Religion and International Relations Theory

After decades of discounting—if not simply ignoring—the significance of religion in world politics, many international relations scholars have now seen the light.¹ Indeed, most of those involved in the attempt to “bring religion into international relations theory” agree that intellectual and disciplinary blinders explain the field’s decades-long failure to take matters of faith seriously. Some go further, however, and argue that “the global resurgence of religion confronts [international relations] theory with a theoretical challenge comparable to that raised by the end of the Cold War or the emergence of globalization” (Hatzopoulos and Petito 2003, 3). Others, shockingly enough, disagree. In a recent review article, for example, Eva Bellin evinces frustration with continued “exhortion[s] for a paradigm shift” in international relations theory and implores the field to “get on with the project of puzzle-driven research that might shed light (and middle-range theoretical insights) on questions of when and how religion matters in international affairs” (Bellin 2008, 316)

In this chapter I argue against the proposition that religion requires a “paradigm shift” in international relations theory.² Many scholars use religion as nothing more than a new vehicle for long-standing criticisms of the field, for example, that it pays inadequate attention to cultural forces, non-state actors, or even specific social-theoretic traditions. But I also dissent from Bellin’s view that we should simply bracket epistemological questions and “get on with” constructing middle-range theories involving religion. Disputes over the importance of religion do highlight a number of ongoing problems with the way that the field handles not only religion but a host of cognate phenomena.

In particular, many substantive debates in the field pivot over the relative importance of “material” and “ideal” forces in international politics. For example, realists argue that the imperatives of relative military power matter more than ideological orientations in determining how states relate to one another. Thus, arguments for the importance of religion in international politics quickly become a specific instance of arguments for the importance of cultural forces vis-à-vis material ones.

This has two major consequences. First, it makes it difficult for us to assess the importance of complicated sociocultural forces, including religion. Religion shapes how humans behave via a wide variety of processes and mechanisms. It establishes basic conceptual categories and symbolic orders. It empowers some individuals to speak and act authoritatively in specific settings. It supplies justifications for social and political claims, such as calls for specific policies, acts of resistance, and demonstrations of obedience. It structures, and manifests in, a wide variety of social relations.

Even particular religions—ones recognized by adherents, for example, as forming a singular community of believers—are rife with ambivalent and ambiguous theological principles, practical instructions for daily conduct, and specified social roles. For all these reasons, we cannot resolve a debate over the relative importance of religious and material factors by looking to see if a particular international actors’ behavior better correlates with some “religious norm” or “power-political interests.”

Second, framing this debate in terms of material versus cultural distracts us from a more interesting set of questions involving the relative importance of social forms and cultural content. Indeed, most of the factors that international relations theorists define as “material,” such as economic interests and relative material power, are really manifestations of social position and relation. Although international relations scholars have paid inadequate attention to religion itself, religious forces manifest in a variety of social forms that are both familiar to international relations scholars and generate comparable dynamics to their secular cousins.

In the pages that follow, I review the putative challenges posed by religion to international relations theory. I then use evidence from the Reformations era to illustrate what these challenges get right, and what they get wrong. I next discuss the aforementioned problems with material/ideal framings of the significance of religion in international relations. Here I highlight an implicit theme of this chapter—that we face greater danger of treating religion as sui generis than not taking it seriously enough. I end with some concluding words concerning the “old wine in new bottles” character of much of the paradigm-change literature on religion and international relations theory.

The last decade has seen a growing body of scholarship that accuses international relations theory, whether directly or indirectly, of suffering from a “secularist bias.” My reading of relevant literature suggests that we can distinguish four distinct, if sometimes overlapping, lines of criticism. In order to adequately grapple with the place of religion in international relations, scholars argue, we must:

• Avoid treating material forces as more important than meanings, ideas, and beliefs;

• Abandon state-centric accounts of world politics that ignore the importance of non-state religious actors;

• Eschew secularist understandings of “religion” and “politics” as distinctive zones of activity; and

• Rethink our tendency to analyze religion primarily in terms of categories such as preferences, norms, and identities.³

Not a few scholars charge that the materialist bias of many international relations theoretical traditions renders them unsuited to understanding religious phenomena. If we accord causal priority to material factors—such as the military capabilities of states, economic interests, and so forth—then we immediately downplay the importance of symbols, meanings, and, for believers, matters of the spirit that comprise religious worldviews and motivations. Realists, for example, tend to argue that religious factors only matter at the margins; that leaders of states—and other political elites—deploy religious claims to mask or forward their self-interested pursuit of wealth, power, and status; and that religion is, in fact, epiphenomenal to the real drivers of international political processes.⁴

To the extent that liberals privilege economic interests and adopt a narrow understanding of social action as the product of rational, self-interested utility maximization, they similarly cannot adequately theorize religious phenomena. And Marxist accounts, critics contend, also raise problems in that they treat religion as a form of false consciousness epiphenomenal to class politics and the workings of modes of production.⁵ As Hurd argues, “Conventional understandings of international relations, focused on material capabilities and strategic interaction, exclude from the start the possibility that religion could be a fundamental organizing force in the international system” (Hurd, 2008, 1).

