A major section of this book criticises ‘New Atheist’ rhetoric for its indifference to a social scientific understanding of the social role of religion, or maybe simple ignorance of it. This section also draws attention to the verbal violence displayed by ‘New Atheists’ when fastening the blame for violence on religion and claiming innocence for themselves.
Apart from its critique of the rhetorical strategies of contemporary ‘New Atheists’, this book has a radical and contentious thesis: the importance of analysing religion and politics in the same conceptual frame. We cannot discuss the place of religion in our public life as though we were dealing with irrational religion in the private sphere and rational politics in the public sphere. That procedure is as morally outrageous as it is scientifically untenable. I have summed up my case in the phrase ‘No Logos without Mythos’, meaning by that an irreducible core of narrative myth and a grammar shared by religion and politics alike over the last three millennia. I find my starting point in the narrative myths stimulated by the different angles of transcendence and different transformation scenes found in Karl Jaspers’ notion of the Axial Age. I find them also in Max Weber’s essays on religious rejections of the world as it presently is, in the light of a world to come, or as it was once, or as it resides immanently, or elsewhere. I focus on the tensions these angles of transcendence, these transformation scenes and these religious rejections, create in every social realm: the economic, the political, the erotic and the aesthetic. I know the criticisms of the Axial Age hypothesis put forward by my friend and colleague Jan Assmann, and I appreciate his emphasis on the key role of writing as storing memory, in a volume to which we jointly contributed. This criticism is based on his magisterial studies in Egyptology, and I am quite happy if the idea of an Axial Age understood as having defined temporal and cultural locations is taken instead to refer to axial characteristics of the kind discussed in Max Weber’s essays.1 It is the profound tensions in the spheres of politics, economics, art and sexuality that matter. They cluster around power, wealth, representation and the erotic.
A book about faith and power has to begin with the issue of secularisation because secularisation implies a steady decline in the power of religion. At various points I am obliged to provide summaries of my own theoretical understanding of the secularisation process, and I fear the repetitions are unavoidable. Secularisation introduces a major theme of the book: the partial shift in what we loosely call modernity from the expression of power, violence and the pursuit of peace, in religious modes, to expressions in the secular and secularised modes of nationalism and political ideology. The locus of violence shifts, not the violence itself.
I would add one further important point about modernity that follows from my postulated unity of the religious and the political and from the historical variety of secularising tendencies central to my general theory of secularisation, including in particular the contested role of Pentecostalism as an agent of an ‘alternative modernity’, that realises on a global scale the modernising potential of German-American Pietism and Anglo-American Methodism. In my own studies since 1986 I have presented Pentecostalism within the frame of alternative modes of secularisation and alternative modes of modernisation.
But the credentials of Pentecostalism are contested from an unrealistic perspective that imagines a rational and rationalised sphere of ‘western’ politics intermittently encroached upon by irrational and quasi-religious forces at the margin of a truly modern consciousness. This perspective is a self-deluding fantasy, contrary to the empirical evidence about the nature of our everyday political practice. Of course, we debate and rationally examine alternative causal sequences in matters of public policy. But the horizon within which our debates take place is informed throughout with non-rational understandings and choices, and sustained by modes of solidarity based on images and pictograms of ‘the Other’ and of the past and the future.
This self-deluding perspective allows us mentally to quarantine Pentecostalism as informed by charismatic and magical impulses, including charismatic authority, as though our rational debates about the most efficient means to secure our ends exempted us from those same impulses, including charismatic authority. Yet Pentecostals are notoriously pragmatic in their use of efficient means to secure given ends. They are technically proficient and organisationally pragmatic. The problem here relates to charisma itself, which is an ineluctable element in politics and religion alike and easily combines the impetuous flow of the spirit with magical thinking. The impetuous flow of the spirit in Pentecostalism constantly combines with magical thinking, and that offends against our artificially purified notion about our own genuine modernity.
