What, if any, are the connections between religion and politics? Is the only acceptable political order a secular one? Is the conflation of religion and politics a category mistake?
These questions come into sharp relief when one considers the tendency of those who seek a tight and formal logical correspondence between religion and politics – this tendency has come to be known as “fundamentalism.”
The issues of textual interpretation and the logic form of such relationships are briefly discussed here. The reason that I have used scare quotes around “fundamentalism” is to indicate that we cannot assume that we have even broad agreement on what “fundamentalism” means. As with many socio-political concepts one has to retrieve it from the domain of popular discourse, more so in the case of “fundamentalism,” discussion of which takes place against a background of a shrill and highly loaded “debate.” There are three components to this discussion:
1. “Fundamentalism”: A Sociologically Distinctive Phenomenon?
2. The Logical Form of “fundamentalism”
3. The Epistemology of “fundamentalist” Belief
1. “Fundamentalism”: A Sociologically Distinctive Phenomenon?
Insofar as the general notion is concerned we need to submit the target concept to three tests:
1) logical independence
Would analysis of the target concept presuppose the very concept? e. g. demonization;
2) extensional and intensional equivalence
Does the analysis identify or pick out all and only the things to which the concept itself applies? Might not so-called “fundamentalism” be tied to the internal logic of a given religion?
3) functionality
What logical space might the concept occupy? What work would the concept be doing that cannot be redescribed under a different aspect?
One has to keep these tests at the back of one’s mind. One further aspect concerns the conceptual and the empirical: Is there sufficient empirical evidence to support the concept? (We should note that the empirical feeds into the conceptual and vice versa.)
Perhaps an overly ambitious “definition” of “fundamentalism” is offered by Connolly:
Fundamentalism . . . is a general imperative to assert an absolute, singular ground of authority; to ground your own identity and allegiances in this unquestionable source; to define political issues in a vocabulary of God, morality, or nature that invokes such a certain, authoritative source; and to condemn tolerance, abortion, pluralism, radicalism, homosexuality, secular humanism, welfarism, and internationalism (among other things) by imputing moral weakness, relativism, selfishness, or corruption to them. (Cited in J. Donald Moon, “Engaging Plurality: Reflections on The Ethos of Pluralization” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 24, no. 1 (1998): 64-65).
Though Connolly’s characterization is informed by the American experience, the general point is clear. The epistemological character of “fundamentalism” is very clearly foundationalist – the terms absolute and singular signify this tendency. Continuing, Connolly says that “every doctrine . . . rests upon fundamentals” and that is pursued through:
a set of political strategies to protect these fundamentals by defining every carrier of critique or destabilization as an enemy marked by exactly those defects, weaknesses, corruptions, and naiveties you are under an absolute imperative to eliminate.
The new component Connolly brings in welds an activist style of politics to the anti-liberal non-tolerant “imperative.” So not only is there a theoretical search for “authenticity” but simultaneously there has to be an aggressive activist political posture waged against other conceptions of the human good. Thus we have the demonization of these competing conceptions of the good, typically Western liberal values.
Now the question is whether or not these typical features can be found across “fundamentalisms” – Christian, Muslim and Jewish? Let us compare Israeli’s (R. Israeli, Muslim Fundamentalism in Israel, London, Washington and New York, 1993: 1) list of features that he discerns as being “essential” to Muslim “fundamentalism”:
1) a total and unconditional rejection of the West, in all its political, intellectual, economic and cultural manifestations;
2) a rejection of all aspects of western domination over the rest of the world;
3) a yearning to return to the sources of Islam for guidance;
4) a renewed acceptance of Islam not only as a faith but also as a total way of life;
5) a reassertion of political, territorial and economic independence;
6) Islam is seen as a panacea for the ills of society.
Whether one should consider this Islam the “traditional” Islam of the conservative ‘ulama or as a new revolutionary-radical Islam, is just as pertinent a question to be put to Jewish “fundamentalism.”
One of the most extensive treatments of Jewish “fundamentalism” is offered by Webber who sets out to uncover:
the ideological structures that generate the reference to fundamentalism amongst the Jews and the particular circumstances that have given rise to their use of the category, whether it be seen as a ‘response’ to modernism or simply a re-statement of traditional orthodox tenets which modernists classify as “fundamentalist” so as to make there own position appear normative by contrast. (J. Webber, “Rethinking Fundamentalism: the Readjustment of Jewish Society in the Modern World” in L. Caplan Ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism, London, 1987, p. 95).
