The complex relationship between religion and politics in international scholarship was reshaped during the early 2000s as scholars questioned the role of secularism in politics and the role of religion in public life.Footnote 1 By exploring the development of what became known as the secularism debate, this chapter shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up possibilities to engage with religion in new ways. As we shall see, the re-evaluation of the secular foundations of liberal thought and liberal politics opened the door for a considerable body of research on religion and global politics. However, despite efforts to the contrary, the attempts to rehabilitate religion as a significant node in the study of global politics have actually undermined its analytical value. By looking closer at the history and particular intellectual legacy of the secularism debate, we see how these problems emerged and how they are reproduced in current scholarship.
This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of the International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between what I refer to as the multiculturalist and genealogical positions within the secularism debate. It argues that exploring the contours of this legacy is necessary in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship, policy, and practices around religion. Once we get a clearer picture of the intellectual legacy that has structured current scholarship on religion and global politics, it will be easier to understand both the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of critical religious studies that has accompanied the introduction of religion into the field of IR and global politics. Based on the examination that follows, how and why a theoretical and analytical deadlock has taken hold in the field of religion and IR will become clear. It will also become possible to identify the latent correctives resting in seemingly unrelated corners of IR theorizing and in ongoing scholarship on religion in the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, history, and religious studies.
Critiquing Secularism: Common Core Assumptions
As interest in religion and politics grew exponentially in academia, policy circles, and public discourse during the early 2000s, a debate regarding the secular foundations of the liberal political (international) order moved onto centre stage.Footnote 2 In this debate, scholars outlined and critiqued various forms of secularist assumptions about political order and legitimate authority that explicitly saw religion as outside of – and sometimes even delineating the limits of – the political and the public.Footnote 3 Accordingly, they argued that religion was not as easily separated from politics as had been previously assumed and that liberal secularity, as we know it today, was the result of a particular set of assumptions developed in a particular historical period.Footnote 4 The resulting understanding of liberal secularity was, in this sense, neither universal nor neutral. As the various studies showed, the secularism(s) underlying the Western liberal political order had a history – a genealogy – and was to be studied in detail rather than used as a necessary condition for democratic development.Footnote 5
Shifting the focus away from the common practice of writing religion and its role out of liberal political orders, the new critical scholarship replaced normative ideas about secularization as a teleological process intimately connected to modern progress, pluralism, and equality with pressing questions about the role and function of such narratives. Notably, in IR, the secularization story functioned as part of another dominant narrative (or trope) in the field: the emergence of the sovereign state. As William Connolly put it, following the seventeenth-century Thirty Years War in Europe, the ‘best hope for a peaceful and just world under these new circumstances was an institution of a public life in which the final meaning of life, the proper route to life after death, and the divine source of morality were pulled out of the public realm, and deposited into private life’.Footnote 6 The secularization of public life was considered ‘crucial to private freedom, pluralistic democracy, individual rights, public reason’,Footnote 7 and the primacy of the state. The key to its success, according to this formulation, is the separation of church and state and the general acceptance of a conception of public reason that would enable public agreement on non-religious issues.Footnote 8 Divesting international politics of religion, in this sense, was a process that began with the Peace of Westphalia, sedimented by the European Enlightenment and securely nested in the development of modern liberal political thought. In this established story about the secularization of modern Western liberal orders, secularity was equated with modernity, and a secular public sphere was considered necessary for the workings of public reason and a neutral and legitimate government. Religion, as the opposite of secularity, was necessarily kept private.
There were multiple problems with this analytical trope about secular liberalism, however, and, from the mid 2000s onwards, critical scholars started picking it apart.Footnote 9 They considered the invisibilization and marginalization of religion practically problematic, for example, as it excluded some members of society from the public sphere or strongly regulated their presence. This was particularly pertinent in the case of the Western Muslim population whose difference from an acclaimed ‘non-Muslim West’ had become even more emphasized following the attacks on New York in 2001 and the following so-called War on Terror that directly or indirectly and disproportionately targeted Muslim-identified individuals and groups around the world. The strength of the secularism critique grew as an increasing number of organizations, groups, and individuals framed themselves, their arguments, their conflicts, and their aims in terms of religion, and as national and supranational courts saw a growing number of court cases regarding religious freedom and religious minorities demanding adjudication.Footnote 10 As scholars of law and religion noted, however, the courts and the national and international legal systems not only decided on the relationship between different norms – such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech – but, more importantly for our discussion, defined the meaning and the scope of the concept of religion itself.Footnote 11
In the context of minority rights, conflict resolution, international aid, peacebuilding, and more proactive efforts to promote democracy, academics, pundits, activists, and lawmakers relied on the concept of religion to describe, understand, and explain international dynamics.Footnote 12 It was part of the conceptual toolbox for participants in these conversations, as well as for the analysts and responding policymakers engaged in international conflicts. Therefore, so the argument went, ignoring religion explained why IR scholars were unable to anticipate religiously infused revolutions, the spread of religious nationalisms, and faith-based social movements but also why they were unable to explain and respond to religiously coded violence and terror, to analyse the progress or failure of various developmental projects, or understand the processes of democratic transition and nation-building where religious actors were key figures linking the international and the local.Footnote 13 The idea that the world was or should be secular was, in this view, a globalized version of a European presumption blind to the myriad religious actors, ideas, practices, relics, books, aesthetics, institutions, semantics, and structures that suffused the world around it. For critics within the secularism debate, secularism was neither neutral nor necessary to maintain order or justice but rather a particular knowledge-power regime and tool of governance.Footnote 14
Intimately connected to these descriptive and analytical arguments was a normative argument pointing to the marginalizing effect of secularist frameworks. To Mustapha Pasha, for example, the universalization of secularity came at the price of marginalizing alternative histories and sites.Footnote 15 Secularism, Erin Wilson writes, ‘may be considered a form of ontological injustice because it attempts to privatize, minimize and exclude ways of understanding and living that do not conform to the assumptions of secular ontologies’.Footnote 16 Destabilizing these ontologies, she continues, is a crucial part of addressing existing epistemic and ontological injustices.Footnote 17 Reinforced by Orientalist frames of seeing ‘religious’ others, ‘secularity rapidly evolved into a “standard of civilisation”’.Footnote 18 This kind of argumentation combined agonistic scholarship on the value of pluralization with versions of the multiculturalist claim that the misrecognition of individual and group identities causes injury and is, therefore, unjust.Footnote 19 Secularism was, in this sense, a problem of unjust exclusion and an unnecessary limitation to moral and epistemic diversity.
The common argument underlying these different forms of critique is that, by making sure that the public is free from religion, regimes of secularism also define what the public needs to be freed from and thereby defines the meaning of religion itself. The principal problem, then, is the erasure of secularism’s genealogy. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argued in The Politics of Secularism in International Relations that secularism cannot be written off as a fixed and final achievement of European modernity. She showed, rather, that secularism needs to be considered a socially constructed and historically contingent form of religious governance that has consequences for domestic and global politics.Footnote 20 Once secularism is seen as a mode of political governance rather than a stable and neutral solution to the problem of religion in public, it is possible to start looking at the evolution of different forms of secularism and their multifaceted trajectories, histories, and political consequences.
