Religion and International Relations Theory

Are international relations theorists about to awake from their long, secular slumber and discover that the world has had, continues to have, and always will have a religious dimension? There is clearly a growing interest in religion, much of it driven by its presumed association with various forms of collective violence. Yet so far international relations theorists have spent little time wondering how religion in global life might implicate their existing theories of international relations or how existing theories of international relations might help us better understand the shape, forms, and consequences of religion in world affairs.¹ Should international relations theorists atone for their sins of omission and engage the religious world? I confess that I was among the guilty—and I write as someone whose “first career” was the international relations of the Middle East. If the Middle East did not convince me to take religion seriously, then what did? An encounter with Alice’s Cheshire cat during my recent research on the evolution of the international humanitarian order.

The international humanitarian order is generally understood to include the network of international and nongovernmental organizations and the constellation of rules, norms, and principles that are intended to reduce the suffering of distant strangers.² Most contemporary writing on the subject presumes it is secular and humanistic because it cites principles of humanity and not religion, refers to an international and not a religious community, and adheres to the principles of impartiality and not difference based on religious identity. Yet as I began excavating the origins of this order, I began digging through layers of religious sedimentation. Religious agencies dominated the relief sector until after World War II. Missionaries and the religiously inclined helped to protect indigenous populations and, in doing so, articulated basic human rights. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was established by a gentile Genevan society that firmly believed that the Christian moral order was under assault by modernizing forces and that voluntary medical societies comprised of (Christian) citizens would strengthen Christian society. And, at bedrock, I encountered the abolitionists, who were not only religious but represented a new brand of evangelicalism. I then played history’s tape forward, tracing the evolution of these religiously inspired institutions, and discovered, to my great surprise, that the religious appeared to melt into a secular sky—rather like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a winsome smile. Ever since, I have traveled backward and forward, and then forward and backward, mesmerized by the shifting boundaries of the religious and the secular.

How are we to make sense of this relationship between religion and humanitarianism? One possibility is that this is some kind of confidence trick. Has religion, namely Christianity, discovered a stealth method for converting the world? Have religious organizations discovered that they can use humanitarian institutions to launder religious values? Is this why so many narratives of humanitarianism are sprinkled with Christian symbolism, with references to sacrifice, redemption, offering, atonement, and salvation? If we want to defend this possibility, then we must be prepared to imagine that all those non-Christian countries that helped to negotiate many of the founding conventions were not aware of how manipulated they were by their Christian interlocutors, and that those thousands of aid workers who work for secular agencies do not realize how they are part of God’s plan. Another possibility is that values once associated with Christianity, including, charity, love, and compassion, are not specific to Christianity but are truly cross cultural. There is evidence that the international human rights conventions emerged from a relatively impressive dialogue, but the ICRC crafted its Code of Conduct in relative isolation, though it is now exploring whether other religions have comparable traditions.³ A third possibility is that humanitarianism is another instance of secularization. The world has undergone secularization, and humanitarianism is not apart from but rather part of that world. Yet before we get carried away with this possibility, we must recognize that sociologists of religion no longer subscribe to the strong versions of this thesis.⁴

Humanitarianism’s androgynous quality—its ability to defy the standard binary of religious and secular—challenges our understanding of the international order and how international relations theorists should study it. This chapter proceeds in two sections. The first considers the religious dimension of international order. International relations theorists resemble liberal political theorists to the extent that their categories of analysis separate the political from the religious.⁵ Yet such categorizations are more deceptive than informative because the distinction rests on ever-shifting sands. This becomes particularly evident in the Europeanization of the world during the nineteenth century and the rise of international rules, laws, and rights designed to protect the vulnerable. Yet, following on my earlier observations regarding religion’s game of peek-a-boo, there are reasons to question the purported demise of religion and rise of secularism in the twentieth century. I tease out some alterative possibilities, including how the discourse of secularism makes possible a sphere of religion and how the liberal international order, which seemingly rests on nonsectarian grounds, might nevertheless represent its own kind of religion. The second section explores the implications of these observations for how international relations scholars should study religion in world affairs. Specifically, I argue that while constructivism is not the answer, it does offer several important commandments (not quite ten, but enough to get us started). I conclude by offering that while there are good reasons to take religion seriously, it is not the only kind of faith that exists in world affairs.

Do we live in a religious world? Most international relations theorists would probably answer yes. Does the modern international order have a religious foundation? Most would probably say no. The resistance to acknowledging the international order’s religious foundations comes from two, somewhat contradictory, directions. The first is fear. Modern international relations history tends to treat religion as a principal source of conflict, violence, and war, and secularism as the great antidote. The discipline’s founding historical moment occurred when the wars of religion in Europe were pacified by the presumed separation of church and state and the creation of a secularized sovereignty and the principle of noninterference, targeted specifically at those actors, religious and otherwise, that used religion to justify their interventions in the affairs of another state. Today the mere mention of religion summons images of religious fanatics constructing communities isolated from the modern world and producing suicide bombers. It is now almost conventional wisdom that the Arab-Israeli conflict is potentially resolvable if it remains a “nationalist” conflict but potentially intractable if it becomes a religious war. There are times when religion affects the state’s foreign policy, but, following the general view that religion is part of the irrational, it almost always causes the state to act in ways that are counter to its national interests. For instance, according to some realists religious communities can form interest groups to shape the state’s foreign policy, but doing so invariably harms the state “objective national interest.”⁶ Although religious forces and figures have spawned many of the norms, legal principles, and ethics that are normatively valued, international relations theorists have placed religion on the international community’s “most wanted” list.⁷

The second reason international relations theorists resist acknowledging the international order’s religious basis is that although they treat religion as a source of mayhem, they somewhat paradoxically act as if it has little causal significance and thus can be safely ignored. Materialist theories such as hard-core realism and Marxism have little patience for religious claims on the grounds that they are epiphenomenal or superstructural; the international distribution of power and states, and the economic structure and classes, are all we need to know. Labeling a state Islamic or Christian does not do any meaningful explanatory work; a state is a state is a state. Marxists have argued that economic forces explain the rise and success of the antislavery movement.⁸ Some observers claim that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is motivated by an eschatological branch of Islam; therefore, this “irrational” actor cannot be deterred through standard threats and punishments.⁹ Realists counter that he is a “rational” actor using Islam to legitimate a foreign policy made dangerously reckless by a surfeit of oil money and America’s misadventures abroad, and that ultimately he will be constrained by external reality.

