Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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With the advent of historical religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Christianity, a more complex pattern began to emerge. Here, the religious sphere was gradually differentiated as being concerned with a supernatural order associated with the divine, as distinguished from a secular and natural order associated with mortal humanity. In short, a cosmological dualism appeared. Now, religious activity and belief began to carry with it the idea that there was a higher and better reality above and beyond ordinary reality to which all were in principle subject, including the king, the wielder of political power within that natural order. Thus there arose the possibility for some separation between the religious and political spheres, but also the possibility of tension and rivalry. For in articulating the imperatives of the divine and supernatural, the religious sphere prescribed specific values and behaviours within what was viewed as a subordinate order. In response, there emerged a variety of religio-political patterns. Some entailed very close relationships indeed where each supported and reinforced the claims of the other, or at least an accommodation was reached not to undermine the other’s position. In other contexts, an adversarial pattern developed whereby religion provided an institutional framework or ideological rationale for political revolution or reform by invoking the superiority of the divine and supernatural reality.
Within and between the two, many variations have arisen in the course of human history, as all the major religions have had a concern for the political realm. In so doing, of course, this has led the political realm to have a concern for religion. This dialectic has been particularly intense where the religious sphere has articulated its concerns through specific institutions such as churches, temples, mosques and synagogues, and expressed them through religious functionaries such as rabbis, mullahs, monks or priests. How all this worked out in specific historical patterns has been the intent of scholars through the ages to understand and explain, or to advocate for particular idealized relationships.
Religion and politics in the pre-modern period
In the lengthy era between the advent of the historical religions and modern times, much was written about the relationship between religion and politics, largely of a prescriptive variety. Religion loomed large in the wider culture and society and hence its manifestations were of considerable moment for the political realm.
In Judaism, a very substantial tradition exists of reflection on ideal political relationships from a religious perspective. These have their origins in the understandings of the nature and role of politics and religion as set out by the authors of the Hebrew Bible. Those authors were writing for a people who felt themselves in a close relationship with the divine and formed a community which, for much of its history, had a degree of political autonomy. As a result, much was written about the way that political life should be ordered, political affairs conducted, public policies formed and rulers rule (see Bauckham 1989). Fundamental was the idea that God was the sole creative source of all reality, supernatural and natural, and had entered into a special relationship with the people through a covenant, spelt out in laws set out in the Pentateuch, that governed all aspects of life, religious, social, economic and political. Provision was made, in other words, for a very close and intimate relationship between the religious sphere and the political. Indeed, the notion of the divine covenant was the main principle of cohesion for what was otherwise a relatively loosely articulated tribal confederation. Political power was exercised in different specific forms, an assembly of adult males in earlier times, judges and kings later. But all operated within a framework that was substantially religious. Kings, however, were not of the pharaonic type – they were primarily
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secular political figures confirmed and legitimated by religiously conveyed gifts. This in turn allowed some prophetic writers to be highly critical of the way in which kingly political Âleadership was undertaken.
Later Jewish political organization and prescriptive political writing built on this tradition. Ben Joseph Gaon Saadiah (882–942), for example, set out prescriptive principles for Jewish life, in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions (1948), which sustained the idea of the Torah as the appropriate framework for a Jewish political constitution (see Elazar and Cohen 1985). Later still, other Jewish writers such as Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) advocated a form of prophetic political leadership. The common pattern of such writings, however, is the idea of a nation or community that was both political and religious, thereby closely interweaving religious and Âpolitical ideas within one overarching system of thought.
The immediate context for writings in the Christian tradition was the presence of the Roman Empire, bitterly resented by many Jews. Within this emerged a Galilean Jew, Jesus, with remarkable gifts as a prophet and teacher whose attacks on established Jewish religious codes embroiled him in political as well as religious controversy. Some scholars, indeed, have cast him pre-eminently as a political revolutionary (Brandon 1967). From the New Testament record, however, his political views were essentially accommodationist, or neutralist, rather than adversarial. He is depicted as espousing a certain separation between politics and religion, and as expressing little direct interest in political affairs, and certainly not as encouraging nationalistic rebellion against the Romans.
In this vein, early Christian writings, represented by Paul (Romans 13: 1–13) and Peter (1 Peter: 2–3), reflect a fundamentally positive, or at least neutral, view of the Roman state (Cullmann 1957). Their concerns were with an ‘other-worldly’ agenda of conversion and awaiting the Parousia, Christ’s soon-expected second coming. In this framework, mundane politics played little part. But, as the Church spread and grew, it increasingly attracted the attention of the governmental authorities as an unauthorized and potentially seditionist association. Some interpret passages in the Book of Revelation as cryptic responses to the persecution of the Church under Nero and Domitian (Rev. 17: 3–6, 18). As such attacks were periodically renewed, Christian writers such as Justin Martyr sought to explain and defend the Church, attacking the injustice and irrationality of the state in punishing believers. These ‘apologists’ claimed that the Church was not seeking to undermine Roman authority but looked to promote peace and decency in building ‘God’s Kingdom’. Their posture, in short, was largely apolitical and pacifist (Bainton 1960: 53–84) but, as in other historical and religious contexts, this does not always produce a policy of neutralism or benign neglect on the part of government.