Contextualizing and historicizing secular orders and ontologies debunks their claims to neutrality. In this sense, Jonathan Agensky writes that transhistorical epistemology such as secularism ‘obscure the dialogic and socially productive dimensions of global relations’.Footnote 21 Underlying the descriptive, normative, and analytical critique against excluding religion is the claim that the depiction of religion as separate from the secular was never a neutral description of global life. Rather, the very distinction between religion and the secular was upheld by the persistent myth of secularism in its Westphalian and Eurocentric form – a distinction that was, in and of itself, political. Religion and the secular, as well as religion and politics, were, in this sense, not separate categories of public life but two sides of the same coin, co-constitutive rather than contradictory, intertwined rather than independent.Footnote 22
The secularism critique argued that the secular was not an empty, neutral space where different ways of life could engage and coexist but a mode of thought built on particular assumptions regarding private and public, the individual and the self, authority and sovereignty.Footnote 23 By drawing the boundaries between what is understood to be religious and what not, scholars argued that secularism exercises a productive power that constitutes religion as something distinct from the public, political, and liberal secular sphere of international relations and, generally, designates it as something private and apolitical.Footnote 24 Consequently, it is not only that religion appears to be missing from political scholarship because most scholars adopt a view of the world based on a secular reality; it is, as Hurd showed, that scholars also miss out on ‘secularism’s role in the production of the subjects that it presupposes’, both the religious and the secular.Footnote 25 A secular public sphere is thereby a particular form of government producing a particular understanding of the concept of religion and its legitimate space and place.Footnote 26 In Talal Asad’s words, ‘secularism isn’t merely a rational, modern society… (it is a) particular pattern of political rule’.Footnote 27
As we will see in the following pages, the discourse and critique of secularism have spanned across disciplinary borders. There have been, however, a few common assumptions across disciplines. These include the co-constitution of religion and politics and the futility of their separation, both practically and theoretically; the critique of the assumption that religion is private, amodern, and irrational; and the definition of secularism as a particular and historically contingent mode of thought, mode of governance, and knowledge regime rather than a neutral and natural necessity for liberal government.Footnote 28 The scholarship on secularism in the first decade of the 2000s came primarily from two distinct sources, what I will refer to as the multiculturalist perspective and the critical, or genealogical, legacy. While the bodies of scholarship are complex and diverse, these conceptualizations work heuristically to drive home a larger point: the approaches to religion following from the critique of secularism reproduced the tension inherent in and between these two strains of thought. From the scholarship of multiculturalism came the reification of cultural identities, and from genealogical scholarship came a lack of alternatives in relation to the critique of power hierarchies. By looking closer at the internal logics of these two strands of thought, we will see how the tension between them emerged and how it has continued to structure current IR scholarship on religion. While multiculturalist scholars seek to recognize the immanence and value of religion for global politics following the critique and deconstruction of IR’s secularist ontology, it becomes clear when we place it in conversation with the genealogical alternative that there are unrecognized consequences and costs to the multiculturalist perspective.
‘Taking Religion Seriously’ in IR Scholarship
This section looks in detail at specific arguments made by IR scholars in order to illustrate the techniques used to argue for the recognition of religion. What we see is an overarching agreement that recognizing religion adds value to the analytical, normative, and descriptive power of IR, but close analysis also reveals the problems inherent in the assumptions these arguments rest on. An early proponent emphasizing the entangled relationship between religion, the secular, and the political in IR scholarship is US-American political scientist Daniel Philpott. He sums up his argument that religion lies ‘at the very root of modern IR’ with the slogan, ‘No Reformation, no Westphalia’.Footnote 29 I quote Philpott in detail throughout this section to illustrate the nature of the arguments characterizing the first wave of recognition arguments in IR. Philpott represents a body of scholars arguing against the marginalization of religion in a discipline they consider to be unjustly excluding certain subjects and practices. They also see the discipline’s very foundation – the idea and the history of the sovereign state as well as its international system, its rise, and possible fall – as intrinsically interwoven with religion. To Philpott and those who share his perspective, there is no way of separating the religious and the secular or the religious and the political.
Looking to introduce religion into a discipline that had relatively little experience with – and seemingly little interest for – questions regarding religion, Philpott tried to show how religion not only was worthy of peripheral attention but sat at the core of the key feature of international politics: the emergence of the sovereign state and the modern state system. Throughout the early 2000s, Philpott argued that religion was invaluable for understanding the constitution and dynamics of the international political order, and he did so through a detailed examination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, emphasizing the effects of changing ideas regarding authority and sovereignty. According to him, religion was constitutive of the current Westphalian international order of sovereign states, as this order would never have emerged were it not for the way in which the Reformation and Protestant ideas of political authority shaped the states’ interests in sovereign statehood.Footnote 30 He wrote, ‘plumbing the causal logic behind this correlation I argue that the intrinsic content of Protestantism itself point to sovereignty’.Footnote 31 He continued a year later, ‘if the place of religion at the origins of international relations becomes more clear, then perhaps its place in international relations today will be taken more seriously’.Footnote 32
Philpott used the argument that religion was constitutive for the present international system in order to forward a quest to take religion ‘more seriously’. In addition, he noted that religion could be considered a fundamental challenge to the international order. Religious international organizations, he wrote, ‘directly challenge the authority structure of the international system’.Footnote 33 This challenge ought to be a ‘call to direct far more energy to understanding the impetuses behind [these] movements’.Footnote 34 In other words, he suggests that since the current international order is both constituted through and challenged by religious actors, ideas, motivations, movements, and conflicts, IR scholars must recognize religion’s relevance.
Philpott was keen on transforming religion from a marginal side note clustered together with race, culture, and gender into an established sub-field of IR in its own right, including publications, emergent research centres, university chairs, and departments all dedicated to studying the impact of religion on global politics. Efforts to this end include work explaining the role of religion in conflict,Footnote 35 movements of fundamentalism,Footnote 36 peacebuilding,Footnote 37 human rights,Footnote 38 democracy,Footnote 39 international development,Footnote 40 political integration,Footnote 41 and climate change.Footnote 42 Scholars have since traced the way in which religious practices in the military mobilize and prepare for war,Footnote 43 how religious NGOs shape policy in transnational organizations,Footnote 44 the level of discrimination against religious minorities,Footnote 45 and the ways in which religion was woven into the most unsuspecting corners of international political theory.Footnote 46 The common trait here is the assumption that there is a set of practices – or organizations, institutions, a set of norms, ideas, values, and, not least, identities – that fulfil the criterion of religion, and that the real challenge is to understand their impact on the actions, identities, choices, and ideas of those who inhabit them, as well as the political order they shape.
The assumption that religion has an impact on international relations, however, assumes that (a) religion is intelligible and identifiable from other forms of human interaction and (b) its impact is irreducible to other causes. As I will argue in the Conclusion, these are highly contentious claims and rather poorly founded, not because of missing data or falsely interpreted theories but for the fact that the concept of religion remains analytically incoherent. As we will see in this chapter and Chapter 2, a conceptual analysis of religion in IR scholarship shows the concept of religion, at best, assuming a plethora of meanings – as a certain set of practices, rituals, institutions, values, or identities (most of which could claim a Wittgensteinian family resemblance only under a very strained conception of family), or, at worst, as a form of ideological or political tool. If the concept of religion is used to describe a commonsense understanding of what religion is – who it represents, its role in a particular society, its relationship to the letters of the law, its influence in politics – the concept itself remains nothing but an affirming description of the present use of language. If international political scholarship aimed to engage in a conceptual analysis of religion, that would be fine. But it doesn’t. IR scholarship aims at an integration of religion as an analytical concept able to help understand and explain the dynamics of international politics. This remains a futile task, however, as religion is not a viable analytical concept.
Where Philpott and others reference the foundations of the international system and the challenges to its political order as a means to support their argument for the recognition of religion, more conceptually careful scholars tread more lightly and, therefore, more convincingly in terms of their argumentation. Scott Thomas, notably, joined Philpott’s effort to reread the history of the discipline in order to draw out the artificial nature of the separation between global politics and religion. I emphasize his work in great detail here, as it illuminates several of the key argumentative techniques at play in the effort to ‘take religion seriously’ while also reflecting some of the nuanced drawbacks they entail. Like Philpott, Scott Thomas belongs to the group of scholars who tried to unsettle the religio-secular binary in IR theory and international history by rereading the history and legacy of the seventeenth-century Westphalian Peace agreements. While Philpott had emphasized the ‘intrinsic content of Protestantism itself’ as the origin of the strive towards state sovereignty,Footnote 47 Thomas challenges existing assumptions regarding Westphalia as a starting point for secularized international relations altogether.