Surprisingly, religion gets little respect from those theories of international relations that explicitly theorize the ideational elements of global affairs. Consider the English school. Its theorization of the multilayered ontology of international order and its historical scholarship on the European origins of international society should encourage attention to religion. However, discussions of the origins of modern international society conform to the “religion is the root of all evil” thesis, to the extent that the Peace of Westphalia and other treaties and conventions that put religion in its place are viewed as the great stabilizers.¹⁰ English school scholars do consider how Christianity became fused with civilizing processes during the nineteenth century. However, religion seems to have disappeared with the London Missionary Society and been overtaken by other (secular) institutions of modern international society.¹¹ Religion also vanishes from their analytical frameworks. Moving from a Hobbesian to a Lockean to a Kantian world order does not require any consideration of religion. In fact, their theorization of a Kantian world order insinuates that peoples are unified by basic Enlightenment principles and forms of solidarity that have a rationalized basis. In short, even when English school scholars speculate about the possibility of forms of cosmopolitanism, it is always in a secular register.

There is potentially an interesting tale to tell regarding this omission.¹² The founding fathers of the English school, including Martin Wight and Hedley Bull, were quite cognizant of the power of religion in world affairs throughout international history. They were also quite aware of the secularizing trends in global society, particularly evident after World War I and apparently accelerating after World War II. They considered this historical evolution a positive development because it stabilized international order around rationalized principles that had a universal appeal.¹³ Famously, the English school has difficulty separating normative from positive theory, and what they did next conformed to this predilection: they decided to omit religion from their discussions regarding the principles of modern international order, in part because they assumed that religion was inherently destabilizing, and in part because they allowed their normative conclusions to influence their theoretical framework. Since the pioneers of the English school decided to omit religion, its followers may have reflexively continued this tradition without fully recognizing the built-in bias.

Constructivism might be the best hope for integrating religion into international relations research—after all, it forcefully argues that ideas, norms, identity, and culture have a causal significance in world affairs. However, it too disappoints. It is not that religion does not get mentioned, per se. Rather, it is that religion becomes subsumed under concepts such as identity, norms, and values, which in turn are nearly always treated as secular phenomena. Religion becomes a modifier, describing the source of the identity, the norms, and the values. But it rarely gets center stage.¹⁴ Religious activists are often feted for their strategic acumen in forging the international human rights regime, but the rights regime is almost always treated as a secular development—not religious. Individuals credited with founding some of the most important modern institutions of care are acknowledged to have been motivated by Christian principles, but these institutions are defined as secular, universal, and humanistic. In short, constructivist theory, particularly when examining the evolution of international norms, contains an implicit secularization thesis. Among the possibilities for this move, two are particularly important. One is that its framework, and the very language of identity and values, cannot accommodate religious experience.¹⁵ The other is that the theory does not have religious blinders on but rather is implicitly suggesting how international norms and rules that once had a decidedly Christian flavor have become truly intercultural. In either case, constructivists seem to have felt little pressure to consider the religious in global affairs. To what extent does religion help explain how the “world hangs together”?¹⁶

Should international relations scholars make amends and find religion? The answer is hardly obvious and partly depends on what theorists are hoping to gain. One possibility is that they might gain a theistic theory of international relations. Such theories are present in fundamentalist, eschatological, and millenarian doctrines. Presumably, our theories of international relations are secular because they are premised on social science methods and not a divine plan that cannot be immediately known to us but instead depends on revelation or scripture. I say presumably because vestiges of the religious might be unknowingly part of our theories. The revival of classical realism has included a reexamination of the importance and influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose religious beliefs shaped his theory of world politics.¹⁷ Rear Admiral Arthur Thayer Mahan’s writings on American expansion and the importance of sea power in geopolitics were motivated by a belief that the United States had a divine mission and central role to play in the global expansion of Christianity.¹⁸ Neoliberal institutionalism is built on a religious foundation: it sits atop welfare economics, and welfare economics in turn rests on evangelical social and economic thought.¹⁹

As Jack Snyder notes in the introduction to this volume, it will be much easier to persuade international relations theorists of the necessity of incorporating religion if its causal significance can be convincingly hypothesized or demonstrated. Following in this spirit and in the context of my earlier comments regarding how different international relations theories have tended to exclude religion from their calculations regarding the foundations of international order, this chapter selectively samples the history of humanitarianism to suggest some of the consequences of neglect. Specifically, my discussion of humanitarianism highlights two themes: the first concerns the unstable, fluid, and negotiated relationship between the religious and the secular in the global order; the second concerns how the religious operates at various moments in the causal chain, including as discourse that is productive of ways of knowing and making the world intelligible, as beliefs that are the source material for identity and interests, as ideology that can help justify material interests, and as constraints upon the profane.

A signature conclusion of much of the literature on European expansion is that a religiously defined humanitarianism helped to motivate and justify the conquest and colonization of the world. Certainly, European countries were motivated by power and profit, but there was also a strong element of purpose—religious purpose. This religious dimension was most closely connected to a civilizing mission as defined by Christian discourse.

