Compiled by Professor Michael D. McGinnis, Indiana University, for use in courses on Religion and World Politics (POLS Y210, Spring 1995) and Religion and Ethnic Nationalism and World Politics (POLS Y200, Spring 1994). All copyrights reside with the original authors and publishers.
Detailed List of Sources:
Diverse Perspectives on Religion
Everyone knows what religion is -- that is, until someone tries to define it. ... We might want to limit religion to a relationship that humans consider themselves to have had with God or the Gods, but someone could point out that the oldest Buddhists did not believe in any God,... We might want to call religion a way of living, an ethical system such as Confucius taught, but somebody could counter that all people had some way of living or other and that many of these ways were not, in any recognizable sense, religions. We might say that religion had to do with a quality of experience, a powerful feeling that people have had when they have confronted something totally "other." Yet a few in our group would be sure to suggest that the most powerful experience they could remember at a religious service on many a Saturday or Sunday morning was being lost in a daydream. We might become very brave and venture that religion was the thing in life a person was most ultimately concerned about, but one sarcastic member of our groups would be sure to ask if that meant racehorses or the lottery as well as less material realities. ... What is it about religion that eludes our grasp? ... In the end, religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life, and therefore it is difficult if not impossible to define it.
Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 2nd edition, Wadsworth, 1992, pp. 2-3, 5
[H]uman beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in like, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity.
Karen Armstrong, A History of God
On earth, in history, one has to deal with three broad levels of religion: [1] the highest spiritual level, represented by the teaching of the great founders, prophets, and holy men; [2] organized religion, represented by established churches with vested worldly interests; and [3] popular religion, representing how the faith works out in the thought, feeling, and behavior of ordinary men. Organized religion, always a necessary mediating agency, is the easiest for a historian to deal with, since the doings of the churches are written all over the record. I assume, however, that he cannot ignore the pervasive influence of the lofty spiritual ideals, difficult though it is to assay, or the equally difficult questions raised by the fruits of popular religion.
Herbert J. Muller, Religion and Freedom in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 2-3 [numbers added]
To understand why religion and politics are so frequently tied together in this country [the United States], it is necessary to examine the incentives for political activism by religiously committed people and groups, the opportunities for involvement, and, finally, the resources that enable the religious to participate effectively. ... All three aspects, or "faces," of religion are capable of promoting an interest in politics -- creed, institution, and social/cultural group ...
As used here, creed refers to the fundamental beliefs, ideas, ethical codes, and symbols associated with a religious tradition, including what others call a theology or belief system. ... As comprehensive systems of belief, religious traditions may provide guidance for believers about appropriate behavior in secular realms, such as politics.
Religion and politics can also be linked through the tie of interest. Religious communities are represented in concrete form by specialized institutions, ... In the United States, churches are not merely building that provide places for worship; rather, they have become multipurpose agencies providing an astonishing array of services,...
Religion also denotes a social group, a subculture or community of believers. The members of a congregation may share regular social interaction, a common status, and a distinctive way of life. ... The larger the role played by the church in defining the lives of its members, the greater the church's potential impact on their political activities.
Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 2nd edition, CQ Press, 1992, pp. 26-26
For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve, for an individual or a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them,... Religious concepts spread beyond the specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience--intellectual, emotional, moral--can be given meaningful form.... A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and psychological events. It renders them graspable.
But more than gloss, such beliefs are also a template. They not merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms...but they shape them.... The tracing of the social and psychological role of religion is thus not so much a matter of finding correlations between specific ritual acts and specific secular social ties--though these correlations do, of course, exist and are worth continued investigation...More, it is a matter of understanding how it is that men's notions, however implicit, of the "really real" and the dispositions these notions induce in them, color their sense of the reasonable, the practical, the humane, and the moral. How far they do so..., how deeply they do so..., and how effectively they do so ... are crucial issues in the comparative sociology and psychology of religion.
Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," [1966] reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, Basic, pp. 123-4
Policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and scholars who are ready to overinterpret economic causality, who are apt to dissect social differentiations most finely, and who will minutely categorize political affiliations are still in the habit of disregarding the role of religion, religious institutions, and religious motivations in explaining politics and conflict,and even in reporting their concrete modalities. Equally, the role of religious leaders, religious institutions, and religiously motivated lay figures in conflict resolution has also been disregarded -- or treated as a marginal phenomenon hardly worth noting. ... One is therefore confronted with a learned repugnance to contend intellectually with all that is religion or belongs to it...
Edward Luttwak, "The Missing Dimension," in Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, editors, Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, Oxford Univ. Press, 1994, pp 9-10
One who tries to study the social consequences of religion will soon discover how little we really know about its effects on behavior.
Herbert J. Muller, Religion and Freedom in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 4
Diverse Consequences of World Religions
A universal church is a special-purpose organization, and a new community created over and above traditionally existing ones. For this reason, each of the great "world religions" takes its origin from a prophet or other charismatic founder, whereas traditional and communal rites usually have more anonymous, unhistoricized origins. ... A church is a major political weapon, serving to manipulate loyalties and ideals and sometimes as an actual organization for material administration of the state. A universalistic church has frequently been either the vehicle for developing intensive political administration in a previously "uncivilized" area or an ally of such administrations. Christianity provided the literate administrators who turned the Germanic tribal kingdoms into organized states, just as Buddhism served politically to organize Tibet and central Asia. Confucianism, originally perhaps only marginally "religious," not only was instrumental in shaping the administration of the first bureaucratized Chinese dynasty, the Han, but became itself organized as more explicitly a religion in the process. We have seen that the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, ... was part of a general effort in the late Empire to introduce rationally centralized administration and an accompanying universalistic mechanism for producing legitimacy.
Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory, Cambridge, p. 226, 215.
[H]istory has been largely the record of conflict, of war, political uprising, factional maneuver and change. And this is true even if one is writing the history not of the state but of an idealizing institution like religion. The history of every church -- Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, or any other, no matter how loving or pacifist its doctrine -- has nevertheless been the history of struggle, factions, persecutions, and conflicts, often entwined with economic and political factions in the larger society.
Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions, Oxford U., 1994, p. 49
There is no sign of a universal harmony among the first generations of Christians. A simplicity of Christian unity at the beginning is as much a myth as the straightforward "doctrine-free" picture of the historical Jesus. The reason is the same in both cases: this is what later generations would like to believe, in the teeth of the historical evidence. ... Any investigation of the main texts of the New Testament, seen in relation to the communities which produced them, has to admit the variety and complexity of ideas and practices already found in the first century. ... Eventually in the second century unity was imposed and many groups fell away. The arguments to justify the inclusion of a particular writing, or theological tenet, within the scope of orthodoxy were intense and fraught. The main procedures were: the issue of a canon of scripture, the formulation of doctrinal statements, and the establishment of church councils. By these means the church parties in the ascendant could legislate for the beliefs and practices of the "universal" church. ...
The central events of Christian doctrine -- Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension -- are too complex for one single view to prevail. ... Authors of varying backgrounds and attainments were inspired to address the different needs and problems in communities distinguished by social an geographical conditions. There are some signs of underlying unity and continuity, but the influential cultural conditions differed dramatically so that, in addressing these local needs and problems, the writers took the Christian tradition as they had received it, and reinterpreted it for their own day and concern.
John and Kathleen Court, The New Testament World, Prentice-Hall, 1990, pp. 347, 349-51, 362-63, 370, 369, 370.
Holy war was a response to trauma. The Hebrews experienced the trauma of slavery in Egypt and the Muslims the culture shock of a changing Hejaz. Both undertook migrations each of which was a journey toward a new self. They wanted to achieve liberated, dignified and independent new identities. But there were other people in the way of these goals and inevitably these people became the enemies of the newly emerging identities. ... In the eleventh century Western Christians were beginning to recover from the trauma of the Dark Ages and were trying to create a new Western identity which would enable them to shake off their sense of inferiority toward their more powerful and cultured neighbors. They were trying to achieve a new self and were beginning to feel a new confidence. ... The Crusades of the early thirteenth century also show a new tragic intolerance of Christians against other Christians. Neither Jews nor Muslims have ever persecuted their coreligionists to this degree and they are quite understandably shocked at this Christian habit. Such persecution and intolerance were, of course, not a completely new departure. Christians had fought what they call heresy bitterly, ever since the early fourth century. ... Christians have long had a strange yearning for ideological conformity: maybe it is because the Christian creed is so complex.
Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, New York: Anchor Books, 1991, pp. 47-48, 412-13.
In everyday behavior, Buddha was an eloquent advocate of the "middle way." ... His lifestyle eschewed fanaticism, and his teachings suggest that our stubborn desire to win the argument, to shape the other person to our preferences, and to be in control all spring from an ego that has not yet learned the disciplines of nonattachment and nonaggression.
Does this demanding ethic have any relevance in the world of organized power within which statesmen and politicians operate? To cast some light on this question, one can look to the man who is often held to be the best example of the Buddhist ruler, the great Indian king Ashoka (269-232 BCE). The story goes that just as Ashoka was feeling the pangs of regret that arose from the suffering he had caused by his far-flung conquests, he also heard the Enlightened One's teaching. As a result, he left behind his Hindu upbringing and became a Buddhist. He then went on to try to forge a kingdom in which the various religions could dwell together peaceably. Even more importantly, he decided that his commitment to the "middle way" of the Buddha, although it allowed for self-defense, excluded all wars of aggression. ...
As a convert, he displayed the zeal converts characteristically do and, while tolerating other paths, adopted a goal of converting all of India to the Buddha's way. He erected stupas and sent out missionaries, to places as distant as Egypt, Syria, and Greece. His own brother headed the mission to Sri Lanka, where Buddhism remains the principal religion today, centuries after it virtually disappeared from the land of its birth. The Buddhist "conquest" of southeast Asia, however, took its toll. Today in Sri Lanka one can witness some of the negative effects of using a religion, even such an essentially pacifistic one as Buddhism, to bolster a national and ethnic ideology.
Harvey Cox, et al., "World Religions and Conflict Resolution," in Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds., Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, Oxford, 1994, pp. 272-273.
Religion as Ideology and Power
By the year AD 2000 it seems probable that Islam will be one of the half-dozen significant political forces in the world.... To many Europeans and Americans it may seem strange to include religions among political forces, because they have been accustomed to think of religion as concerned only with personal piety. They are misled, however, by the divorce of religion and politics in the West since the European wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Throughout the vast ranges of world history it has been normal for religion to be closely linked with politics. The reason is not far to seek. When politics becomes serious and it is a question of men being ready to die for the cause they support, there has to be some deep driving force in their lives. Usually this force can be supplied only by a religion, or by an ideology that is acquiring some of the functions of religion...
W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Political Thought, 1968, Edinburgh Univ. Press, p. ix
[A]ny successful ideology must overcome the free rider problem. Its fundamental aim is to energize groups to behave contrary to a simple, hedonistic, individual calculus of costs and benefits. This is the central thrust of major ideologies, since neither maintenance of the existing order nor its overthrow is possible without such behavior. The costs of the maintenance of an existing order are inversely related to the perceived legitimacy of the existing system. To the extent that the participants believe the system fair, the costs of enforcing the rules and property rights are enormously reduced....
Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History, 1981, Norton, p. 53
There is no greater barrier to clear political thinking than failure to distinguish between ideals, which are utopia, and institutions, which are reality. The communist who set communism against democracy was usually thinking of communism as a pure ideal of equality and brotherhood, and of democracy as an institution which existed in Great Britain, France or the United States and which exhibited the vested interests, the inequalities and the oppression inherent in all political institutions. The democrat who made the same comparison was in fact comparing an ideal pattern of democracy laid up in heaven with communism as an institution existing in Soviet Russia with its class-divisions, its heresy-hunts and its concentration camps. The comparison, made in each case between an ideal and an institution, is irrelevant and makes no sense. The ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal and becomes the expression of a selfish interest, which must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal. This constant interaction of irreconcileable forces is the stuff of politics. Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and power.
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, [1939], 2nd ed., Harper, 1964, pp. 93-4
The two most obvious types of power are the military and the economic, though in primitive society the power of the priest, partly because he dispenses supernatural benefits and partly because he establishes public order by methods less arduous than those of the soldier, vies with that of the soldier and the landlord.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, Scribners, p. 7
Everywhere state and society have been greatly influenced by the struggle between military and temple nobility, between royal and priestly following.... As a rule, priestly charisma compromised with the secular power... [E]ach power was permitted to exert certain influences in the other's realm in order to minimize collisions of interest; the secular authorities, for example, participated in the appointment of certain clerical officials, and the priests influenced the educational institutions of the state. these compromises also committed the two powers to mutual assistance.... The secular ruler makes available to the priests the external means of enforcement for the maintenance of their power or at least for the collection of church taxes and other contributions. In return, the priests offer their religious sanctions in support of the rulers' legitimacy and for the domestication of the subjects.