Before we say what Jewish “fundamentalism” consists in it might be helpful to first say what it is not.
It is not coextensive with as Webber (1987: 95-121) says “a rejection of modernism in theology that sought to take into account the results of biblical criticism, scientific discovery and the general conditions of modern culture.” Neither is is coextensive with orthodoxy nor indeed with ultra-orthodoxy: “it is employed here not to refer to hyper-religiosity, nor to evoke images of fanaticism or simplistic styles of thinking, but to focus attention on a certain kind of politics.”
These ideological structures are the claims measured against the metric of halacha, i. e. the liberal’s (note, liberal with a little ”l”) view of the conservative and the conservative view of the traditionalist and so on, thus alerting us to the possibility that “fundamentalism” is just part of the internal ideological polemic. Webber draws the distinction between the modernist rationalization of religion accounting for the epistemological gap filled by religion as “faith or superstition” and the view “that the ultimate purpose and meaning of their religion is to be found precisely in those areas inaccessible to ordinary intellectual introspection” as not incompatible. Regardless of whether one has religious commitments or not, I think Webber is correct on this point – the point is that rationalism would view religious experience, qua experience as incompatible. But Webber suggests that we should shift the alienation felt by the “fundamentalist” group to include several factors of which rationalism is just one. Webber does not spell out as to what his notion of rationalism consists in. Webber’s claim is that,fundamentalism is to be best understood not as the product of a pre-scientific society, but on the contrary, as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, drawing not only its primary stimulus but also its insights . . . but that
“even ‘rational’ forms of belief and practice are regarded as outmoded . . . with the result that all forms of practicing Judaism are potentially tinged with the fundamentalist dye” and that “the tension between fundamentalism and modernity lies at the very root of contemporary Jewish society . . .” Lustick (I.S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, New York, 1988, p. 4 ), however, traces the “fundamentalist” impulse from the time of the early prophets through to the present day which predates the modernist tendencies of Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative denominations.
Webber is quite correct in suggesting that although there is no word in Hebrew for fundamentalism that does not mean that there is any incommensurability in translation. The lack of such a term suggests “that fundamentalism is in principle a category imposed from the outside rather than a self-descriptive category . . .” and that it is the “categorical result, of modern ideological structures that have generated the concept in the process of interpreting and making sense of a much wider realm of social realities.” So Webber here considers the possibility that “fundamentalism” could be reduced indiscriminately to those who make any reference to the past. On the one hand, Webber acknowledges that there is something that distinctively marks out the space “fundamentalism,” albeit a highly qualified notion (recalling it as a pejorative, external ideological construct), and on the other hand, he denies that there is space that would be filled by an identifiable group:
But who precisely are these Jewish fundamentalists? The point is, of course, that they are everywhere . . . there is no one specific Jewish sect or denomination that is called by others as fundamentalist . . . and [several reference groups] share a number of attitudes typical of fundamentalism generally.
Webber is equivocating: he struggles to articulate this tension which could easily be dissolved by expressing it in terms of the notion of family resemblance, thus resisting the impulse to push for a closed concept, which he recognizes is pointless. Recall the task we set ourselves at the beginning of this section. If the concept, here “fundamentalism,” is not filling a logical space and is functionally and explanatorily vacuous then we cannot coherently say that the concept exists. Webber acknowledges that “the term is both “‘central’ and ‘irrelevant simultaneously.’” I am, however, in accord with Webber when he says that “there is nothing particularly ‘fundamentalist’ about fundamentalism’s emphasis on the general problem of Halacha.” Lustick, however, aware of the problem, has no difficulty in identifying the Gush Emunim. But a word of caution. That there is a group and a constituency may suggest a homogeneity, but there is a great deal of internal diversity within “fundamentalism” and further as Lustick points out:
individuals, organisations, or movements may be regarded as fundamentalist to the extent that they (1) base their activities on uncompromisable injunctions; (2) consider their behaviour to be guided by direct contact with the source of transcendental authority; and (3) are actively engaged in political attempt to bring about rapid and comprehensive change.