Missionary activity was the central embodiment of the cultural and religious expansion of Europe.²⁰ Although missionary movements accompanied the spread of the West and were increasingly visible in outposts in the New World, missionary activity entered a new, vigorous, and more sustained chapter in the early nineteenth century. Evangelicalism was a major reason for this new energy. Now that it was possible for individuals to elect to escape eternal damnation, evangelicals believed that they had a mission to spread the gospel and give all nonbelievers the choice.²¹ Adopting militaristic language like a “crusade against idolatry” and “war for salvation,” missionaries spread out across the world, hoping to give individuals the opportunity to restore their right relationship with God.²² Toward that end, missionaries preached and proselytized, and attempted to express their religious commitments through activities that were designed to instill moral sobriety, and to create a civilized society through religious institutions and the introduction of modern schools as well as advances in health, science, and technology.²³

It is important to get beyond the standard view that missionaries and colonialism had a hand-in-glove relationship, but it must be acknowledged that their relationship was in some ways mutually beneficial. For many, the West and Christianity were synonymous. Colonialism gave missionaries a sense of confidence and the ability to move into once inhospitable lands. In fact, the failure to respond to these new opportunities could trigger in them feelings of guilt and remorse.²⁴ In particular, Britain’s fortunes were treated as a sign of God’s grace, giving the country and its evangelicals special responsibilities for helping the backward races.²⁵ Commerce and Christianity also developed a close association. For many evangelicals and missionaries, commerce was not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. For some it would help eliminate the slave trade, which many considered evil; for others it would allow individuals to pursue their own ambitions beyond the reach of cruel political forces; and for still others, drawing on the moral economics of Adam Smith and other theorists, commerce and morality were compatible.²⁶ Missionaries, foreign capitalists, and colonial administrators could share the urge to civilize the colonial peoples, to transform them and their societies so that they resembled European states. While the missionaries might not have had the explicit goal of helping further the interests of the administrators and foreign capitalists, many of their activities had the effect of helping to make the local population more susceptible to outside control.²⁷ In general, for many missionaries the debate was not about whether there should and could be a positive relationship between missionary work and colonialism, but rather whether there was a causal relationship between the two.²⁸

Yet missionaries often collided with colonial administrators and foreign capitalists who pursued power and profits and not God.²⁹ Humanitarians and missionaries wanted to convert and civilize, and while colonial authorities were not necessarily opposed to such missions, they often privileged security and commercial interests. For instance, the British population’s desire to stamp out the slave trade led to the ill-fated British expedition to the Sudan in 1882, opposed on strategic grounds by Prime Minister Gladstone.³⁰ Colonial administrators frequently had little interest in civilizing the population, especially if it might complicate colonial rule or cause political rebellion, and engaged in all kinds of exploitation that missionaries found gravely irreligious.

Missionaries and foreign capitalists also clashed at various moments. Missionaries looked suspiciously on foreign capitalists who seemed willing to do anything to make a profit, who hardly comported themselves along Christian principles, and who desired to transform individuals into consumers, promoting not righteousness but rather hedonism.³¹ Missionaries frequently saw their job as not only converting the local population but also reminding their compatriots about the temptations of sin and what happens when individuals find salvation in material goods and not in the gospel.³² Foreign capitalists, in turn, often viewed missionaries as meddlesome busybodies, ready to incite unrest among the population, an accusation previously leveled by slave owners.³³ For instance, during the nineteenth century British missionaries advocated the abolition of the Indian practice of suttee, or the self-immolation of widows. The East India Company’s initial position was one of indifference to all dimensions of Indian society, an indifference that translated into a 1772 company policy of noninterference concerning religion and local institutions. Utilitarian rather than principled factors drove this policy: it held that any move that might be interpreted by the local population as proselytization could trigger a rebellion, hardly good for business. Before the governor-general would consider suspending this policy, then, he had to calculate that it would not gravely damage the company’s financial and political health. Ultimately, he decided to take the risk because of a desire to convey to the British public the image of an enlightened rule, to show by example good governance and progress—and the superiority of Western civilization.³⁴

Although humanitarianism was closely associated with world order as defined by the European powers, many missionaries and liberal humanitarians developed a multicultural sensibility resembling that of many human rights activists today. Although missionaries had a well-earned reputation for viewing derisively the habits and customs of the local populations and treating them as less than fully human, at times their encounters forced them to reevaluate their own identities, values, and understanding of self in relationship to the colonial “other.”³⁵ An interesting development of the nineteenth century was the subtle but significant shift from the project of destroying other cultures and religions to trying to create the social conditions that would improve their well-being.³⁶ This development had various related sources, including growing critical self-reflection in response to the accusation that missionaries were paternalistic and imperialistic, and the growing influence of new interpretations of social gospel that highlighted equality, justice, and solidarity.³⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, many American missionaries were treating charitable institutions such as clinics, orphanages, and schools less as magnets for possible converts and more as vehicles for saving societies.

The World Missionary Conference (WMC) held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910, a highly self-conscious and scientific effort to consider how best to Christianize the world, reflects many of these world order issues.³⁸ In preparation for the meeting, the conference planners created several committees to place the missionary project on a more scientific and systematic footing. It is difficult to exaggerate their ambitions and accomplishments. The organizing committee wanted their discussions to be informed by empirical analysis and not guesswork; this “scientific” turn was a natural outgrowth of the development of the professional field of missiology—the application of scientific methods to assess missionary practices, a movement led by the American evangelist A. T. Pierson.³⁹ Accordingly, the committee surveyed hundreds of missionaries, who, in many respects, were the anthropologists of their day, having lived for years among the “natives” and observed their cultural and religious practices. The vast majority of the missionaries responded, and many with lengthy, detailed, and handwritten reports. The committee then summarized the findings in a set of reports that were designed to consider how to advance the missionary project.⁴⁰

Many western political, economic, and religious elites did not see missionary activity as a separate and distinct feature of Western expansion, but rather as a critical element of it. Consequently, in attendance were some of the most important religious, political, and economic figures of the period. The presiding officer was Lord Balfour, who opened the conference with a warm statement from the King of England. The American delegation included Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan; William Jennings Bryan; John Mott, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of the best-known evangelical ministers of the period; and Seth Low, the former mayor of New York City and President of Columbia University. Theodore Roosevelt could not attend, but sent a very warm letter of congratulations and reflected on the conference’s importance to the Western international order.