Max Weber, Economy and Society, [1922], Beckminister Press, 1968, Vol. III, 1160-62
Power over opinion is therefore not less essential for political purposes than military and economic power, and has always been closely associated with them. ... Christianity seems to have been the first great movement in history with a mass appeal. Appropriately enough, it was the Catholic church which first understood and developed the potentialities of power over large masses of opinion. The Catholic church in the Middle Ages was -- and has, within the limits of its power, remained -- an institution for diffusing certain opinions and extirpating other opinions contrary to them: it created the first censorship and the first propaganda organisation. ... The Reformation was a movement which simultaneously deprived it, in several parts of Europe, of its power over opinion, of its wealth and of the authority which the military power of the Empire had conferred on it....Contemporary politics are vitally dependent on the opinion of large masses of more or less politically conscious people... Democracies purport to follow mass opinion; totalitarian states set a standard and enforce conformity to it. In practice, the contrast is less clear cut. ... Democracies, or the groups which control them, are not altogether innocent of the arts of moulding and directing mass opinion. ... The mass-production of opinion is the corollary of the mass-production of goods.
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, [1939], 2nd ed., Harper, 1964, pp. 132-4
Religion's Role in Legitimation and Reform
The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. ... This state, this society, produce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. ... The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. ... Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," [1844], in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., 1978, pp. 53-54
[G]ods and demons, like vocabularies of languages, have been directly influenced primarily by the economic situations and the historic destinies of different peoples. Since these developments are concealed from us by the mists of time, it is frequently no longer possible to determine why some particular type of deity achieved superiority over others. ... Yet there is no communal activity ... without its special god. ... Whenever a grouping does not appear to be the personal following of a single master who forcefully controls it, but rather appears as a genuine group, it has need of a special god of its own. ...
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, [1922], Beacon Press, 1963, pp. 13, 14
[R]eligion spawns organization: to propose a new interpretation of the invisible entities is to propose a new way of doing things.... The relationship between the [religious and political establishments] was sometimes harmonious and sometimes stormy, but a relationship there clearly had to be: given that religious and political leaders were both concerned with the organization and management of people in the here and now, they could not ignore each other for long....
Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, 1989, Basil Blackwell, pp. 131-32
The constant pressures from within to renew, change and reform, across the Muslim world are neither modern nor new; they represent the quest for the ideal in an imperfect world. Islam was always reviving after declining; always being re-discovered after being neglected. ... Islamic history may be interpreted as an attempt to live up to and by the seventh-century Muslim ideal. So, whereas Muslim dynasties or empires rise and fall, never to emerge again, the ideal is constantly renewed by groups and individuals in different places and in different times. The farther from the ideal, the greater the tension in society.
Akbar Ahmed, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society, 1988, Routledge, pp. 4, 31
There is a millennial hope in every vital religion. The religious imagination is as impatient with the compromises, relativities and imperfections of historic society as with the imperfections of individual life... Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion, no society will have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible. The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partly realized by being resolutely believed.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, Scribners, pp. 60-61, 81
Since every need for salvation is an expression of some distress, social or economic oppression is an effective source of salvation beliefs, though by no means the exclusive source. Other things being equal, classes with high social and economic privilege will scarcely be prone to evolve the idea of salvation. Rather, they assign to religion the primary function of legitimizing their own life pattern and situation in the world... a psychological need for reassurance as to the legitimacy or deservedness of one's happiness, whether this involves political success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of love, or anything else. What the privileged classes require of religion, if anything at all, is this psychological reassurance of legitimacy.
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, [1922], Beacon Press, 1963, p. 107
Religion has often been a force upholding the status quo, reinforcing the stability of society and enhancing political quietism.... And yet, religion has also been an important force facilitating radical political and social change, providing the motivation, ideological justification, and social cohesion for rebellions and revolutions. ... The relative infrequency of revolution ... may be one of the reasons why most students of religion and politics have emphasized primarily the integrative role of religion.
Many of the philosophers who considered religion a source of social integration made it appear as if religious faith was deliberately manipulated by rulers to keep their subjects obedient and submissive.... Typical of the condescending and patronizing opinion of the man in the street that characterizes many of these writers, and probably the best known, is Gibbon's comment on the different modes of worship prevailing in the Roman world during the age of the Antonines -- they "were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful." ...
Religion integrates and also disrupts society; it is truly Janus-faced. It may provide legitimation for the existing order, give emotional support to the fundamental values of a society, soften the impact of conflict by emphasizing values such as salvation which are common to all, and lessen social tension by stressing supramundane values. But religion also involves transcendent moral standards which define an ideal against which human performance can be measured. Hence those who are dissatisfied -- politically, economically, socially, or spiritually -- may find in religion strong support for their attack upon the status quo. Religion can be a powerful agent pushing the thoughts of men beyond tradition,... Religion can provide man with the zeal of the true believer who knows that he is right and who acts with fortitude since he carries out God's will and counts on God's helping hand.
Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution, 1974, Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 11, 540, 541, 583-5
Alliances Between Religion and
Politics
Every religion has some political opinion linked to it by affinity. The spirit of man, left to follow its bent, will regulate political society and the City of God in uniform fashion; it will, if I dare put it so, seek to harmonize earth with heaven. Most of English America was peopled by men who, having shaken off the pope's authority, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they therefore brought to the New World a Christianity which I can only describe as democratic and republican... From the start politics and religion agreed, and they have not since ceased to do so.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, [1835], edited by J.P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence, Anchor Books, 1969, Vol. I, p. 287-8
It may be argued further and with a measure of truth that religions, strictly speaking, have no political concepts attached to them. What is found is that a religion sometimes favours the political concepts of the region of its origin. This certainly is the case with Islam. Among the nomadic tribes of Arabia there was as great a degree of communal solidarity as anywhere else in the world. In Mecca before the preaching of Muhammad commercial prosperity was breaking down the solidarity of tribe and clan. Islam may be said to have restored communal solidarity but to have attached it to the total community of Muslims rather than to any smaller unit.