What we see here is an argument that draws its strength from the historical contextualization of religion in order to emphasize its relevance for past and present IR. In the centuries preceding Westphalia, Thomas points out, religion carried a social meaning. That is, religion was meaningful only in reference to practices within the particular (Christian) communities that sustained it.Footnote 48 However, this changed during the early modern period. ‘As a result of the modern concept of religion’, Thomas asserted, ‘the virtues and practices of the Christian tradition came to be separated from the communities in which they were embedded’.Footnote 49 The development from the social to the modern meaning of religion was necessary, he suggests, in order to make religion ‘compatible with the power and discipline of the state’.Footnote 50 Religion was detached from the virtues and practices of the ecclesiastical community and privatized in the – abstract – form of belief and conscience.Footnote 51 Thomas presents the argument that the ‘previous [intellectual and social] discipline of religion was taken over by the state, which was given the legitimate monopoly on the use of power and coercion in society’.Footnote 52 The state used this ‘invention of religion’ to legitimate the transfer of the ultimate loyalty of people from religion to the state as part of the consolidation of its power. The state had to separate ‘doctrines and beliefs from practices and communities as part of state-building and affirming internal sovereignty’.Footnote 53 Thomas thus calls the ruling assumption in IR theorizing that religion needed to be separated from international relations the ‘Westphalian presumption’. Significantly, the genealogical reading Thomas gives us shows that the removal of the modern, abstracted version of religion from public life still left its social and communal aspect intact.Footnote 54
During the conflicts preceding the Westphalian settlement, the role of religion was not one of doctrine. Rather, as Thomas puts it, ‘what was being safeguarded and defended in the Wars of Religion was a sacred notion of the community defined by religion, as each community fought to define, redefine, or defend the boundaries between the sacred and the profane as a whole’.Footnote 55 In this sense, religion in early modern Europe should be interpreted as a ‘community of believers rather than as a body of doctrines or beliefs as liberal modernity would have it’,Footnote 56 that is, as a practice community rather than disembodied ideology. Yet the Westphalian presumption in IR ignores this and treats Westphalia as the beginning of secularized international relations and characterizes the occurrence of religion within this international realm as a threat to the Westphalian secular order. The Westphalian presumption thus excludes religion and generally perceives the growing reference in global politics to religion as the internationalization of a private matter – and, hence, a problem.
However, according to Thomas, religion is not a problem in global politics or in IR. The international realm is permeated by the social and communal aspect of religion. The formation of the international ‘thick practices’ of diplomacy and war are deeply embedded in a particular religious and cultural traditions of Christendom and are incommensurable when placed outside of this framework. Bringing religion back into IR, Thomas argues, entails countering the Westphalian presumption and its version of religion as private, abstract, and decontextualized belief. ‘If the global resurgence of religion and cultural pluralism are to be taken seriously, then a social understanding of religion and its importance to the authenticity and development of communities and states should be recognised as part of any post-Westphalian international order.’Footnote 57 Rather than ideology or dogma, Thomas argues, religion is better understood as a ‘living tradition’.
The idea of religion as a ‘living tradition’ follows on from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and the view that human actions only become intelligible once they are interpreted as a part of a larger narrative of the collective life of individuals, communities, and states.Footnote 58 Values, virtues, practices, and identities are expressed through and rooted in the culture, traditions, and history of the particular communities in which they are embedded. Thus, practices of warfare or statecraft can only be understood if one takes into account the larger context within which they took place. According to Thomas, before Westphalia, this context was Christendom, and the practices of international relations – war and diplomacy – were embedded in the wider religious and cultural traditions of Christendom. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these practices became detached from Christian traditions: ‘Christendom gave way to the invention of religion, and religion came under the modern state’s power and discipline.’Footnote 59 The international practices were, accordingly, detached from Christianity as a social tradition and were reduced to rules and further codified by the emerging idea of international law.
Thomas’s MacIntyrean reading of this process argues that the reduction of the thick practices of international relations – those embedded in the social traditions of world religions, cultures and civilizations – to the thin practices of procedural rules has ‘undermined the basis for the social bond that made them binding in international society’ in the first place.Footnote 60 By detaching rules from practices and the practice communities out of which they grew, he suggests, ‘the debates on just war, arms races, or humanitarian intervention have become incommensurable not only within the Western societies, but among Western and non-western countries as well’.Footnote 61 This is also the case for religion. The reduction of religion from its social meaning as a ‘living tradition’ to an abstracted and static dogma or set of beliefs has rendered religion private and, as such, necessarily excluded from the realm of international relations. Discarding the Westphalian presumption and its exclusion of religion from IR, Thomas thus calls on the discipline to reinterpret the foundations of the Westphalian international system. ‘Taking religious and cultural pluralism seriously means identifying those practices of particular religions and cultural traditions … [and] cultivating and supporting them.’Footnote 62
Through this close reading of Thomas’s argumentation for the recognition of religion, we see a two-step process. First, he deconstructs the religio-secular binary and illustrates the processes by which the separation came into force, as well as the purposes it served. The historicization of the secular norms underpinning IR theory and its key players – state and state system – was, as we saw in this section, a necessary step to enable a different engagement with questions regarding religion in global politics. But despite his efforts to emphasize the dynamic nature of religion as a ‘living tradition’, as we see in the next section, Thomas necessarily needs an identifiable and intelligible religious subject once he wants international organizations and institutions to recognize religion more concretely. In this sense, Thomas, like Philpott, cannot get away from the binding power of recognition.Footnote 63
Secularism and the Multicultural
The common denominator of the multicultural perspective in the secularism discourse is, on the one hand, the assumption of a continuing legacy of religion in modern political thought, value systems, and subjectivities. It is also, on the other hand, the critique of the marginalization of religious forms of knowledge, cosmologies, and actors. For these multiculturalist scholars, the problem of excluding religion within the secularist framework can be addressed through an engagement with religious institutions, voices, arguments, and so forth. There is something to be gained, they argue, by engaging religion. Here, we have the central argumentative slippage from an analytical and historical deconstruction and critique of secularism to a normative argument for recognition.Footnote 64 This is the main difference between this multicultural approach to religion and global politics and the alternative emphasis on genealogical care, to which I will return in this chapter and in Chapter 2.
What makes Scott Thomas join this multicultural legacy is that he, after having disassembled and critiqued the assumptions allowing for IR scholarship to place religion into the box of ‘private – irrational – unmodern’, uses the space he just cleared to fill it up with arguments for the engagement with religion in a very particular way. In what follows we see how he follows a line of thinking that argues for engaging with those national and international actors who are already recognizable as religious: Jewish NGOs at the United Nations, Sunni leaders at the World Economic Forum, papal declarations on human rights. What happens is that the argument for the recognition of religion in IR turns into a multiculturalist effort for liberal pluralism but a plurality made up of predetermined units.
For multiculturalists, religion is identified as a form of difference – cultural, epistemic, ontological – the recognition of and engagement with which carries a value in and of itself. Religion in this space becomes a symbol for diversity where diversity is the necessary antidote to the monistic hierarchy of liberal secularism.Footnote 65 I argue that this – the critique of secularism and the argument for the recognition of religion – is the central part of the multicultural body of scholarship that sees an intrinsic value in religion, even if the meaning and scope of the concept is not considered fixed. Together with a second body of multiculturalist scholars with a more differentiated conception of what religion is, the common denominator is a shared hope – and at times demand – for expanding the sources of knowledge, the kinds of agencies, and worldviews informing (liberal) political orders.Footnote 66 It is a demand for rehabilitating religion and a demand for its recognition. In this section, we look at a number of scholars I have gathered under the canopy of ‘multiculturalism’. As I will demonstrate, the argument regarding the epistemic continuation from religious discourse to secular reason not only justifies the value and the importance of engaging with religious ideas and actors; it also legitimizes the critique of the artificial nature of a secular ontology reduced to the exclusion of religion.