The conference members’ concern with how to most effectively and efficiently promote the missionary movement led them to try and understand the conditions under which a society would be receptive to the message of the gospel. Toward that end, and following the fashion of the times, they created a hierarchy of societies, ranking them in terms of where they fell on a civilizational scale. Being closer to civilization was no guarantee that a society would be more receptive to the gospel; by their accounts, Japan was nearly civilized but missionaries could hardly penetrate Japanese society, and Korea was farther down the ladder but convertible. Strikingly, the conference spent a considerable amount of time worrying about “Mohammedism.” Many missionaries reported considerable difficulty penetrating Islamic societies and that Christianity was losing ground to Islam for the souls of nonmonotheistic peoples in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Sounding alarmed and anxious, the conference highlighted the urgency of the task of confronting Islam, limiting its gains, and, if at all possible, sending it back to Arabia.

The WMC also dwelled on the complicated relationship between missionaries and political power. The heated consensus among the conference participants was that colonialism by the Christian powers provided an unprecedented opportunity for spreading the word, and they were brimming with the confidence of the period (little did they know, though, that this meeting was occurring at the twilight of the imperial era). National governments were not simply pursuing a secularized “national interest”; instead, they were helping to make possible a Christian world order. Consequently, while those in attendance may have been chauvinists and nationalists, they believed that the power of the state could and should be used to spread Christian civilization. The duty of governments, as they put it, is “to restrain evil and promote good,” and “both missions and governments are interested in the welfare of nations.”

However much affection the missionaries felt for the colonial powers, there were limits. Following the maxim, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” they attempted to maintain a line between themselves and politics. Matters of governance were the domain of the state and matters of religion were the domain of the church, and both the government and the church needed to recognize each other’s sphere of authority. Critically, missionaries were not to engage in “political agitation” and instead had a duty to teach and practice obedience to “settled government.” Reflecting their desire to respect a neutral zone, the participants identified a set of rules that resemble modern humanitarian principles. They expressed a principle of humanity, that all individuals had the right to hear the gospel and have the opportunity to convert, and they expressed a principle of neutrality, discouraging missionaries from confronting colonial governments, because doing so might jeopardize access to populations “in need.”

Yet missionaries were not always pleased with the behavior of the colonialists and the capitalists and frequently intervened to stop the sinning in their midst. Specifically, they had a duty to “exercise their influence for the removal of gross oppression and injustice, particularly where the government is in the hands of men of their own race … provided that in so doing they keep clear of association with any political movement.” Much like many relief organizations of today, missionaries were “rights-based” movements that wanted to protect certain fundamental rights of the population in ways that were apolitical, which they defined in ways that resemble our term nonpartisan. The conference singled out three activities for opprobrium: opium, liquor traffic, and enforced labor. Opiates and alcohol were particularly pernicious because they numbed the masses and were conduits of evil. Ever since the early nineteenth century and beginning with the abolitionist movement, missionaries had viewed slavery as a major evil. Importantly, colonial governments and foreign capitalists also had to be confronted because, in many cases, they had introduced and profited from these evils. A Christian, European international order, alongside its civilizing impulses, included principles of rights, justice, and compassion.

Although missionaries are perhaps the most vivid example of the relationship between the secular and the religious in the creation of the modern world order, religiously motivated action also was instrumental in creating the very international institutions, laws, and ethics that are frequently treated, at least today by those in the West, as quintessentially secular.⁴¹ Consider the ICRC. The founders of the ICRC initially saw themselves as part of a civilizing mission—but one that worked within the existing boundaries of civilized society, that is, Christian Europe. Reflecting “the religious and moral assumptions of the nineteenth century European bourgeoisie … they had naturally assumed that mercy and compassion were uniquely Christian values. The first task for the Red Cross, they believed, was to propagate these virtues more widely within Christendom itself, especially among the common people whose weak moral sense seemed to them to need careful nurture.”⁴² The issue was not simply a matter of getting their priorities right—it also concerned whether and how these values might apply to those outside of Europe. Consistent with the notion, prevalent at that time, of a variegated humanity, the ICRC believed that while European Christians could comprehend and honor the Red Cross principles, those outside these boundaries probably could not. ICRC was surprised, therefore, when in 1865 the sultan of the Ottoman Empire communicated his willingness to accept the Geneva conventions; it could not believe that the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim state, understood or was prepared to honor these conventions. The controversy continued when the Ottoman Empire notified Geneva that it would not adopt the symbol of the cross. While the delegates to the Congress probably selected the cross because of its association with Christian charity and aspirations for a universal, enlightened humanitarianism (and not as a tribute to Switzerland), they nevertheless treated the symbol as nonsectarian and could not imagine how it gave offense.⁴³ After considerable discussion, though, ICRC authorized the Ottoman Empire to use the Islamic-based crescent.

This episode caused the ICRC to rethink its purpose and entertain the possibility of a civilizing mission beyond its borders. One founder stated in a newsletter in 1873 in the context of ICRC’s discussions with Japan that, while it would be “puerile” to expect “the savages and barbarians, who are still singularly numerous on the face of the globe, to follow [Japan’s] example, there is the possibility that there are races which possess a civilization, albeit one different from ours, that desire closer relations with Europe and might be brought into civilized society through the red cross societies.”⁴⁴ Red Cross societies began to expand across the globe. For a dedicated colonialist like the ICRC’s Gustave Moynier, the ICRC could help perform a civilizing mission that would “humanize” the “savage peoples” by rescuing them from their “brute instincts.” As the ICRC considered the speed with which it did so, it imagined not only the universalization of the laws of war but also the expansion of Christian notions of charity.

A similar story can be told regarding the creation and evolution of many of the original human rights documents. Missionaries, especially those who were outraged by slavery and the genocidal rule of King Leopold in the Congo, were at the forefront of defining and defending “native rights.” At the turn of the century they were joined by activists motivated less by religion and more by a secularized humanity, and after World War I the latter became more prominent. Indicative is the story of Save the Children and the creation of the first convention on the rights of African children.⁴⁵ Although Save largely convened the preparatory meeting, around the table were missionaries from all over the continent, who could speak with considerable authority given their “field expertise.” Although fully aware of Save’s quasi-secular orientation, they nevertheless viewed the process as a vehicle for institutionalizing a set of rights that were founded on Christian principles but potentially had a greater chance of becoming institutionalized because they were now associated with a secular and universal agenda.