W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Political Thought, 1968, Edinburgh University Press, p. 29
Times of violent religious controversy have generally been times of equally violent political faction. Upon such occasions, each political party has either found it, or imagined it, for its interest, to league itself with some one or other of the contending religious sects. ... The sect which had the good fortune to be leagued with the conquering party, necessarily shared in the victory of its ally, by whose favour and protection it was soon enabled in some degree to silence and subdue all its adversaries.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, [1776], Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976, Vol. II, p. 313
There have been religions intimately linked to earthly governments, dominating men's souls both by terror and by faith; but when a religion makes such an alliance, I am not afraid to say that it makes the same mistake as any man might: it sacrifices the future for the present, and by gaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks its legitimate authority.... [R]eligion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them... [W]hen a religion chooses to rely on the interests of this world, it becomes almost as fragile as all earthly powers. Alone, it may hope for immortality; linked to ephemeral powers, it follows their fortunes and often falls together with the passions of a day sustaining them.
Hence any alliance with any political power whatsoever is bound to be burdensome for religion. It does not need their support in order to live, and in serving them it may die.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, [1835], edited by J.P. Mayer, translated by George Lawrence, Anchor Books, 1969, Vol. I, p. 297-8
Reformation and the Medieval Church-State
[T]he teachers of new religions have always had a considerable advantage in attacking those ancient and established systems of which the clergy, reposing themselves upon their benefices, had neglected to keep up the fervour of the faith and devotion in the great body of the people.... The clergy of an established and well-endowed religion ... are apt gradually to lose the qualities, both good and bad, which gave them authority and influence with the inferior ranks of the people. ...
Times of violent religious controversy have generally been times of equally violent political faction. Upon such occasions, each political party has either found it, or imagined it, for its interest, to league itself with some one or other of the contending religious sects. ... The sect which had the good fortune to be leagued with the conquering party, necessarily shared in the victory of its ally, by whose favour and protection it was soon enabled in some degree to silence and subdue all its adversaries. ...
[T]he constitution of the church of Rome may be considered as the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the authority and security of civil government, as well as against the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind, which can flourish only where civil government is able to protect them. In that constitution the grossest delusions of superstition were supported in such a manner by the private interests of so great a number of people as to put them out of all danger from any assault of human reason: because though human reason might perhaps have been able to unveil, even to the eyes of the common people, some of the delusions of superstition; it could never have dissolved the ties of private interest. Had this constitution been attacked by no other enemies but the feeble efforts of human reason, it must have endured for ever. But that immense and well-built fabric... was by the natural course of things, first weakened, and afterwards in part destroyed, and is now likely, in the course of a few centuries more, perhaps, to crumble into ruins altogether.
Adam Smith, 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, U. of Chicago Press, 1976, Vol. II:309-310, 313, 325.
From the day Martin Luther first posted his ninety-five theses in 1517, the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics was embroiled in politics. This was inevitable. The spiritual crisis affected men's attitudes toward this world as well as the next. The Church possessed vast political and economic resources, and when the Protestants repudiated the basic doctrinal tenets of Rome, they necessarily also attacked the Church's existing institutional fabric. Protestant and Catholic reformers alike looked to the secular authorities for help, and kings and princes gained political and economic advantage from participating in the conflict. ...
In the years of religious conflict and political upheaval between 1559 and 1689, politicians of every stripe invoked God's will to suit their particular purposes. The aristocratic and bourgeois Calvinists found divine sanction for rebellion, constitutionalism, and limited government. The Jesuits found divine sanction for the deposition of heretical rulers and a return to papal suzerainty. The secular princes found divine sanction for absolute monarchy. Radicals found divine sanction even for republicanism, democracy, and communism. Such were the effects of religion on politics, and of politics on religion.
Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1715, 2nd ed., 1979, Norton, pp. 12, 18
In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. ... [T]he interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen. ... [U]nder such conditions, all general and overt attacks on feudalism, in the first place attacks on the church, all revolutionary, social and political doctrines, necessarily became theological heresies. In order to be attacked, existing social conditions had to be stripped of their aureole of sanctity.
Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, [1850], in The German Revolutions, edited by Leonard Krieger, pp. 34-35.
The history of the Western church in the Middle Ages is the history of the most elaborate and thoroughly integrated system of religious thought and practice the world has ever known. ...
[T]he church was a compulsory society in precisely the same way as the modern state is a compulsory society. Just as the modern state requires those who are its members by the accident of birth to keep its laws, to contribute to its defence and public services, to subordinate private interests to the common good, so the medieval church required those who had become its members of the accident (as one may almost call it) of baptism to do all these things and many others. ... In this extensive sense the medieval church was a state. It had all the apparatus of the state: laws and law courts, taxes and tax-collectors, a great administrative machine, power of life and death over the citizens of Christendom and their enemies within and without.... But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.
To rule men at a distance requires an army of willing and disciplined collaborators, capable of being reached by a word of command, of moving when commanded, and of coercion when necessary. Very great efforts were made, especially by successive popes, to give western Christendom an effective centralized government sufficient for directing the main areas of human life....But they failed to gain the acquiescence with must be the basis of any state. No sufficient body of powerful men was ever persuaded that they had a Christian duty to support the popes in these tasks.
R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, 1970, Penguin, 15-19
It is the [Roman] Church that has kept, and keeps, Italy divided. ... For, though the Church has its headquarters in Italy and has temporal power, neither its power nor its virtue has been sufficiently great for it to be able to usurp power in Italy and become its leader; nor yet, on the other hand, has it been so weak that it could not, when afraid of losing its domination over things temporal, call upon one of the powers to defend it against an Italian [city-]state that had become too powerful. ... The Church, then, has neither been able to occupy the whole of Italy, not has it allowed anyone else to occupy it.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, [1531], edited by Bernard Crick, Penguin Books, 1983, p. 145 [Discourse I.12]
Power over opinion is therefore not less essential for political purposes than military and economic power, and has always been closely associated with them. ... Christianity seems to have been the first great movement in history with a mass appeal. Appropriately enough, it was the Catholic church which first understood and developed the potentialities of power over large masses of opinion. The Catholic church in the Middle Ages was -- and has, within the limits of its power, remained -- an institution for diffusing certain opinions and extirpating other opinions contrary to them: it created the first censorship and the first propaganda organisation. ... The Reformation was a movement which simultaneously deprived it, in several parts of Europe, of its power over opinion, of its wealth and of the authority which the military power of the Empire had conferred on it.
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, 1939, pp. 132-4.
[T]he Financial organization of the medieval church is reminiscent of a large system of corporate franchise. Clerics paid rent to the Vatican for the continuing privilege of operating benefices; although this rent was described as a "tax" (and took a wide range of specific forms that varied across Europe and over time), clerics holding "franchises" (which included parishes, bishoprics, ecclesiastical foundations, monasteries, and other organizations) who failed to pay up were replaced.... These franchise obtained revenues through either the normal operations of the productive resources at their disposal (for instance, the sale of agricultural output and the receipt of rent in the case of estates), voluntary contributions from the faithful, or the sale of indulgences and other services.