The multiculturalist legacy of IR scholarship regarding religion and global politics mirrors political theorist Charles Taylor’s arguments regarding the lack of epistemic break between secular rationality and religious discourse. When Charles Taylor cracked open a debate on the relationship between religion and secular politics in his 2007 book A Secular Age, he fundamentally shifted the conversation by dismantling the idea that religion and secularism are opposing worldviews.Footnote 67 Rather than thinking about secularism as little more than a mode of organizing state and society – widely believed to be the foundation for the legal and political protection of individual belief, the tolerance of religious and cultural differences, and the political resolution of wars of faith – Taylor presented secularism as a fundamental condition of individual consciousness and subjectivity.Footnote 68 Through a deep dive into the story of the historical construction of secular subjectivity, he shows how this secular outlook has come to be seen as non-optional for most members of modern Western liberal societies. Taylor locates the development of this secular consciousness within religious discourses rather than treating it as an independent development anchored in extra-religious forces of science or the rationalization and administration of modern society. The processes that became associated with secularization, according to Taylor, were intimately interwoven with intra-Christian reform movements. The processes that drew people into the ‘slipstream of disenchantment’ were not secular ones but religious. The secular self, to Taylor, is a distinct Christian achievement.Footnote 69 Throughout the book, Taylor challenges the assumption of an ‘epistemic break’ between Western secular reason and religious discourse.
In the European and North American discourse, Taylor’s treatment of Christianity in the North Atlantic as a homogeneous body from which the development of modern-day secularism stems did not escape critique, some of which I will return to in the next section. What is important for now is his argument that modern secularism is a continuation of Christian values and judgement rather than an ‘epistemic break’ with prior religious sentiments and ontologies. The argument for the religious sources of modern political concepts had previously been presented by Carl Schmitt in 1922 and further debated between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg.Footnote 70 What is new and consequential to the development of the study of religion and politics in the social and political theory that followed is that religion – be it in its ‘secular’ Christian version or, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, its ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage – cannot simply be translated into secular concepts for a modern liberal society. It is, in fact, already woven into the fibres of its subjects, their cognitive and conceptual faculties, and social and political analysis. Taylor’s publications, together with those of Habermas, which we will turn to in Chapter 2, opened the gates to a body of scholarship embarking on an intellectual archaeological treasure hunt for relics from the era of this improbable relationship. Religion and the secular, they set out to prove, were entangled. And due to this entanglement, religion had a necessary place in current international scholarship and was constitutive of social life and political order in a much broader sense.Footnote 71
IR’s multicultural scholars of religion, like Scott Thomas, emphasize this entanglement and pick apart the secular ontology of the discipline and its founding myth. Notable to this multiculturalist strain of scholarship is that religion is formulated both as the foundation for Western (international) political thought and as a distinct form of difference that sits apart from it as one among many ‘multiple modernities’,Footnote 72 as a ‘living tradition’,Footnote 73 or as a form of epistemic community.Footnote 74 Thomas and other multiculturalist scholars of religion expect that undoing the knowledge-power regime of secularism and its religio-secular settlement, therefore, will expand the range of actors, arguments, ideas, and institutions considered to be relevant parts of international dynamics and further provide an epistemic opening to ‘otherwise neglected forms of being, becoming and knowing’.Footnote 75 Expanding the hermeneutic register to reach localized cultural markers or vernaculars or establish an open hermeneutic margin for non-Western actors to widen the resources of negotiation – to ‘pursue an ethos of engagement’ with a plurality of previously untapped moral resources or alternative ontologies – is considered a value in and of itself.Footnote 76 By questioning the boundary between the secular and the religious, the boundary itself turns ‘into a space in which new forms of embodied political agency and imagination may be observed’.Footnote 77
According to the multiculturalist perspective, the value of diversity and plurality is particularly important in relation to the decolonialization or provincialization of an otherwise Eurocentric framework. ‘Taking view of other worlds seriously’, Erin Wilson writes, ‘requires that we do not attempt to relate different ontologies to one another through language and concepts that belong to only one of them’.Footnote 78 By conceptualizing religion as a ‘living tradition’, Thomas aims to avoid the pitfalls that come with religion’s modern genealogy. However, as we will see in the next section, by pushing the argument to recognize religion as part of a more genuinely plural order, he circles back to a version of religion that needs to align itself with pre-existing notions of what a religion is and, so I argue, keeps the living traditions from staying alive.
Keeping Living Traditions from Staying Alive
Scott Thomas’s attempt to conceptualize religion as a ‘living tradition’ picks up on multiple other scholars’ efforts to bring (back) into a focus localized communities, their practices and concerns, as well as the materiality of their everyday. Doing so, their work implies, moves us away from thinking about religion as detached from a continually changing context. Thomas shares his turn to the Aristotelian ideas of MacIntyre with Cecelia Lynch and, to some extent, Talal Asad, to whom I will turn in the next section. The communal embeddedness of the ‘living tradition’ of religion means that religion cannot be viewed as a static set of beliefs or as a dogma. It develops with the community. As Lynch emphasizes, the ‘good’ or ‘right and wrong’ can only be imagined and understood through the prism of, and in reference to, the community within which one exists.Footnote 79 It is thus through a focus on the construction of religious meaning and the informal adjudication regarding what the common good in each particular era requires – expressed through moral practice within these communities – that we may come closer to an understanding of the influence of religion in IR.Footnote 80 The ethical agency of religion, according to Lynch, can be found between doctrine and the sociopolitical context in which the community is embedded.Footnote 81
Although Thomas as well as Lynch (and other scholarship drawing on them) reject the absolute and essential character of religion, it still seems to carry influence and importance.Footnote 82 In their view, religion is conceptualized as differentiated communities or, as Thomas puts it, faith-based communities. As morality is situated in communities and ‘religion and culture shape, inform and determine the conception of the good among particular social traditions and communities’,Footnote 83 the recognition of religion means taking the organizations that spring from those communities ‘seriously’. This means that they need to be included within international practices, such as diplomacy, peacebuilding, development aid, and projects of international cooperation and democratization.Footnote 84 As Lynch writes, ‘we cannot ignore Christian ethics and practices in the modern West, both in their problematic forms and in the good they purport to offer.’Footnote 85 However, the question remains, if religion is not a set of doctrines, as the Westphalian presumption claimed, what is it then?
In the end, Thomas’s argument that we should ‘take religion seriously’ is, on the one hand, an argument against the necessity – and possibility – of a public sphere with individuals detached from their ‘cultural and religious’ traditions. On the other hand, it is an argument for the recognition of religion, the religious communities – ‘faith communities’ – and the organizations that embody them. Thomas illustrates the different segments of world politics where religion already plays a role: the promotion of democracy, economic development, international cooperation, diplomacy, peacebuilding, and so on. He also lists organizations that embody this embedded understanding of religion: Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, Christian Aid, Fatayat (the association of young Islamic women), the Women’s Welfare Association (Indonesia), Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (Sri Lanka), and Sarkan Zoumountsi Association (Cameroon). He sees this embodied and embedded religion in the United Nations and at the tables of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Thomas wants ‘religion’ to be a part of a multitrack diplomacy, assuming its role next to governments, NGOs and professional organizations, business communities, research institutions, and more. In taking religion seriously, Thomas argues for the recognition of religious communities at the deliberation table of international organizations, in fora for international conflict solution, in diplomacy, and in democracy-building.Footnote 86
This position, however, carries with it a range of problems. First, there needs to be a great deal of care taken when using groups’ self-description and their leaders’ distinguishing characteristics to define them. In these cases, groups and their elites are the subjects rather than providers of the analytical toolkit. Roger Brubaker writes with regard to questions of ethnicity, for example:
[We] must, of course, take vernacular categories and participants’ understandings seriously, for they are partly constitutive of our object of study. However, we should not uncritically adopt categories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis … Participant’s accounts … often have a performative character. By invoking groups, they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being. … Reification is a social process, not simply an intellectual bad habit. … To criticize ethnopolitical entrepreneurs for reifying ethnic groups would be a kind of category mistake. Reifying groups is precisely what ethnopolitical entrepreneurs are in the business of doing. … As analysts, we should certainly try to account for the ways in which – and conditions under which – this practice of reification … can work. However, we should avoid unintentionally doubling or reinforcing the reification of ethnic groups in ethnopolitical practice with a reification of such groups in social analysis.Footnote 87
Translating this to the question of religion and the effort to take the living traditions and the communities as the definitive source for the concept of religion, it remains a categorical mistake to argue for the recognition of religion in IR with reference to the self-definition of religious actors in global politics.