These sketches of the international humanitarian order suggest three ways of thinking about the changing relationship between religion, secularism, and world order. One, following the lead of sociologists of religion, is to consider the causes and consequences, and the varieties and vagaries, of the secularization of the world. However, if international relations theorists do this they will be adopting a position that was long ago found wanting by many of its founding advocates. Specifically, one of the important revisions of the secularization thesis is the assumption that the religious and the secular can be understood as binaries, and that the ascendance of one comes at the immediate expense of the other. Treating these spheres as distinct, indeed as rivals for supremacy, risks neglecting how the two can be co-constitutive and discursively related, how the secular might create the religious, and how the religious might underpin the secular.

A second way of thinking about this relationship might be to treat the secular as a “strategy” for managing the role of religion in world affairs. This possibility is offered by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, who in this volume provocatively and persuasively argues that the modern secular order itself rests on a religious foundation. She argues that there are “two trajectories of secularism, or two strategies for managing the relationship between religion and politics.” The first is laicism, “a separatist narrative in which religion is expelled from politics.” The second is Judeo-Christian secularism, which is an accommodationist narrative to the extent that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not attempt to expel religion but rather sees it as very much a part of cultural life and, in fact, as helping to constitute modern secular life. Citing Samuel Huntington, Hurd argues that this narrative shows religion to be the common ground for Western democracy. Secularism, therefore, is a core value of a Judeo-Christian order, and basic liberal institutions are themselves shaped by, if not made possible by, Christian-Judeo values.⁴⁶ In this view, then, religion becomes either an element of Western secularism or makes Western secularism possible; in either case, the religious is part of the secular. As Hurd argues, such strategies for the domestic also appear in the international, in some ways consistent with the early findings of the English school regarding the importance of sovereignty and other international mechanisms that were designed to safeguard the state and codify a warmed-over realpolitik. But it would be critical to avoid seeing realpolitik as statecraft to the exclusion of “religiocraft.”

A third possibility is that the religious helps to constitute the contemporary international order. For many scholars this requires upsetting some conventional wisdoms. International relations theorists are generally comfortable referring to a liberal world order, but because they generally equate liberal with secular, a liberal world order cannot also have a religious content. Does this mean that liberalism and other kinds of modernist projects might also have a religious dimension? Perhaps. This possibility is offered by many scholars of religion, including, most recently, Charles Taylor in his magisterial A Secular Age. Following on a centuries-long tradition, Taylor distinguishes between the immanent and the transcendental:

The great invention of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether, if it did, we should infer a transcendent Creator beyond it. This notion of the “immanent” involved denying—or at least isolating or perhaps problematizing—any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on the one hand, and the “supernatural” on the other, be this understood in terms of the one transcendent God or of Gods or spirits, or magic forces or whatever.⁴⁷

But the immanent can never quite purge all vestiges of the transcendental, in large part because humans have a constant need to relate to something bigger than themselves. It is not simply the search for meaning, but rather a particular kind of meaning that allows them to imagine themselves as connected to a universe in existence and in emergence. Consequently, Taylor finds evidence of the transcendental in the immanent in various areas of life. For instance, British and American forms of patriotism have always projected a sense of the divine, or at least operated under the belief that each country was helping to further a civilizing process that was part of God’s plan:

The sense of superiority, originally religious in essence, can and does undergo a ‘secularization’, as the sense of civilizational superiority becomes detached from Providence, and attributed to race, or Enlightenment, or even some combination of the two. But the point of identifying here this sense of order is that it provides another niche, as it were, in which God can be present in our lives, or in our social imaginary; not just as the author of the Design which defines our political identity, but also of the Design which defines civilizational order.⁴⁸

He similarly suggests that the the liberal order of equality, rights, and democracy might be sustained by more than a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” based on Kantian utilitarian grounds and theological grounds. Secularization did not kill religion. Instead, projects that are viewed by many as quintessentially secular are sustained and given meaning by religious beliefs.

Although Taylor largely limits the transcendental to the religious, Craig Calhoun and others argue that the transcendental need not pivot on God, but can exist wherever there are collective beliefs that refer to the divine and that conceive of practical action as designed to transform oneself and the environment in order to bring about a greater good.⁴⁹ Consider human rights. Arguments about natural rights and human dignity are defended not only in terms of their instrumental value for other kinds of positive outcomes (including peace and prosperity) but also in terms of basic notions of justice and humanity that are part of the “divine.” Humanitarian action is defended not only in terms of its contribution to international peace and security but also because it signifies the kind of world order that many would like to bring into existence. Many of the attributes of a liberal international order (and international ethics more broadly) are embedded in a cosmopolitanism and transcendentalism that is concerned not only with human flourishing but also the possibility of transforming oneself in relation to others and a broader moral universe. In short, modern day liberalism, this secularized liberalism, has a religious content because of its relationship to the transcendental.⁵⁰ If so, the modern liberal international order is not evidence of the triumph of secularism, as most international relations theorists assert, but rather the ascendance of a particular brand of secularism that itself has a strong religious content and is tied to the transcendental.

I must emphasize that the transcendental is not the universal—the transcendental is always historically and culturally situated. International ethics can have elements of the religious to the extent that those elements are constituted by the transcendental, but this is a transcendental born of a particular time and place, even if it is defined by its advocates as timeless. Consider, once again, humanitarianism. The idea of humanitarianism—the attempt to ameliorate the suffering of distant strangers—might appear to have an unambiguously universal character. Both Christian and Islamic aid agencies are inspired by religious commitments to help the poor and the suffering. Yet these different faith traditions also understand the purpose and principles of humanitarianism in fundamentally different ways, and tie them to very different understandings of a transcendental world order. For many Christian aid agencies it has been practically impossible to spread Christianity without also directly or indirectly transforming various aspects of social relationships and creating new kinds of transnational relations. The same is true for many Islamic aid agencies. In other words, the desire to relieve suffering, presumably a universal good and the purest expression of a transcendental ethic, is itself reflective of a particular understanding of order.