Many of the most important religious actors in world politics are non-state in character. Al-Qaeda and nonviolent Islamic revivalist movements, Falun Gong, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Evangelical churches, the Church of Scientology, and a host of Christian missionary movements all operate within and across state boundaries. The Catholic Church has its own state, controls a transnational organization, and acts as an interest group in many political communities. Religious organizations and movements participate in the formulation of state policies through various routine and contentious activities, including lobbying officials, electing representatives, sitting on administrative bodies, mobilizing for protest, and even wielding violence.⁶

It follows that international relations theories that focus on states as the only, or at least primary, actors of significance in world politics erase religious forces from the map. Adopting a weaker form of state-centrism—one that rejects that treatment of states as unitary actors and considers how their domestic politics profoundly shapes their behavior—fails to solve this problem, insofar as religious norms, identities, values, interest groups, and societal actors merely become influences on state foreign policy. Such a blinkered framework, the argument goes, precludes us from locating religious forces, actors, and movements as part of the texture of international politics itself. Thus, international relations scholars downplay the influence of religious forces at the international and transnational level.⁷

State-centrism and materialism comprise, arguably, symptoms of a broader secularist bias in international relations theory. International relations scholars, according to this line of criticism, build a distinction between religion and politics into their theories, insofar as they treat the two as discrete phenomena that, under normal circumstances, designate separate zones of activity. But this line of thought stems from Enlightenment ideology, particularly in its secularist offshoots; it reflects a concerted effort to take religion out of the “public” sphere and relegate it to the “private” realm of personal convictions and practices.

This line of argument implies that, for example, the very act of defining some variables as “religious” and others as “political” may lead us to underestimate the significance of religious forces in international politics. We must also be careful about the way these categories lead us to describe religion as acting upon politics, as if the “natural” condition of politics is to be free from religious influence. Instead of allowing this distinction to inflect our analysis of religious phenomena, critics contend, we must treat the boundary between religion and politics as variable, contested, and contingent: in other words, as socially constructed.

The boundary itself, it follows, often comprises the relevant focus of scholarship on religion and international relations. Scholars should study the processes that sustain, transform, or reconfigure the relationship between religion and politics across time and space (Hallward 2008, 2, 4–6). In this light, the so-called resurgence of religion reveals itself not as an eruption of religiosity, but as “a series of challenges to the fundamental assumptions that sustain particular authoritative secularist settlements” (Hurd 2008, 143).⁸

Many of the scholars who best articulate the aforementioned secularist bias in international relations theory find fault with attempts to view religion primarily as a source of individual preferences and input into strategic choices. Kubálková, for example, criticizes “mainstream or soft constructivist” scholars for being “prepared to consider ideas, including religious ideas, and changing identities and state interests,” but subordinating them to “the rational choice theory” (Kubálková 2000, 677). Contemporary rational choice methodologies, critics note, are rooted in Renaissance, liberal, and Enlightenment arguments concerning the necessity of taming passions—notably, religious passions—through interests. The rational, self-interested pursuit of worldly ends therefore entails a normatively laden set of claims about what politics should and should not entail.

Many of the international relations scholars who advance these claims rely, therefore, on analyzing religion as a set of norms, a discourse, or a basis of individual and group identity. But some argue against applying those categories to religious phenomena. One line of argument holds that religious orientations—unlike, for example, political ideologies—suffuse their adherents’ entire lifeworlds. As Thomas argues, “What is distinctive about [religious non-state actors] … stems from the way religion is rooted in and constitutive of particular kinds of faith communities” (Thomas 2005, 98). Religion cannot be reduced to an idea, or even a social identity, that individuals adopt or discard with relative ease. Religious orientations produce fundamental categories of knowledge and practice that operate at a much “deeper” or “thicker” level than, for example, identification with a particular political party or ethnic group.

Mitchell, in contrast, agrees that many of these terms are themselves deeply inflected by secularist bias, but offers a different kind of objection. Writing in the idiom of Western Christianity, he argues that “to speak of ‘religious values’ [and here we might substitute ‘norms’ as used in international relations theory] is to speak incoherently, since a ‘value’ is something that a man has as his own.” Religious experience, however, looks towards the transcendent, and “God is the Author of all things. … ‘Value’ is affirmative with respect to man; religious experience is deferential with respect to God” (2007, 356). The category “identity,” moreover, implies an understanding of politics in which religion is merely a marker of a role in the world, a characteristic of individuals in their relation to one another. The terms “preference,” “choice,” “value,” and “identity,” argues Mitchell, “were generated to understand specific problems. As new problems arise, they must be seen as the historically contingent terms that they are, so that more adequate terms can be developed” (359).

Indeed, we might argue that most of the language used by international relations scholars who accuse the field of a secular bias—concerning ideas, identities, norms, and discourses—shapes our attempts to theorize religion with assumptions born from heuristics incompatible with important religious challenges to contemporary secularisms. It is not immediately clear why, if we accept other charges of secularist bias, we should be comfortable treating religion as another manifestation of identity politics, of the struggle over values and norms, or understanding it through post-structuralist categories such as “discursive configurations” that deny the stable relationship of signs and signifieds. As Gregory argues:

[I]f the entire premise of a study on the Eucharist in the late Middle Ages is that it was “constructed as a symbol,” and that religion is reducible to culture and “all culture, all meaning can usefully be studied as a language through its salient symbols,” then one will necessarily miss the meaning of transubstantiated host for late-medieval people high and low, clergy and laity, according to whom the Eucharist was not merely symbolic. (Gregory 2006, 143)

TESTING THESE CRITICISMS: CAN MAINSTREAM INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY SURVIVE THE PROTESTANT REFORMATIONS?

If mainstream international relations theories falter in the face of contemporary religious forces, then we should have particular difficulty using their tool kits to make sense of the impact of the Protestant Reformations on early modern Europe. Not only did the international relations of the period take place in a pre-secular environment, but the Reformations gave rise to a number of non-state religious movements whose activities shifted the European balance of power.