If we only pause for a moment to consider how the supposed rationality of the market operates, then our exemption from the sphere of the non-rational ought to be an obvious delusion. If the operations of the market do not convince us of our delusions about our modernity then we have only to contemplate the social reality of nationalism seen as the supposedly ‘modern’ substitute for religion. Bernice Martin has made a parallel argument with respect to ‘modern’ individualism as contrasted with the ‘permeable’ self of Pentecostals open both to the incursion of the Spirit (or demonic spirits) and to the selves of others with whom they have relations. We in the West have an artificially purified and solipsistic notion of the western individual, when in reality this individual only exists within the modalities of interdependence and social solidarity.2
In the first chapter I summarise my initial critique of secularisation and my subsequent ‘general theory’ of secularisation, before considering more recent issues relating to secularism and the ‘post-secular’. I am highly critical of recent writing on secularism and the post-secular, in particular the contribution of Jürgen Habermas. I conclude the first chapter with a brief sketch of changing modes and shifting foci of collective violence from the Middle Ages to the period of Absolute (or Enlightened) monarchy, and from nineteenth-century nationalism to twentieth-century political ideologies like Liberal Imperialism, Fascism and Communism. I could equally well have included the Roman Empire because I argue that, whatever the type of society, the agents of the ‘conscience collective’ (in Durkheim’s formulation) are always liable to deploy massive violence against ‘the Other’, whether defined as heretic, traitor, political deviant or implicated in ‘an axis of evil’. In short, the discourse that preceded the attack on Iraq as part of ‘the axis of evil’ and as harbouring weapons of mass destruction is to be understood in the same context as the attack on the Albigensians. In Ancient Rome, for example, the state religion was not imposed on subject peoples, and any number of cults were tolerated provided they paid respect to the aura of the emperor and the imperial cult, but extreme brutality was deployed to suppress internal revolts and meet external threats. Whatever the more or less moral justifications adduced for violence, its dynamics and its attendant discourses are remarkably similar from the imperialism of ancient Rome to the liberal imperialism of today. Not only do I reject the supposed contrast between rational politics and irrational religion, but I also stress the underlying dynamics of power, solidarity and violence exercised against the Other whether the dominant ideology is Christianity, nationalism or Communism. The geopolitical dynamics of power discussed in the final chapter on Western Eurasia illustrate a striking continuity all the way from Russian Orthodoxy to scientific atheism, and from Ivan the Terrible to Soviet Russia.
The next four chapters critically examine contemporary discourses associating religion in particular with the use of violence. Just as the discourse associating religion with the use of violence, notably in the time of the ‘Wars of Religion’, involves a liberal claim to historical innocence, so the Marxist understanding of the violence of liberal imperialism in its turn involves a claim to historical innocence. Today a similar claim to historical innocence is made in the name of science by ‘New Atheists’ claiming that religion is not only superstition but uniquely prone to appeal to force. These four chapters focus on this claim as put forward by Richard Dawkins and by others loosely associated with the ‘New Atheists’. They seek to illustrate the paradoxical indifference displayed by these protagonists of science to a social scientific understanding of a notoriously complex issue. Instead they deploy a moralising rhetoric, presumably because it avoids the real complexities of the issues involved.3 It has all the polemical advantages of ‘cheap and dirty’ journalism.
Chapters 6 to 11 discuss the intersection of the religious and the political and seek to demonstrate the extent to which religion and politics need to be analysed in the same conceptual frame. Chapter 6 descries the political future of religion and suggests that future has a longue durée ahead of it, especially given the persistence of sacred ‘centres’ attracting the respect and reverence of the majority. It is in this chapter that I develop furthest the theoretical perspective informing the book as a whole, picking up from the discussion in Chapter 5 about kinds of truth and sketching the relation between the kind of truth elicited by sociology and the kind of truth re-presented, uncovered and exposed by theology. I develop Weber’s arguments about the spectrum of axial religions, their inter-relation and the different kinds of grammar that they generate. (The arguments in Chapters 5 and 6 were developed at the same time as I finalised the Prospect and the Retrospect of my intellectual autobiography The Education of David Martin in the late summer of 2012.)4
Chapter 7 adopts a contrasting approach by discussing the dialectic of automatic belonging (ethnic and territorial) with personal choice, and by elaborating the dialectic of religion and nationalism, in particular where religion and nationalism virtually fuse in the cultural defence of a territory and where transnational religion, for example Pentecostalism, challenges birthright membership in the Church-nation. Chapter 8 likewise focusses on nationalism and religion and analyses the many binary distinctions, like Charisma and Founding Fatherhood, shared by religion, nationalism and political ideology. I try to exhibit the common grammar of religion, nationalism and political ideology.