In sum, our contemporary world order might have a religious dimension in visible and veiled ways. International relations theorists have long been concerned with the production of order. A century ago that imagined order was assumed to have a Christian character, or at least most theorists believed that it should. The steady secularization of the world and the academic community that studies it has transformed the conceptualization of order as a result of rationality and the collective pursuit of interdependent interests. Indeed, not only did international order have little to do with religion, but increasingly religion was viewed as a destabilizing force. International relations theorists have become increasingly attentive to how order is accomplished not only by instrumental action but also by normative structures; as they have done so they have tacitly presumed that this order has a secular character. Yet the secular and religious elements of international order might not be as cleanly segregated as international relations theorists presume. Religious values might be part of our international ethics and international order, having become institutionalized in the world’s governing institutions, and our liberal international order might itself have a religious dimension. If so, international relations theorists have much to learn about the world—and themselves.

Recent scholarship on religion and international relations has been as methodologically and epistemologically diverse as the field of international relations. This secularist attitude toward the study of religion must continue. There is no single path to salvation and there is no single epistemological path to enlightenment. Yet the recent history of constructivism provides several cautionary lessons about the dangers of attempting to study the social dimension of world affairs. Three stand out as particularly important.

Social kinds do not have an essence. Instead they are social constructs whose meaning is historically and culturally situated in relationship to other discursive kinds. There is no essence to gender or religion. Critics might try and identify an essence, as will fundamentalists. But social scientists should know better. Islam does not have an essence and those that try to find it, whether they are critics wondering whether the world would be better without Islam or fundamentalists who believe that Islam has an eternal meaning, are practicing their own forms of orientalism.⁵¹ Religious discourse, like all cultures, is fractured; consequently, scholars need to trace these ever-shifting and never-stable cultural and religious fault lines. If a religious discourse appears to have an essence or fixed meaning, then this is a result of politics, and the job of the scholar is to understand how this appearance was achieved. For instance, Hurd expertly examines how social actors attempt to establish the meaning of the secular in relation to the religious, and do so for various politically motivated reasons.⁵²

In order for constructivists to make headway in the study of the social character of international politics, they had to overcome several hegemonic social theoretic binaries, including interests/norms, rationality/irrationality, and power/ethics. These binaries were an artifact of the dominant position of realism (or at least the Waltzian version) and individualism, and made it difficult for scholars to recognize that international relations, like all social relations, have a social character. In response, constructivists argued that interests are socially constructed and are constituted by norms, that there is an important distinction between instrumental and subjective rationality, that too many scholars influenced by rational choice fail to recognize how rationality makes no claim regarding the preferences of actors, and that power is not limited to its material forms but instead some of the most enduring forms of power are found in discourse, ideas, and other ordering elements that direct action and shape self-understanding.⁵³

International relations scholars should fight against binaries such as interests/religious values, rational/religious, and power/values because they undervalue the significance, both causal and phenomenological, of religion. Instead of asking how religion influences interests, we will assume that interests are material and that those who act in ways that seemingly go against their material interests will be viewed as irrational (or acting under forms of false consciousness). Fundamentalist Christians in Kansas and Wahabis in Saudi Arabia have much in common because they are willing to sacrifice their material interests for religion and fail to understand their true preferences.⁵⁴ The nation becomes part of the “national interest” that exiles the religious, while religious motivations become part of some ill-defined and amorphous community; patriots rationally sacrifice for the nation but suicide bombers are irrationally driven by visions of virgins. Such binaries can lead to ontological dead ends and alleviate analysts from the demand of having to understand actors in terms of their own interpretations of their actions and their constructed world.⁵⁵

The very desire to demonstrate that religion “matters” can encourage international relations scholars to transform religion into a variable. We cannot and should not avoid thinking in terms of variables. Yet a variable-centered world can omit four important features of many good explanations. First, it can lead scholars to fail to consider how actors make their actions and the world around them meaningful. Good explanations not only refer to interests but also to reasons, and the reasons that actors give for their actions provide important insights into how they make their world meaningful. Following Max Weber’s insight that “we are cultural beings with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude toward the world and to lend it significance,” constructivists and others following an interpretive tradition attempt to recover the meanings that actors give to their practices and the objects that they construct. The meanings that actors lend to their activities derive not from private beliefs but rather from society or culture. In the United States a religious haze helped to define the meaning and significance of the terrorist attacks on September 11. Some religious figures posited that the attacks were divine retribution or a wake-up call to a dangerously irreligious country. The framing of the attacks and the post-September 11 climate as “good versus evil” drew from Christian discourse. Many other orienting concepts, which give meaning to events and inspire responses, also have religious foundations. Sin. Redemption. Sacrifice. Atonement. Forgiveness. These concepts are loaded with Christian meaning and can help legitimate foreign policy or even motivate it. In general, if international relations scholars look they are likely to find religion.

Second, a variable-centered approach to religion also neglects social constitution. Constitution is not mere description but is explanatory theory, of a particular sort. There are “why” and “how” questions.⁵⁶ Standard causal analysis asks “why” questions as it treats independent and dependent variables as unrelated entities. Constitutive theories instead ask “how” questions. They explore how structures constitute social kinds and make possible certain tendencies. Sovereignty does not cause states to act in certain ways; it helps to constitute them and endow them with certain capacities that make possible certain kinds of action. Being a sovereign state, after all, means having certain rights and privileges that other actors in world politics do not have. To what extent were/are Western states Christian states and how does this identity make possible certain kinds of action? What does it mean to be an Islamic state? What kinds of historically situated social capacities does an Islamic state possess?