The Reformations led, for example, to a series of military conflicts in the German Empire that, by the middle of the sixteenth century, forced Charles of Habsburg—ruler not only of the empire but also of a hodgepodge of dynastic holdings including Castile, Aragon-Catalonia, the Netherlands, and parts of Italy—to abdicate and divide his holdings between his son, Philip II of Spain, and his brother, Ferdinand, founder of the “Austrian” branch of the Habsburg dynasty. Not long afterwards, the spread of Calvinism plunged France into the decades-long Wars of Religion and sparked the Dutch Revolt, an uprising in the Netherlands that eventually mutated into an interstate war between the Dutch Republic and its erstwhile Spanish Habsburg rulers. Another series of religious conflicts in the Empire culminated in the 1618–1648 Thirty Years’ War, which marked the end of Spanish Habsburg hegemony in Europe.

A variety of other reasons suggest that the Reformations era should be a particularly “easy” case for validating the challenges associated with religion and international relations theory. Religious claims and narratives played a major role in the legitimation of early modern authority, whether in the Holy Roman Empire, the French monarchy, or elsewhere. The papacy, for example, had the power to place monarchs under interdict—an act that, when exercised, created significant political difficulties for its targets. Individuals took oaths extremely seriously, as violating them without appropriate dispensation threatened the immortality of their souls. Obedience to temporal authorities was justified in profoundly religious terms. And so on and so forth.⁹ Indeed, many who accuse modern international relations theory of having secularist bias invoke early modern Europe as an example of a pre-secular political order.¹⁰

Can we provide adequate explanations for the international politics of the early modern era that focus on the distribution of military capabilities or other putatively “material” factors? In some respects, such explanatory frameworks fare better than we might expect. Consider realist interpretations of the Reformations period, which focus on dynamics associated with balance-of-power politics and the rise and decline of hegemonic orders. Realists point to two processes in particular: First, increasing Habsburg power threatened other actors in Europe, such as the rulers of France and those German princes seeking to consolidate and expand their political autonomy. Second, Charles V and his Spanish Habsburg successors suffered from conventional problems of hegemonic overextension and decline in the face of strategic commitments that exceeded their underlying resources (Gilpin 1981, 120–121). Religion, in this interpretation, played at best a secondary role in the decline of Habsburg hegemony and the power-political struggles of the period.

We can, in fact, find a great deal of evidence that supports downplaying religious forces. Protestant German princes balanced with Catholic French kings against the Habsburgs. Philip II intervened in the French Wars of Religion to keep his primary rival politically fragmented, but failed to provide sufficient support to French Catholic parties to resolve the conflicts in their favor. Elizabeth Tudor initially resisted appeals from Protestants to support co-confessionals in the Netherlands against their Spanish overlords. She only swung decisively against Spain when power-political and economic considerations recommended English intervention in the conflict. The Thirty Years’ War saw Protestants and Catholics fighting alongside one another in the various armies that clashed across Germany. And so on.¹¹

In this reading, Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thus demonstrates how, as Waltz puts it, through “all of the changes in boundaries, of social, economic, and political form, of military and economic activity[,] the substance and style of international politics remains strikingly constant” (Waltz 1986, 329).¹² Realism, properly understood, does not exclude the role of nonmaterial factors in shaping alliances, decisions to support opposition movements in other polities, or leading actors to adopt policies inconsistent with a “pure” form of realpolitik. One could also argue, quite plausibly, that the Habsburg experience reflects, in Gilpin’s terms, how the “fundamental problem of international relations in the contemporary world is the problem of peaceful adjustment to the consequences of uneven growth or power among states, just as it was in the past” (Gilpin 1981, 230).

Realism, of course, comprises only one variation on the materialist theme. A broader materialist bias might lead us to conclude that if we scratch the surface of apparently religious motivations and forces, we find economic and other materialist interests. Religion is, in this way, epiphenomenal to political outcomes. Such claims are not at all uncommon in analysis of the Reformations era. Over the last two decades, however, a number of historians have placed great emphasis on the religious character of rule, conflict, and resistance in the period. In doing so, they have actively contested what was the dominant trend in historical interpretations of the period: to treat political, economic, and class interests as much more important than autonomous religious forces. Unsurprisingly, many of those international relations theorists who consider religion a significant force in the period draw on such recent scholarship.¹³

It isn’t difficult to understand why many historians downplayed, and continue to deemphasize, the significance of nonreligious forces. Most rebellions in early modern Europe were, at their heart, disputes over taxes, disagreements about rights and privileges, conflicts over the balance between central authority and local autonomy, rivalries between court factions, struggles over succession, or some combination of all five. Tabulating the number of these issues at stake, in fact, provides a decent indicator of the likely severity of any given conflict. The more of them in play, the more destructive and prolonged the struggle.

Some combination of these disputes were almost invariably present in the “religious” civil wars of the period, whether in Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, or elsewhere. The French Wars of Religion, for example, overlaid a confessional dispute on a struggle for influence among court factions; the untimely death of Henry II and his rapid succession by two young and inexperienced sons led to high-stakes conflict between rival noble families, most notably the Guise and the Bourbons. Factional struggles for influence in the government of the Netherlands, disputes over taxation, and fears of Spanish encroachment on local privileges played major roles in the Dutch Revolt. Hence, we do not need to stretch matters much to characterize most of the “religious” conflicts within early modern polities as tax revolts or struggles for the control of government. Most of the interstate wars involving confessional differences involved, for their part, preexisting dynastic rivalries and dynastic claims.

But we also confront strong evidence against those who would accord overwhelming weight to power-political and material forces. The French Wars of Religion owed much of their intensity and intractability to the presence of religious disputes. Foreign princes and religious authorities intervened, either directly or indirectly, to support their co-confessionals. Religious affiliations motivated burghers and other ordinary people to commit their money and their lives to the cause of noble factions whose rivalries they usually greeted with indifference (Kingdon 1967; Parrow 1993, 9; Wood 1996, 5; Elliott 2000, 74–75).

