ll mention by way of conclusion. Today many scholars and practitioners interested in these topics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere see no way forward but to take their place in the burgeoning international infrastructure of religion and development, religion and humanitarianism, religion and legal reform, interfaith understanding, religious rights protections, and so on. There is pressure to sign on to these projects, and, in many cases, strong financial incentives. The field has become an important source of grants, institutional support, career stability, and prestige in an era of neoliberal reform in the academy, increased donor scrutiny and control often informed by strong normative agendas, and faltering support for secure academic positions that provide the opportunity for long-range critical and scholarly reflection. I think it is important to think carefully about the political economy of the new global politics of religion.

I welcome other perspectives on these important issues, and look forward to continuing the conversation.