In any event, the whole context changed radically with the coming to power of Constantine. In contrast to his predecessor Diocletian who had pursued a policy of persecution under Constantine (312–37), the State and Church entered into a most intimate and mutually supportive relationship (Armstrong 1993). In short, there emerged in Western culture the model of the sacralized Christian polity, or ‘Christendom’, which has provided the framework for debates about Church–State relations ever since, not least in the United States where public religious observances and favourable tax treatment of religious groups, for example, remain topics of public debate.
Reactions to this Constantinian settlement varied. Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260– c.340) occupies an important place as perhaps the first Christian political theologian in that his central problem was to expound the virtues of a Christianized civilization and polity. To him, the close association of Church and Empire allowed for the possibility of realizing
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the image of the heavenly city on earth (Cranz 1993). In practice, however, by espousing Christianity, Constantine had moved to co-opt and control the Church for his own political purposes. In reaction, St Gelasius, Pope from 492 to 496, developed his notion of ‘two swords’, one to the emperor as a symbol of secular power, but the other to the Pope and Church as a symbol of spiritual authority. Indeed, he not only denied that secular power could be exerted over the Church, but also asserted the superiority of the ecclesiastical power to the civil, in the tradition of Israelite theocracy (Ziegler 1942). As such, his writings became the basis for later medieval papal claims to both religious and political authority – to hold both swords simultaneously.
Yet another response came from St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) in his celebrated De Civitate Dei (On the City of God). This, however, was heavily influenced by an Empire already falling into disarray with the collapse of Rome before the pagan Visigoths in 410. Augustine posited two ‘cities’, the ‘City of God’, which entails the establishment of a perfect peace and justice through fellowship with God, and a ‘City of man’, instanced for Augustine by the Roman Empire. Rooted, in his view, in materialism, violence and injustice, the ‘City of man’ can never be the subject of Christian sacralization. At best it is capable of only a partial and temporary good. As such, his position on Church–State relations was a mixed one, advocating what might be called a semi-accommodationist posture.
The theocratic claims of the medieval papacy in their turn produced a reaction, most notably perhaps in the writings of Marsilius (or Marsiglio) of Padua (c.1275–1342). In his Defensor Pacis (1522), he argued that it was the State, not the Church, which should be the unifying presence in society. Indeed, the Church should be subordinated to the State, not the other way around, with the Church’s decisions made through conciliar, rather than Papal, institutions. However, by this period, the whole medieval religio-political system was beginning to break down by the onset of the Reformation and the emergence of secular national political power.
What was unleashed was a whole range of arrangements and prescriptions about the relationship of Christianity to politics. On the one hand, in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, close relationships were advocated with the Church typically subordinated to the State. This is known as Erastianism after the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus who defended the supremacy of the secular power in his Ecclesiastical Polity (1594). But the Reformation also gave rise to more radical ideas about Church–State patterns. Calvin’s political views, for example, influenced developments in many parts of Protestant Europe including Scotland, England and Holland that in turn influenced Puritan politics in New England and later the founding of the American republic (Kelly 1992). What all of this demonstrates is that, within the historic Christian tradition, a wide variety of Church–ÂState patterns have been both advocated and institutionalized. These range from a monistic closeness and accommodation, on the one hand, to a dualistic tension and even adversarial separation, on the other, representing a diversity that persists through to the modern period.
The other major historical religions also developed distinctive views about the political realm. In traditional Islam, its core idea was the sovereignty of God over the entire community (the Ummah Wahida), manifested in public witness through prayer, fasting, tithing and pilgrimage. In other words, it emphasized a whole way of life embracing all facets of society, both ‘religious’ and ‘political’. As such, the Islamic tradition is analogous to biblical Judaism in that the two spheres, though distinguishable in principle, are in practice brought into a very close monistic relationship. Governing that relationship is a body of Holy Scripture (the Qur’an) and a body of sacred law (the sharia).
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Over the centuries since Muhammad (c.570–632), a number of writers developed these ideas in various ways. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), in his Muqaddimah, for example, argued that political rule was not directly drawn from divine sources, but arose from social solidarity within the ummah (Gibb 1962). Thus, while not espousing theocracy, he nevertheless saw a close relationship of politics, religion and law through their common roots in the ummah. Ahmad Ibn Taimiyya (1263–1328), on the other hand, developed a more direct and superordinate relationship between Islam and politics in which the Qur’an, the sharia, and hadith (collections of Muhammad’s sayings and actions) provided the framework for government. For Taimiyya, religion provided legitimacy to Islamic rulers while the state provided security and protection to the religious authorities. His ideas have since inspired the political ideas of modern Islamic religious leaders such as Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brethren movement, Abu-l-Ala al-Mawdoodi (1903–79) who established Pakistan’s Islamic Party and, not least, Ruholla Musavi Khomeini (1902–89), who inaugurated a theocratic system of government in Iran in 1979.
