To look at the political future of religion I set on one side the idea of the separation of the spheres of religion and politics because it is rare in the historical record outside the French and American revolutions, and because it generates an unrealistic account of religion and politics now and in the future. An establishment of religion of some sort is normal, and not merely if you include functional equivalents like the panoply of images paraded by the communist regime in North Korea or the sacred icons held up in the western media. There is a persistent relation of society to core values, and the sacred is ceremonially exposed in its ‘high places’ for obeisance and emulation. This relationship is mediated by a temple which is also a ‘template’, meaning a significant arrangement of sacred space in (let us say) Tiananmen Square or the Kremlin, lying at the sacred heart of sacred territory. Religion responds to the territorial imperative. You blaspheme or commit sacrilege when you defile established shrines, rituals and icons.
All that is functionalist sociology in the Durkheimian tradition, formulated when France was torn apart by an uncivil political war between two versions of establishment, the Catholic Church and the Republic. The Republic won. The Church was disestablished in 1905 and religion of a kind migrated to the shrines and icons of the Republic. When the Republic exacted blood sacrifice on a vast scale during the First World War the sacred flame of the Unknown Warrior was located under the Arc de Triomphe, not in Notre-Dame. If you want to know whose heraldry occupies the high and holy places and spaces you have to seek out the commemorative icons of blood sacrifice. In Britain, with a different history of relations between Church and state, the monument to the Unknown Warrior lies in the ‘royal peculiar’ of Westminster Abbey. The graves of the dead in war, whether in defence of the nation, or the revolution, or both, represent sacred territory in miniature, securely maintained against defilement. Russia condemns interference with the monuments to its 20 million dead in World War Two as ‘blasphemy’, and when Palestinians want to protest against what they see as occupation of their sacred territory their targets include Jewish graveyards.
The relationship of religion to the state, to territory and to a people has a longue durée to come. It is not at all a necessary relationship such as might allow one to characterise ‘religion’ as such, even supposing the term ‘religion’ can be used coherently. But there is a persistent tendency for a link to be forged between what one may call the territorial imperative as that is linked to the dynamic of power and realpolitik, and a predominant structure of values characterised by the features I have already indicated.
That is my argument, and it holds even in the United States. The USA celebrates what Thomas Jefferson called ‘the wall of separation’ between religion and the state, and boasts of being the home of the voluntary and non-territorial principle; yet it celebrates a form of religious establishment, in particular a curious political coinage called Judaeo-Christianity. Conor Cruise O’Brien, in a book entitled God Land, recalled a prayer breakfast in Washington which began: ‘We are met today in the presence of Almighty God and the President of the United States’1. This is the political role of religion in the heartland of the voluntary principle and the separation of Church and state and in the most technologically advanced and rationalised society on the world. The power of the established or territorial principle is also evident in Buddhist societies, which in the West maintain a reputation as non-coercive and pacific: in Sri Lanka and Burma alike the state seeks to extrude, subject or harass Christian, Muslim and (in the case of Sri Lanka) Hindu minorities.
That rather leaves France as the standard-bearer of a laïque future, though the invocation of ‘the Republic’ and of La France amply fulfils a functionalist understanding of religion. But if Church and state are once again in collusion in Russia after 70 years of the Soviet experiment and massive persecution of religion, then the onward march of history anticipated by L’An Un, Year One, and a new calendar in France after 1789 includes major retreats. Ankara, Nowa Huta and Wenzhou were envisaged as secular cities. Today their skylines witness to that retreat.
I summarise. The future includes the resilience of establishment, of a holy people in a Holy Land and of the role of sanctuaries, sacred texts and icons in holy places. That holds whether we speak of religion as conventionally understood or in functionalist terms that would identify the worship of the great leader in North Korea as religious. However, I am also looking at, and appealing to, the future-in-the-past, including the remoter past. We forget just how long the durance of our contemporary religion has really been in our obsession with where we go next. Much of what I have just described goes back millennia to cosmic religions centred in vast temple complexes like Karnak, focussed on the divine status of the ruler, and requiring blood sacrifice to the powers of nature and the emperor. China today modernises at breakneck speed, but also celebrates the ancient ideal of harmony posed against the threat of chaos within a sacred territory. Much blood has been shed, long ago and also very recently, to secure China’s territorial integrity and to fulfil the territorial imperative.