Lustick suggests that “most Israeli/Jewish intellectuals are so repulsed by its tenets that they avoid analysis of it or focus only on its most sensationalist aspects.” This avoidance is echoed by Glenda Abramson who comments that:
even the literature of the radical Left in Israel and failed to address what seems to be a taboo subject. I’ve already marked the possibility that this lack of engagement and intellectually isolating “fundamentalism” might amount to no more than an embarrassment and that while “fundamentalism” might be an extreme, it is internally related to more moderate positions. (Jewish religious nationalist writings on the Palestine question: the case of Gush Emunim. In Muslim-Jewish Encounters: Intellectual Traditions and Modern Politics, eds. R.L. Nettler & S. Taji-Farouki, Amsterdam, 1988)
As Webber, Lustick and I have pointed out, there are no distinctively “fundamentalist” features that could not be found elsewhere. Recall Webber’s observation that it was everywhere and nowhere; Lustick’s tracking of the phenomenon historically comes to the conclusion that though it is everywhere it can still be discerned. Webber’s position seems counter-intuitive. What needs to be acknowledged is that while it may not exist in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, it might as a family resemblance concept which allows for some likeness in certain contexts with certain emphases. So a foundationalist epistemology and an activist style of politics in-of-itself does not add up to “fundamentalism” but could be so in a certain complex with other features. This leads us straight into the next question.
On Webber’s account it could not occupy any logical space? Either he is suggesting that “fundamentalism” is internally tied to existing and established/entrenched religious ideologies albeit at the extremity, or it does not exist at all.
2. The Logical Form of “fundamentalism”
There are three logical angles on the relation of politics to religion.
1) There is the relationship between toleration and persecution.
2) There is the claim that a religion implies an epistemology and that an epistemology in turn implies, or has implications for, a view of politics.
3) There is the claim that one can derive political conclusions from religious premises.
There are many more ways of conceiving the relations between politics and religion. Historically, the following are varieties of the relationship of religion to politics:
(1) religious explanations of political phenomena (e. g. the explanation of human history in terms of Original Sin).
(2) the use of religion as a political instrument (such as Machiavelli called for in The Prince when he dismissed Christianity as a politically pernicious, outmoded religion to be replaced by a civic religion that would foster patriotic sentiment).
(3) the amenability of both politics and religion to explanation through a third factor, e. g. economic (as in Marxism).
(4) the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings might be seen as the use of religion as a political instrument but many who accepted the doctrine in the seventeenth century did not regard it so cynically.
Given a political apparatus of power and authority, power can conceivably be used on behalf of or against a particular religion (or as in the former Soviet Union) against all religions. But what exactly would it be to persecute a religion? The classic case against persecution is that a person’s beliefs are not normally, if ever, directly and immediately under their voluntary control. This makes it both pointless and immoral to persecute people for their beliefs in respect of (1). Waiving the point that, with modern techniques of manipulation (brainwashing), their beliefs may still be under one’s control, if not theirs (the brainwashers). There is another misunderstanding about the nature of persecution. On the one hand, certainty about one’s own faith is not a sufficient condition of willingness to persecute; and, on the other hand, such certainty is not a necessary condition either.
The second logical angle between religion and politics is that (a) a religion implies an epistemology and (b) that an epistemology implies, or has implications for, a view of politics. The problem is to know how tight the implications are.
The implication in (a) is fairly strong. That is at least as far as Christianity is concerned, a Christian cannot “just believe.” Something is being assumed about their epistemological status. According to natural theology, for example, the existence of God as a spiritual being can be demonstrated by reason. On other approaches, the matter is not one of demonstration but of faith. There are other points as well too. If prayer is a means by which God’s grace is conveyed to us, how are we to distinguish what God genuinely tells us in prayer from what we mistakenly suppose him to be saying? A Christian will have to make assumptions about these things, regardless of whether he can explicate anything very sophisticated.
If a religion implies an epistemology (in the sense of these examples), what of (b), the idea that an epistemology implies a view politics? In general terms there must be such an implication: crudely, if you rule out the possibility of certain kinds of knowledge in general, then you disallow any appeal to those kinds of knowledge in politics. There is a real difficulty in drawing out any systematic connections between say, Christian epistemology and politics. One point might be that if one believes human beings to have free will, this could be held to exclude certain kinds of predictive knowledge in politics.
There is a significant logical difference between Christianity and Judaism’s and Islam’s relationship to politics. In moving from Christianity to Judaism and Islam we find a shift of the problematik. Christianity’s logical problem of deriving political prescriptions from religious premises does not arise, at least with anything like the same force. The central text of Christianity, the New Testament, and the time-hallowed creeds and confessions (the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Augsburg Confession and so forth) contain hardly any political reference. There is only a scattering of New Testament passages from which political implications can be drawn. The import of these passages is often ambiguous. At the very least, nothing like a definite and comprehensive view of political life can be extracted straightforwardly from the prime traditional sources. This means that for the Christian there is a tension. On the one hand, the Christian life is integral and demanding to the ultimate degree. There is no God-free conduct permissible, or even coherently imaginable, to the Christian in any area of life. That includes politics; and it explains George Austin, a former Anglican Archdeacon of York’s remark that: “For the Christian, to mix religion and politics is not an option – it is an obligation.” On the other hand, the basic sources give only the barest, flickering indication of how this can be done.