Gary Anderson, "Mr. Smith and the Preachers: The Economics of Religion in the Wealth of Nations, Journal of Political Economy, 1988, 96:1066-88, p. 1078
The Protestant Reformation ... unleashed events that thoroughly restructured traditional relationships between institutional Christianity and potential lay worshipers. In many areas new institutions housed religious truth -- Lutheran in some German principalities and states, Calvinist in Geneva and England. In Protestant nations, more insistent reformers in turn criticized the new religious establishments as corrupt and illegitimate with a vigor that easily matched the strength of their antagonism toward Catholicism. Amid this change, one island of stability remained. While theology and liturgy shifted, it was government that continued to establish official faith. The Protestant Reformation reinforced rather than reduced the inclination of Western governments to sanction and shape Christianity. Reformers' complaints aside, well into the eighteenth century most Christian worship occurred in congregations sanctioned, supported, and sustained by the government. In fact, the Reformation probably increased government activity in religion... Throughout Europe, legislation established the ecclesiastical order and theological configuration that the state would permit its laity to follow. ... [T]he rise of the early modern state in England and France took nourishment from religious crises.
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, 1990, Harvard Univ. Press, pp. 10-11
Political Liberty and Religious Choice
Religious economies are like commercial economies. They consist of a market and a set of firms seeking to serve that market. Like all market economies, a major consideration is their degree of regulation. Some religious economies are virtually unregulated, while others are restricted to state-imposed monopolies.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, "Religious Economies and Sacred Canopies: Religious Mobilization in American Cities, 1906." American Sociological Review, 1991, 53:41-49, p.42
At the heart of any economic theory of religion is the notion of religion as a commodity, an object of choice... Consumers choose what religion (if any) they will accept and how extensively they will participate in it. Nor are these choices immutable -- people can and often do change religions or levels of participation over time. As with any other commodity, the consumer's freedom to choose constrains the producers of religion. A particular religious firm can flourish only if it provides a commodity that is at least as attractive as its competitors'. Hence, to the extent that the religious market is perfectly competitive, the costs of providing an attractive commodity drives religious firms toward efficient production and zero (excess) profits.
Laurence Iannaccone, "The Consequences of Religious Market Structure," Rationality and Society, 1991, 3:156-177, p. 158
The interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous and troublesome only where there is, either but one sect tolerated in the society, or where the whole of a large society is divided into two or three great sects; the teachers of each acting by concert, and under a regular discipline and subordination. But that zeal must be altogether innocent where the society is divided into two or three hundred, or perhaps into as many thousand small sects, of which no one could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, [1776], Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976, Vol. II, p. 314
Most of English America was peopled by men who, having shaken off the pope's authority, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they therefore brought to the New World a Christianity which I can only describe as democratic and republican... From the start politics and religion agreed, and they have not since ceased to do so.
There is an innumerable multitude of sects in the United States... Each sect worships God in its own fashion, but all preach the same morality in the name of God. Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens should profess the true religion but that they should profess religion...
America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men's souls... One cannot therefore say that in the United States religion influences the laws or political opinions in detail, but it does direct mores, and by regulating domestic life it helps to regulate the state. ...
Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it does not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, [1835], translated by George Lawrence, Anchor Books, 1969, Vol. I, p. 287-8, 290-92.
From the standpoint of the conventional [secular] history, the fact that America was founded by believing Christians, for specifically religious reasons, is an intense embarrassment. That zealous Puritans should have created a society that somehow became the world's premiere exemplar of personal freedom in no wise fits the usual teaching ... This difficulty must be disposed of. ... [Puritans] are depicted as mean, reactionary people who tried to impose their views on everyone else, and created a dictatorial regime to do so. Seen this way, the job of establishing liberty in America began with overthrowing all things Puritan, replacing them with techniques of rational speculation. ... On any fair appraisal of the American Puritans, this portrayal is off the mark. It is certainly true that they didn't believe in religious toleration as we know it (nor, for that matter, did virtually anyone else in the seventeenth century, up to an including Milton, Locke, and Roger Williams). On the other hand, they also didn't believe in imposing their religious views on others. They had a different theory about this subject altogether. In the teaching of New England, religious faith was entirely voluntary. While the settlers thought the state should support and cooperate with the church, they did not suppose the state could force belief. They viewed church and state alike as associations of the willing faithful. This was, indeed, the essence of their doctrine. ...
This was the so-called "covenantal theology," preached in all the churches of the region. ... As argued by the founders of the movement, ... the proper form of organization was not a matter of king and bishops dictating forms of worship, but of believers joined together in voluntary fashion.
Drawing on the covenantal doctrines of the Old Testament and the small apostolic churches created under the dispensation of the New, these theorists specifically stressed the authority of the congregation in choice of ministers. ... The pattern was also evident in the political arrangements that were adopted,... Thus, in an amazingly brief interval, the founders of New England had created most of the features of representative, balanced government: a theory of constitutionalism, power wielded by consent, annual elections with an expansive franchise, a bicameral legislature, local autonomies, and a Bill of Rights. ... As Tocqueville would note two centuries later, the ideas and practices thus established became the template for American institutions. With remarkably few changes, the forms of government created in New England were repeated in the other colonies and states, and thereafter in the federal Constitutions. ... The founders of Massachusetts were not democrats, proponents of toleration, or libertarians--far from it. They were devout believers who based church and civil authority on their reading of the Scriptures. They planted on American soil virtually every institution of free government with which we are familiar--and did so squarely on the basis of religious precept.
M. Stanton Evans, The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, Regnery Publishing, 1994, pp. 186-188, 193, 201, 203.
Religions are in effect independent centers of power, with bona fide claims on the allegiance of their members, claims that exist alongside, are not identical to, and will sometimes trump the claims to obedience that the state makes. A religion speaks to its members in a voice different from that of the state, and when the voice moves the faithful to action, a religion may act as a counterweight to the authority of the state.... A religion, in this picture, is not simply a means for understanding one's self, or even of contemplating the nature of the universe, or existence, or of anything else. A religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world; it is a way of saying to fellow human beings and to the state those fellow humans have erected, "No, I will not accede to your will." This is a radically destabilizing proposition,...
Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, 1993, Basic Books, pp. 35, 41
The use of economic tools in no way suggests that the content of religions is unimportant, that it is all a matter of clever marketing and energetic selling.... The primary value of analyzing American religious history through a market-oriented lens is that in this way some well-established deductions from the principles of supply and demand can illuminate what might otherwise seem a very disorderly landscape...
[T]he "natural" state of religious economies is one in which a variety of religions successfully caters to the special needs and interests of specific market segments. This variety arises because of the inherent inability of a single product to satisfy very divergent tastes. Or, to note the specific features of religious firms and products, pluralism arises because of the inability of a single religious organization to be at once worldly and otherworldly, strict and permissive, exclusive and inclusive, while the market will always contain distinct consumer segments with strong preferences on each of these aspects of faith. This occurs because of "normal" variations in the human condition such as social class, age, gender, health, life experiences, and socialization.
In fact, because of this underlying differentiation of consumer preferences, religious economies can never be successfully monopolized, even when a religious organization is backed by the state. At the height of its temporal power, the medieval church was surrounded by heresy and dissent.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990, 1992, Rutgers Univ. Press, pp. 17-21
Since at least 1776, the upstart sects have grown as mainline American denominations have declined.... These historical trends are not oddities of the American religious economy or of recent history -- they are not new things under the sun. ... Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude. People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition. The religious organizations that maximize these aspects of religion, however, also demand the highest price in terms of what the individual must do to qualify for these rewards. Moreover, because of the long-term exchange relations that religious organizations require, people are forever paying the costs in the here and now while most of the rewards are to be realized elsewhere and later. As a result, humans are prone to backslide, to get behind on their payments. ... Thus, other things being equal, people will always be in favor of a modest reduction in their costs. In this fashion, humans begin to bargain with their churches for lower tension and fewer sacrifices. They usually succeed, ... because each reduction seems so small and engenders widespread approval. There comes a point, however, when a religious body has become so worldly that its rewards are few and lacking in plausibility. ... Here people begin to switch away.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990, 1992, Rutgers Univ. Press, pp. 237, 275
Religion and Economic Development
In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the business sphere was, in a word, secularized. As it grew increasingly independent of ecclesiastic authority, it acquired a much higher degree of autonomy,... Religion was gradually transformed from a restraining influence upon capitalist development to a force that both sanctioned and supported mercantile capitalism by precisely the moral teaching required for the smooth running of the rising commercial system. This was not a question of the theological content of either Catholicism or Protestantism. It was partly a question of the competition inherent in the existence of several rival religions, which, like the existence of competition inherent in the existence of several rival national states, enables a rising merchant class chafing under the restraints of one authority to take refuge with another more congenial.... Protestantism... supplied the merchant class with both a highly individualized moral responsibility outside the control of its clergy and with moral dogmas that emphasized exactly the thrift, industry, honesty, and promise keeping needed for capitalist institutions.
Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World, 1986, Basic, pp. 132-3
In analyzing traditional societies it is possible to distinguish two major society-wide sources of social control: religion and government. In the functioning of any society, however, the two aspects were integrated and fused at so many points that it is more meaningful to speak of a traditional religiopolitical system. The ideological component of this system was provided almost entirely by religion; secular political ideologies did not exist, and the legitimacy of the ruler was based on religious ideas. In a period of slow communications, the maintenance of law and order was more a function of religious mechanisms of social control than of governmental authority. The religiopolitical system was thus an integrated system in which ruler, clergy, religious ideology, religious norms of behavior, and coercive governmental power were combined in order to maximize the stability of society.
Whatever the specific structural arrangements of a given religiopolitical system, the system made sense because the religious ideology satisfactorily explained and legitimized the actual power relationships in society... In various forms and at different times, but roughly from the first decades of the nineteenth century..., traditional systems came under external attack. The attack was most prominently military and political in those countries overrun by Western imperialism, but the technological, economic, social, intellectual, and religious challenge to tradition was soon apparent...This disruption was the beginning of the secularization of the polity.... The process is fundamentally one of differentiation, by which integralist sacral societies governed by religiopolitical systems are being transformed into pluralist desacralized societies directed by greatly expanded secular polities. ... [P]olitical development in the West, stretched over a period of five centuries, was a process very similar to the one just outlined. The contemporary nation-states of the West evolved out of a medieval religiopolitical systems of Catholic integralism. The medieval synthesis was cracked open by the Reformation and the Renaissance, nationalism challenged the religious basis of political community, and the secularization conflicts of individual states have occupied an important place in Western history right up to the present time.
Donald E. Smith, Religion and Political Development, 1970, Little, Brown, pp. 57, 1-3
There is a long heritage of viewing non-Western religions as hindrances to progress. ... [F]ive contemporary accusations made against religion in the Third World are briefly described:
1. The general tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam hinder modernization by instilling concepts such as "otherworldliness" or "fatalism" within their adherents. These attitudes weaken the resolve of the population to strive and innovate. ...
2. The practices that have developed over the centuries divert the faithful from more productive endeavors. For example, feasts, religious ceremonies, gifts to temples, churches, and sectarian organizations or their personnel, and the purchase of religious artifacts are taken from limited expendable income that could be better used for education, housing, or new tools of production.
3. Religious personnel are at best not economically useful members of the community and at worst serious obstacles to change. ... Marxists in particular have charged Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, and local Muslim religious leaders as being parasites who not only do not perform useful productive labor but receive from the faithful their surplus income or even funds necessary for their livelihood....
4. Religion is a divisive force in society. Deep-rooted religious convictions, reinforced by sectarian leadership, have been seen as contributing to intolerance and political instability....
5. Religion is part of a pattern of attitudes and practices that compose traditional society. In this dichotomized view of the world, traditionalism is perceived as clearly distinct and in opposition to modernity...
Fred R. von der Mehden, Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia, 1986, Syracuse Univ. Press, pp. 6-7, 198
The links between religion and national consciousness can be very close... In fact, the relations seems to grow closer where nationalism becomes a mass force than in its phase as a minority ideology and activists' movement... Religion is an ancient and well-tried method of establishing communion through common practice and a sort of brotherhood between people who otherwise have nothing much in common.... Yet religion is a paradoxical cement for proto-nationalism, and indeed for modern nationalism. [Genuinely tribal religions normally operate on too small a scale for modern nationalities, and resist much broadening out. On the other hand the world religions which were invented at various times between the sixed century BC and the seventh century AD, are universal by definition, and therefore designed to fudge ethnic, linguistic, political and other differences. ... Fortunately universal truths are often in competition, and peoples on the borders of one can sometimes choose another as an ethnic badge...