The language of elite participants in international organizations – so-called first-level language – should not be abstracted up to the level of analysis, since the partisans have the task of mobilization and, using the language accordingly, they will seek to ‘evoke what they invoke’. Abstracting the language of practitioners and elites to the language of analysis legitimizes the claims to representation made by these practitioners and elites. It confirms the authority over religion by those who claim to represent it. If this religion – that of the groups and their elites – is what Thomas wants to have ‘taken seriously’, then his model reinstates the power structures of those communities who claim to be religious and the elites within these communities who claim to represent them. How are the ‘living traditions’ of religious communities and traditions supposed to stay ‘alive’ if they are bound by recognition?Footnote 88 And, more importantly to our following discussion, how are they supposed to remain recognizable in the form in which their elites represent them?
In the following chapters, I argue that narratives excluding religion (secularism in its Eurocentric or Westphalian forms) and the multiculturalist arguments in favour of recognition are both performative and productive of the concept of religion. The tendency to assume that there is an identifiable, recognizable subject of religion prior to its recognition is not characteristic of one particular theoretical subgroup of the IR discipline. While Philpott fits neatly into a US-American liberal constructivist tradition, Scott Thomas explicitly speaks from the legacy of the English school. Cecelia Lynch’s neo-Weberian approach informs her attention to socio-historical context, and others such as Mariano Barbato and Mustapha Pasha have brought a critical theoretical Habermasian post-secular theory and decolonial theorizing, respectively, to mainstream IR. I will allow myself to use these latter scholars, Barbato and Pasha, as my last brief examples of the ways in which arguments for the recognition of religion play out among the multiculturalist scholars of religion and IR. A critical reading of their work is important because it shows us the strength of scholarly efforts to move beyond the secular ontology of IR by pluralizing available sources of knowledge, ethics, subjectivities, and rationalities while illuminating the simultaneous dependence of these efforts on the epistemic autonomy of the recognizable religious subject.
Barbato’s Habermasian post-secular account argues for a comprehensive recognition of religion in international relations.
Post-secular emancipation, as I would like to term the project, argues that a liberal society must allow religious citizens the right to bring their arguments forward from a religiously informed perspective and even in a religious language. In the perspective of an emerging global public where a religious majority is here to stay, this post-secular emancipation of the religious masses from the secular elite is pretty much in line with Hegel’s struggle for recognition.Footnote 89
Religion, for Barbato, has the potential to provide international scholarship with new perspectives and semantic figures that ‘harbor concepts of the self, community and agency beyond class [or] state’ and might help to ‘find figures of thought’ for new solutions and approaches to world politics.Footnote 90 He asserts, ‘Religious semantics offer resources for fuelling deliberation processes with notions of arguing beyond narrow concepts of self-interest and for imagining a new community beyond the given ones’.Footnote 91
In Barbato’s view, then, recognizing religion in IR would enable the discipline to address issues of international community and the development of global social bonds in a different manner, which he sees as particularly crucial in the face of the expanding economic rationale of self-interest currently undermining the wider prospects of global community.Footnote 92 He sees religious semantics as able to ‘improve a political culture which struggles to defend its secular concepts of justice against the pathologies of neo-liberal modernisation and globalisation’,Footnote 93 while ‘old representations’ of world politics lack these conceptual resources for ‘developing alternatives to the present impasses’.Footnote 94 Religion, in Barbato’s view, carries intrinsic value. Not only does he see potential for religion to enrich the discipline of IR itself with epistemic perspectives undeterred by rampant neoliberalism; he sees value and potential in the search for alternatives to neoliberalism’s haunted subject. However, this form of post-secular hope that religion will contribute with additional epistemic resources to international theory and ethics builds on the very distinction between religion and secular ontology that Barbato and others seek to overcome. If the distinction between the religious and the secular were not to remain intact in these arguments, then there would be no identifiable resource from which these resources of knowledge could be drawn.
Mustapha Pasha, meanwhile, identifies this approach as a categorical mistake in arguments for the ‘return of religion’ more generally. According to Pasha, the idea that religion either would be possible to distinguish from secular IR theorizing or could be included in new approaches to ethics misses out on the Christian political theology undergirding the discipline as a whole. Naturalized as secularity, the particular form of religiosity that informs IR easily goes unnoticed, he asserts. Hobbesian ideas about sovereignty, just and unjust wars, cosmopolitan ethics, and the civilizing processes of developmental projects, even the secular notion of the separation between religion and politics, all draw ‘from the Christian well’.Footnote 95 The ‘return of religion’, then, will therefore necessarily remain bound to that which is legible as religious – that is, Christian ethics, values, actors, institutions, and so on – and has therefore not changed the ontology of IR at all.Footnote 96 He writes, ‘Largely an unrecognizable and undesirable settlement, the public (the political) performativity of faith among religious others appears anachronistic, even dangerous’.Footnote 97 In other words, he suggests, alien forms of religiosity cannot code itself into familiar vernacular.
As we will see in Chapters 2 and 3, I agree with Pasha that the recognitive ideas of a ‘resurgence of religion’ are limited to very particular forms of communities, arguments, and forms of thought that are already legible as religious. However, as in the case of Scott Thomas, after Pasha deconstructs IR’s concept of religion as being basically Christian, his second step is to argue for a different kind of approach that would be able to engage religion in its multiple variations. He formulates this as the recognition of ‘radical alterity’, which he believes would fundamentally alter the ontology of IR and its ability to ‘see’ that which remains unintelligible under a present framework limited to and by its Christian political theological foundations. The ‘recognition of religious difference afforded by postsecular sensitivity can expand the hermeneutic register without advancing cultural hierarchies’, he writes, suggesting that this would enable us to acknowledge difference ‘on its own terms’.Footnote 98
Just as Scott Thomas’s argument for recognizing the ‘living traditions’ needed an identifiable subject to embody that tradition, the question remains: how do we identify that which we should recognize? In contrast to the Habermasian position of Barbato, who aims to translate religious concepts, ideas, and forms of knowledge to a secular discourse, Pasha remains insistent on the necessary appreciation of incommensurability as the only ground for meaningful dialogue. He notes, ‘Only in acknowledging the impossibility of convergence, perhaps, can the possibility of recognizing true autonomy materialize … This may be a small step towards decolonializing political theology and, by extension, IR.’Footnote 99 But the question remains: how do we identify radical alterity?
Here, I argue that the question of representation does not go away even if the necessity of intelligibility is bracketed. Even if religion does not need to be recognizable in its substance – remaining at the core unintelligible to a Christian political theology of IR – it still needs to be identifiable as radically different. The need for identification and recognizability does not disappear just because the concept of religion is released from its Protestant cage. Recognizing religion or religious difference will not release IR from its Eurocentrism, its provinciality, or its reproduction of Western epistemic or political hegemony. Framed as radical alterity – as cultural, ontological, or epistemic difference – the idea of religious difference will remain dependent on the power of those able to claim representation of the alterity. It will thus reinforce the power structures of existing political orders rather than challenging them, as they have ostensibly set out to do.