Yet that is not the whole story. ‘Religion’ generates alternative scenarios. The Axial Revolution of between two and three millennia ago stored up other possibilities for the future that contemporary sociologists analyse as the advance of religion understood as the exercise of choice. The ability to choose (or reject) religious affiliation is associated with an individualised faith pursued in foro interno, in sincerity and truth, and with the creation of voluntary communities apart from the state and territory. It also has some less obvious relation to the growth of diasporic religion because a religion geographically on the move attracts a more conscious adherence and may even make critical distance or disaffiliation more likely. The Jews in exile and later dispersed around the globe were one of the earliest manifestations of religion in diaspora. The Church of the Early Christians took off from the Synagogue of Rabbinic Judaism. Early Christianity represented a radical disruption of the sacred based on a sense of continuing crisis before the advent of the kingdom. Both Early Christianity and diasporic Judaism were harbingers of an alternative future relatively free of political and state entanglements, of the territorial imperative and of everything state and territory exact in pyramids of blood sacrifice. Since the innovations of the Axial Age, with its universal visions of alternative futures transcending the present, I envisage a constant dialectic between choice and autonomy (including today a discourse of human rights with major roots in religious conceptions) and automatically conferred belonging.2 There are, first, the sources and resources of religion established in a place and conferred by birthright; and then there are the options provided by the exhaustive repertoire made available in the Axial Age, including religion separated from state or from territory or from ethnicity, or from all three.
I look back to descry what is likely to be in the future, and I do so leaning on Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, glossing it as I proceed.3 However, whereas Bellah focusses on everything up to what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, roughly located in the first millennium BC, I focus on the revolutionary possibilities brought into being by the Axial Age and continuing into our present and any conceivable future. I try to grasp the political future of religion by grasping the specific character of pre- and post-axial religion over the past three or four millennia, its social and even its biological roots, and the influence it continues to exercise on how we envisage the world, whether through the religious lens or the political lens or (preferably) through a bifocal lens.
I need to canvass two narratives. There is, first, a grand narrative on a scale of three or four millennia that enables us to descry the durability of religion into the future. There is, second, a much shorter narrative on a scale of three or four centuries that deals only with the transition from early modernity to modernity proper, and that might lead us to doubt whether religion has much of a political future at all. This shorter narrative dominates European consciousness and has been disseminated globally during the colonial encounter. Europeans tell a tale about themselves that starts in the seventeenth century, when Europe began its great leap forward and its global expansion, and focusses on the scientific, technological, agricultural and industrial revolutions. The tale includes three mutations: the Enlightenment in several versions, in particular the French Enlightenment; the rise of nationalism, sometimes seen as secularised religion; and revolutionary ideology, also sometimes seen as secularised religion.
According to the French version of the Enlightenment, religion is, and moreover ought to be, partially privatised. This version is both descriptive and prescriptive. It has undergirded subsequent revolutionary political ideologies in Turkey, Russia and China that have also sought to privatise religion. Yet Russia has already reverted to a collective form of territorial religiosity; Turkey is moving in the same direction and maybe China too. That makes France the great exception. For the rest, including the USA, we observe some version of establishment, some expression of the territorial imperative manifest in the icons of the high and holy place. So even in the course of this shorter tale we observe that collective and territorial expressions of religion are astonishingly resilient. Collective and territorial modes of religion continue to exist in what looks like a semi-permanent dialectic with privatised religion on the French model, with diasporic religion on the original Jewish model and with voluntary religion on the American model. I observe the resilience of collective and territorial religion; I note the mutual reinforcement of religion and ethnicity as groups leave the areas they dominate as majorities to become minorities in diaspora elsewhere; and I chart the real but chequered advance of voluntary religiosity. If voluntarism is the wave of the future, it runs up against the rock-like reality of automatic belonging and collective religion.4
I now turn to the larger narrative covering the last three or four millennia. I emphasise how its various manifestations persist from the era of the cosmic religions of archaic civilisation that provided the backdrop for the emergence of axial religiosity through the vicissitudes of the intervening centuries up to the present. In Religion in Human Evolution Robert Bellah stresses an enlargement of capacities, not replacement or supersession. He argues that ‘nothing is ever lost’, in particular because the existence of narrative remains a permanent resource in culture and still constitutes the primary way we understand our individual and collective selfhood.5 There is no ratiocination without the telling of a story, including the story of the advance of ratiocination. Europeans construct a narrative that begins in ancient Greece and Israel. In ancient Greece it took two forms: the Homeric myths and the rise of philosophical reflection and science. In Israel it focussed on the centre in Jerusalem and the periphery in Galilee. In contemporary England the national song celebrates England as a potential New Jerusalem in prophetic biblical imagery ambiguous enough to unite across political divides; and in the USA ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ celebrates the American struggle for freedom alongside the Christian aspiration to holiness. The initial narrative is constantly adapted to new contexts.