Arguments over the status of the Eucharist between Heinrich Zwingli and Martin Luther nearly doomed the emergence of a German Protestant alliance; only Zwingli’s death and a significant growth in the threat posed by Habsburg power to the survival of Protestantism broke the deadlock (Dueck 1982; Christensen 1984). German Protestant princes, of course, allied with Catholic France against Charles. Yet their concerns about French persecution of Protestants often shaped their relations with France, even precluding an alliance at inopportune times. Confessional concerns led the Spanish, for their part, to delay critical support for French Huguenot rebels during the Thirty Years’ War. The major political pressure on Elizabeth Tudor to support the Dutch emanated from hard-line supporters of the Reformation; without such pressure, support for the Dutch might have been a nonissue (Parker 1977). In fact, the earlier alliance between Madrid and London might have still been in force.

Although Catholics fought on both sides of the Dutch Revolt, religion drove many of the dynamics of the conflict. Persecution of Reformation movements inevitably reduced local autonomy in the Low Countries. It not only went against the grain of local norms, but also required reorganizing the existing Ecclesiastical system in ways that cut out local interests (Nierop 2001). Indeed, as Antonio Ortíz argues, “but for the indignation of Philip II at the excesses of the Calvinists the established order might have been maintained indefinitely in the Netherlands; it was the Calvinists, albeit a minority, who succeeded in giving coherence to the resistance of those who were initially lukewarm.” The conflicts in the Netherlands “were not exclusively religious, but it is unlikely they would have broken out if there had not been religious disaffection. Catholics and Protestants were at one in their indignation at the new taxes and the presence of foreign troops, but it was the Protestants who first resorted to arms” (Ortíz 1971 73–74).

Indeed, religious disputes ultimately destroyed the unity of the revolt. Many moderate Catholics defected to the Habsburgs in reaction to acts of iconoclasm, religious persecution, and a number of urban coups carried out by Calvinist rebels. Calvinism provided the backbone of the organization and resources for revolt; it also made surrender a difficult proposition for those towns where Calvinists had put down significant institutional roots. In the end, the question of toleration—on both Catholic and Calvinist sides—prevented the kind of negotiated settlement to the revolt that might have left Habsburg sovereignty intact (Rowen 1972, 42; Parker 1977, 195; Israel 1995, 183–184).

What should we do in the face of such discrepant evidence? We might argue that religious forces mattered enough that a focus on material interests and capabilities still leads us to unacceptably downplay the role of religion. We might, alternatively, conclude that the existence of a great deal of realist-style power politics in the period provides some support for realism’s claims about fundamental continuities in the texture of international politics. In fact, the importance of power-political calculations despite the pre-secular and religiously inflamed character of the Reformations era arguably provides rather strong evidence against the need for a religion-inspired paradigm shift in international relations theory.

However, as I will argue later on, we should avoid this particular debate altogether. It reflects a basic misconception: that the significance of religion should be evaluated by comparing the relative importance of material and ideational factors in any particular outcome. It also tests the relative importance of these factors by means of questionable assumptions about the relationship between ideas and human behavior.

Early modern Europe provides, at first glance, convincing evidence for the limitations of state-centric international relations theory in the face of religious forces. The period witnessed a spread of non-state religious movements—which modern scholars would describe as “subnational” and “transnational”—that brought about shifts in the European balance of power.

Consider the Netherlands during the sixteenth century. There, Dutch Calvinists operated as part of a network of transregional and trans-state members of the Reformed Church and other Protestant groups. The network included not only Geneva, the base of the Reformed Church, but also French Huguenots, English sympathizers, and German princes. Geneva provided financial and military aid to co-confessionals in the Netherlands and France, and it negotiated loans and agitated for external intervention on their behalf. These linkages proved key to the success of the revolt, allowing it to escape defeat at critical moments and generally to maintain sufficient revenue and manpower to combat the superior resources of the Spanish monarchy. Furthermore, many of the conflicts engendered by the Reformations involved not simply non-state actors, but individuals and factions embedded within the organs of early modern European states. In other words, state actors and different levels of governance fought against one another.¹⁴

A great deal hinges, however, on what we actually mean by state-centrism. It should be pretty obvious that claims along the lines of “only states matter” or “states should be treated as unitary actors” falter when dealing with the Reformations—and, arguably, with the contemporary period as well. But weaker forms of state-centrism hold up a good deal better, such as the notion that states represent the most significant repositories of power. In the Reformations era, many major religious conflicts involved a mixture of interstate conflict and struggles within composite states for control over governance—whether over the whole polity or a segment thereof (Zagorin 1982). Indeed, one of the most successful rebellions, that of the Dutch, led to the creation of a new state. Even before the widespread recognition of the Dutch Republic by dynastic rulers, Holland and Zeeland—among others—managed to hold off the Spanish Habsburgs because they functioned as states in the sense usually understood by international relations theorists: they raised armies, floated debt, and regulated internal violence.¹⁵

In fact, one could make a strong case for applying Mearsheimer’s comments about contemporary violent religious transnational movements to the early modern period: “My theory and realist theories don’t have much to say about transnational actors,” but their activities “will be played out in the state arena and, therefore, all of the Realist [sic] logic about state behavior will have a significant effect on,” for example, “how the war on terrorism is fought” (Mearsheimer 2002). The decisions of rulers about which confession to adopt, which movements to support, and how far to crack down on the spread of heterodox beliefs arguably determined the fate of the Reformations. How important were these decisions? In the absence of external or state support, not a single conflict centering around a Protestant-Catholic struggle resulted in a Protestant victory. Territories with a significant Protestant population that remained under the control of Catholic rulers—such as Bohemia, Hungary, and parts of France—ultimately succumbed to counter-reformation (te Brake 1998).