A Problematic Legacy
Neither Taylor, Philpott, Thomas, Lynch, Barbato, Pasha, nor any other scholar discussed in this chapter claims that religion – religious communities, practices, doctrines, ideas, values, institutions, norms – is unchanging. All acknowledge that communities grow or disappear, practices take on new expressions, doctrines are reinterpreted, ideas and values discarded, institutions develop, and norms change. All agree that the rise of the modern state system and state administration has altered the material and ideational conditions such that religion came to be seen as a separate and private part of human existence. In this, they share a common perspective with the genealogical, or critical, scholars we will turn to in the following section. However, while the genealogical group continue to study the political and legal conditions of government, the scholars I have been engaging with in this section and whose position I call the multicultural critique on secularism see a specific kind of value in religion as a form of community, culture, or knowledge regime. For them, it is an epistemic treasure chest of alternative forms of knowledge about how to battle rampant neoliberalism. It reflects a kind of fundamental ontological difference. To these scholars, religion is both the foundation of Western secular order, including its institutions and subjectivities, and a fundamentally distinct category of difference – cultural, epistemic, or ontological. This is what they see as the key concept to recognize in both IR theory and practice.
As noted, the multicultural approach assumes that we know religion when we see it – otherwise, there is nothing for theorists and practitioners to engage with or recognize.Footnote 100 In a similar manner, therefore, the question that arises from this work is how to avoid the reification of religion, including religious identities, ideas, and institutions, in the wake of its recognition?Footnote 101 If religion in all its indeterminacy, multiple meanings, and many uses carries a value, this assumes an identifiable, recognizable core.Footnote 102 I will return to this in Chapter 3 on the costs of recognition, but for now I want to emphasize that the perspectives that encompass the multicultural critique of secularism contain arguments for the recognition of religion both as a foundation for the liberal understanding of the secular space and secular subject and as a form of epistemic, ontological, and cultural difference. While the deconstruction of liberal secularism remains important, I agree with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd that ‘it is nonetheless not sufficient simply to augment attention to religion, since this “add and stir” approach leaves the basic categories of analysis untouched’.Footnote 103 As Tomoko Masuzawa has shown, the language of difference and plurality is deeply interwoven with colonial and imperial histories of religion.Footnote 104
Genealogical Care and Critique
As I noted in this chapter, the common assumptions of the multiculturalist and genealogical scholars is that religion and politics are co-constituted and that the claim that religion is private, amodern, and irrational is historically specific to European liberalism. As such, both multiculturalist and genealogical scholars see secularism as a particular and historically contingent mode of thought, a mode of governance, and a regime of knowledge rather than a neutral and natural necessity for liberal government.Footnote 105 Where they differ is in their assessment of what this means for politics, policy, and intellectual engagement.
This section is about the conceptually critical approach to religion in global politics as illustrated by what I call a ‘genealogical’ response to the critique of secularism. Genealogical approaches remain attentive to the epistemological politics included in the recognition, reification, and representation of the concept of religion, investigating the processes of subjectivization rather than assuming there is a religious subject available to include, exclude, or manage politically or legally. I argue that this kind of conceptual care – manifested in studies on the genealogy and grammar of religion – is better able than the multicultural approach to grasp the complexities and depth of the global politics of religion and what follows from it. In the subsections that follow, I outline core iterations of the genealogical approach to illuminate how it more effectively serves as a critique to secularism.
Just as Charles Taylor was a starting point for my discussion of the multicultural approach outlined in the previous section, Talal Asad represents a similar point of departure for the genealogical position. Neither Taylor nor Asad should be thought of as points of origin but rather as idealized markers reflecting the two key ways of approaching religion that reverberate in scholarship on global politics. What becomes clear in our engagement with Asad’s work – and the IR scholarship that follows – is the centrality of genealogical care that goes beyond formalizing religion as a particular form of difference. As a central thinker in the critical discourse on secularism, Asad’s genealogical readings of religion and the secular gave historical context and significance to the positions that challenged the secular ontology of international politics and scholarship. In order to understand the fundamental shift in perspective on religion provided by Asad’s scholarship, however, we need to go beyond the acknowledgement of secularism’s ‘religious roots’ and the political theology of IR. As he suggests, we need to look at the connection between authoritative discourses, language forms, and the production of knowledge about particular collective subjects.Footnote 106 Importantly, Asad’s grammatical reading of religion does not simply provide arguments about the contingent and changing nature of the concept of religion or attempt to show that ‘secular’ politics and IR are historically particular to a European project of modernity. Rather, it is an investigation into how these changes in the concepts of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ articulate changes in practices and social usages of the concepts themselves. As Asad puts it, he addresses how ‘contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of the concepts’.Footnote 107
In his seminal book, Genealogies of Religion, Asad problematizes the idea that there is a definition of religion by looking for the particular modern history of knowledge and power that allows for certain practices, institutions, subjectivities, forms of knowledge, and ideas to be categorizable as religious. He asks what kinds of meaning must ‘be identified with practice in order for it to qualify as religion’ and argues that this can never be established independently of the ‘forms of life in which they are used’.Footnote 108 These forms of life, the institutional forms of knowledge and practice as well as the entire range of available disciplinary activities forming and sustaining individual and collective dispositions and ‘possibilities of truth’, end up constituting a new kind of legal and moral subject.Footnote 109
At this point, it is important to note that Asad’s genealogical approach to religion and the secular is not simply a historiographical reading of the development of meaning. It is an argument about the project of modernity and the forms of life that are articulated through the concepts of religion and the secular – as he puts it, ‘the powers that they release or disable’.Footnote 110 Representations of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ in modern and modernizing states, he argues, ‘mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences’.Footnote 111 Understanding the grammar – that is, that which makes certain practices and subjectivities ‘conceptually possible, desired, mandatory’Footnote 112 – helps us understand the development of the social and political orders that contain them. Indeed, this aspect of his scholarship is the most crucial difference between the multicultural and genealogical positions I have outlined in this chapter.
According to Asad and the genealogical scholarship that followed, there cannot be a universal definition of religion: ‘Not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific’, he points out, ‘but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’.Footnote 113 In contrast to the multicultural position, it is not enough to show that religion has been marginalized in global political theory or practice and that it is, when deconstructed, actually interwoven into the fibres of liberal thought and practice. It is necessary to show that the processes that define as religious certain aspects and relationships of social, political, legal, and cultural life are constitutive of the order they make up. Since the meaning as well as the legitimate position of the concept of religion in political discourse and international political scholarship is necessarily shaped by those very discourses and scholarships, therefore, we cannot continue a constructive approach to religion in IR without understanding the ways in which discourse and scholarship have structured the concept of religion itself. This is why a detailed study of the global epistemological politics of religion in IR scholarship is crucial. It enables us to understand why scholarship on religion in IR remains stuck in binary arguments for its relevance to political practice and theory (as well as in the critique against such arguments), and it helps us develop more effective alternatives to move us beyond this impasse.
Critiquing the Restoration Narrative
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd carried the study of the discursive power of secularism into IR. She presents secularism as a mode of governance regulating and constituting the boundaries of religion and its legitimate space and place, asking not how religion impacts international relations but how ‘processes, institutions, and states come to be understood as religious versus political [as private versus public] and [how to] ascertain the political effects of such demarcation’.Footnote 114 Through her 2008 analysis in The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, we see secularism as one of the modalities governing this demarcation and the formation of religion. It was, she suggests, ‘one of the most important organizing principles of modern politics’Footnote 115 and an integral part of the ‘cultural and normative basis of international relations theory’.Footnote 116 According to Hurd, religion seems missing from IR scholarship because most IR scholars adopt a view of the world based on a secular ‘reality’ whereby they miss out on secularism’s role in the production of the categories and subjects that it presupposes (i.e., both religion and the secular).Footnote 117
In this section, I retrace Hurd’s critical reading of secularism and the marginalization of religion, as well as the problems of its alleged ‘return’. In addition to providing an illustration of what genealogical scholarship on religion in IR looks like, I highlight Hurd’s arguments against the multiculturalist restorative narrative of religion and its reproductive qualities. I build on this critique to develop my argument regarding the costs of recognition in Chapter 3. However, in contrast to Hurd, I go beyond identifying pathologies in liberal theory and neoliberal subjectivizing governmentalities to argue that there is a much more fundamental issue at play. Recognition of religion – in its political, legal, or moral form – depends on the assumption of an epistemic autonomy of religion; that is, the notion that prior to its recognition there is a recognizable subject of religion.