When we think about the political future of religion, we need to go back to its origins and consider its relation to the primordial without becoming entangled in an essentially contested definition of religion or devising a set of sequential stages through which it must pass in the course of its cultural evolution. Religion itself is not primordial, because there are cultures like East Germany where it is of scant concern to the majority of the population and presumably has a distinctly modest political future, in spite of the fact that churches provided the main symbolic assembly points for the mass protests that overthrew communism. But if religion itself is not primordial it does at least answer to potentials that are permanently built in. These permanent potentials are, for example, the solidarity of Us against Them and the struggle over scarce resources, whether material power and wealth or face and humiliation. These potentials sustain the territorial imperative. They impel the demarcation of lieux sacrés and sacred territory, and give rise to violence.
In the beginning, according to a modern version of Genesis, certain highly generalised potentials were built into the human psyche by biological evolution and by the prerequisites of any sustainable sociality so that the biological potentials and social prerequisites are mutually reinforcing, and we do not for current purposes need to consider how to disentangle the biological from the social. These potentials and prerequisites are intention and attention; invocation and donation; empathy and friendship; ritual, play and fair play; parental caring and cooperation; fight and flight in the service of self-preservation; competition, ranking, hierarchy and dominance, including dominance by nurture; and violence, against both individual and collective rivals. Bellah concludes that from foragers to schoolchildren to nation states social solidarity between Us will breed solidarity against Them. To revert to the biblical version of Genesis, Cain will always be prone to murder Abel. There is nothing surprising about the mythic histories that religion relates, or that history relates about religion.
We need only add two developments in the course of human evolution, both of which effected great changes and remain with us today. One relates to the key role of language, the creation of a grammar of past, present and future, of volition, of might be and cannot be, of possibility and frustration, in the emergence of religion. The other is the key role of the external memory bank provided by fully alphabetic writing in the emergence of reflection, including the theoretical reflection that constitutes the initial basis of science. Fully alphabetic writing makes possible a stable text and all that implies for continuity and for constant reference back to a shared and extended narrative of goals and origins, and to shared signs and symbols. The sacred and protected text unites the group in the present and carries it forward from generation to generation. The covenant of Israel mutates into the modern constitution. Indeed, in the case of South Korea the constitution consciously looks back to the covenant.
Once we identify the main forms of cosmic and axial religion we can see how they persisted throughout the Axial Age and still provide major elements of our contemporary repertoire. The cosmic religiosity of archaic civilisations often appears to arise in river valleys at the heart of large territories. They create major temple complexes and processional ways dominated by images and icons of power and they offer up mass sacrifices to the powers of nature and the state. Vast numbers of people, including conquered peoples permanently subordinated or enslaved, are brought together to construct temples, pyramids and fortifications. The imperial rulers are obsessed with immortality and the empires are governed by temporal cycles reflecting the procession of the seasons and the heavens. Earth is a reflex of heaven and the emperor a semi-divine incarnation of the immortal gods. Emperors are constantly on the look-out for potential rivals, particularly successful generals and ambitious members of the royal house, and empires rise and fall in succession.
In mutated form we find most of these features throughout later history until our own times, including the great cities of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, St. Petersburg, Rome, Berlin with Potsdam, Paris, Washington and imperial Delhi. They were all built on pyramids of skulls and all periodically demanded blood sacrifice in their defence. Great processional ways are constructed, including waterways, for vast and solemn assemblies, exhibitions of power and the display of images and icons. One of the most extraordinary manifestations of a modern version of cosmic religiosity occurred in Romania under the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu when vast swathes of historic Bucharest were torn down to create a processional way that led to a palace built on the scale of Versailles.
At some point, however, the cosmic religions of archaic civilisation begin to break down, starting with periods of prolonged chaos when the powers of the heartland are challenged by the powers of the periphery or defeat by other empires. War, famine, division and disorder foster doubt about the ability of the ruler to mediate and reflect the will of the gods. Incipient questions of theodicy arise concerning the justifications offered for the way things are ordered here on earth. Is the Good Shepherd of his people truly good and, if not, who might the true king be? In Greece the true king might be Socrates; in India the prince renounces his power and his earthly inheritance to achieve dominion over the unruly demands of the flesh; in Israel there might be no king but God as witnessed to by the prophets; and in Christianity a true shepherd might reign from the throne of his cross. In Christianity the blood sacrifice is made by God, the blood brotherhood of the local clan and the warrior band is replaced by the universal fraternity of peace, and the reproduction of the generations mutates into a second birth in the Spirit.