But there’s a more profound way in which I find myself troubled by criticisms of state-centric frameworks. I find it difficult to make sense of the impact of non-state actors during the Reformations without placing the structure of early modern states at the center of analysis. Some reflections on the conflicts that led to Charles of Habsburg’s defeat in Germany illustrate this point.

The German Empire comprised an extremely decentralized composite political community, one involving important organs of federative governance, such as that of the emperor and the Imperial Diet, with some degree of rulemaking and enforcement capability. Relatively uniform shared rights and privileges among members of the same orders—electors, princes, imperial cities, and the like—coexisted with heterogeneous contracts between them and the empire. Various leagues and other “self-help” arrangements within Germany, such as the Swabian League (which collapsed under the strain of religious conflict), created additional variations in formal and informal relations. Corporate and individual actors such as princes, magistrates, and the regional leagues occupied various intermediary positions between the emperor and his subjects (Wilson 1999).

In some respects, the general parameters of German religious politics in the first half of the sixteenth century shared important features with later politics in the Netherlands. In both cases, religious movements and orientations created networks that often crossed key divisions within composite polities—those of class and region, as well as those within distinctive regions. Rulers of early modern European states normally contained and suppressed resistance by exploiting these divisions.

As te Brake argues, “The fact is that the political bargains by which dynastic princes typically constructed their composite states created local privileges that distinguished one piece of the composite from another” (te Brake 1998, 28). The chances of serious resistance increased when rulers faced cross-class and cross-regional mobilization, and when movements received indirect or direct support from external actors (Elliott 1970, 112; Zagorin 1982; Koenigsberger 1986, 164). The spread of Reformation religious movements produced these conditions in both the German Empire and the Netherlands. In the German Empire, for example, Charles met defeat at the hands of an alliance of Protestant towns and princes; this coalition brought together individuals and political communities that generally disagreed with one another more than with their emperor (Nexon 2009, chap. 5).

Some might argue that this kind of argument—which focuses on the way that state institutions structure political relations—resembles the ones associated with state-centric theories. I agree. It has more in common with historical institutionalist accounts than with standard variants of state-centrism in international relations theory (Katznelson 1997; Thielen 1999). But the fact remains that the structure and organization of early modern European states explains a great deal about why the spread of transnational religious movements led to conflict, territorial adjustments, and changes in the European distribution of power.¹⁶ Indeed, much of the structure of the early modern “international system” can be understood as emerging from the organization of the states that resided within it (Nexon 2009, chaps. 2–4).

Where does this leave us? We have confronted evidence for and against state-centrism. Attention to religious forces certainly rules out the most blunt forms of state-centrism. Yet these forms of state-centrism enjoy virtually no support in contemporary international relations theory, let alone among those who consider themselves realists.¹⁷ Once again, I submit, the argument that state-centric approaches cannot be effectively applied to religion hints at underlying problems with the common ways of framing such debates.

Does drawing a distinction between religion and politics necessarily marginalize religion by rendering it external to our disciplinary object of analysis, i.e., politics? In some respects it does. We frame arguments in terms that replicate secularist assumptions about religion: religion “impinges upon,” “shapes,” or “intersects” with political phenomena. Even some proponents of “bringing religion into international relations” adopt this framework, arguing that “the key is to focus … on what religion … does,” and that we should “stress what role religion plays in society.” But even such scholars admit that it can be difficult to draw the line between religion and politics (as well as culture and society): “the fact that [religion] is sometimes a tool and sometimes an autonomous force blurs the line between religion and other social and political forces” (Fox and Sandler 2006, 176, 177).

Evidence from the Reformations era reinforces the socially and historically contingent nature of the distinction between religion and politics. Most actors in the period did not differentiate between the two spheres of action, as should be clear from Protestant debates over the formation of a defensive alliance in Germany (discussed earlier), as well as the myriad ways in which questions of taxation, central authority, and other supposedly “political” matters were caught up in religious claims and counterclaims. Indeed, even the so-called politique position during the French Wars of Religion did not amount to a kind of proto-secularism (Holt 1995, 109).¹⁸ As Roelker notes, the politiques believed that “in the circumstances of civil war, it was preferable to make temporary concessions on confessional uniformity rather than to suffer the destruction of the national community” (Roelker 1996, 238). The key debate centered upon whether some toleration of religious dissent best served the objective of building a just, peaceful, and unified Christian social order, rather than a reliance on violence and coercion.¹⁹

The frequent misinterpretation of the politique position demonstrates the dangers of a secular bias concerning the distinction between religion and politics. Hall, for example, seeks to explain how France could violate its Catholic “corporate identity” by supporting Protestant powers against the Habsburgs. His answer is that the victory of religious pragmatists, combined with the severity of religious violence in France, meant that France “excised religious identity,” at least in a comparative sense, “from its collective identity,” and thus “emerged into the thoroughly modern era a bit earlier than the rest of Europe, as indicated by the earlier decoupling of religious identity from French foreign policy” (Hall 1999, 57–58).