To Hurd, secularist authority plays a constitutive role within modern politics, including modern international politics relegating religion to a realm outside of the political or pathologizing those political orders or actors that do not uphold the separation between religion and politics.Footnote 118 Religion and politics, she suggests, do not belong to distinct domains of power and authority, and the ‘designation of the religious and the political is itself a political act’.Footnote 119 As she puts it, theories of IR that depend upon ‘stable and universal conceptions of the secular or the religious displace the politics involved in these authoritative designations’.Footnote 120 Failing to recognize the constructedness of religion and the ‘moral, political, and epistemic consequences’ of secularism makes international political scholarship unable to make sense of or provide a way forward in cases of violent conflicts, state-building projects, development of democratic institutions, peacebuilding, or minority protection efforts.Footnote 121 International Relations and global politics has in this sense, she argues, been blind to religion. Yet the problems of marginalization are not solved through the engagement or protection of religion, religious ideas, religious minorities, or rights. In a global political arena where religion is no longer only seen as a threat to dispose of but as a source of knowledge to be engaged with, what does ‘religion’ refer to, who speaks in its name, and what are the consequences thereof?Footnote 122 She asks: what are the implications of ‘construing religion as an isolable entity and causal powerhouse in international relations?’Footnote 123
In Beyond Religious Freedom, Hurd provided a detailed study of the consequences when modes of government single out ‘religion’ as their point of reference, as well as when global political projects are embarked upon in its name. What she calls a ‘religion industrial complex’ has catered to – and nurtured – a hunger for ‘knowledge’ about religion and fed it with commissions, experts, and religious representatives and leaders. This ‘engagement with religion’ is more than a marginal development comprising isolated incidents. It constitutes what she calls the ‘New Global Politics of Religion’, and it is heavily invested into, increasingly well-funded, and located at the very centres of many of the world’s national, supranational, and international governments. Studies on the international governance of religion (and governance through religion) show how particular forms of religious freedom, religious engagement, and the rights of religious minorities are being ‘packaged into political projects and delivered around the world by states and others’ in such a way that shapes the range of what or who falls within the lines of the intelligibly religious.Footnote 124 What this gives us is a new perspective on how these different aspects of the ‘New Global Politics of Religion’ are both presupposing and (re)producing religion as an identifiable, isolatable entity. The adoption of religion as a legal and policy category thereby ‘helps to create the world that it purports to oversee. It naturalizes religious-religious and religious-secular distinctions as the natural building blocks of social order.’Footnote 125
Governing globally through religion incentivizes association accordingly. In Hurd’s words, it ‘funnels individuals into discrete faith communities, empowers those communities and their spokespersons, and marginalized other modes of solidarity … Boundaries solidify. Lines between groups become more salient.’Footnote 126 In this sense, elevating religion into prominence both ‘presupposes and produces the very divides that it is meant to soften or transcend, creating in the process new forms of social friction defined by religious difference’.Footnote 127 In combination with this heightening – or ‘overcoding’ of boundaries, as the political theorist William Connolly terms it – the new global politics of religion has created new categories of actors in world politics existing ontologically prior to the state and other forms of collective governance as ‘static bodies of tradition and convention that lend themselves to becoming objects of state and transnational legal regulation, and … government engagement and reform’.Footnote 128 Echoing Wendy Brown’s study on the productive power of rights, Hurd shows how the ‘New Global Politics of Religion’ is constructive of new international subjects and the hardening of boundaries around and between them.Footnote 129
If religious engagement is a powerful aspect of governing the global, what is the underlying assumption of the nature of this power? This question is important, since the critique directed at these forms of ‘religious’ governance, in both Hurd’s work and that of others, comes with a diagnosis of its problematic consequences, namely the silencing of those failing to align with the recognizable religious.Footnote 130 ‘To rely on the category of religion as an object of foreign policy and human rights advocacy privileges certain forms of expression and ways of life while marginalizing others’, Hurd argues.
It puts pressure on nonestablished, unorthodox, nonconforming ways of being religious, and of being human. Doubters, dissidents, and those who identify with nonorthodox versions of protected traditions struggle for air on a landscape politically defined and divided by religious- religious and religious- secular distinctions. Those who would like to speak but prefer not to do so in their capacity as believers, nonbelievers, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, or Christians are rendered inaudible.Footnote 131
The problem of the ‘New Global Politics of Religion’ is thus not only that it creates new subjects or heightens tensions along hardened boundaries but that it marginalizes those subjects who do not fit the model of the recognizable religious.
Hurd shows us that the engagement, protection, and rights of religion mask global epistemological politics while framing the politics of recognition as neutral, suggesting that projects to engage with religion carry a constructive but selective aspect: ‘When governments engage individuals and groups as religious groups, they are forced to discriminate regarding who is chosen and which orthodoxies are enshrined as voices of authority.’Footnote 132 Selecting interlocutors, however, is part of any form of representational government, and these problems reoccur on every level with every single issue involving selectively defined groups. The problem, therefore, is the claim that this representation is apolitical. In a similar manner as Hurd identified the politics in international secularism, she pinpoints the politics entrenched in religious engagement: ‘The pretense that it is possible to identify and engage “religions” neutrally, on equal footing, masks the politics of government-sponsored religious engagement.’Footnote 133 Hurd then unmasks the claim to neutrality by displaying the workings of the ‘arbiters of orthodoxy’.Footnote 134 For Hurd, in other words, there is no such thing as an engagement with religion that is free of conscious or unconscious selection in terms of who gets to count as religious. The definition of religion is political, and the conceptual politics are lost on those arguing for uncritical engagement or recognition. The restorative narrative that accompanies efforts for engagement and recognition, her work thus suggests, both produces the subjects they seek to engage with (or recognize) and reproduces the political and epistemic structures that embody it.
Critics of her position have portrayed these arguments as attempts to instrumentally delegitimize efforts to promote religious rights such as religious freedom. I will return to this debate in detail in Chapter 2, but for now I want to highlight one important glitch in the critique to argue that rendering conceptual critiques as instrumentalist makes them out to be little more than mere power politics – whether, simply, religious freedom exists or does not. What is at stake, however, is not whether religious freedom projects are legitimate but, more fundamentally, whether they can be anything other than legitimate with the working conceptualization of religion underpinning the analysis in the first place. The question – and the claim connected to it – is how to enable a critical analysis of the global politics of religion where the terminology that defines the substance – religion – is limited to the particular histories and epistemic assumptions carried by those defining the discourse. How do we avoid reproducing those histories and epistemologies?
Becoming Recognizable
As we saw in the previous section, Talal Asad’s work on the genealogy of religion both highlighted the historical context of the emergence of the concept of religion as a separate space of individual and collective life that was epistemically autonomous and traced this legacy back to a particular Christian, specifically Protestant, discursive lineage. Several scholars have echoed Asad’s genealogical work, locating religion within and not outside of history, tracing the historical, political, and legal formations and limits of religion, and examining the accompanying regulative powers. For example, Brent Crosson studied the criminalization of Obeah in Trinidad, showing that the restriction of what religion is and is not allowed to be is intimately connected to power, race, and colonial hierarchies. Noah Salomon traced the articulations of Islam by individuals and organizations working in Sudan as Sudanese society was coming to terms with the meaning of the modern Islamic state. Courtney Bender shows how public and the political rhetoric of religious pluralism depends on evidence of religion’s multiplicity and its differentiation from other parts of social life. And Nadia Marzouki illuminates how controversies around Islam in the United States constitute a limited space for Islam as part of US-American society while simultaneously functioning to reflect the American public’s ambivalence towards freedom of speech and the legitimacy of liberal secular democracy.Footnote 135
Contrary to what their critics have had to say about their work, these approaches to religion and global politics were not arguing that a Christian or Protestant conception of religion has come to structure the public imagination of acceptable or unacceptable religious expression as a form of cultural global governance.Footnote 136 In other words, these are not instrumentalist arguments that modern state governmentality set out to create order through unification according to its own standard of acceptable subjectivities or hierarchies. Rather, modern dominant power is seen by these scholars to govern through ambivalence – through processes of categorization and differentiation. ‘Others’ are not marginalized or forced into assimilation but rather remain unintelligible or craft themselves along the available categories of intelligibility. Religion, in our case, is one of these categories.