The moment the idea of truth and a true God is contrasted with falsehood and false gods, and genuine faith contrasted with bad faith, a revolutionary dynamic is unleashed that closes temples, reprimands kings, smashes statues and abolishes priesthoods. A new or revised or recovered meta-narrative displaces all the old testaments. In the case of Israel, for example, the great redaction that bought together priestly narratives and revised kingly narratives with the Mosaic narrative of direct covenant of God with the People eventually gave the Jews a stable text that enabled them to survive anywhere. It produced the social innovation of Rabbinic Judaism and the synagogue, which in turn produced the great innovations of vast transnational brotherhoods and sisterhoods: the Church with the universities, and the Umma with the madrasas. The modern transnational voluntary association which today interacts with and challenges religions of the territorial imperative reaches back to the creation of the synagogue as the central institution of Judaism in diaspora, and to the early Christian Church as an association of the like-minded across all the frontiers of the Roman Empire and beyond.
In the Axial Age we are dealing with more universal and ethically informed perspectives that might involve a tradition of prophetic denunciation as in Israel, or of wisdom and theoretical reflection as in Greece, or of renunciation as in India, or reflection on the Way of Nature and of Heaven as in China. Between them they comprise an exhaustive set. Of course, if you stress theoretical thinking, then Greece is the only sure case; and if you stress transcendence, then China is distinctly dubious. But in all these very different cases you find some intimation of the universal and some critical distance achieved from immemorial givens. Within each new perspective you are enabled to redraw the map of human potential and possibility. You can realise how far you have fallen short, through sin, or weakness, or imprisonment in the shadowy realm of Plato’s cave, or through illusion (or Maya), or simply because you are out of tune with Heaven and Nature (or Li).
The life choices coded by this range of responses to the world and the new worlds of human possibility opened up still provide our fundamental repertoire. Particular angles of transcendence either exclude or marginalise the possibilities and perspectives emphasised in civilisations structured according to different angles of transcendence. Law and conforming to statute on the one hand, and faith and inwardness on the other, are accorded quite different weights in Judaism and Christianity. At the same time some forms of Christianity are legalistic and some forms of Judaism elevate inwardness above outward conformity. In our modern situation what had been shadowy intimations of the Other within very different projections of the world, previously largely restricted to educated elites, have now become common property. The main civilisational complexes mingle their resources both through communications and through redistributions of population, but the original templates stay intact and continue to provide the frames within which the majority understands the world. Each country in Europe, for example, understands the various diasporas of Judaism and Islam within its own historic model. We call this multiculturalism, but in fact the main projections of the world from China to Peru stay in place.
Religion is profoundly implicated in all the dramatic transformation scenes of the Axial Age, in the narratives they generate, and in the rituals and icons carrying forward the dramas and the narratives from generation to generation. The dynamic released by the Axial Age ensures that the rituals are challenged by anti-rituals. The mediation of icons and priesthoods is challenged by iconoclasms and by demands for lay access. The incorporation and partial expropriation of hope and truth by power is challenged by heresies and movements of purification, often among the excluded and marginalised, but also among counter-elites. The evolution of religion is punctuated by perpetual revolution and perpetual reformation: semper reformanda. These reformations and revolutions themselves hide an enduring will-to-power and to dominance behind a claim to nurture and behind the recitation of genealogies and apparently impeccable credentials, as a religion of love in the case of Christianity or as the party of reason and humanity, as in the Enlightenment. A Christian faith in love, and an Enlightened faith in reason, often both together as in the USA, create platforms in consciousness from which to criticise failures to deliver.
The developments of the Axial Age generate a reserve about things as they are in ‘the world’ from different vantage points and variable angles of transcendence. In the specific case of Christianity a reserve about the world generated the dialectic of faith and the world and the binaries of God and Caesar, spirit and flesh, law and grace, the City of God and the City of Man, and the Two Kingdoms, and all their associated imageries. The dialectic of religious and secular is itself another derivative of the Christian reserve about the world. I am saying that the grammars that govern the way we think derive directly from the different perspectives opened up by the Axial Age. When we in the West deploy the vocabulary of the religious and the secular we too easily forget that it derives from a specifically Christian history. It may be that the very notion of becoming secular in which the secularisation thesis is embedded belongs to a specifically Christian history and largely applies elsewhere through the consequences of the colonial encounter.6 During the last half century I have constantly argued that the varied trajectories of the secular within Christianity, for example in the very different American and French versions, do not provide prototypes for likely changes in the rest of the world. Those who regard politics as primary are reproducing a template forged in the revolutionary fires of French history, and are too prone to forget that the religious and the political are not so easily separated. They share fundamental orientations and different civilisations parse their intertwined relationship very differently. If we think of China as the coming superpower we gain some idea of the range of possibilities by seeing how differently it parses the shared axes of human existence.