Chapter 9 focusses on the crossover between religion and politics as that emerges from the current debate about the actual role and the appropriate role of religion in the public sphere of politics It draws attention to the persistent confusion of normative and descriptive accounts of that role and criticises the notion that politics is rational whereas religion is irrational. You cannot divide up the social world in that way. The social world is a unity. As in earlier chapters, I stress the characteristics shared by religion and politics, such as ritual role-playing and rituals of commination. Chapter 10 concludes the middle section of the book with an exercise in comparison between religion and politics in South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Europe: areas inflected by very different patterns of secularisation. The different patterns of secularisation follow from very different histories and they produce very different relations between religion and politics. Chapter 11 tries to show how a common language (or mythic structure) is shared alike by religion, nationalism and politics through an exploration of the potent ambiguity of ‘Jerusalem’, England’s second national anthem. It presents the argument of the whole book in concentrated form and provides the heart of what I want to say. Inevitably some material with respect to the Axial Age has to be repeated here in condensed form.
The final four chapters are tentative sketches for what might have been a much more extended argument about the relation of religion and power to places and spaces, especially high places and sacred spaces. Chapter 12 provides a thematic introduction to these sketches by exploring the basic grammar of Christianity as that is realised in the tension between the City of God and the City of Man and in the tension between the kingdom of God translated into the Church (whether national or international) or translated into the radical sect. It also explores the emergence of a major transformation of that grammar in the early modern period when voluntary forms of Christianity hived off from the state and from the all-encompassing territorial collective, and often (for example in early nineteenth-century English Nonconformity) embraced a pacific commercial ethos equally opposed to ecclesiastical establishment and to the military and aristocratic notions of honour. This thematic introduction includes a brief outline of the distinction between centre and periphery because that distinction provides a key conceptual tool for any attempt to understand how power relations are inscribed in high places and sacred spaces.
Chapters 13 and 14 try to realise spatially my ‘general theory’ of secularisation, and focus in particular on the concept of functional differentiation whereby different social spheres, like education and welfare, emerge from the overarching sacred canopy of religion and occupy their own quasi-sacred space. These chapters are problematic, in part because it is not easy to know what to include and what to exclude. Nevertheless they fit well with the current interest in ‘materialising’ religion, especially in urban ecology, and I have risked including them. Chapter 15 brings together most of the themes treated earlier: it is a spatial-temporal realisation of secularisation and de-secularisation, ethno-religion and voluntarism, organised around the distinction between centre and periphery. It illustrates the geopolitical constants of violence over time and cultural space, whether the governing ideology is Christianity in the Orthodox style, Enlightened autocracy as practised by Catherine the Great or scientific atheism as practised by Soviet Russia.
1 Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press, 2012). Robert Bellah provides the key analysis of the irreducible role of narrative in his Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2 Bernice Martin, ‘Tensions and Trends in Pentecostal Gender and Family Relations’, in Robert Hefner (ed.), Global Pentecostalism in the 21st Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, Chapter 4, pp. 115–48).
3 A.C. Grayling has said that the case against faith schools can be summed up in two words: Northern Ireland (‘A.C. Grayling on Faith Schools’, www.youtube.com/watch?V=4UuSJJB9u-A, accessed April 2013). But, of course, issues cannot be decontextualised without analysis of the particular socio-historical conditions obtaining in Northern Ireland. One has to begin with the clash between British liberal imperialism and Irish secular nationalism, and the differential access to power, status and wealth enjoyed by rival groups distributed in different ratios across a territory demarcated by an arbitrary boundary. Then one has to look at the role of faith schools where these conditions do not obtain. Bully-boy polemic of the kind deployed by Grayling offends against the canons of rational debate and scientific comment, and either these are not understood or they are understood; and I am not sure which should shock us the most, the ignorance or the moral insouciance. Maybe the social scientific approach could be more easily grasped by A.C. Grayling were anyone to claim that the case against atheism was summed up in two words: Ukrainian famine. Once grasped, it might then be possible to move from the pleasures of indignation to the satisfactions of understanding.
4 The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist (London: SPCK, 2013).