3. The Epistemology of “fundamentalist” Belief
There are two sets of questions that come under the above heading. First, there is a set of broadly theological questions about the relationship between faith and reason, between what one knows by way of reason, broadly construed, and what one knows by way of faith. These questions can be termed theological: one will find them of interest only if one thinks that in fact there is such a thing as faith. Secondly, there is a set of questions having to do with whether and to what degree religious beliefs have warrant, or justification, or positive epistemic status. I cannot consider the former for we are dealing with people who do believe and that is the assumption we have to accept. But I can comment on the second aspect; whenever there are appeals by believers to warrant as believers, they do not have to, neither would it change their beliefs.
When the believer does appeal to warrant it is a strategy to engage, and convince non-believers – beyond the realm of religious belief but in the realm of “rationality” for political purpose. There are many kinds of rationality: deductive, mathematical, meaning, induction, probabilistic, practice, linguistic etc. but typically it is deductive that is appealed to, hence the title of this discussion “can political conclusions be derived from religious premisses?” I need to give a brief account by what I mean by deduction and foundationalism.
I suspect the notion of deduction is misunderstood by both “fundamentalists” and their critics, not surprisingly the term is misunderstood in popular discourse as well. Typically Holmes would say to Watson that he “deduces” that because the window to the room was open and the odor of a certain tobacco lingered, that he “deduces” that Moriarty was here. Holmes is doing nothing of the sort – he is making an inference. The easiest way to understand the nature of deduction is to see the contrast with induction.
“Fundamentalist” epistemology is distinctly foundational. The “fundamentalist’s” task is to identify those beliefs which the person is entitled to feel quite sure of, and that are not themselves grounded upon, or justified in terms of, other beliefs. Having derived which beliefs are basic, the next step is to specify which beliefs can be justified by deriving them through various intellectual processes from those that are basic. These beliefs are “derived” even through intuition; certainty is transmitted from premise to conclusion. Beliefs that are neither basic nor derived are mere prejudices; we have no epistemic right to believe them at all. Traditional foundationalism of the sort one finds in Descartes, Locke, Hume and many others tends to identify two classes of beliefs as basic: those grounded in sense awareness and those that are self-evidently true or known by some sort of intellectual intuition. Foundationalists also distinguish two sorts of inferences by means of which the right to believe is transmitted: those that are deductive, or demonstrative, and those that provide non-deductive support to their conclusions. The latter are sometimes called “inductive.” The “fundamentalist” has access to the TRUTH: moral, political and religious truth each entailing each other. To be fair, I have not come across the “fundamentalist” invoking the notion of deduction. I do not even think that deduction evens comes into their reasoning – they just have privileged access to the TRUTH.
One resort is to derive mixed premisses: e. g. “supporting democracy is a political form of loving one’s neighbor as oneself,” a premise that combines religious and political concepts and would allow the above political prescription to be deduced. Of course, this just relocates the problem, for how are the mixed premises to be derived? Are they deliverances of natural law or just fallible moral judgments by the individual? Consider:
Love your neighbour as yourself (religious premise)
therefore
support democracy (political prescription)
This is not a valid inference in any known system of logic.
It is of course well known that forms of Latin American Catholicism, not necessarily sanctioned by the Vatican, have close a relationship with socialism, in particular Marxism, manifest as liberation theology. Though the Old Testament provides the paradigmatic expression for oppression and freedom of a people, politically speaking it has been non-Jewish peoples that have appealed to it, typically Black America and Latin America (M. H. Ellis’s attempt, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll, 1987, to “reconstruct a Jewish liberation theology” is both interesting and sensitive but in the final analysis not convincing).
Here I take the case of a live issue regarding society and religion – that of the notion of Jubilee. This notion brings together many of the strands that we have already discussed – the nature of the religious/political correspondence and problems of interpretation. The notion of Jubilee is to be found in Leviticus (25: 8-24). The idea composed of three elements, is that every fiftieth year:
- was declared a special year during which there was to be no agricultural work
- all landed property was to revert to its original owner
- slaves were to be set free.