I am suggesting that if we are thinking bifocally about religion and politics and the political future of religion, we need to recognise that the different perspectives on the world set up by the religions of the Axial Age continue to shape the repertoire of options routinely entertained by both politics and religion in each major civilisation. That is true not just of ‘enchanted’ continents like Africa, India and Latin America, but of highly secularised parts of the world like the contemporary European West and contemporary China. Fundamental modes of being, and of relation to time and space, hierarchy and equality, individual and collective, simultaneously undergird the politico-religious taken for granted, and demarcate the boundaries between civilisations. The question is not how we eliminate these boundaries and these differences through some notion of a common global culture, but of understanding the gains and losses severally entailed by living within these boundaries. The repertoire itself is exhaustive, but within each boundary a different balance of opportunity and cost can be exploited.
The markedly different angles of transcendence and the radically different degrees of tension with ‘the world’ between China and western Christianity create different relations between cyclic time and forward looking time; between Being and Becoming; between the Outer and the Inner; between divine dissatisfactions and the pursuit of an ideal Peace and Harmony; between failure as weakness or inadequacy and failure as evil or alienation; between the meditative mode of the wisdom of the sages and prophetic denunciation. At the same time mirror images of the Other appear in disguise and with more or less centrality: the Chinese concern for a right relation with the cosmos and the associated geomantic orientations is shadowed by Renaissance ideas of proportion in music and architecture derived from ancient Greece. Contemporary humanists steeped in the Greek tradition relate easily both to Renaissance ideas of harmony and maybe the life of the courtier, and respond with equal ease to a Chinese aesthetic and the modes of being cultivated by Chinese poets, painters and sages, especially those forms which bring Nature and society into right relations.
This pursuit of right relationships within a scheme of prescribed roles and attendant duties contrasts sharply with the Christian world of strenuous moral self-scrutiny without the secure definition of role offered by the idea of my station and its duties7. Christian self-fashioning is both ill-defined and open-ended to allow for the forward pull of time and purpose and the realisation of a kingdom beyond this world. The Christian world is visited by divine discontents and a profound sense of the distance between the fallenness of human nature and the demand to pursue perfection in alignment with the perfect will of God. The Christian sense of the radical nature of evil and of a need to seek a city ‘whose builder and maker is God’ is endemic to modern culture in the West, both with regard to self-fashioning and the purposes of politics. Secular politics are not concerned so much with the establishment of harmonious order, or what Shakespeare called ‘degree’, as with the re-creation of society sometimes within the context of a millenarian hope. Contrasts of this kind mean that when elements of the Christian repertoire seep into Chinese society, often through missionaries, the settled order suffers a major inundation. The idea of a great leap forward incorporates the forward impulsion of time and the replacement of the old order by the new.
The kind of contrast just sketched between the West and China might be made between any two major civilisations. It is too easily assumed that we are confronted with a global smorgasbord of incompatible options understood as mutually contradictory beliefs about the world, and that these beliefs are internally incoherent. On the contrary, we live within civilisations that between them provide an exhaustive repertoire of life choices and ways of being and becoming. Each of these ways is both internally coherent in terms of a logic of signs and set at an angle which cannot cover all possibilities. Coverage in one area creates gaps and lacks in others. For example, the Christian pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the City of God includes periods of sojourn in the Delectable Mountains for refreshment of spirit but the journey forward must be resumed, whereas a Chinese adept wends a peaceful way through a carefully tended landscape punctuated by shrines to a temple at its heart that provides the focal point of the journey. For the Chinese adept rituals and codes of behaviour offer settled and satisfying models of being in the world, whereas within Christianity rituals and codes may well be suspect and subordinate to the inward quest for grace and for salvation driven by shortness of time.
This suspicion of codes and rituals as providing cover for overt power and inner corruption is now endemic in western society irrespective of its religious roots. The desire to maintain outward composure and secure respect without loss of face is very widespread in all kinds of human society, and yet Christianity lacks an honour code and provides no rules to compensate for loss of face. It is a gap that has to be filled from other sources, in particular from the inheritance of the ancient classical world. A care for the continuity of the generations is another very widespread human characteristic, and in China the care for continuity is expressed in forms of veneration that mount perpetual guard over the honour of the family so that the individual is inserted within a chain of being. Judaism also exhibits a care for genealogy expressed in the invocation of the patriarchs as founding fathers. Yet Christianity has trouble with the venerations of ancestors and founding fathers, and even with a primary loyalty to the family: it is a religion of the Son and the charismatic gifts of the Spirit breaking into the continuity of the generations and falling on whom it will. ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ represents a demand to go forward and not look back and it runs contrary to what most of humankind regards as natural human instincts.