E.J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 1990, Cambridge U. Press, pp. 67-8
The leaders of many developing nations live in two worlds simultaneously. In order to raise their countries from poverty they seek to modernize and to acquire for their societies the education and the advanced technical know-how of the west. At the same time, to maintain rapport with their tradition-bound people, they must appeal to native pride and communal and ethnic sentiments as well as religion. What makes the resulting identity and ideological crisis more severe is the fact that these leaders themselves have often been unable to clarify their attitude to tradition and religion. Thus a policy toward religion which on the surface may look like a Machiavellian manipulation of religious sentiments is what it is sometimes not only because it is a necessary expedient but also because its originators are genuinely uncertain and ambivalent....
Modernists like Nasser feel constrained to point out past errors and outmoded elements in their own culture and to keep the door to the West open. They reject a mere romanticizing of the Islamic past, and they stress the need of accepting many Western ideas and techniques. At the same time they often seek to hide the extent of their borrowing by asserting that the borrowed elements are actually Muslim in origin or at least a logical development of Muslim elements correctly interpreted. ... The result of this dualistic orientation in intellectual confusion and strain that affects Arab attitudes toward the West as well as their own history. The decay of the once flourishing Muslim civilization and the weakness of today's Muslim world must be admitted, but ... on whom is the blame for the present predicament to be placed[?]...
We Muslims, notes Anwar Sadat, "inherited a glorious torch that could have guided us to the road to justice, knowledge, and peace. Why then did we become hungry, ignorant, sick and slaves?" Because Western colonialists, in alliance with reactionary rules and an ignorant priesthood, stole and hid the torch of the true religion which exists to improve human life. This tendency to blame outsiders for present difficulties and past failures is seen in many countries undergoing modernization.
Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution, 1974, Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 455-7
We hear much these days about political and economic modernization in the new states of Asia and Africa, but little about religious modernization. When not ignored entirely, religion tends to be viewed either as a rigidly archaic obstacle to needed progress or a beleaguered conservator of precious cultural values threatened by the corrosive powers of rapid change. Little attention is paid to religious development in and of itself, to regularities of transformation which occur in the ritual and belief systems of societies undergoing comprehensive social revolutions... But our view of Asian and African religions as such is oddly static. We expect them to prosper or decline; we do not expect them to change.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, Basic, p. 170
Despite their admission that secular nationalism is emotional and that in many cases it superseded traditional forms of faith, scholars such as Kohn and Emerson and nationalist leaders such as Nasser and Nehru insisted that secular nationalism was superior in large measure because it was categorically different from religion. Yet it seems clear in hindsight that to believe in the notion of secular nationalism required a great deal of faith, even though the idea was not couched in the rhetoric of religion. The terms in which it was presented were the grandly visionary ones associated with spiritual values. ... This structural similarity between secular nationalism and religion is complemented by what I regard as an even more basic, functional similarity: they both serve the ethical function of providing an overarching framework of moral order, a framework that commands ultimate loyalty from those who subscribe to it. A further point, ... bears mentioning here: nowhere is this common form of loyalty more evident than in the ability of nationalism and religion, along among all forms of allegiance, to give moral sanction to martyrdom and violence.
For that reason, I believe the line between secular nationalism and religion has always been quite thin. Both are expressions of faith, both involve an identity with and a loyalty to a large community, and both insist on the ultimate moral legitimacy of the authority invested in the leadership of that community. ... Because the social functions of traditional religion and secular nationalism are so similar, it is useful to designate a general category that includes them both: a "genus" of which religion and secular nationalism are the two competing "species." ... I will refer to what I have in mind as ideologies of order. both religious and secular-nationalistic frameworks of thought conceive of the world in coherent, manageable ways; they both suggest that there are levels of meaning beneath the day-to-day world that give coherence to things unseen; and they both provide the authority that gives the social and political order its reason for being. In doing so they define for the individual the right way of being in the world and relate persons to the social whole.
Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War?, U. of California Press, 1993. pp. 15-16, 30, 31
The West -- including the communist regimes -- tended to misapply Marx's concept, accepted widely in some quarters of the Western intellectual tradition, that religion is the opiate of the masses. This concept was taken to mean that religion was a distraction from the important things of life ...
Marx himself and many others neglected the point that opiates are addictive. Heroin addicts usually can be weaned from their drug only by the use of methadone, an equally addictive drug that is dispensed by government authorities that provides no "high." This is analogous to the role of comprehensive secular ideologies that revolutionary regimes often try to push onto the masses from above in lieu of religion. They must be imposed continually and bring relatively little satisfaction. Moreover, the substratum of religious belief often continues to exist underground, awaiting some opportunity to reassert itself as an ideology. Thus, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini provided a better aphorism than Marx when he commented, "The masses are naturally drawn to religion."
Barry Rubin, "Religion and International Affairs," in Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, editors, Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, Oxford Univ. Press, 1994, pp. 20-21
Religion and Political Violence
When the democratic process appears unable to satisfy demands that claim to be rooted in religion, violence is the possible and rational solution. Violence in India is not, then, senseless and random. It is a way of changing things, of challenging a recalcitrant political order. In India, as elsewhere in the world at the end of the twentieth century, religions have legitimized violence as people struggle for what they regard as their just claims upon the future. Frustration and fear may have their roots in identifiable economic and social causes which could be ameliorated by secular remedies within the democratic process, but a religious vision can offer a more readily available solution by legitimizing the violence that is born of hatred and despair.
Ainslie Embree, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India, 1990, University of California Press, p. 132
We like to think theocracies and holy wars ended with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of secular culture in the West. But one look at twentieth-century propaganda dispels this notion. If anything, the ideology of holy war and the attribution of the symbols of absolute evil to the enemy has grown stronger in our supposedly secular century. That God has died has not prevented his use as a political sanction for warfare.
Sam Keen, Face of the Enemy, 1988, Harper & Row, p. 29
The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.