Third, variable-oriented analysis neglects discursive formations. We must be attentive to how historically and contingently produced discourses shape the subjectivity of actors, and how systems of knowledge and discourse shape categories of meaning and significance. Although some variable-oriented scholars turn gender into a variable that is reducible to biological categories—leading to questions like whether the world would be peaceful if women were in charge—scholars who understand that gender is socially constructed and a discourse are attentive to its historically situated meaning.⁵⁷ In a similar vein, a variable-centered scholar might be tempted to ask if the world would be more peaceful if Islam no longer existed, or more violent if Reverend Pat Robertson had his finger on the nuclear “button.” The modern category of the religious is defined historically and in relation to the category of the secular; in some respects the secular is an invented term to help construct, codify, grasp, and experience a realm or reality differentiated from the religious. Consequently, we can speak not of secularism but rather of secularisms.⁵⁸

Fourth, and following on the aforementioned points, the divisions between rationalism and constructivism are several and significant, but at times can be overhyped, to the detriment of creating sophisticated explanations of action and outcomes.⁵⁹ Constructivists made considerable headway in the discipline by demonstrating how thin understandings of action and stripped-down versions of methodological individualism omitted the various ways in which normative structures shape global life, including how actors make sense of the world and give it significance, the origins of beliefs, identities, and interests, and what counts as legitimate action. Yet as they have plowed ahead they have incorporated various enduring insights from rational choice, including that actors are goal oriented, self-reflective, strategic, and capable of using cultural resources for ulterior purposes. An approach that limits the place of the religious and the secular to discourse and normative structure leads to an impoverished account of human action, but an approach that fails to recognize how actors are able to instrumentalize religious beliefs and adopt interpretations of religious norms that are consistent with existing interests also yields an impoverished understanding of action.

It has been said often enough that scholars of international relations should be more attentive to the role of religion in world affairs, but it is not at all clear how we should do this. I am unconvinced that religion requires any special epistemology or ontology. Existing theoretical approaches provide a useful starting point. And while I suspect there will not be much enthusiasm for trying to develop a theistic theory of global affairs, there is considerable evidence that only by incorporating religion will we have a better understanding of how the world is constantly made and remade. As eloquently argued by Hurd in this volume and elsewhere, though, international relations theorists should not and cannot study the varieties of religion without also studying the varieties of secularism.

The religious and the secular have evolved in relation to one another and stand in a relationship of opposition and differentiation, as well as co-constitution. World leaders have used secularism as a strategy to try and define the political and the religious in ways that are hypothesized to be consistent with the requirements of international order. However, many “secular” global institutions have religious origins and continue to retain religious significance for many different groups. Many national and transnational projects have a high degree of support in part because of their relationship to religious discourses. And, lastly, there is the possibility that “we” will define order not only in terms of stability but also in terms of an ongoing search for enchantment, progress, and heaven on earth.

Yet as international relations scholars turn to the study of religion they also should bear in mind that religious faith is not the only kind of faith that exists in world affairs. The earlier discussion of the distinction between the transcendental and the immanent suggested that the transcendental can be either religious or nonreligious. There is of course no single, accepted definition of religion. Instead of trying to settle what will always be unsettled, scholars have favored formulations that identify “family resemblances,” allowing them to identify a set of beliefs, commitments, and institutionalized practices that combine to produce an entity that can be defined as more or less religious.⁶⁰ So, for instance, religions have various characteristics—including an appeal to supernatural entities, conversion experiences, doctrines, rituals, understandings of the meaning of suffering, distinctions between the sacred and profane, and so on—but not all of these characteristics need be present in order to constitute a religion. Faith, on the other hand, can be generically understood as belief in the divine that does not depend on the existence of a God.⁶¹ Liberal cosmopolitanism, particularly those versions that have shades of transcendentalism, can also be understood as part of a faith tradition. Nearly every aid worker I have ever met, from those who work for the evangelical World Vision International to the irreligious Doctors without Borders, expresses one kind of faith or another. While the humanitarian sector operates with a distinction between faith- and non-faith-based action, it is probably more accurate to acknowledge that its workers are inspired by different kinds of faith traditions. If so, then different kinds of faith—and not merely different religious denominations—exist in global politics.

I would like to thank the many who indulged my attempt to work through a set of painfully unfamiliar ideas. In addition to those who contributed to this volume, I owe much to Al Stepan, José Casanova, Bud Duvall, Nicholas Guilhot, and those who attended my talks at Columbia University and Australian National University.

1. There is a growing literature on religion and world affairs, but very little on religion and international relations theory. For important exceptions, see Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulus, eds., Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (New York: Palgrave 2003); Scott Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Ron Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), chapter 1. For a good overview of the challenge for theorists of IR and comparative politics, see Eva Bellin, “Faith in Politics: New Trends in the Study of Religion and Politics,” World Politics 60, no. 2 (January, 2008): 315–347.

2. Michael Barnett, The International Humanitarian Order (New York: Routledge, 2010), chapter 1.

3. James Cockayne, “Islam and International Humanitarian Law: From a Clash to a Conversation Between Civilizations,” International Review of the Red Cross 84, no. 847 (2002): 597–626.

4. José Casanova, “Secularization Revisited: A Response to Talal Asad,” in David Scott and Charles Hirshkind, eds., Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 24–28; Dominique Marshall, “Children’s Rights in Imperial Political Cultures: Missionary and Humanitarian Contributions to the Conference on the African Child of 1931,” International Journal of Children’s Rights 12, no. 3 (2004): 273–318.

5. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).

6. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

7. Ann Tickner, for instance, recently pleaded with international relations theorists to pay greater attention to religion by citing its importance for understanding violence. See Ann Tickner, “On Taking Religious Worldviews Seriously,” in Power, Interdependence, and Nonstate Actors in World Politics, ed. Helen Milner and Andrew Moravcsik (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 223–42.

8. Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1” American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985): 339–361.

9. Bernard Lewis, “Does Iran Have Something in Store?” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006; Daniel Pipes, “The Mystical Menace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” New York Sun, January 10, 2006.