Whatever concessions Christianity has to make to the imperatives of territory and to the continuity of the fathers from generation to generation, it deals in a world that is passing away and giving place to the new. Once you have a faith that breaks with the continuity of the generations and invokes a Spirit that falls on whom it will as part of a new birth that sets aside the tradition of the fathers, you have the beginnings of a voluntary religiosity. This voluntary religiosity challenges the territorial imperative and undermines automatic incorporation within the territorial group in union with others who acknowledge the ties of blood, even if these are purely fictive. If the reserve towards the world in Christianity creates a hiatus with regard to loyalty to the family from the Chinese perspective, the Christian reserve towards wealth creates a hiatus with regard to the commendation of honestly achieved prosperity in Judaism. The Christian exaltation of ‘the poor’, of charity towards the poor and of the embrace of poverty, was from the beginning in tension with the particular rights and duties of citizenship as understood in the Roman Empire.8
Diasporic religion was initiated by a break with territory where the Jewish people under covenant wandered across frontiers and sometimes found themselves a source of chronic contention, partly on account of different perspectives on the world, for example, attitudes to prosperity; partly on account of the social niche they occupied, especially where it involved greater wealth and lower socio-religious status; partly on account of the dynamic of relations between majorities and minorities; and partly on account of difficult but intertwined histories. Membership remained an ascribed status acquired at birth, but the link with a homeland was cut and the synagogue became the local focus of an ethnic group wandering across frontiers. The Jews were pioneers of religion in diaspora; and in more recent times various ethno-religious peoples like the Armenians, the Greeks and the Christian Lebanese have scattered to the far corners of the world, often fulfilling particular occupational roles and living in ghettos. The relationships experienced by the Jews in diaspora, though they have their own specific problems, provide a paradigm for contemporary flows all over the world, from Muslims in Europe to the Chinese in South-East Asia. In general the minority status of an ethnic group in diaspora will reinforce religious identifications that distinguish the minority from the majority in the host country. All over the world religion is reinforced and made more explicit by the mere fact of intensified contact, especially where there are serious differences of power and status between one civilisation and another and by the dynamic of relationships between minorities and majorities. These dynamics are reinforced where ethno-religious groups lie at the edge of major boundaries or across them: for example in Northern Ireland, the Caucasus, South-Eastern Europe, the Levant, the countries on the Islamic-Christian frontier from Ghana to the Sudan, western China and South-Eastern Asia.
Diasporic religion breaks the tie with the territorial imperative, but at the same time it reinforces the nexus of religion with ethnicity. Classical voluntarism represents a much more dramatic break because it releases religion from the ethnic tie as well as from the territorial imperative. This release from territory and ethnicity was dramatically present in Early Christianity, even though Christians often drew their converts from diasporic Judaism. Apart from sectarian groups that revived the radical spirit of the Gospels, voluntarism lay dormant for many centuries once Christianity itself became an established faith. Then at some time in the post-Reformation period, small groups emerged within established Christianity that pursued a more intense individual piety, beginning in Germany and England.9 Today classical voluntarism presents the major challenge to established majority faiths everywhere, with different balances of power in each case: voluntary religion in the form of Evangelical Christianity in Latin America forges ahead, whereas in Afghanistan it is violently extruded and in China watched with a suspicious and vigilant eye.
Classical voluntarism began within established Protestant churches, often at a quite high social level, and then created large communities further down the social scale as these subordinate communities came to self-consciousness. Classical voluntarism took increasingly populist forms up to the emergence of Pentecostalism in several parts of the world, but most dramatically and influentially in the United States. Pentecostalism brings together black and white revivalism and the charismatic ‘gifts of the Spirit’ with layers of inspirited religiosity all over the globe, and is able to cross any number of cultural frontiers and adapt to local culture without ceasing to be recognisable as a populist form of Christianity. It provides platforms for the disciplined pursuit of moral and material betterment, including a reconstitution of the family where the male renounces macho irresponsibility to embrace the domestic virtues. Everywhere it is poised against the emplacements of territorial religion, although insofar as it enters into local cultures it may take on their specific colouring, for example among the peoples of the Andes or in relation to the shamanistic traditions of South Korea, or as it converts large numbers among the Roma of Southern and Eastern Europe. If these ethnic groups themselves move across frontiers to North America or Europe their local Pentecostal churches, whether in Boston or Amsterdam, take on some of the characteristics of diaspora. Ghanaian Pentecostals in the cities of Northern Europe or North America constitute a people in diaspora.