Kenneth Boulding (quoted by Steven Nelson, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1974, 28: 324)
On Inauguration Day, Bill Clinton told the country and the world a story about how "a generation raised in the shadows of the cold war assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds." ... But recent news accounts that depict the violence as an outgrowth of old animosities are misleading. Hindus and Muslims in Indian under the Mughal emperor Akbar, the nationalistic leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress governments of Jawaharlal Nehru have gotten along more often than they have gone for each other's throats. So did Serbs, Croats and Muslims under Tito in Yugoslavia. Clinton and others too easily invoke "ancient hatreds" to explain what are really contemporary conflicts. The question, in other words, is not why old conflicts are flaring up anew, but rather why traditionally harmonious mosaics have been shattered. ... "Ancient hatreds" are thus made as much as they are inherited. To call them ancient is to pretend they are primordial forces, outside of history and human agency, when often they are merely synthetic antiques. Intellectuals, writers, artists and politicians "make" hatreds. Films and videos, texts and textbooks, certify stories about the past, the collective memories that shape perceptions and attitudes. ... Religion is on the rise everywhere, from the religious right in Colorado Springs to Islamic fundamentalism in Tehran. It exhibits benign enthusiasm, spiritual exaltation and neo-communitarianism on the one hand, exclusionary and even deadly intolerance on the other. As political ideology recedes with the collapse of communism, the politics of identity have begun to occupy the space vacated by political ideology. Directly and indirectly, religion, ethnicity and gender increasingly define what politics is about...
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, "Modern Hate," The New Republic, March 22, 1993, 24-29
What is needed is not a requirement that the religiously devout choose a form of dialogue that liberalism accepts, but that liberalism develop a politics that accepts whatever form of dialogue a member of the public offers. Epistemic diversity, like diversity of other kinds, should be cherished, not ignored, and certainly not abolished. What is needed, then, is a willingness to listen, not because the speaker has the right voice but because the speaker has the right to speak. Moreover, the willingness to listen must hold out the possibility that the speaker is saying something worth listening to; to do less is to trivialize the forces that shape the moral convictions of tens of millions of Americans.
Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, 1993, Basic Books, pp. 230-231
[R]eligiously inspired reform has been around for a long time. Ever since the dawn of prophecy during the first millennium before the Christian era, urbanized societies have accommodated reformers who cast their reproaches against existing conditions in religious terms. The Hebrew Prophets ... the Persian Zoroaster ... Gautama Buddha in India ... The Reformation of the sixteenth century ... Muhammad's revelation ... Shi'a reformers ... the Mahdi in the Sudan ... the Wahhabis in Arabia ... The Taiping Rebellion in China ... Adventist and Morman churches ... [S]ince about 700 B.C.E., in urban and civilized societies, where inequitable social relations were always present to offend tender consciences, energetic groups of reformers have persistently and perpetually sought to remake the world along juster, religiously sanctioned lines...
[A]ll of the world's higher religions took shape and flourished in the context of urban anomie and only subsequently penetrated the countryside and established roots among the peasantries of the earth. ... Synagogue, church, mosque, and temple all made the anonymity and uncertainty of urban living more nearly bearable by creating a supportive environment of like-minded persons within which individual private lives could attain (or maintain) meaning or value. By also promising redress of injustices in a future life, the suffering and inequities of everyday became more bearable as well. The effect was to make urban, civilized forms of society more stable than could otherwise have been the case. ...[I]t seems reasonable to suggest that urban civilized existence, dependent on continual transactions with strangers, can only flourish when acting within a matrix of religiously defined local communities that give individual lives meaning and guidance, while also minimizing friction with outsiders, even, or especially, with those living immediately at hand. If so, the importance of contemporary fundamentalist movements is considerable, for the seedbeds of future religious communities that might stabilize worldwide urban society can only emerge from their ranks. That, it seems to me, is the historic importance of these groups. The radical instability that prevails worldwide, as the human majority emerges painfully from rural isolation and struggles to accommodate itself to the dictates of an exchange economy, gives religious fundamentalists an extraordinary opportunity to channel mass responses either into an angry assault on aliens and infidels or toward peaceable symbiosis with strangers.
William McNeill, "Fundamentalism and the World of the 1990s," in Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and Society, 1992, University of Chicago Press, p. 559-562, 573
Personal Experience, Society, and the Sacred
There is an economy about religious belief -- an economy and a tendency toward evolution. Over the centuries, the religious traditions, like traditions of other kinds, tend to abandon what is useless and preserve what is useful. The religions may not measure utility in the same terms that secular society does; but, as many sociologists have suggested, religious traditions that lack any relevance to the human experience are very likely, over time, to wither.... This evolution matters because it suggests that a religion that has survived must include some kernel of moral truth that resonates with broader human understandings, whether or not most people share the epistemic premises of the religion itself.
Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, 1993, Basic Books, pp. 230-231
[A] religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it--the element of the sacred. ... Because religion is human it must for that very reason be something social, something linguistic, something economic... But it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of these basic functions...
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 1958, Meridian, p. xiii
Let us consider the deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion. Faith unto Salvation, Trust, Love--all these are there. But over and above these is an element which may also on occasion, quite apart from them, profoundly affect us and occupy the mind with a wellnigh bewildering strength.... [W]e are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its `profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful, and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of--whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, [1917], 1928, Oxford U. Press, pp. 2, 3-4, 12-13
One of the essential qualities of the sacred, as encountered in "religious experience," is otherness, its manifestation as something totaliter aliter as compared to ordinary, profane human life. It is precisely this otherness that lies at the heart of religious awe, of numinous dread, of the adoration of what totally transcends all dimensions of the merely human. ... [A]t the core of the phenomenon of religion is a set of highly distinctive experiences. A religious tradition, with whatever institutions have grown up around it, exists as a fact in ordinary, everyday reality. It mediates the experience of another reality, both to those who have never had it and to those who have but who are ever in danger of forgetting it.... Religious tradition is a collective memory of those moments in which the reality of another world broke into the paramount reality of everyday life. But the tradition not only mediates the religious experience; it also domesticates it. By its very nature, religious experience is a standing threat to social order -- not just in the sense of this or that sociopolitical status quo but in the more basic sense of the business of living. Religious experience radically relativizes, if it does not devalue altogether, the ordinary concerns of human life. ... No society could survive in the fixed posture of encountering the supernatural. In order for society to survive..., the encounters must be limited, controlled, circumscribed. This domestication of religious experience is one of the most fundamental social as well as psychological functions of religious institutions. Thus religious tradition is also a defence mechanism of the paramount reality, guarding its boundaries against the threat of being overrun by the incursions of the supernatural.... Whatever else it is, religious experience is dangerous. Its dangers are reduced and routinized by means of institutionalization. Religious ritual, for example, assigns the encounters with sacred reality to certain times and places, and puts them under the control of typically prudent functionaries.... Religious tradition is the careful management of an exceedingly dangerous human experience.
Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 1979, Doubleday, pp. 87-90, 46, 48-50