French Catholic devouts, in fact, voiced opposition to Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg policies on the grounds that they undermined the Catholic cause. They accused him of adopting politique and Machiavellian principles of statecraft. But Richelieu, in turn, justified his policies on the grounds that they would best serve the long-term interests of the Catholic cause. Richelieu’s Castilian counterpart, the Count-Duke Olivares, himself authorized support for French Protestant rebels in order to weaken the Bourbon cause. True, he convened a junta of theologians to justify his actions, but the rationales they provided were strikingly similar to those embraced by Richelieu (Elliott 1984, 125–127).²⁰ As Elliott remarks, “It seems necessary … to discard any straightforward picture of a Spanish foreign policy dictated by purely confessional considerations and a French foreign policy operating in conformity with the unvarnished requirements of raison d’état.” The fact that France crossed confessional lines far more systematically than the Spanish, he concludes, was because they had more opportunities to do so in support of their strategic goals (Elliott 1984, 127).

But why isn’t this evidence in favor of a trans-historical distinction between religion and politics? One might argue, with some justification, that French and Spanish authorities provided rationales for supporting actors from opposing confessions that were religious-political in character; since defense of dynastic interests also amounted to a religious imperative, theological considerations recommended, under certain circumstances, in favor of assistance to heretics and infidels. In other words, they approached the decision whether to support heretics not just in terms of expediency, but whether doing so was “acceptable to God.” And that question, rather than a “modern” appeal to the interests of the state qua state, framed subsequent debate.

However, I do see problems with this line of argument. If we want to ask specific questions about contestation over the boundary between religion and politics, then we obviously cannot assume a fixed relationship between the two (Hallward 2008). But if we don’t assume such a fixed relationship, than what exactly do we need to change about contemporary international relations theory? I suppose, as I noted with respect to French and Spanish policy during the Reformations, that realists (or anyone else) should be wary of arguing that evidence of power-political behavior cuts against the significance of religious forces. But here we are back to the same concern raised by the materialist bias claim: that we too readily downplay the importance of religion. The obvious solution, then, is for us to be on our guard against doing so.

To put it another way, an analyst suffering from a strong secularist bias on these issues might wrongly conclude that conflicts over taxation in early modern Europe were political rather than religious. But a scholar overly concerned about displaying symptoms of secularist bias might have difficulty recognizing that the Reformations often injected high-stakes religious disputes into conflicts over taxation—and therefore produced an extremely combustible admixture of the sacred and the profane.

The fourth set of criticisms are much more serious than the ones we have looked at so far.²¹ As I noted when I introduced them, they apply even to the work of some of the most prominent critics of the field’s supposed secular bias. Insofar as such critics embrace, for example, linguistic-turn and identity-centric frameworks for making sense of religion, they arguably provide alternatives no more or less tainted by secularist ideologies than strategic-choice approaches. All of these forms of analysis fail, as Mitchell argues, to take religious experience seriously.²²

Many of the contexts in which we study religion, however, do not require us to understand the nature of religious experience. They involve the translation of religious experience into the kinds of activities we associate (rightly or wrongly) with politics. I would never claim to understand, for example, how Francis I experienced religion. But I feel confident that I can make sense of the elaborate steps he took to negate his oath in support of a punitive treaty dictated by Charles V after the 1525 French defeat in Italy. Francis feared that failing to do so would condemn his soul to hell. Moreover, the political (or, if you prefer, “religious-political”) significance of his actions depended not one whit on Francis’s experience of religion: given that he intended to nullify the treaty the moment he returned to France, it was rather prudent of him to find a way to justify his future actions to his subjects and to the church (Knecht 1996, 35–38).

As Wilcox and colleagues argue, “Religion is not simply a set of preferences, choices, values, or identities,” but religion does shape, inform, produce, and otherwise translate into preferences, choices, values, and identities (2008, 878). The problem rests less on applying particular (possibly anachronistic) frameworks to understanding religion than it does on reducing the causal and constitutive role of religious forces to a particular social-scientific heuristic.

A critical evaluation of the secular bias literature leads, I believe, to a number of conclusions about the status of religion in international relations theory. Most important, I think, is the notion that religion cannot be reduced to preferences, choices, values, and identities. Religion not only inflects preferences, choices, values, and identities, but also manifests itself in habits, material practices, and styles of argument. Thus, we need to be careful about what frameworks we use to assess the influence of religion on global politics.

We should often approach religion as something akin to a discursive context.²³ Rather than supply efficient causes of behavior, religion creates conditions of possibility for action. This means that we are unlikely to make much progress if we attempt to “test” whether, for example, material interests or religious ideas explain particular outcomes.

This point deserves some elaboration. I have already noted how the Reformations era witnessed a wide range of behaviors with respect to religious, economic, and power-political aims. Even individual rulers, officials, nobles, theologians, and ordinary people might privilege one set of interests at a particular moment, then another at the next. Such variation complicates attempts to use the standard logic of appropriateness-logic of consequences framework that many international relations theorists use to evaluate claims made by constructivists, realists, rationalists, and proponents of other broad approaches. This framework holds that norms and identities matter to the extent that actors are willing to pursue them even in the face of deleterious consequences (Elster 1989; March and Olsen 1998). Thus, we might see the refusal of German princes to form a defensive alliance due to theological disputes as evidence of the importance of religious norms; after all, it left them vulnerable to pro-Catholic forces.²⁴ But periods of French support for German Protestants, which involved sacrificing confessional concerns in order to weaken Habsburg power, would provide evidence that “necessity and reason of state trump morality and ethics when those values conflict” (Schweller and Wohlforth 2000, 69). Similarly, situations in which actors placed economic considerations—overtaxation, trade, and so forth—over confessional ones would also constitute evidence against the constructivist position and, more broadly, the significance of religious forces.²⁵

At one level, this kind of reasoning makes perfect sense: the presence of conflicting behavior simply represents variation in individual preferences and level of commitment to religious concerns. Some individuals are just more “religious” than others, and even those individuals face disparate constraints and opportunities for realizing their aims and values at any given moment. At another level, though, it creates real difficulties. It may lead us to underplay the importance of religious forces, or to treat religion as an overly deterministic source of human behavior.