If Pentecostalism represents a voluntarism where the religious community holds individualism in check and inculcates the disciplines of betterment and survival, modern spirituality of the self sees no needs for such communal disciplines. It shifts from dramatic new birth in order to live a new life and finally banish chaos, to a therapeutic mode that concentrates on the flowering of the true self. The lack of a strong communal bond means that there is relatively little by way of moral demand and only a barely discernible moral structure. That is because morality is generated by living together over time in a particular place, and people who embrace free-floating spirituality are usually on the move. Spirituality picks up fragments of cosmic religiosity, for example where individuals on the move come together in a temporary communitarian celebration of the procession of the seasons and a reverence for the amoral forces of Nature. Neo-paganism of this kind flourishes in countries where the established churches have been seriously weakened and intelligentsias look back to pre-Christian cults as sources of authentic and unfettered Being, for example in the Balkan States, in parts of Russia and the Caucasus, as well as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa where elites strive to create new forms of indigenous cultural bond.
I have been arguing for the resilience of established religion and the recurrence within established religion of elements of the repertoire of archaic religiosity. If we take established religion and archaic religiosity together the thematic repertoire includes festivals of nature and the life cycle and the demand for blood sacrifice from the warrior hero; the maintenance of peace and order against chaos; the celebration of sacred territory for a sacred people; a myth of origins, recurrent crises and eventual destiny which includes a special status within the order of the world; Founding Fathers and a succession of iconic leaders; the principle of securing sacred boundaries, often in relation to natural features such as the sea, rivers and mountains; sacred centres dominated by major monuments and icons of identity. There are also forms of collective religion in diaspora which are both pulled towards the sacred centres of major civilisations and are liable to be either subordinated or extruded by the host civilisation, as the Jews in ancient Egypt were subordinated by their hosts, at least according to their founding myth in the Hebrew Bible. Diaspora groups will strive hard to maintain collective solidarity. They carry with them a carefully tended memory of their original homeland and its sacred sites.
I have also argued that the expansion of the voluntary principle constantly interacts with the resilience of establishment and the persistent repertoire of archaic religiosity. Voluntary religion is most likely to emerge where the axial angle of transcendence encourages direct access of the individual to the divine and creates an individual conscience that transforms the images of cosmic religiosity into a spiritual landscape of inward progress from destruction to redemption or spiritual fulfilment. The optimum conditions for the expansion of voluntary religion occur where Protestantism mingles with the Enlightenment to produce what in the West would be regarded as the ‘modern subject’ and everything Charles Taylor has discussed in his Sources of the Self.10 Voluntary religion provides fertile soil for a concept of human rights in persistent tension with the necessities of collective survival in all the modes of established religion and of religions in diaspora. Diasporic religions both seek to protect their integrity against the disintegrative potential of human rights discourse and to deploy that discourse in their own collective defence.
It would be possible to devise a global map of the distribution of these three types of religiosity – established, diasporic and voluntary – perhaps beginning with Islam, which, after all, accounts for over one-fifth of humankind. From Dakar in West Africa to Jakarta in Indonesia, Islam achieves some kind of establishment, perhaps most obviously in the central belt of the Arabic states, Iran and Pakistan, but also in somewhat lighter forms in Indonesia and parts of West Africa. Islam also exists in diasporic forms in areas from China to Western Europe. At the same time individualisation, self-conscious commitment and the separation of religion from the primordial collective and ‘immemorial’ tradition occur within Islam to some extent just as they do in Christianity, and can even involve conversion to Christianity in places as unlikely and diverse as Iran, Morocco and Algeria. Faith can separate itself from identity. That at least is the argument of Olivier Roy which I take up in a further treatment of the tension between the voluntary and the collectivistic (or traditional) forms of religion in Chapter 7.11 Here I rather conclude by sketching what a global map of established and voluntary religion would look like in America and China as the two contemporary superpowers, in India as a future superpower and in Russia as perhaps a superpower of the past.
I would contrast America and India on the one hand as pre-eminent examples of the separation of religion and the state; and China and Russia as pre-eminent examples of what in the West would be called caesaro-papism. I would want to show that even where religion and the state are clearly separated religion is still in some important sense established. The Indian sub-continent presents an interesting case because its partition in 1947 proceeded entirely along religious lines with very large Muslim majorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where minorities experience serious pressure from the majority, and India, where there is a large Hindu majority and two significant minorities, one Muslim and one Christian, both concentrated in particular areas and both under pressure in spite of the separation of religion and the state and the secular credentials of the founding political dynasties. One of the great parties of the Indian state promotes the ideology of the essentially Hindu character of Indian society through the concept of Hindutva.