10. Hedley Bull, Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: McMillan, 1977).

11. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Gerrit Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

13. Hedley Bull and Martin Wight, Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966).

14. Although he might not care for being classified as a constructivist, Daniel Philpott’s work is an important exception. See, for instance, “The Challenge of September 11th to Secularism in International Relations,” World Politics 55, no. 1 (2002): 66–95; and “The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations,” World Politics 52, no. 2 (January 2000): 206–45.

15. Joshua Mitchell, “Religion Is Not a Preference,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 2 (May 2007): 351–62.

16. John Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 855–885.

17. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires: A Study of Recurring Patterns and Problems of the Political Order in Relation to the Unique Problems of the Nuclear Age (New York: Scribner’s, 1959); The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952); Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Scribner’s, 1940); and, with Alan Heimert, A Nation So Conceived: Reflections on the History of America from Its Early Visions to Its Present Power (New York: Scribner’s, 1963).

18. R. N. Leslie Jr., “Christianity and the Evangelist for Sea Power: The Religion of A. T. Mahan,” in Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan s “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783,” ed. J. B. Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991).

19. On the political economy, see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

20. C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). For general overviews of missionary movements, see Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Leicester: Apollos Press, 1990); Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos Press, 1990); and Sister Mary Casilda Renwald, Humanitarianism and British Colonial Policy (PhD dissertation, St. Louis University, 1934), especially chapters 2–4.

21. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? 32–38; Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, 63, 161; Sister Mary, Humanitarianism and British Colonial Policy, 49.

23. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? 32–38; Paul Varg, “Motives in Protestant Missions, 1890–1917,” Church History 23, no. 1, (March 1954): 75–78.

27. Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Douglas Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Monson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

28. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? 92–115; Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

30. P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 32–44; Robin Neilands, The Dervish Wars: Gordon and Kitchner in the Sudan (London: John Murray, 1996), 23–34.

31. Varg, “Motives in Protestant Missions,” 73; Stanley, Bible and the Flag, 73.

32. Stanley, Bible and the Flag, 78–83; Sister Mary, Humanitarianism and British Colonial Policy, chap. 6.

33. Sister Mary, Humanitarianism and British Colonial Policy, chapter 6; Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, 90; Hall, Civilizing Subjects; Claire McLisky “‘Due Observance of Justice, and the Protection of Their Rights’: Philanthropy, Humanitarianism, and Moral Purpose in the Aborigines Protection Society circa 1837 and Its Portrayal in Australian Historiography, 1883–2003,” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 11 (2005): 57–66.

34. Nancy Cassels, “Bentinck: Humanitarian and Imperialist—The Abolition of Suttee,” Journal of British Studies 5, no. 1 (November 1965): 77–87; Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–43; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 13.

35. Frederik Cooper and Ann Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); A. Lester, “Reformulating Identities: British Settlers in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1998): 515–531; A. Lester, “Settlers, the State and Colonial Power: The Colonization of Queen Adelaide Province, 1834–37, Journal of African History 39, (1998): 221–246, and Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 1991); David Lambert, “Geographies of Colonial Philanthropy,” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 3 (2004): 320–341.

36. Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, 75; Varg, “Motives in the Protestant Missions,” 75–78.

37. Amanda Porterfield, “Protestant Missionaries: Pioneers of American Philanthropy,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence Friedman and Mark McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6465. See also Emily Rosenberg, “Missions to the World,” in Friedman and McGarvie, Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, 245; Porter, Religion Versus Empire, 328.

38. Brian Stanley, “Defining the Boundaries of Christendom: The Two Worlds of the World Missionary Conference, 1910,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30, no. 4 (October 2006): 171–6, “Africa Through European Christian Eyes: The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910,” in African Identities and Global Christianity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Klaus Herausgegeben von Koschorke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 165–80, “Twentieth-Century World Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions,” in Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth-Century, ed. Donald M. Lewis, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 52–83, “Church, State, and the Hierarchy of ‘Civilization’: The Making of the Commission VII Report, ‘Missions and Governments’ Edinburgh, 1910,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1840–1914: The Interplay of Representation and Experience, ed. Andrew N. Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 58–84, and “Edinburgh 1910 and the Oikoumene,” in Ecumenism and History, ed. Anthony Cross (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2002), 89–105. See also W. H. T. Gairdner, Echoes from Edinburgh 1910: An Account and Interpretation of the World Missionary Conference (n.p.: Gairdner Press, 2008); Charles Clayton Morrison, “The World Missionary Conference,” Christian Century, July 7, 1910.

39. Dana Robert, Occupy Until I Come: A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).

40. For constructivists interested in the life cycle of norms and normative diffusion, the conference in particular and missionary activity more broadly represents a fascinating and understudied topic, potentially illuminating various features of normative diffusion, including its altered meaning as it becomes localized and institutionalized in the context of existing cultural practices.

41. Jennifer Beard, The Political Economy of Desire: International Law, Development, and the Nation State (New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).

42. John Hutchinson, Champions of Charity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 203.

44. Ibid., 204. See also Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Carroll and Graf, 1999), 122.

46. Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5–6.

47. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 15–16.

49. See also Craig Calhoun, “A Secular Age: Going Beyond,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, Social Science Research Council blog, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/28/going-beyond/.

51. Graham Fuller, “A World Without Islam,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2008, 46–53.

53. One of the normatively desirable consequences of rationalist approaches is that they foreclose the possibility of the most pernicious forms of ethnocentricism.

54. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Holt, 2005); Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper Perennial, 2003).

55. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

56. Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 5 (1998): 101–118.

57. The debate over gender raises the need to note that the study of religion does not need any special epistemology. However, see Mitchell, “Religion Is Not a Preference,” for an argument regarding the near impossibility of contemporary models to capture the “religious experience.”

59. James Fearon and Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism Versus Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 52–72.

60. For a recent and good example of this exercise, see Jonathan Benthall, Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age Is Haunted by Faith (London: Taurus, 2008).

61. There are a bevy of other concepts that are used to signify nonreligious faith, including spirituality.