Recall Francis I’s repudiation of his treaty with Charles V, Richelieu’s justifications for supporting Protestants, and Olivares’s decision to convene a council to rule on the appropriateness of supporting Huguenot rebels against France. It isn’t so much that necessity and reason of state trumped ethics in such cases, but that religious beliefs proved flexible enough to accommodate a range of actions—most of which were also seen as religious imperatives. But more striking, I think, are the ways in which theologians adjusted their views on the right to resist duly constituted authority. Lutherans and Calvinists, in particular, shifted their positions in light of changing circumstances. But they always felt compelled to couch their positions, at least in part, in terms of religious principles. Religious beliefs also never provided unlimited flexibility for participants in these debates; they did not allow, for instance, for resistance to a rightful prince on just any grounds.²⁶ And they also proved quite sticky, such that the lag between religious sanction for resistance and the onset of civil conflict might reduce the scope and chances of successful mobilization against rulers.

But this is exactly what we should expect. Religious orientations supply ways of apprehending the world, which, in turn, constitute conditions of possibility for social action. Actors operating within a particular set of religious frameworks have a limited number of scripts, rhetorical commonplaces, and styles of reasoning available to them. Religious beliefs, experiences, and frameworks draw boundaries, however blurred, around what constitutes acceptable arguments and warrants.²⁷

Thus, in early modern Europe, the same basic religious experiences suggested, at one time, obedience to temporal authority and, at other times, resistance to rulers unwilling to accommodate confessional concerns. It isn’t so much that actors deployed these resources in purely instrumental terms—although sometimes they did—but that they combined and recombined them in the face of shifting circumstances. In many respects, John Shotter’s understanding of nationalism applies well to religion: as a “way for people to argue about who and what they are, or might be. And the very fact of their arguing about it sustains their form of [religion] in existence” (Shotter 1993, 201). As such, although it is far more than a source of identity, preferences, and norms, religion also manifests itself in a variety of different sources of behavior.

Unfortunately, the way of thinking about religion that I just outlined remains overly limited in at least one crucial respect: it emphasizes the cultural content of religion. We often conceptualize religion as something solely in the realm of ideas—or of the spirit, if you will—and that’s one reason we test its significance against that of material forces.²⁸ But religion often manifests itself in terms of how it patterns social relations. In that sense, religious phenomena have a dimension of “form” as well as “content,” and religion implicates social relations that take forms quite familiar to international relations theorists.

We often identify Georg Simmel with one of the stronger versions of this kind of claim. As he argues, “In any given social phenomenon, content and societal form constitute one reality” (Simmel 1971, 25). But our ability to extrude, at least analytically, content from form allows us to abstract general patterns that obtain despite variations in constitutive ideas and beliefs. “Superiority, subordination, competition, division of labor, formation of parties … and innumerable similar features are found in the state as well as in a religious community, in a band of conspirators as in an economic association, in an art school as in a family. However diverse the interests that give rise to these sociations, the forms in which the interests are realized are identical (Simmel 1971, 26).

Although the example is a bit simplistic, recall one of the reasons the Reformations led to such significant political upheaval in early modern Europe: some of the movements it generated crossed the boundaries of composite polities and their constitutive segments, while linking together otherwise adversarial class and status groups. In other words, it produced broad-based transnational movements. These movement are comparable to both secular and religious ones found in other times and places; some even had underground cells, propagandists, and other features of what Koeningsberger calls “revolutionary parties” (Koenigsberger 1955; Nexon 2006). Others displayed patterns consistent with other well-rehearsed forms of collective mobilization (te Brake 1998). We can make sense of much of their impact on patterns of resistance and rule in early modern Europe by analyzing only their formal properties, rather than focusing on the specific content of their ideas.²⁹

Indeed, while international relations scholars need to take religion seriously, they should also be careful about treating religious phenomena as sui generis. We most often study religion in settings where it supplies part of the cultural content of movements, political parties, insurgencies, states, and other phenomena well known, if not always well theorized, by scholars of international relations. There’s no reason to suppose the politics and dynamics of those phenomena will be so profoundly different from their secular cousins as to render the two noncomparable. At least, that is my reading of how best to understand the impact of the Protestant Reformations on early modern European political relations.

I do not mean to suggest that religious content makes no difference whatsoever; indeed, my sense is that much of what interests us concerns whether (and how) religious claims and contexts intersect with more general dynamics to trigger differing processes or produce different outcomes. It would also be a mistake to view religion as a purely “cultural” phenomenon. Religious practices, institutions, and activities have material properties; they involve exchange, social performances, and so on. In consequence, shoehorning religion into the “ideas” side of the material/ideal debate unacceptably restricts our ability to analyze the impact of religious forces on world politics.

But, yet again, we are ultimately talking about a broader set of problems with contemporary international relations theory. On the one hand, we tend to conflate social processes with cultural ones. Much of the research that goes on under the name of constructivism, for example, drops the “social” from “social construction” in favor of studying the impact of symbols and meanings on world politics, i.e., the causal and constitutive role of culture. On the other hand, we tend to describe social phenomena as material. For example, economic exchange and extraction is not a material process, but a social one. Most of the objective and material economic interests studied in contemporary political economy, for example, stem from where actors are situated in trade and production networks, that is, their social location.

The net effect is that we focus our energies on a putative material/ideal dichotomy and mostly ignore the relationship between the social and the cultural. As a consequence, we risk rendering religion overly mysterious, when much of what we study under the rubric of “the impact of religion on world politics” involves rather familiar forms of social organization.