Likewise in the United States – in spite of the First Amendment and the secular credentials of the Founding Fathers, and a massive pluralism characterised by constant switching between denominations – the nation is defined in Judeo-Christian terms which reflect the religious range of its European origins. There are shadow establishments of religion area by area, especially in the South, and local forms of religious hegemony, for example Methodists and Catholics in Kansas. America is defined as an imperium stretching ‘from sea to shining sea’, its boundaries are celebrated as demarcating ‘the last best hope of mankind’ and its leaders are accorded iconic status.
In the case of Russia, it has throughout its history regarded itself as a third Rome on the Byzantine model of the virtual fusion of Church and empire, and it has now returned to a modified form of this model after just 70 years of undisputed communist hegemony. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989–90 occurred entirely along ethno-religious lines, above all in the Muslim states of Central Asia; and the remaining points of tension are found in Muslim majority areas within the Caucasus.
Finally, in the case of China we have the most impressive example of the continuity of establishment over more than two millennia based on a dualism where religious needs have been provided by Buddhism and Daoism, and the hierarchical structure of the state has been maintained by a tradition of Confucian wisdom still intact today and undergoing revival. The centre encounters problems in its eastern and southern peripheries where the majorities are both religiously and ethnically distinct. Christianity arrived in a collectivistic Catholic form, first at the elite level with the Jesuit missions and then through Catholic missions with a strong communitarian character; Christianity also seeped in through the syncretism of the Taiping movement which resulted in chaos and the re-establishment of order only after the loss of millions of lives; most characteristically Christianity has come through versions of Protestant voluntarism that have expanded considerably over recent decades, but only up to the level of, say, 3–4 per cent. As in the case of Soviet Russia, China experienced strong nationalist and communist movements, each with some Christian elements in the background, that led to the establishment of a communist hegemony ‘with a Chinese face’, and massive manifestations that recouped features from the repertoire of archaic civilisation, including sacred leaders and sacred texts, the execration of the foreigner and the invocation of the sacred land. The contemporary interest, particularly among academics, in some revival of Confucianism, represents a desire to recuperate in modernised dress and as a matter of conscious choice rather than immemorial tradition an ethos of social respect, dedication and harmony, combined with a wisdom tradition with deep roots in Chinese history.
In all four cases the human rights discourse has cut across the interests of an established collectivity and the realpolitik of survival. Although many commentators might regard the United States as an exception, its political behaviour, particularly after its symbolic heartland was attacked on 9/11, suggests that collective survival and the interests of the sacred nation override adherence to human rights. The same is true of India, while in the case of Russia and China there is an explicit commitment to the necessities of political order against chaos and to collective survival.
Even if one were to extend this global map to Western Europe it would be obvious that the majoritarian principle in alliance with some form of establishment extends from Britain at one end of the continent to Greece, Romania and Poland at the other. Much sociological writing, including my own, has been devoted to tracing the advance of a voluntary principle often derived in its several origins, though not necessarily in its development, from Protestantism in alliance with the Enlightenment. The voluntary principle in its pietistic and ecstatic form has made its most spectacular advances in the spread of Pentecostalism over the last half century. But one may doubt whether active voluntarism is likely to include significantly more than 10–20 per cent of any given society, though its underlying ethos may seep through society as a whole with an increase in personal choice and individual commitment. Establishment and the territorial imperative taken together remain stubbornly resilient. As I argued at the outset, if voluntarism is regarded as the wave of the future it beats against an obstinate core of territorial religion exhibiting characteristics recurrent over the last four millennia and most unlikely to disappear any time soon.
1 Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
2 The history of human rights, and the associated concepts of natural law and religious or secular universalism, is complex and tangled. Here it is worth mentioning, within the Anglo-American tradition going back to the seventeenth century, the role of the English Levellers in the 1640s, John Locke, John Wesley (regarding slavery), Thomas Paine (of Quaker stock), William Lloyd Garrison (Unitarian) and Frederick Nolde (American Lutheran and a major influence on the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights). Cf. John S. Nurser, For All Peoples and Nations: The Ecumenical Church and Human Rights (Washington: Georgetown University, 2005).
3 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.
4 Slavica Jakelić, Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice and Identity in Late Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
5 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.
6 Martin with Catto, ‘The Religious and the Secular’.
7 Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain
8 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, Chapter 4.
9 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
10 Taylor, Sources of the Self.
11 Olivier Roy, ‘The Transformation of the Arab World’, Journal of Democracy (July 2012, 23: 3, pp. 5–18).