Buddhism also has a lengthy history of close entanglements with the political sphere. Buddha was himself, according to tradition, a political leader from Northern India who turned to an ascetic lifestyle and developed a set of teachings or truths about human existence (the Dharma). Critically, for its relationship with the political realm, Buddha attracted a set of followers, or ‘sons’, committed to the ‘Noble Eightfold Path’, a disciplined way of attaining the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana. These monks or clergy, known as the Sangha, formed the core of Buddhism as an institutionalized religion. However, Buddha’s emphasis on ascetic detachment from worldly possessions led the Sangha into dependency on worldly leaders with wealth and power to provide them support. Thus in Buddhist societies too there arose a close and mutually supportive relationship between the religious and political domains. The religious sphere, the Sangha, provided political rulers with moral legitimacy while the political rulers provided Buddhist clergy with protection.
Such arrangements emerged in areas of South and Southeast Asia where Buddhism gained ascendancy. The earliest model is provided in India by Asoka who provided patronage to the sangha during his rule from 270 to 230 bce. It was further realized elsewhere, notably in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar), Siam (Thailand) and Tibet. In Sri Lanka, for example, a Buddhist dynasty was, according to Âtradition, established by Asoka’s son and survived until its abolition by British colonialist Âintervention in 1815. But the tradition of a close association between Buddhism and polity has remained and become a major element within modern Sinhalese nationalism (see Smith 1978).
Similarly close ties developed in Tibet where Mahayana Buddhism became the central motif of political rule. Tibetan rulers came together with religious leaders (lamas) in a close system of mutual accommodation. The Dalai Lama emerged as the most powerful among the latter to become a cornerstone of state rule in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, from the seventeenth century onwards. Until the arrival of the Communist Chinese after the 1949 Revolution, Buddhist monks formed a core part of Tibetan government, with the Dalai Lama acting as spiritual guide to the lay political leadership. Not surprisingly, therefore, after his flight to India in 1959, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935–Â), set up a Tibetan government-in-exile, upholding Tibetan culture and the traditional association of Buddhism with the exercise of political power (see Goldstein 1989).
In Hinduism, the religion of some 800 million adherents mainly in India, there is also a tradition of very close associations with the political realm. Indeed, as in Islamic and Buddhist thought, Hinduism sees no clear distinction between the two. Both are part of
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a common overarching set of cultural assumptions. Politics is seen as a moral activity and morality is a matter of religion. Hence, religion has a legitimate claim over the political order. In Hindu thought, this comes about through the concept of the purushartha – that all action should conform to a set of moral or spiritual values that form the controlling framework for individual economic, social and political pursuits.
Such traditions, set out in classical Hindu texts as the Arthashastra of Kautilya from around 300 bce, provided the basis for Hindu princely states right down to the modern period of British colonial rule. They also informed Hindu revivalist movements in the nineteenth century, such as the Arya Samaj, or Society of the Aryas, founded in 1876, which helped establish the Indian nationalist movement. Subsequent writers such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1839–94) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) explicitly used religious ideas to link Hindu resurgence with political aspiration (see Jones 1989). And, of course, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led the independence movement in the twentieth century, was himself a deeply spiritual Hindu and espoused a strong personal moral code as the basis for his political activity (see Parekh 1989).
What these historical circumstances reveal is a common pattern in which religion, be it Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu, has typically, but not uniformly, maintained a prescriptive claim over the workings of the political sphere. Similarly, such claims have aroused strong political responses, again often resulting in the religious sphere being drawn within the orbit of the state. As such, in the pre-modern period, there is a wide, indeed global, pattern of intense if varying relationships between the religious and the political in which at times any demarcation between the two seems hard to discern. It is in the context of that legacy that the relationship between religion and politics in the modern period must be situated.
Religion and politics in the modern period
Amidst all the immense changes that mark off the modern context, religion still continues its claim to political relevance as the prescriptive arbiter of political and public morality and the repository of received, indeed, divinely inspired wisdom. Indeed, there has been much in the history of modern politics that has provoked, and continues to provoke, an affirmation of that claim. The scale and destructive capacity of modern warfare, the invention of nuclear weapons, the experience of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, the invention of new medical reproductive technologies, the recent phenomenon of global warming, the chronic disparities of material conditions within and between societies, are all examples of issues that have evoked a strong religious concern for the direction of public policy. Not least, the modern phenomenon of secularization has itself provoked a political response from the religious sphere. The whole movement of fundamentalism has been seen as a confrontation by traditionalists of those believed to be responsible for replacing a religious moral framework for politics and government by one that is humanistic and materialistic, and therefore, in their view, anti-religious (see Marty and Appleby 1991 and 1995).
Christian fundamentalism has been a significant presence in the United States throughout the twentieth century. First emerging in response to Darwin’s evolutionist ideas, the movement’s political influence rose but then declined following the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Until the 1960s, fundamentalists focused on building up educational and media institutions within their sub-culture. Then, with the rise of new issues evidencing a further erosion of the traditional religious and moral fabric of public life in the banning of