The field has long-standing traditions of complaining about state-centrism and about the field’s preference for material explanations over ideational ones.³⁰ Even criticisms of the religion-politics distinction—let alone the use of specific modes of analysis for assessing the impact of religion on world politics—echo larger debates between, for instance, so-called rationalists and constructivists. Claims concerning the historical specificity of the religion/politics distinction, for example, bear more than a passing resemblance to well-worn criticisms of international relations scholars for smuggling historically specific conceptions of state sovereignty into their theoretical frameworks.³¹

Thus, the challenge posed by religion to the study of international relations turns out to be, more or less, exactly comparable to that supposedly produced by the end of the Cold War and processes of globalization, insofar as the resurgence of religion (or, at least, the field’s renewed attention to religion) provides another opportunity to score the same basic points in ongoing disciplinary debates. None of this suggests that we should reject secular bias arguments out of hand. Rather, we need to be sensitive to the very real risk that religion becomes yet another vehicle for advancing the agenda of, variously, constructivists, post-structuralists, interpretivists, and adherents to other “dissident” positions in the field.³²

There is, of course, nothing wrong with arguing that developments in the field or in world politics provide warrants for one’s preferred analytic framework. That is, in essence, what I did in the preceding section. But, at the end of the day, none of these putative challenges suggest much that is special about religion, and we should not, based upon them, elevate religion to the next great challenge facing some aggregated body of approaches called “international relations theory.” Indeed, if our brief forays into the Reformations era elucidate anything, it is that fetishizing religion is as much a danger as not taking it seriously enough.

1. The growing availability of funding for grants and institutes related to religion and politics likely played some role in their conversions.

2. I should note that such uses of the term paradigm shift usually obscure more than they reveal. The issues at stake here are less tendentious than those associated with paradigm shifts of the sort analyzed by philosophers of science (see Jackson and Nexon, 2009).

3. See, for example, Kubálková 2000; Lautsen and Wæver 2000; Thomas 2000; Hatzopoulos and Petito 2003; Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006; Mitchell 2007; Hallward 2008; Hurd 2008.

5. These approaches, Hurd argues, reach this conclusion because they start from secularist premises. See Hurd 2008, 31–32, and my discussion in this chapter.

9. See, in general, Elton 1964; Grimm 1965; Lambert 1977; Tracy 1999; Kamen 2000; Gregory 2006, 143–145.

11. See, for example, Parker 1977; Elliott 1984; Knecht 1989; Elliott 2000; Bonney 2002.

12. See also Mearsheimer 2001, 365. Although Mearsheimer believes that anarchy inclines states to maximize power, and thus sees regional hegemony rather than balances of power as the norm in world politics, his theoretical architecture tracks closely to that found in conventional structural-realist approaches.

15. Indeed, their experience in these activities while under Habsburg rule contributed greatly to the viability of the revolt. See Tracy 1985; Tracy 1990.

16. It also helps explain their spread in the first place, but that’s another matter entirely.

17. As William Brenner notes, even “within the realist research program there is a grudging acknowledgement of the increasing importance of nonstate actors,” (Brenner 2006, 504). And the dominant forms of realism—neoclassical and defensive—place a great deal of emphasis on domestic politics and domestic structures. See, for example, Snyder 1991; Rose 1998; Snyder 2000; Schweller 2006.

19. For discussions, see Holt 1986: 76–85; Bettinson 1989; Beame 1993; Holt 1995, 108–109, 168–169; Roelker 1996, 326–328. For the standard view of the politiques, see Philpott 2000; Philpott 2001.

21. The forms of secularist bias we have explored cut much less deeply than some of their advocates imply. The first two comprise sins of omission rather than of commission: many international relations theorists habitually focus on variables and actors that lead them to neglect the significance of religious phenomena. Criticisms of the religion-politics distinction, in contrast, tackle an apparent sin of commission. But, as we have seen, the main implication of this assumption is the same as for other forms of secularist bias: it facilitates relegating religious phenomena to second-class status in international relations theory. The ultimate correctives, as best I can tell, are to take religion more seriously, recognize that politics and religion need not be distinctive arenas of practice, and so forth.

22. Mitchell admits that his arguments work best in the context of specific Protestant understandings of religious experience. See Mitchell 2008, 883.

24. As is usually the case, this example is complicated by the existence of a variety of factors, some of them decidedly profane, that also worked against the alliance.

25. One contemporary variant of this kind of argument dismisses the importance of ethnic identity in civil conflicts and argues, based on large-n studies, that economic factors provide one of the best predictors of intrastate conflict. See Fearon and Laitin 2003.

26. For discussions, see Sutherland 1967; Shoenberger 1977; Shoenberger 1979; Knecht 1989; Parrow 1993.

27. For discussions of this theoretical point, see Jackson and Nexon 2001; Jackson 2006; Krebs and Jackson 2007.

28. I find it odd that so much of the work on identity in the field seeks to determine whether “identity mattered” by posing rival hypotheses focused on material interests, but so little tries to ascertain which identities mattered most for explaining a particular phenomenon. Much of the politics of identity, after all, concerns conflict between rival claims concerning the (1) relevance of particular identities and/or (2) what those identities imply for political action. When, for example, early modern rulers were forced to choose between (at least in the short-term) advancing their confessional interests or their dynastic ones, they were, in a sense, trying to reconcile conflicting social roles.

30. For example, Keohane and Nye 1971; Ruggie 1982; Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Onuf 1989; Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994.

32. Thus, for example, Kubálková’s call for an “International Political Theology” turns out, rather unsurprisingly, to also be an argument in favor of Onuf-style “rule-oriented constructivism” against its realist and “soft” constructivist interlocutors. See Kubálková 2000, 677ft.

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