A great example of how political power has reshaped and been shaped by the conceptual and institutional conditions of possibility is the work of Iza Hussin. In The Politics of Islamic Law we see how Islamic law became a codified, state-centred system in India, Malaya, and Egypt through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how these processes of defining and categorizing Islam and Muslim identity – limiting them to areas of personal and family law while keeping them out of the public, political, and economic realm – became the foundation of the modern Muslim state.Footnote 137 With modern state formation intimately interwoven with the codification, bureaucratization, and reification of law, culture, and religion, Hussin shows how the textualization and formalization of Islamic law were critical for the application of colonial order and ‘intrinsic for the understanding of the territories and people [it] governed’.Footnote 138 Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, religion increasingly became the object of British colonial rule and established itself as one of the most important means through which this rule extended into the social fabric of Indian society. Changes in legal contexts would ‘define religion as a problem of public order that could only be contained by colonial law’.Footnote 139 In British India after the Sepoy War, the 1858 trial of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, served to re-establish a language of justice and order after brutal British retaliations for what they considered an Indian rebellion. Here, religion was cast as ‘the catalytic agent among easily incited natives’.Footnote 140 Hereafter, British officials considered religion as defining the Indian subject and its ‘protection and preservation critical to the maintenance of peace’.Footnote 141
Through Hussin’s study, we see how the perceived need to control and manage religion joined processes of increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the law that brought Islam under state control at the same time as it limited Islamic law to the areas of personal and family law. Hussin writes that the ‘rise of the governmental and administrative state was directly related to the rise of a version of Islamic law that was text-based, tied to a specific ethnic and national identity, and centred in state institutions and authority’.Footnote 142 Thereby, ‘Islamic law’ changed from an uncodified and locally administered set of legal institutions with wide-ranging jurisdiction to a codified, state-centred system with jurisdiction over family law while being excluded from public administration, finance, and the government of public order.
Far from being simple instrumentalizations of religion for political power, work such as Hussin’s and the other scholars mentioned here illustrates how conceptual and epistemological politics were at the heart of the national and international order. As I argue, such examples of genealogical scholarship on religion and global epistemological politics are irreducible to instrumentalist arguments for power politics. Through such scholarship, we see how forms of conceptual politics surrounding religion never stayed the property of a single political position but were leveraged by both colonial governments and the struggles against them. As Bernard Cohn argues, colonialism was an ontological and epistemological project: its ways of knowing were its ways of governing.Footnote 143
By engaging with genealogical accounts of religion in global politics, we can clearly see the limitations of the multicultural approach to religion. The assumption of an inherent value of religion – in broadening the analytical scope of IR, in accessing new forms of knowledge, or as a form of cultural diversity – rests on the assumption of the epistemic autonomy of religion, that is, the intelligibility of religion in and of itself no matter how complex its history. But recognizing religion in global politics is Janus-faced. It both enables and limits. In the following chapters I will argue that the two sides of recognition, particularly the side of costs and consequences, are not coincidental, nor are they limited to context. They are part of a grammar of recognition that depends on a recognizable subject in order to get off the ground in the first place. Studying the epistemological politics of religion – the historical ‘Politics of Islamic Law’ or the contemporary ‘New Global Politics of Religion’ – gives us a different register to assess the conditions, politics, and costs that come with its recognition, be it epistemic, political, or legal.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the discourse on religion and politics as it took shape and grew from being a marginal side note to an institutionalized research field of its own across international relations, political theory, anthropology, sociology, history, and law. The beginning of the century saw two bodies of scholarship coalesce in a sustained critique of secularism. I have offered the heuristically useful categories of multiculturalism and genealogy to describe them. From the former came the critique against the marginalization of religion and the value of diversity and plurality. From the latter came the critical deconstruction of naturalized assumptions – conceptual, institutional, normative – and the established power hierarchies that contained them.
By engaging in detail with the arguments and rhetorical techniques of scholars from both sides, I showed how the multicultural position emphasized the value of religion, either as constitutive for liberal political thought or as a form of epistemic, ontological, or cultural difference. In order to better explain and understand historical and contemporary international political dynamics, IR scholarship, so the argument goes, needed to overcome its secularist ontology and recognize religion as central both to its foundational structures (the sovereign state and state system) and to the actors and institutions embodying these structures and the ideas guiding the actors. This movement towards exploring previously excluded aspects of international life, however, did not only identify new perspectives or increase the range of relevant actors, events, and institutions being engaged. It was also productive in defining who and what would be identifiable as religious and thereby worthy of recognition as such. In various ways but in a similar manner, both the narratives of exclusion tracing what had been lost due to the ‘secularist’ marginalization of religion and the restorative arguments and policies regarding what needed to be ‘brought back in’ were constitutive of that which could count as ‘religious’ and what could not (or should not) be.Footnote 144 In other words, arguments for recognition are productive of that which they seek recognition for.
In contrast to the multicultural position seeking to recognize religion in IR, I presented what I termed a genealogical position. While this position shares some fundamental assumptions with the former – such as the notion of religion and politics being co-constitutive; critically viewing the assumptions that religion is private, irrational, and amodern; and defining secularism as a historically contingent mode of thought and governance – it highlights the problematic aspects of the multicultural perspective and argues that the critique of religion’s exclusion does not warrant an argument for its inclusion or recognition. Particularly problematic, according to the genealogical position, is the unacknowledged productive power of the restorative narrative. While the multicultural scholars had deconstructed the secularist ontology of IR and its marginalizing effects on all things religious, they had missed out on the fact that they relied on an identifiable religious subject in order to argue for the recognition of religion. These include, for example, a recognizable religious minority to engage with, intelligible religious arguments to leverage in conflict negotiations, and identifiable faith-based community representatives to engage in development projects. The subject needed to be presupposed and religion epistemically autonomous, or else there would be no way of knowing who to engage with, which arguments to include, or which representatives to acknowledge. There would be no way of knowing when religion had been recognized unless there was this benchmark of inclusion to relate to.
The reason why the multiculturalist assumption of a recognizable version of religion is problematic is the way in which it defines the conditions of possibility for certain aspects of social and political life to gain recognition as religious, that is, those who qualify under the present working definition. Since one can only recognize as religious that which is already recognizable as such, there is a fundamental need to understand the processes by which actors and arguments, ideas and institutions, qualify as religious, and, more importantly, what the consequences are of these processes. Notably, the tension between the multicultural and post-secular logics regarding secularism and religion, the subject and processes of subjectivization, mirrors the tension regarding recognition in the field of international political theory. Engaging with this tension and the attempts to solve it in Chapter 2, I then return to the topic in Chapter 3 to develop an alternative approach that is better equipped to address the complexities that come with studying the global politics of religion today.
The narrative of religion’s exclusion from global politics emerged from an image of the current international order and the sovereign state as products of a secularizing Westphalian settlement. As the settlement and its underlying Eurocentric vision of the international was deconstructed and placed in historical and geographic context relativizing the normative claim of secularism, scholars argued that new space opened up for alternative forms of political life and order. Following from this, Chapter 2 asks: What entered into this space? After secularism, what has the scholarship on religion and global politics engaged with? As we will see, two distinct analytical tropes emerged, one pushing for us to acknowledge the role and influence of religious ideas and identities, the other pursuing an engagement with local knowledge ‘on its own terms’, including various forms of discursive traditions and their forms of ethical life.
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