The heightened interest in the notion of the Jubilee was tied to the new millennium as reflected in the book edited by Hans Ucko (The Jubilee Challenge: Utopia or Possibility?, Geneva, 1997). For the purposes at hand, I can only highlight certain problems that the notion of Jubilee presents.
Several contributors have raised the question “In what sense can the Jubilee vision be relevant to present society?” Typically, “the Levitical program suggests the cancellation of all debts, and announcing freedom from the oppression of economic interests.”(Ucko, p. 7). The cancellation of debt here refers to the cancellation of the crippling Third World debt, and because we do no longer have slavery as an institution of the sort last seen in North America, there is a distinctly socialist flavor to the notion of freedom – a material freedom expressed through economic interests. Gottwald (Ucko, pp. 33-40) identifies this ideological bias in the very title of his paper: “The Biblical Jubilee: In Whose Interests?” The first point he makes is that there is no consensus of interpretation on any of the major points and the textual references do not form “a single harmonized system” but reflect practice over a long period of time very different from ours. (Spray in Ucko, p. 134).
The Jubilee according to Gottwald’s reconstruction runs on two premisses:
1) a “premise of a unified cultic community with responsibility to keep family units intact on cultivated land” (Ucko, p. 35) under a communitarian mode of production. (Ucko, p.34)
2) a premise of “sufficient prosperity for debtors and debtor slaves to be able to work their way to solvency and freedom long before the next Jubilee” (Ucko, p. 36).
Because of the absence of references to concrete enactment of the Jubilee, Gottwald suggests that this has given rise to Utopian interpretations read either as something which will never be put into practice, or in my view, a utopianism that can be conjoined to an existing political utopianism, namely a variant of socialism. Whatever the interpretative difficulties the point should not be lost that as “an exercise in historical imagination” the Jubilee is helpful “to assess economic-reform proposals that are given religious endorsement.” (Ucko, p. 38). It is the suggestiveness that should be emphasized, a suggestiveness that is not crudified by an infertile search for religious textual references, nor the positing of a particular ideology that would most likely carry out the Levitical “program.”
Charles Davis (Religion and the Making of Society, Cambridge, 1994) offers a philosophically competent and imaginative discussion that has insights for all religions. Davis’ position can be captured through the following two propositions:
1) society is not given anterior to human freedom but is a human construction (p. 2);
2) there is no distinctively religious sphere . . . religious faith, practice and language is a dimension of human experience in all its forms.
Assuming these two propositions Davis argues that two mistakes are made:
It follows that to suppose – the first mistake – that religion constitutes a distinct world, defined as sacred over against the secular of the three human worlds (the cognitive, the normative, the expressive or cultural sphere), entails a second mistake, namely an erroneous conception of religious experience. The error is to claim a direct, literal apprehension of the Transcendental, so as to give positive content to that sacred world, and thus fall into idolatry by identifying the transcendent with its finite symbols (Davis, p. 52).
We hardly need to indicate that Davis’ target is the “fundamentalist’s” literalism. At a blow, Davis also undermines the modernists who insist on the absolute separation of the religious realm from the social sphere:
there is no proper or specific religious language precisely because religion is not a specifically distinct realm of meaning or culture (Davis, p. 118)
what is problematic is not the religious use of political language but the political use of religious language (Davis, p. 119)
Davis rejects the liberal modernist position which, in the removal of religion from the public domain, amounts to the “privatization of religion” just as Reform Judaism and Protestantism have done.
Davis’ claim that it is “not in religion’s involvement in politics, but in its identification with bad politics” is problematic. Quiet what “good” politics consists in, is uncertain. Why should the Old Testament be viewed as the paradigm of the religio-political? Davis views the Old Testament’s religious use of political language to be legitimate but illegitimate the other way round. This can only arise in intolerance whereby “the unqualified assertion of a political claim against others on the basis of religious beliefs that others do not share is a violation of both the nature of politics and of religious language.” Davis suggests a way that the Christian can negotiate this question. Political action is religiously (Christian) when:
1) it remains in a critical relationship to the existing order;
2) it is utopian in its openess to new possibilities and;
3) it refuses to respond to hate with hate but, instead, embraces the risk of offering gratuitous love.
Lest the word utopian be misunderstood, Davis talks of the “politics of hope” (a phrase quite possibly appropriated by Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope, London, 1997). For Davis “the politics of hope rests upon the confidence that, however bleak the prospect, there are always new possibilities.”
